WWW: Wake (28 page)

“Caitlin.” Her mom’s voice, very soft. She turned. Her mother was doing something with her head, and...

Oh! She was gesturing with it, just as her dad had earlier to Kuroda: she was indicating Caitlin should come with her. Caitlin got up and followed her to the kitchen, on the far side of the intervening dining room, leaving her dad sitting in his favorite chair in the living room.

“Sit down, sweetheart.”

Caitlin did so. She was still just beginning to learn to interpret expressions, but her mother’s seemed ... agitated, perhaps. “Have I done something wrong?”

“You can’t stare at your father like that.”

“Was I? Sorry. I know it’s not polite—I’ve read that.”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s—well, you know how he is.”

“How?”

“He doesn’t like to be looked at.”

“Why not?”

“You know. I told you.”

“Told me what?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” her mom said. “And maybe it’s even why he’s so good at math and things like that.”

Caitlin shook her head a bit. “Yes?”

“You know,” her mom said again. “You know about your father’s...” She lowered her voice, and turned her head, perhaps, Caitlin thought, to glance through the door. “...condition.”

Caitlin felt her eyes going wide—but, as she’d already discovered, that didn’t really expand her field of view. “Condition?”

“I told you years ago. Back in Austin.”

Caitlin racked her brain, trying to recall any such conversation, but—

Oh. “I asked you why Dad didn’t talk much, and you said—at least I thought you said ... oh, cripes.”

“What?”

“I thought you said he was artistic. I hadn’t known that word then.” She swallowed and found herself looking through the kitchen doorway, too, making sure they were alone.

“Well, he is artistic. He thinks in pictures, not words.”

Caitlin felt herself go limp in the chair. It made sense, she realized, her heart pounding; it made perfect sense. Her father—the renowned physicist Malcolm Decter, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.—was autistic.

* * * *

Shoshana had heated up a couple of sacks of Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave, and she, the Silverback, Dillon, Maria, and Werner were now seated in the main room of the bungalow, facing the large Apple computer monitor, munching away.

“Okay,” said Shoshana, touching a button on the remote, “here we go.”

She had footage of Dr. Marcuse from earlier projects, including one bit in which he’d done an amazingly protracted yawn. She’d thought about putting that in a circle, with the letters M-G-M above, and the caption “Marcuse Glick Movies” below, but she’d decided not to risk it. Instead, the little video began with white letters over a plain black screen that said, “Ape Makes Representational Art,” followed by the URL of the Marcuse Institute.

Next there was footage of the blank canvas, and then a reverse angle to show Hobo. “This is Hobo,” said Marcuse’s voice over top of the pictures, “a male...” There was just the slightest hesitation, Shoshana noticed. She hadn’t been aware of it when they’d recorded the audio; she’d take it out in the final edit. “...chimpanzee,” continued Marcuse. “Hobo was born at Georgia State Zoological Park, but was raised in San Diego, California, under the care of primatologist Harl P. Marcuse, who...”

The narration continued, and Hobo’s second painting of Shoshana took shape on the canvas. She ate some popcorn and watched the faces of the little audience as much as she watched her video, gauging their reaction. And then came her own big moment: the image divided into a split-screen, with the colored canvas on the left and new footage Dillon had shot on the right: a long pan around her head, and then holding on her in profile, the portrait Hobo had made side-by-side with the genuine article.

“The money shot!” said Dillon. Shoshana threw a little popcorn at him, which he batted out of the air with his hands.

When the video was over, Dillon and Maria clapped politely, and Werner nodded his head in satisfaction. But it didn’t matter what they thought, Shoshana knew. Only the Silverback’s opinion counted. “Dr. Marcuse?” she said, a bit timidly.

He shifted in his chair. “Good work,” he said. “Let’s get it online—and then see what the response is from the Georgia Zoo.”

And here was the biggest leap of all so far, here was the discovery, the realization, the breakthrough, that was the hardest to make but also, I suspected, the most important.

The other entity looked at many, many things, and I had gathered that they were mostly near to it, but there was this rectangle, this frame, this window that it often looked at that was—

Oh, such a leap! Such a strange concept!

It was a display of some sort, a way of representing things that weren’t actually there. And I could see what was on the display, but only when the entity looked at it.

And, just now, the display was showing something ... strange. It took me time to work out the recursiveness of it all: the entity was looking at the display, and the display was showing moving images of a being unlike any I’d yet seen, with longer upper projections and shorter lower ones and a lump that was differently shaped. And this abnormal being was making...

Yes, yes, yes! The abnormal being was making marks on yet another flat surface: shapes, splashes of color. I watched, baffled, perplexed, and—

And suddenly the display was divided into two parts. On one side, I saw the colored shapes that the strange entity had made, and on the other there was an entity of the type I was more used to seeing. That entity was rotating, and—and—and—

And then it stopped rotating, holding its position, and—

The shapes on one side, the entity on the other: there was a ... a correspondence between them. The shapes were a—yes, yes! They were a simplified version of the entity on the right. It was a stunning revelation: this was a representation of that!

The simplified representation was two-dimensional, similar to the way I was used to conceptualizing my own reality. I watched, and concentrated, and—

Suddenly it all made sense!

The lump at the top of each entity did have structure, did have components. As I saw them rendered in basic form, I could now discern the parts on the actual entity that had been rendered. The strange being that had made this rendering had exaggerated certain details so that I now saw not only their significance but realized what things differed from lump to lump: the color of the ... eye, I’d call it. The color of the hair. The color of the rest of the lump. The shape of the nose. The shape of the mouth. The relative size of the ear.

The individual that had been rendered had an odd projection off the back of its lump, possibly part of its hair; as I recalled other lumps I’d seen, I realized that such projections were rare but not unheard of.

It was wonderful! I was clearly discerning the parts of the ... no, not lump; a lump was a generic mass, and this was a specific, very special form, so it deserved its own coinage: head.

I was still far from fully understanding these creatures, but I was at last making progress!

* * * *

Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda headed down to their basement workspace. He’d described it in words to her before, and she now saw—saw!—that he’d done a pretty good job. It was indeed unfinished, had a concrete floor (which she’d already known about from walking across it), and it did contain bookcases and an old TV. But she’d had no idea that the bookcases were finished in a pattern of lighter and darker brown swirling together; she guessed that was wood grain, something she’d felt on other pieces of furniture. And the TV was larger than she’d imagined, and had a black housing.

Still, there were so many other things that Kuroda hadn’t mentioned: thousands of details about the walls, the bare lighting fixture, the metal box that had the light switch on it, the curtains on the little window, a cylindrical contraption that she belatedly realized was the water heater, and on and on. How one decided quickly, as he had, which details were important and which were not worth mentioning was still a mystery to her; it all seemed relevant.

The swivel chairs turned out to have dark red upholstery, which was another thing Kuroda had failed to mention. She sat down in one and Kuroda took the other. He was wearing a colorful loose-fitting shirt with an abstract pattern on it.

“You get along well with my dad,” she said to him, once he’d settled in. The two men had actually bantered a bit over dinner; Kuroda seemed to have an instinct for knowing when her dad was trying to be funny and had laughed at things in a way that encouraged him to say more.

Kuroda smiled. “Sure. Working in the sciences, you have to learn to deal with such people.” But then his face changed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Caitlin. I, um...”

“It’s all right. I know he’s autistic.”

“Asperger’s, most likely, if you want my guess,” Kuroda said, swiveling his chair a bit. “And, well, you do see it all the time among scientists, especially physicists, chemists, and the like.” He paused, as if wondering if he should go on. “In fact, if I may be so bold...”

“Yes?”

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t.”

“Go ahead. It’s okay.”

She saw him hesitate a moment more. “I was just going to say—and forgive me—that you’re fortunate you’re not autistic yourself. It’s particularly common among those who are as gifted as you are mathematically.”

Caitlin lifted her shoulders a bit. “Just lucky, I guess.”

Kuroda frowned. “Well, in a way. But—I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t...”

“Don’t worry about my feelings.”

Kuroda smiled. “Ah, but I must! For, like you, I’m not autistic.” He seemed to think this was funny, so Caitlin laughed politely.

But Kuroda was on to her. “You know, I attend a lot of conferences in Japan at which Western academics speak with the aid of an interpreter. And I remember one who made a joke that I got—it was a play on words in English—but I knew wouldn’t translate. But he got a big laugh anyway. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because the translator said in Japanese, unbeknownst to the speaker, ‘The honorable professor has made a joke in English; it would be polite to laugh.’”

Caitlin did laugh, genuinely this time, then: “But you were saying...”

Kuroda took a breath, and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. “Well, it’s just that maybe you do have the same autistic predisposition as your father, but you dodged the bullet, so to speak, because you were blind.”

“Huh?”

“A large part of the problem with socialization in autism is eye contact; many autistics have trouble making and holding eye contact. But a blind person doesn’t even try to make eye contact, and isn’t expected to.”

She remembered how her mother had sobbed when Caitlin had first looked into her eyes. Having a husband who rarely looked directly at her and a daughter who never did must have been a special sort of hell.

“Have you read Songs of the Gorilla Nation?” Kuroda asked.

“No. Is it science fiction?”

“No, no. It’s a memoir by an autistic woman who finally learned to deal with humans after having been a gorilla handler at a zoo in Seattle. See, the gorillas never looked at her and they don’t look at each other. They interacted in a way that felt natural to her.”

“My mom always told me to turn my head toward whoever was speaking.”

Kuroda’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t do that naturally?”

“Hello! Earth to Dr. Kuroda! I was blind...”

“Yes, but many blind people do that automatically anyway. Interesting.” A pause. “Do you remember your own birth?”

“What?”

“Do you know Temple Grandin?”

“No. Where is it?”

Kuroda chuckled. “It’s not a place, it’s a person—that’s her name. She’s autistic and she claims to remember her own birth. She says lots of people with autism do.”

“How come?”

“You want my take? Many autistics, Dr. Grandin included, say they think in pictures, not in words. Well, of course, we all think in pictures originally; we don’t have sufficient language until we’re two or three years old to do otherwise—and events from when we’re two or three are the earliest most people can recall. Many neuroscientists will tell you that that’s because no memories are laid down before then. But I think, rather, that when we start thinking linguistically that method supersedes thinking in pictures, locking out our ability to retrieve memories that had been stored in the old method; it’s an information-theory issue again. But since many autistics never start thinking linguistically, they have an unbroken chain of memories right back to birth—and maybe even prenatally.”

“That would be awesome,” she said. “But, no, I don’t remember my birth.” And then she smiled. “But my mother does—remember mine, that is. Every year on my birthday she says, ‘I know exactly where I was x-number of years ago...’“ She paused. “I wonder if apes remember their births?”

Kuroda’s face did something. “That’s an interesting thought. But, well, maybe they do; they obviously think in pictures rather than words, after all.”

“Have you seen Hobo?”

“A hobo? In this neighborhood?”

“No, no. Hobo, the chimp who can paint people. It’s all over the Web.”

“No. What do you mean, ‘paint people’?”

“He did a profile of this woman. Actually, I think he’s done it twice now. Here, let me show you the clip...”

“Maybe later. You know, I’m surprised you haven’t read Temple Grandin. Most people with autistics in their families find her books—” He suddenly looked mortified. “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe they aren’t available for the blind.”

“They probably are,” Caitlin said. “Either as Braille, ebooks, or talking books, but...” She considered what she wanted to say next; she certainly didn’t want Kuroda to think she was a bad daughter. “I, um, only just found out my father is autistic.”

“You mean after you were able to see?”

“Yes.”

Kuroda clearly felt he should say something. “Ah.” And then: “Well, there are a lot of good books about autism you should read. Some good novels, too. Try The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. You’ll love it: the main character is a maths whiz.”