Somebody Somewhere (18 page)

I
wanted to understand emotions. I had dictionary definitions for most of them and cartoon caricatures of others but because they didn't happen in context I couldn't link them to the physical experience.

My inner map was blown to bits so I also had trouble reading what other people felt. I could make some translations, though. If people's voices got louder, faster, or went up, they were angry. If tears rolled down their faces, or the sides of their mouths hung down, they were sad. If they were shaking, they were perhaps frightened, sick, or cold. If they smiled, they were laughing.

The most important thing was to check if people were angry. “Angry” had the worst and most invasive consequences.

“Are you angry?” I asked Dr. Marek, as his voice changed. “No Donna, I'm not angry,” he replied for the fiftieth time. Dr. Marek smiled.

“Stop laughing at me,” I said as he smiled. “I'm not laughing,” he
said, “I'm smiling.” “You're lying. You
are
laughing. Look at your face. Your eyes are laughing and you're smiling.” I went on. Dr. Marek couldn't win. The only categories left were “sad” or “frightened.” If I had seen “sad,” I would probably have been worried I would now be in trouble or I would feel angry at him feeling sorry for me. If I had seen “frightened,” I would know that I was something very, very bad. The other alternative was to choose not to give a damn. I gave a damn bigly.

“How do I stop people getting angry?” I asked. In effect, this meant how could I stop them from having any vocal variation whatsoever. I also wanted to know why they made faces and insisted on making their voices dance even though they could see it upset me.

“How do other people learn these things?” I wanted to know. If I could learn how they learned them, I could teach myself. “They learn them naturally,” Dr. Marek said.

He explained that others could use these ways of self-expression and spoken words all at the same time without conscious analysis. I felt I was staring into the face of genius. This made people's apparent ignoring of my reality look all the more deliberate, the inequality and injustice I had faced all the more intentional. How could I have been such a bad person and not known it?

I
t was the end of the first teaching round. I had spent two weeks teaching everything from math to music, phys ed to social studies, to a class of nine-year-olds. I had survived, with a good report for teaching and a bare “Pass” when it came to rapport with fellow staff-members. It had been a damned hard few weeks.

I liked Vanessa. She was a student in the course with me. I liked her hair and I liked her eyes. I reminded Vanessa of someone she knew. “Do you know anything about dyslexia, Donna?” she asked me. “Some,” I said.

Vanessa had a friend who had reading difficulties but she had
always felt it was more than this. Her friend had shared the same strange ways and had failed to pick up the subtleties. Vanessa wondered what it was that we shared in common.

“Does dyslexia also involve having trouble being with people?” she had asked me. “What sort of difficulties?” I asked. “He doesn't seem to notice people's feelings. He talks over everyone or he talks really loudly about anything in front of anyone. I end up feeling embarrassed by him sometimes and when I explain it to him he really tries to understand but then he does it again,” she explained. “When I met him, I thought his funny ways were really cute. I thought he was just naïve and that he'd learn all these things, but now we've been together three years and I think either he can't change or he doesn't want to bother.”

Vanessa was close to a person with some difficulties like mine. I could, therefore, risk telling her why I was like I was. I told her about autism.

When I saw Vanessa was placed with me for the first teaching round, I was relieved. There would be someone here who would understand me. I spoke freely and openly with her.

We were both teaching at the same school and it was the day our supervisor would come to assess our ability to teach. One hour before my assessor came to watch me, Vanessa asked me to come with her to the room she was teaching in. She handed me a letter. I walked away to read it.

The letter explained that I was making her very, very uncomfortable. It said that she had been dropping hints but I hadn't seemed to get them. The note said that I was selfish because I only talked about myself and never asked her about herself except to say, how are you? The note said not to talk to her in front of people anymore and not to discuss the note with anyone except her. I was not to do so face to face. I was to do so only by phoning her outside of school hours to discuss it. Vanessa never realized that to say, How are you? from my own feelings was a big thing. She never realized that none of the things that had upset her were intentional.

I burned up with shock and shame and hurt. I stood in the
bathroom and splashed myself with cold water. I was about to vomit when the assembly bell rang. My next class was going to be assessed by the lecturer who I had already been informed I couldn't tell about the letter.

Carol had been chatty with the other performers in the play as they stood behind the stage curtain waiting to go on. Tonight was a special night in the run of the play, a family night. Everyone had someone special to them come along to the show. Carol looked at the audience from behind the curtain, all the anonymous faces. A realness began to break through, as though a child was crying from somewhere inside her.

Donna stood there shaking, with tears in her eyes. Vomit rose in her throat. “You okay?” said one of her comrades in the play, reaching out and touching her on the back. In a flash, Donna was “gone,” killed off by the grace of unexpected touch. Carol bounced back as dead as ever, totally focused on the rote-learned script, the role about to be played. The curtain went up and she strutted out to do her scene.

“That was great,” said the director, after the show. “That was the best show you've done so far.” “Yeah, I know,” replied Carol glibly. “I was throwing up just before I went on.”

I wanted to run, to cry, or be sick. Carol took over, emerging in full force to do a great performance. She returned from the dead and took the lesson as though she were on stage. Betrayed by a “the worlder” I had trusted with my self, I had nothing left within me to drive me to fight back. The classroom was Carol's theater. The audience had appreciated the performance. The lesson was assessed as very good but I was told I had been hyper and manic. “You won't be able to keep up this pace as a teacher,” warned the lecturer.

I knew this better than anyone. I knew that I was unable to keep up this pace even as a person. It was Carol's first and last performance in a classroom. I had been shocked and yet relieved, sure that if that trigger between terror and manic oblivion had not been set off, I would have failed the assessment. I got home and fell in a heap.

A knock came at the door. I sat bolt upright like Dracula in his
coffin at the stroke of midnight. “It's me, Jessy,” called the Millers' daughter. “Mum and Dad want to know if you want to come in.”

The Millers kicked some spirit back into me just at the point when I felt I had to drop out. “You've come this far and you're going to give up just because of one ignorant person,” said Mr. Miller. “What a wimp.” I was not a wimp and Vanessa's ignorance was not going to make me give up.

T
he Millers tried to teach me that words can be used to form closeness. They didn't realize that I didn't share a “the world” definition of closeness. I had far more understanding of why I needed to avoid it than welcome it.

They began to talk. I selected out bits of what they had said and went through my “me, too” routine. “The world does not revolve around Donna Williams,” said Mr. Miller gently.

Shifting back and forth from one voice to the other, the pattern of speech changed continuously. It was too quick for me to keep up with any interpretation and it was getting out of sync. Mrs. Miller's patterns were just registering when Mr. Miller began to take over. My hearing started to climb, as though someone had turned up my volume, pitch, and speed controls. I covered my ears and tried to get a rhythm to calm down.

My emotions climbed. I snapped as though being attacked. The Millers tried better to explain what they were saying. Overload had set in. Explanations were just more blah-blah-blah. I needed time out but I couldn't get the mechanics going to work out how.

My vision started to climb; an emergency signal to tell me to do something about the overload before the fuses blew. The lights became brighter.

I was tickled by the effect on my senses and began to giggle. The hypersensitivity and the memory experience of it took on a momentum of its own. It climbed ever higher, topping itself under the intense effect of the brightness on my nervous system.

I squinted and grinned, the strain and the confusion of the sudden change from happy to excited to tortured took place within the space of fifteen minutes with no cues to tell me why or what I was feeling and no time to reflect. My ship was sinking and no one knew.

Conversation poured down upon my ears. The TV went blah-blah-blah. The carpet had a disordered pattern of fluff upon it. The papers on the table needed tidying. The grain in the wood paneling was not symmetrical. There was a sock under the couch. “A sock under the couch? A sock under the couch? A sock under the couch? Damn! What the hell is a couch?”

I looked at the beige-colored rectangular blob in front of me. Meaning had shut down not only through my ears but now through my eyes, too. I could see it but I had absolutely no idea what it was for anymore.

Carol would have broken into “entertainment” time. Endless reams of stored commercials, songs, and word associations. My fear had been Carol's mania, a last-ditch effort to stay out of the Big Black Nothingness. But now here sat I, with the time, space, and inclination to stay intact despite the fear. These people fought for me and inspired my insistence to have a self.