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Authors: Elizabeth Moon

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction

The Speed of Dark (6 page)

BOOK: The Speed of Dark
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I can get confused.” I point to an airplane coming toward a gate. “Is that the one?”

“I think so.” She moves around me and turns to face me. “Are you all right?”

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“Yes. It just… happens that way sometimes.” I am embarrassed that it happened tonight, the first time I have ever been alone with Marjory. I remember in high school wanting to talk to girls who didn’t want to talk to me. Will she go away, too? I could get a taxi back to Tom and Lucia’s, but I don’t have a lot of money with me.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Marjory says, and then the door opens and people start coming off the plane.

She is watching for Karen, and I am watching her. Karen turns out to be an older woman, gray-haired.

Soon we are all back outside and then on the way to Karen’s apartment. I sit quietly in the backseat, listening to Marjory and Karen talk. Their voices flow and ripple like swift water over rocks. I can’t quite follow what they’re talking about. They go too fast for me, and I don’t know the people or places they speak of. It’s all right, though, because I can watch Marjory without having to talk at the same time.

When we get back to Tom and Lucia’s, where my car is, Don has gone and the last of the fencing group are packing things in their car. I remember that I did not put my blades and mask away and go outside to collect them, but Tom has picked them up, he says. He wasn’t sure what time we would get back; he didn’t want to leave them out in the dark.

I say good-bye to Tom and Lucia and Marjory and drive home in the swift dark.

Chapter Three

MY MESSAGER IS BLINKING WHEN I GET HOME. IT’S
Lars’s code; he wants me to come on-line. It’s late. I don’t want to oversleep and be late tomorrow. But Lars knows I fence on Wednesdays, and he doesn’t usually try to contact me then. It must be important.

I sign on and find his message. He has clipped a journal article for me, research on reversal of autistic-like symptoms in adult primates. I skim it, my heart thudding. Reversing genetic autism in the infant or brain damage that resulted in autisticlike syndromes in the small child has now become common, but I had been told it was too late for me. If this is real, it is not too late. In the last sentence, the article’s author makes that connection, speculating that the research might be applicable to humans and suggesting further research.

As I read, other icons pop up on my screen.The logo of our local autistic society.Cameron’s logo and Dale’s. So they’ve heard about it, too. I ignore them for the time being and go on reading. Even though it is about brains like mine, this is not my field and I cannot quite understand how the treatment is supposed to work. The authors keep referring to other articles in which the procedures were spelled out. Those articles aren’t accessible—not to me, not tonight. I don’t know what “Ho and Delgracia’s method” is. I don’t know what all the words mean, either, and my dictionary doesn’t have them.

When I look at the clock, it is long after midnight.Bed. I must sleep. I turn everything off, set the alarm, and go to bed. In my mind, photons chase darkness but never catch up.

AT WORK THE NEXT MORNING, WE ALL STAND IN THE HALL, NOT
quite meeting one anothers ’ eyes. Everybody knows.

“I think it’s a fake,” Linda says. “It can’t possibly work.”

“But if it does,” Cameron says. “If it does, we can be normal.”

“I don’t want to be normal,” Linda says. “I am who I am. I’m happy.” She does not look happy. She
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looks fierce and determined.

“Me, too,” Dale says. “What if it works for monkeys—what does that mean? They’re not people; they’re simpler than we are. Monkeys don’t talk.” His eyelid twitches more than usual.

“We already communicate better than monkeys,” Linda says.

When we are together like this, just us, we can talk better than any other time. We laugh about that, about how normal people must be putting out a field that inhibits our abilities. We know that’s not true, and we know the others would think we were paranoid if we told that joke around them. They would think we were crazy in a bad way; they would not understand that it is a joke. When we do not recognize a joke, they say it is because we are literal-minded, but we know that we cannot say that about them.

“I would like to not have to see a psychiatrist every quarter,” Cameron says.

I think of not having to see Dr. Fornum . I would be much happier if I did not have to see Dr. Fornum .

Would she be happy not to have to see me?

“Lou, what about you?”Linda asks. “You’re already living partly in their world.”

We all are, by working here, by living independently. But Linda doesn’t like doing anything with people who are not autistic, and she has said before she thinks I shouldn’t hang around with Tom and Lucia’s fencing group or the people at my church. If she knew how I really felt about Marjory she would say mean things.

“I get along… I don’t see why change.” I hear my voice, harsher than usual and wish it didn’t do that when I get upset. I’m not angry; I don’t want to sound angry.

“See?” Linda looks at Cameron, who looks away.

“I need to work,” I say, and head for my office, where I turn on the little fan and watch the twinkles of light. I need to bounce, but I don’t want to go in the gym, in case Mr. Crenshaw comes in. I feel like something is squeezing me. It is hard to get into the problem I’m working on.

I wonder what it would be like to be normal. I made myself quit thinking about that when I left school.

When it comes up, I push the thought away. But now… what would it be like to not be worried that people think I’m crazy when I stutter or when I can’t answer at all and have to write on my little pad?

What would it be like to not carry that card in my pocket?To be able to see and hear everywhere? To know what people are thinking just by looking at their faces?

The block of symbols I’m working on suddenly looks densely meaningless, as meaningless as voices used to sound.

Is that it? Is this why normal people don’t do the kind of work we do? Do I have to choose between thiswork I know how to do, this work I’m good at, and being normal? I look around the office. The spin spirals suddenly annoy me. All they do is turn around, the same pattern, over and over and over. I reach to turn the fan off. If this is normal, I don’t like it.

The symbols come alive again, rich with meaning, and I dive into them, submerging my mind in them so I don’t have to see the sky overhead.

Page 25

When I emerge again, it is past lunchtime. I have a headache from sitting too long in one place and not eating lunch. I get up, walk around my office, trying not to think about what Lars told me. I can’t help it. I am not hungry, but I know I should eat. I go to the kitchenette in our building and get my plastic box from the refrigerator. None of us like the smell of the plastic, but it does keep our food separate, so that I don’t have to smell Linda’s tuna fish sandwich and she doesn’t have to smell my jerky and fruit.

I eat an apple and a few grapes,then nibble on the jerky. My stomach feels unsettled; I think about going into the gym, but when I check, Linda and Chuy are in there. Linda is bouncing high, her face set in a scowl; Chuy is sitting on the floor, watching colored streamers blow from the fan. Linda catches sight of me and turns around on the trampoline. She does not want to talk. I do not want to talk, either.

The afternoon seems to last forever. I leave right on time, striding out to my car in its spot. The music is all wrong, loud and pounding in my head. When I open the door of my car, superheated air puffs out. I stand by the car, wishing for autumn and cooler weather. I see the others come out, all showing tension in one way or another, and avoid their gaze. No one speaks. We get in our cars; I leave first because I came out first.

It is hard to drive safely in the hot afternoon, with the wrong music in my head. Light flashes off windshields, bumpers, trim; there are too many flashing lights. By the time I get home, my head hurts and I’m shaking. I take the pillows off my couch into the bedroom, closing all the shades tightly and then the door. I lie down, piling the pillows on top of me, then turn off the light.

This is something else I never tell Dr. Fornum about. She would make notes in my record about this; I know it. As I lie there in the dark, the gentle, soft pressure gradually eases my tension, and the wrong music in my mind empties out. I float in a soft, dark silence… at rest, at peace, uninvaded by the fast-moving photons.

Eventually I am ready to think and feel again. I am sad. I am not supposed to be sad. I tell myself what Dr. Fornum would tell me. I am healthy. I have a job that pays pretty well. I have a place to live and clothes to wear. I have a rare high-status permit for a private automobile so that I do not have to ride with anyone else or take the noisy, crowded public transit. I am lucky.

I am sad anyway. I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I’m fine, good night, please, thank you, you’rewelcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.

They do not know how hard it is. They do not care. They want me to change. They want to put things in my head, to change my brain. They would say they don’t, but they do.

I thought I was safe, living independently, living like anyone else. But I wasn’t.

Under the pillows, I’m starting to shake again. I don’t want to cry; crying might be too loud and my neighbors might notice. I am hearing the labels crowding in on me, the labels they put in my record when I was a child.Primary diagnosis Autistic Spectrum Disorder/autism.Sensory integration deficit.Auditory processing deficit.Visual processing deficit.Tactile defensiveness.

I hate the labels; they make me feel sticky, where they are stuck to me with professional glue I can’t pry off.

Page 26

All babies are born autistic, one of ourgroup said once. We laughed nervously. We agreed, but it was dangerous to say so.

It takesa neurologically normal infant years to learn to integrate the incoming sensory data into a coherent concept of the world. While it took me much longer—and I readily admit that my sensory processing is not normal even now—I went at the task much the same way as any other infant.First flooded by ungated , unedited sensory input, protecting myself from sensory overload with sleep and inattention.

You might think, reading the literature, that only neurologically damaged children do this, but in fact all infants control their exposure— by closing their eyes, averting their gaze, or simply falling asleep when the world is too much. Over time, as they make sense of this data chunk and then that, they learn what patterns of retinal excitation signal what events in the visible world, what patterns of auditory excitation signal a human voice—and then a human voice speaking their native tongue.

For me—for any autistic individual—this took much longer. My parents explained it to me, when I was old enough to understand: for some reason, my infant nerves needed a stimulus to persist longer before it would bridge the gap. They—and I—were lucky that techniques were available to provide my neurons this needed duration of signal. Instead of being labeled with an “attention deficit” (which used to be quite common), I was simply given stimuli to which I
could
attend.

I can remember the time before I was exposed to the computer-assisted primary language-learning program… when the sounds that came from people’s mouths seemed as random—no, more random—than a cow mooing and moaning in the field. I couldn’t hear many consonants—they didn’t last long enough. Therapy helped—a computer stretched the sounds out until I could hear them, and gradually my brain learned to capture briefer signals.But not all of them. To this day, a fast-talking speaker can lose me, no matter how I concentrate.

It used to be much worse. Before the computer-assisted language-learning programs, children like me might never learn language at all. Back in the mid-twentieth century, therapists thought autism was a mental illness, like schizophrenia. My mother had read a book by a woman who had been told she had made her child crazy. The idea that autistic people are, or become, mentally ill persisted right through the end of the twentieth century, and I even saw an article about that in a magazine a few years ago. That is why I have to visit Dr. Fornum , so that she can be sure I am not developing a mental illness.

I wonder if Mr. Crenshaw thinks I am crazy. Is that why his face gets shiny when he talks to me? Is he frightened? I don’t think Mr. Aldrin is frightened of me—of any of us. He talks to us as if we were real.

But Mr. Crenshaw talks to me as if I were a stubborn animal, one he had a right to train. I am often scared, but now, after the rest under the pillows, I am not.

WHAT I WISH IS THAT I COULD GO OUT AND LOOK UP AT THE
stars. My parents took me camping in the Southwest; I remember lying there and seeing all the beautiful patterns, patterns that went on and on forever. I would like to see the stars again. They made me feel calm when I was a child; they showed me an ordered universe, a patterned universe, in which I could be a small part of a large pattern.

When my parents told me how long the light had traveled to reach my eyes—hundreds, thousands, of years—I felt comforted though I could not say why.

I cannot see the stars from here. The safety lights in the parking lot next to our building are sodium vapor lights emitting a pinkish yellow light. They make the air seem fuzzy, and the stars can’t show through the blurry black lid of sky. Only the moon and a few bright stars and planets show at all.

Sometimes I used to go out in the country and try to find a spot to look at the stars. It is hard. If I park
Page 27

on a country road and turn off the lights of the car, someone could run into me because he can’t see me. I have tried parking beside the road or in some unused lane that leads to a barn, but someone who lives nearby may notice and call the police. Then the police will come and want to know why I’m parked there late at night. They do not understand wanting to see the stars. They say that is just an excuse. I don’t do this anymore. Instead, I try to save up enough money that I can take my vacations where there are stars.

BOOK: The Speed of Dark
5.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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