Do You Think This Is Strange? (10 page)

She drove me to the station and held me tightly until I finally pushed her away. “It's time for you to be a man now,” she said. “Get up and get on with your life.” Then she sat me on the bench, made me lie down and close my eyes, and she left. That's just the way it is.

I don't remember how I got home. It's one of the few things in my life I don't remember. Instead, I remember lying on my back, looking at the dark night sky, as the rain fell on my face. I remember feeling cold, listening to the sound of people around me, the sounds of the train station, the ticking of cooling metal, the hiss of air being released from brakes.

I remember someone standing over me, as I lay staring up at the sky.

“What are you looking at, sport?” he said.

I opened my eyes
and I was fourteen years old, in my bed, and my father was drinking in the kitchen. I couldn't sleep, and the house was cold. I got up from bed and walked downstairs. I found him at the kitchen table.

The kitchen table is my brother, my father often told me. When I was a child, he liked to tease me about it. It made no sense to me, but I liked it, because he played with me when he said it.

“You're the two funniest looking twins I've ever seen,” he told me, putting down his beer and chasing me to the living room, where my mother was dancing.

The table and I are non-identical twins, so that makes us fraternal. We were both delivered on the same day. Me, at 9 pounds, 12 ounces. The table, at 158 pounds. I don't know how many ounces. Me, with a slight swirl of blond hair. It, with oak stained cherry red.

Both the kitchen table and I were difficult deliveries.

The table was too large to easily fit through the front hall and had to go into the house through a more circuitous route, lifted up to the balcony, through the sliding door into the living room. Then to the nook in the kitchen.

Similarly, I was too large to easily fit through a birth canal and had to go out through a more circuitous route. The womb from which I was ripped grieved petulantly. It mourned its loss, crying eleven units of blood over the next two hours. Until the surgeons finally stopped the flow of blood, it wasn't known whether I would be born to a one- or two-parent family.

The table was my father's present to his beloved wife, to my mother, for the work she had done, for the sacrifice she gave. She could never have children again. I destroyed her womb. I blew shut the door from which I came, and no one could follow after me. I made my mother into a one-act play, and I was the plot.

And now, fourteen years later, my father sat alone in the dark with his scotch and his candles.

“Where's Mom?” I asked him, and the candles danced.

“You keep asking that,” he sighed.

Outside, a flash of lightning turned the night to day, and I saw the alder at the window, tapping.

“You know where she is,” he said. He motioned to the chair across from him. “Sit,” he said. “Just sit for a bit.”

I sat down.

“Have you asked me where Mom is before?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Have I told you the answer before?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me what the answer is.”

“She left us.”

He nodded.

“When did she leave us?” he asked.

I paused. “Seven years ago.”

“How many days?”

“Two thousand, seven hundred, and forty-three days.”

He nodded again. “Two thousand, seven hundred, and forty-three days,” he said and took a sip of his scotch. “That's a long time for you to keep asking, you know.”

The refrigerator turned on. I listened to its chatter for a moment and it calmed my mind. I watched the candles flicker. They were a characteristic of our home. My father preferred them to a lamp. He claimed it made the evening more important.

“A candle at the table means there are secrets, Freddy. A candle is
intimate
. On a night where there is only a candle for light, you are probably about to enter into a dialogue with your own soul.”

He leaned toward me. “Tonight, boy,” he pointed his dying cigarette at me, “we can talk about questions of the soul.”

“Why did she leave?” I asked.

“Some people can't handle it.” He shrugged.

I stared out the window.

“Listen,” he said. “There were stages we went through. I think they're the same stages every parent like us goes through. Some of the stages overlap.” He held up his glass. “Like the drinking stage.

“But the first stages are the same for everyone. First there's shock, and you sit around waiting for someone to pull out the accidentally misplaced file and tell you it was all a mix-up. Then there's the stage where you don't believe it, what if the diagnosis was wrong, what if Freddy was just having a bad day?” He shook his head. “But deep down you know none of that is going to happen, because you've suspected for too long, you've lived with it for too long. You know it's true. And you move on to the next stage.

“You go through each phase and it's tough,” he muttered as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Because nothing happens. You get angry, but there's no one to be angry at. You sit in denial and hope that your kid will spontaneously get better. You do nothing and watch it get worse. After that, and for the rest of your life, you live with the guilt that you didn't start soon enough.”

He looked at me. “Betty had a tough time getting past that stage.”

I waited.

“There was the stage where we believed that it would come to an end soon. And there was the stage where we decided that by the time you were fifteen or sixteen you'd be cured.”

“Cured of what?” I asked.

He nodded and pointed a finger at me. “Exactly,” he said. He sat back, his shoulders relaxed like a great truth had been spoken. “Exactly.”

Clink, clink.

“Then there was the stage where we stopped pretending that some things were getting better. Because some things weren't. That's the stage where we knew it would be like this forever. This isn't like the flu. Autism isn't acute.” He looked me directly in the eye as he said this, then he was quiet for a while.

“And when you realize something like that,” he said at last, “your world collapses like a mud hut. It drops down on you, and there's no more lying about it. Your son has autism. He has it and he'll have it the rest of his life.” He pulled out another cigarette, his fingers shaking. “That's the worst stage because the question becomes: how far will your son make it in life? And the answer is now back in your court.” He pointed a finger at me. “Where
you
end up depends on what
I
do right here, right
now
. This is the stage where I realize that your future is in my hands, and it scares me to death. For the past ten years, I've been afraid that I don't have what it takes.”

Not good enough
, the threads said.

“Why did Mom leave?”

He sighed and dropped his head. “I don't know. I don't know if she realized she wasn't up to the challenge, or if she thought that I wasn't up for the challenge. Either way, she left.”

He took a long drag of his cigarette and looked at me as he drank the last of his scotch, then set his glass on the table. “And she didn't take you.”

That night my father told me that my mother left me behind was an inflection point in my life. It marked the end of seven years of wondering why she left. Now I finally knew: she left because of me.

So began the three years since, wondering what to do about it.

This is what I remember of my mother: her hair was blond and it hung two inches past her shoulders. Her eyes were blue. She was three inches shorter than my father. She wore dresses. Her favourite flowers were orchids. She smelled like strawberries off a knife. She liked to wear red lipstick. Her housecoat was pink and came down to just above her knees. On weekends, she liked to make a morning pot of coffee and sit with my father in the living room for an hour, looking out the window, talking about the years ahead and what would be. I was not allowed to take part. Until the last cup of coffee was finished, I was not supposed to interrupt. My mother called it their Special Morning Time.

My father called it his Time Out from Me.

I remember my mother liked to dance in the living room, or fuss with her orchids, ignoring my father's complaints about the expense. I remember she liked to hop up and down with me when I got excited or agitated, and it ended up calming me. Sometimes, we clapped our hands for twenty minutes until I stopped bouncing on the couch. I remember when we did it on our feet and my father walked in and took a bow because he said he thought we were giving him a standing ovation.

“No, we're NOT!” I shouted, jumping up and down.

I remember at night, sometimes, I would sit in my bed and stare at the wall and listen to my mother crying. At the time, I didn't understand what she was crying about. On the night my father told me why my mother left, I realized she was crying about me. I realized that when they yelled, they were yelling about me.

For days after I realized this, the thread consumed me, this question of what I did to make her leave. It appropriated my time until it became my Most Favourite Thing. I still stared at the giant clock, and still watched the time pass, but my mind was no longer empty. It was filled with questions and thoughts and logical rabbit holes.

Over those days, I withdrew. When outdoors, I was especially unresponsive to others. My head went down when I walked. My eyes went distant when I stood. I thought about my mother and watched the time tick away.

A week after our conversation over the candle, as I sat at the bus stop and turned the pages of my book, a group of boys chatted among themselves, pushing at each other and laughing. I stared at a grey wall in the distance, watching the clock tick time. 4:32, 4:33, 4:34. But it was difficult to stay focused because one of the four boys was directly in my line of sight.

“Could you not stand there?” I asked him.

That was how it began.

I opened my eyes
and I was fourteen years old. I lay on my back and looked straight up into the sky. Rain fell on my face. The wheels of my stretcher rattled, and two paramedics rolled me to the ambulance, put me inside, closed the doors, and took me to Eagle Ridge Hospital.

It was unusual that I went willingly on a stretcher. I'm not fond of things with small wheels, like shopping carts, or skateboards, or ottomans. I don't feel the same way about Hot Wheels cars, which also have small wheels. The wheels aren't small in proportion to the rest of the toy car. Small wheels are disconcerting when the chassis is disproportionately larger than the wheels. I don't like large airplanes for that reason.

It took the paramedics a small amount of coercing and shepherding to get me on the stretcher. They didn't know I was autistic, and thought I was just injured. So they went slow. They put a collar around my neck. They slid a board under me.

“What are you looking at, sport?” the paramedic first asked me, then shone a light in my right eye.

What happened?
a thread finally asked.

It may have been a troll that did this to me. Perhaps there's a subspecies of troll, shaped like teenage boys, with rings and baseball caps and thick green coats. If so, it was trolls that did this to me.

On the way to the hospital, they asked too many questions.

“Can you understand me?”

When I tried to reply, they interrupted me with a different question.

“Can you tell me what day it is?”

I didn't reply. Fool me twice, and all that.

I was disoriented and frightened, but mostly I was annoyed at the two paramedics for asking questions that didn't require immediate answers. I could tell them the date later. It wasn't the most pressing question.

The most pressing question was:
why did this happen?

—

I lay on the stretcher, even though I wanted to stand, and I remember they put an oxygen mask over my mouth, even though I wasn't having trouble breathing. Their actions kept spawning new questions in my mind, and I was overwhelmed. I lay back, closed my eyes.

“Okay, he's shutting down,” said the first paramedic, alarmed.

“Stay with me, sport,” said the second.

“Stop talking, please,” I said.

I closed threads:

The stretcher has small wheels
, said a thread.

I knew that the gurney was tall relative to its wheels, probably unstable, and therefore dangerous. But I was inside the back of an ambulance, in a confined space. Further, the paramedics collapsed the gurney so that it was only inches off the floor. There was little chance that the gurney could tip over.

Okay
, said the thread.

However, the ambulance door could open at a stoplight, the ambulance could accelerate, and I could spill into traffic, strapped to the stretcher. I did a memory search for any examples of a patient accidentally sliding out the back door of an ambulance at a traffic light and found nothing.
Okay
, said another thread.

A thread remembered a news story I read, two years, three months, and four days ago, about an enraged mob blocking an ambulance carrying a suspected rapist. The mob dragged him from the back of the ambulance and beat him to death.

But I wasn't suspected of rape. In fact, I was the victim of violence, not the suspect of violence. It was unlikely that an enraged mob would attack the ambulance and beat me.
Works for me
, said the thread.

One thread remained: the four boys could pull me from the ambulance and complete my beating. They had motivation and had indicated they weren't done. The one in the thick green coat warned me that the beating was incomplete.

“If they ask you who did this,” he said, picking me up by the scruff of my shirt, “you tell them you don't know nuthin'. Otherwise, we'll find you and finish the job.”