The Speed of Dark (20 page)

“I’m your boss, not your friend,” Mr. Aldrin blurts out. He turns even redder. He said earlier he was our friend. Was he lying then, or is he lying now? “I mean… it had nothing to do with work.”

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“It is the reason you wanted to be our supervisor,” Cameron says.

“It’s not. I didn’t want to be your supervisor at first.”

“At first.”Linda is still staring at his face. “Something changed. It was your brother?”

“No. You are not much like my brother. He is… very impaired.”

“You want the treatment for your brother?” Cameron asks.

“I… don’t know.”

That does not sound like the truth, either. I try to imagine Mr. Aldrin’s brother, this unknown autistic person. If Mr. Aldrin thinks his brother is very impaired, what does he think of us, really? What was his childhood like?

“I’ll bet you do,” Cameron says. “If you think it’s a good idea for us, you must think it could help him.

Maybe you think if you can get us to do it, they’ll reward you with his treatment? Good boy: here’s a candy?”

“That’s not fair,” Mr. Aldrin says. His voice is louder, too. People are turning to look. I wish we were not here. “He’s my brother, naturally I want to help him any way I can, but—”

“Did Mr. Crenshaw tell you that if you talked us into it, your brother could get treatment?”

“I… it’s not that—” His eyes slide from side to side; his face changes color. I see the effort on his face, the effort to fool us convincingly. The book said autistic persons are gullible and easily fooled because they do not understand the nuances of communication. I do not think lying is a nuance. I think lying is wrong. I am sorry Mr. Aldrin is lying to us but glad that he is not doing it very well.

“If there is not enough market for this treatment to autistic persons, what else is it good for?” Linda asks.

I wish she had not changed the subject back to before, but it is too late. Mr. Aldrin’s face relaxes a little.

I have an idea, but it is not clear yet. “Mr. Crenshaw said he would be willing to keep us on without the treatment if we gave up the support services, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, why?”

“So… he would like to have what we—what autistic persons—are good at without the things we are not good at.”

Mr. Aldrin’s brow wrinkles. It is the movement that shows confusion. “I suppose,” he says slowly. “But I’m not sure what that has to do with the treatment.”

“Somewhere in the original article is the profit,” I say to Mr. Aldrin . “Not changing autistic persons—there are no more kids born like we were born, not in this country. There are not enough of us.

But something we do is valuable enough that if normal people could doit, that would be profitable.” I think of that time in my office when for a few moments the meaning of the symbols, the beautiful intricacy of the patterns of data, went away and left me confused and distracted. “You have watched us work for years now; you must know what it is—”

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“Your ability in pattern analysis and math, you know that.”

“No—you said Mr. Crenshaw said the new software could do that as well. It is something else.”

“I still want to know about your brother,” Linda says.

Aldrincloses his eyes, refusing contact. I was scolded for doing just that. He opens them again.

“You’re… relentless,” he says. “You just don’t quit.”

The pattern forming in my mind, the light and dark shifting and circling, begins to cohere. But it is not enough; I need more data.

“Explain the money,” I say to Aldrin .

“Explain… what?”

“The money.How does the company make money to pay us?”

“It’s… very complicated, Lou. I don’t think you could understand.”

“Please try. Mr. Crenshaw claims we cost too much, that the profits suffer. Where do the profits really come from?”

MR. ALDRIN JUST STARES AT ME. FINALLY HE SAYS
, “I don’t know how to say it, Lou, because I don’t know what the process is, exactly, or what it could do if applied to someone who isn’t autistic.”

“Can’t you even—”

“And… and I don’t think I should be talking about this. Helping you is one thing…” He has not helped us yet. Lying to us is not helping us. “But speculating about something that doesn’t exist, speculating that the company is contemplating some broader action that may be… that could be construed as…” He stops and shakes his head without finishing the sentence. We are all looking at him. His eyes are very shiny, as if he were about to cry.

“I shouldn’t have come,” he says after a moment. “This was a big mistake. I’ll pay for the meal, but I have to go now.”

He pushes back his chair and gets up; I see him at the cash register with his back to us. None of us says anything until he has gone out the front door.

“He’s crazy,” Chuy says.

“He’s scared,” Bailey says.

“He hasn’t helped us, not really,” Linda says. “I don’t know why he bothered—”

“His brother,” Cameron says.

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“Something we said bothered him even more than Mr. Crenshaw or his brother,” I say.

“He knows something he doesn’t want us to know.” Linda brushes the hair off her forehead with an abrupt gesture.

“He doesn’t want to know it himself,” I say. I am not sure why I think that, but I do. It is something we said. I need to know what it was.

“There was something, back around the turn of the century,” Bailey says. “In one of the science journals, something about making people sort of autistic so they would work harder.”

“Science journal or science fiction?”I ask.

“It was—wait; I’ll look it up. I know somebody who will know.” Bailey makes a note on his handcomp

.

“Don’t send it from the office,” Chuy says.

“Why—? Oh. Yes.” Bailey nods.

“Pizza tomorrow,” Linda says. “Coming here is normal.”

I open my mouth to say that Tuesday is my day to shop for groceries and shut it again. This is more important. I can go a week without groceries, or I can shop a little later.

“Everybodylook up what you can find,” Cameron says.

At home, I log on and e-mail Lars. It is very late where he is, but he is awake. I find out that the original research was done inDenmark , but the entire lab, equipment and all, was bought up and the research base shifted toCambridge . The paper I first heard about weeks ago was based on research done more than a year ago. Mr. Aldrin was right about that. Lars thinks much of the work to make the treatments human-compatible has been done; he speculates on secret military experiments. I do not believe this; Lars thinks everything is a secret military experiment. He is a very good game player, but I do not believe everything he says.

Wind rattles my windows. I get up and lay a hand on the glass.Much colder. A spatter of rain and then I hear thunder. It is late anyway; I shut down my system and go to bed.

Tuesday we do not speak to one another at work, other than “good morning” and “good afternoon.” I spend fifteen minutes in the gym when I finish another section of my project, but then I go back to work.

Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Crenshaw both come by, not quite arm in arm, but as if they were friendly. They do not stay long, and they do not talk to me.

After work, we go back to the pizza place. “Two nights in a row!” says Hi-I’m-Sylvia. I cannot tell if she is happy or unhappy about that. We take our usual table but pull over another one so there is room for everybody.

“So?” Cameron says, after we’ve ordered. “What have we found out?”

I tell the group what Lars said. Bailey has found the text of the old article, which is clearly fiction and not
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nonfiction. I did not know that science journals ever published science fiction on purpose, and apparently it only happened for one year.

“It was supposed to make people really concentrate on an assigned project and not waste time on other things,” Bailey said.

“Like Mr. Crenshaw thinks we waste time?” I say.

Bailey nods.

“We don’t waste as much time as he wastes walking around looking angry,” Chuy says.

We all laugh, but quietly. Eric is drawing curlicues with his colored pens; they look like laughing sounds.

“Does it say how it was going to work?” Linda asks.

“Sort of,” Bailey says. “But I’m not sure the science is good. And that was decades ago. What they thought would work might not be what really works.”

“They don’t want autistic people like us,” Eric says. “They wanted—or the story said they wanted—savant talents and concentration without the other side effects. Compared to a savant we waste a lot of time, though not as much as Mr. Crenshaw thinks.”

“Normal people waste a lot of time on nonproductive things,” Cameron says.“At least as much as we do, maybe more.”

“It would take what to turn a normal person into a savant without the other problems?” Linda asks.

“I don’t know,” Cameron says. “They would have to be smart to start with. Good at something. Then they would have to want to do that instead of anything else.”

“It wouldn’t do any good if they wanted to do something they were bad at,” Chuy says. I imagine a person determined to be a musician who has no rhythm and no pitch sense; it is ridiculous. We all see the funny side of this and laugh.

“Do people ever want to do what they aren’t good at?” Linda asks. “Normal people, that is?” For once she does not make the word
normal
sound like a bad word.

We sit and think a moment; then Chuy says, “I had an uncle who wanted to be a writer. My sister—she reads a lot—she said he was really bad.Really, really bad. He was good at doing things with his hands, but he wanted to write.”

“Here y’are , then,” Hi-I’m-Sylvia says, putting down the pizzas. I look at her. She is smiling, but she looks tired and it is not even seven yet.

“Thank you,” I say. She waves a hand and hurries away.

“Something to keep people from paying attention to distraction,” Bailey says.“Something to make them like the right things.”

“ ‘Distractibilityis determined by the sensory sensitivity at every level of processing and by the strength of
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sensory integration,’” Eric recites. “I read that. Part of it’s inborn. That’s been known for forty or fifty years; late in the twentieth century that knowledge had worked its way down to the popular level, in books on parenting. Attention control circuitry is developed early in fetal life; it can be compromised by later injury…”

I feel almost sick for a moment, as if something were attacking my brain right now, but push that feeling aside. Whatever caused my autism is in the past, where I cannot undo it. Now it is important not to think about me but about the problem.

All my life I’ve been told how lucky I was to be born when I was— lucky to benefit from the improvements in early intervention, lucky to be born in the right country, with parents who had the education and resources to be sure I got that good early intervention. Even lucky to be born too soon for definitive treatment, because—my parents said—having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.

What would they have said if this treatment had been available for me when I was a child? Would they have wanted me to be stronger or be normal? Would accepting treatment mean I had no strength of character? Or would I find other struggles?

I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS THE NEXT EVENING AS I
change clothes and drive to Tom and Lucia’s for fencing. What behaviors do we have that someone could profit from, other than the occasional savant talents? Most of the autistic behaviors have been presented to us as deficits, not strengths. Unsocial, lacking social skills, problems with attention control… I keep coming back to that. It is hard to think from their perspective, but I have the feeling that this attention control issue is at the middle of the pattern, like a black hole at the center of a space-time whirlpool. That is something else we are supposed to be deficient in, the famous Theory of Mind.

I am a little early. No one else is parked outside yet. I pull up carefully so that there is the most room possible behind me. Sometimes the others are not so careful, and then fewer people can park without inconveniencing others. I could be early every week, but that would not be fair to others.

Inside, Tom and Lucia are laughing about something. When I go in, they grin at me, very relaxed. I wonder what it would be like to have someone in the house all the time, someone to laugh with. They do not always laugh, but they seem happy more often than not.

“How are you, Lou?” Tom asks. He always asks that. It is one of the things normal people do, even if they know that you are all right.

“Fine,” I say. I want to ask Lucia about medical things, but I do not know how to start or if it is polite. I start with something else. “The tires on my car were slashed last week.”

“Oh, no!”Lucia says.“How awful!” Her face changes shape; I think she means to express sympathy.

“It was in the parking lot at the apartment,” I say.“In the same place as usual.All four tires.”

Tom whistles. “That’s expensive,” he says. “Has there been a lot of vandalism in the area? Did you report it to the police?”

I cannot answer one of those questions at all. “I did report it,” I say. “There is a policeman who lives in our apartment building. He told me how to report it.”

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“That’s good,” Tom says. I am not sure if he means it is good that a policeman lives in our building or that I reported it, but I do not think it is important to know which.

“Mr. Crenshaw was angry that I was late to work,” I say.

“Didn’t you tell me he’s new?” Tom asks.

“Yes. He does not like our section. He does not like autistic people.”

“Oh, he’s probably…” Lucia begins, but Tom looks at her and she stops.

“I don’t know why you think he doesn’t like autistic people,” Tom says.

I relax. It is so much easier to talk to Tom when he says things this way. The question is less threatening.

I wish I knew why.

“He says we should not need the supportive environment,” I say. “He says it is too expensive and we should not have the gym and… and the other things.” I have never actually talked about the special things that make our workplace so much better. Maybe Tom and Lucia will think the same way as Mr.