Somebody Somewhere (29 page)

The course over, I sat down to serious business and together with the Millers' daughter, we made a tall, life-sized, homemade cardboard cut-out of a Christmas tree. We decorated it with scraps of shiny paper, glitter, and cut-out stars. Then we hung it on the door of my apartment. Kerry would be moving in after I left and it would be there to make her feel welcome.

My friend Tim showed up in time to help me put together the Millers' tree. Together with the Millers' daughter, the three of us went into rapture (mostly me) over the various kinds of tinsel and colored plastic decorations. I raced outside to bring in some presents I had already bought and wrapped. I gave Tim the one I had wrapped for him. It was a painting of the countryside, which I was going to miss: a lake at dawn, surrounded by shadows caught by tall blades of grass. It was the sort of picture that conjured up the sounds of birds in the morning and the feel of bare feet on stubbles of dried grass and golden clay. This used to be the best kind of Christmas: a hit-and-run Christmas where I wouldn't be there to share it. Yet a lot had changed. I now wished I was going to be there to celebrate.

Tim and I sat among the fallen orange pine needles of the small pine tree cluster at the foot of the farm. It was a warm feeling: a feeling of home, which I felt I was leaving. I looked into his eyes, spoke as myself, and felt—all at the same time. We discussed how far our paths had come. “It's been six years,” I said. “Thanks for believing.” Thanks for sticking with it. Thanks for being able to see the real me. Thanks for insisting I live with myself, I thought to myself.

Saying goodbye to Tim, I didn't want him to try to hug me anymore. I wanted to know what it was not to be inflicted upon (even though I had coped better with Tim than anyone else). I wanted to know what it was like to want to hug this person I knew I felt for. “Can I hug you?” I asked, unsure of how one announces such things but feeling it was surely fair to do so. I felt somehow that by announcing it, the expression of this want was not undeniable and I would have to follow it through. “Of course you can,” said Tim. I managed to stay with the feeling long enough to know it. “That is the first time I have been the first to pull away,” Tim said. We both smiled.

I
t was the final day before boarding a plane to go overseas for the first time since writing
Nobody Nowhere.
On the way I would land in another state in Australia and do more publicity for Holly Hobbie.

I went out walking in the night and said goodbye to the farm and the city I'd grown up in. Something within me knew I'd only really come back to go to a few funerals and say goodbye. Some things are a part of the way. Some things are where you are going.

Goodbyes to the Millers had come in the midst of Christmas and other confusions. They had been a great help to me and had spent many late nights sitting up with me defining and illustrating a hundred and one elusive social and emotional concepts, expectations, conventions, and rules. We had gone over everything from mock interviews to herd mentality.

The Millers were going to take me to the airport. Tim had always wanted to but I had never allowed him. But there were no more battle lines now. Both Tim and the Millers could take me to the airport. I warned them all, “You know I may feel nothing. I may say a blunt and casual goodbye and leave as though I am just going to do my shopping.” They understood and accepted.

It was too much. I was woozy with so much newness and the almost irreconcilable image of Tim standing together with the Millers, chatting occasionally. These people were from different times in my life, different situations, and spoke in different ways. Strangely the only consistency was that I had been the same self with each of them. Yet I couldn't hold together what was happening, or follow it too well. I decided just to have a little faith and let it be.

It was time to go through the departure gates. I was having trouble enough keeping up with three people and two children talking, and keeping track of the sequence of moves involved in boarding a plane. I stood at the gateway and shook hands with the Millers.

I looked at Tim. He knew I was sorry that in all the confusion and overload, my capacity for emotion had simply abandoned me. There was no interpretation of the events happening. I hadn't managed to get that far with everything happening at once. And yet no characters emerged. “You knew this would probably happen,” I said to him, speaking a language he understood already without explanation. “I'll probably fall apart in the toilets on the plane in about an hour when it all hits me.” He wouldn't be there then.

It would take that long for the blocked sink to clear. By then, all the emotions would be robbed of their context. There would be no Millers, no Tim, and no Mareks. There would just be me with myself in the immediate context of an airplane toilet, several thousand feet up in the air. Silent screaming and tears without understanding would be my traveling companions, with little more than rocking as a release to comfort me and keep me sane.

Contextless emotions. God must have an incredible imagination to have created such a thing. But God probably knew where I was
going in this life. There probably could have been no greater guarantee against a disturbing environment in which I had always remained detached and almost alien in my resilience.

T
he bright city lights of another Australian state were a good transition to the huge changes ahead. The state was unfamiliar enough to shake me up and yet familiar enough to get used to in small doses.

It was one thing to make great flying leaps when I was alone and free like a leaf in the wind. That had always been part of the freedom of untouchability and escape. Now I was embarking upon journeys where people would be aware of my every move. My days would be thoroughly planned and filled up with people I would have to see on an ongoing basis as myself. All my life I'd avoided planned meetings and dates; they were like social cages where I could be held to time and place and be scrutinized. I couldn't just tell the journalists and publishers we'd run across each other sometime, in the usual hit-and-run style I'd been used to.

In my hotel room, I discovered room service, and the drama of getting all the steps going in cooking were suddenly unbelievably simple: the menu was unfamiliar to me, the food was unfamiliar to me, so I went out and bought some groceries and cooked for some of the time instead.

My washing was washed with my body in the bath as usual, then wrung out and hung to dry around the room. Eventually I made sense of the cards about laundry service but spent a long time contemplating whether I could cope with other people taking my clothes away and deciding to bring them back when
they
were ready. I stuck to the bath system.

“Don't go walking around at night in the city,” the Millers and the Mareks and my publisher had said. I stood barefoot instead on the gravel-paved balcony. I looked at the symmetry of various patterns of city lights, their colors, and the sharp contrast of the vitality of the
city with the serious and ever consistent deep blueness of the night sky hanging overhead. It rained. I stood out in it; big drops of fresh water fell on my outstretched hands.

Holly Hobbie was waiting in the hotel lobby. I was glad to see her familiar face. Her red hair was a guarantee she was a nice person even if it came from a bottle. It was frightening to speak to people without anyone to copy or mirror, without searching and constantly anticipating the correct or expected response. How did she become herself and be there to greet me so easily, so breezily? I was in awe of the ease with which others seemed to master some of the most difficult things, and yet these were the things they labeled “simple,” “natural,” and “instinctual.”

The first journalist reminded me of a friend of mine. There seemed no point to me in the ego exercise of seeing “how well we could make the autistic woman speak.” I knew damned well this would suffice for ten-minute meetings or intellectual reel-offs of well-rehearsed topics. This would not suffice for personal topics about a life I now felt was more than just “the Donna case.”

I didn't want to answer the reporters' questions on the basis of fifteen to fifty percent comprehension. I wanted to be sure I was answering on the basis of at least eighty percent. Having the questions on paper in the intimacy of my own undistracted space, I could cut out the effects of anxiety, distraction, and confusing verbal waffle. I could see what I was saying and what I wanted to say. I would not be forced to speak, deaf to the meaning of my own words. I was not a freak in a circus or some exploited performing animal forced to do impressions of human stunts with no understanding of why. I deserved no less humanity than others did even if mine was a hidden disability.

It was time to fly off to the United Kingdom. I called Theo Marek to say goodbye before leaving my country. I was full of the weight of “sad.” The blocked-sink effect was beginning to clear. I was getting the effects of the events from two days and several goodbyes
before. I thought of why I was there and why I had even decided to let the book be published. I would manage. I would have to.