Somebody Somewhere (33 page)

M
y plane touched down in St Louis. As I came through the gates I spotted a skinny little dark-haired woman of my own age. “Donna!” she squealed.

It was Kathy, the autistic woman who had tracked me down almost a year ago in Australia in her effort to accumulate “comrades.” She had written to me regularly ever since.

I had recognized her from her photo. “How're ya doin' comrade?” she said in a broad Midwestern drawl that impressed me deeply (being a great lover of accents). She was just as excited by my accent as we walked to God-knows-where and I squinted under the awful glare of overhead fluorescent lights and the high pitch of her voice.

We were going to her apartment, where she lived with her cat, Obie, and worked as a secretary with university qualifications in history and politics.

I was so totally relieved to meet her. I could not believe that I would ever meet another autistic woman as able as I was. There was another surprise. Jim, an autistic person from Kansas, was driving down to stay over for a few days and meet me. Jim and I had also
been writing to each other. It was to be one of the best reunions I had ever had.

Kathy and I had loads to talk about and, boy, could Kathy talk. Like Carol she was almost manic and talked virtually nonstop and I had to tell her that I couldn't keep up. We swapped letters, books, information, and life stories. Kathy was like a resource person on autism and had so many contacts that she made me feel—as she had said right in her first letter—that I was not alone.

Kathy was part of a pen pal list for high-functioning autistic people. The list had grown in the last two years from twenty people to around two hundred people of all ages, abilities, backgrounds, and qualifications. Most had been diagnosed in childhood, some with hopeless prognoses. Others, like Kathy, had been diagnosed in late childhood and others in adulthood. Some had had good functional language most of their lives. Some had been late talkers and a few, like Jim, had not had functional language until quite late.

Jim was working toward an M.A. in psychology, gave lectures, ran newsletters, and taught at a religious school. He showed up accompanied by his three dogs. He had left his four cats at home in his small apartment with a neighbor to watch out for them. He was as small as Kathy and me. I began to wonder if autism had something to do with Munchkins.

There was something familiar about Jim almost straightaway. At first he struck me as being very much like Willie. So purely clinical and logical, he was a walking dictionary who could climb inside of his own mind and describe it with the detachment of a structural surveyor.

It was like we used the same system. As it turned out, Jim and I both had trouble with sensory overload and shutdown through our eyes and ears. Jim's trouble amounted to his being functionally blind to the meaning of much of what he saw. Despite this, he was able to drive, able to avoid hazards, and stay within the lines, even if he didn't make meaning out of other things.

Jim and I took the dogs for a walk. The familiarity between us, the sense of being “normal” in his company, struck me as it did with Bryn
and the Welshman. But this time, there was no fear of emotion. It was accepted. I looked into Jim's eyes as he looked into mine and felt as though I was hit. It was as though all of the impact people have upon each other every day was lost for me because I struggled by their system, their “normality.” And yet with Jim I was impacted upon straightaway, all the more forcefully because I so rarely experienced it.

Until I met Jim, I had not fully realized the different forms autism could take. Being with him, I knew that he and I were like each other within this wider category. Like me he had mastered the art of “speaking in order to get the words out” despite being meaning-deaf to himself. Like me he was able to continue to function in spite of total physical-, vocal-, emotional-, social-, and even self-dissociation. Like me, he could work with overload and shutdown in a way that generally never left him with any one system shut down permanently but left the forfeiting of systems in a constant state of shift. We both paid the price in terms of the fragmented perception of ourselves, our lives, and our surroundings. And yet despite all the inconsistencies and the lack of connections, both of us had remained connected at the very center of our own being. Despite the chaos, we could maintain faith and never be totally lost.

Despite thousands of miles, our “our world” concepts, strategies, and experiences even came down to having created the same made-up words to describe them. Together we felt like a lost tribe. “Normal” is to be in the company of one like one's self.

Jim stayed for a few days and among the three of us there was hardly a word of silence. We all had so much to say. Over the three days, we barely managed to prepare three cups of tea and drink them. We hardly cooked or ate. Yet it was such a great atmosphere. No one would criticize us here for staring at a hot cup of tea and not working out what to do about it until it was stone cold three hours later.

We all had a sense of belonging, of being understood, of being normal…all the things we could not get from others in general. It was so sad to have to leave. “Why can't we all live together?” we had each asked at some point or other. Jim and I felt the same way
about touch and Kathy was the same but less so. We said goodbye with our eyes and it meant so much more.

B
ack in Australia, I arrived at Bryn's place with a copy of my book for him. I was able to look at him and give it to him and show how I felt both toward myself and toward him.

After reading the book, he came to see me. There was so much to say and it was all he could do to contain his emotions. I had been right that he was like me. Bryn was diagnosed at the age of thirty-eight as having Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.

Bryn looked back with tears and anger, with regret and shame. He looked back upon years and years of bullying in school for “daydreaming.” He looked back upon the isolation of never having had friends and the sense of intrusion by his parents, and he tried to forgive. He looked back upon his sense of inadequacy in not having developed the social skills to know the hows or whys of relationships and touch, and he tried to accept. Bryn looked back upon six months in a psychiatric hospital for being a withdrawn teenager, uninterested in socializing, and he tried to be understanding. He looked back upon the well-intentioned forty courses of electroconvulsive therapy he had been given there in an effort to “get his mind right,” and tried to laugh.

He looked back on having developed a character in place of the self he hadn't yet learned to express; a mechanical, automatic, endlessly rambling, apparently perfect, “the world” version of himself in order to work his way beyond this place. He had thought of that character as Perfect Bryn but had always known it was a façade. He looked at ten years he had spent buried in alcoholism, unable to give up the secret that his self was long since dead and buried, and he tried not to cry. He looked back over almost three and a half decades of the effects of ignorance. After he had looked back over it all, he found
forgiveness of both himself and his life and those in it. He was just so glad to have found some answers. “No more Carols,” I said to him.

Bryn and I drove to the riverside where we had once had coffee. We lay in the tall grass and both of us were shaking. The feelings were out in the open now. We looked into each other's eyes. Bryn's were full of tears that rolled silently down his face and onto the grass. For the first time, I found the want to touch him. I was not afraid of him and although my own emotions were making my body shake from head to toe and my hearing climb unbearably, I reached out and put my hand against this big giant's hand as my mirror. I looked into his eyes as I linked my fingers with his. I held on to the him in there to stop him falling into the void alone. I was shaking violently. We both gave strength to each other.

It was nighttime. Walking through the darkness, Bryn's tall frame looked so vulnerable in my own black coat, which I had given him to wear against the cold. His long arms stuck out well beyond the sleeves. He was my comrade, a brother, a friend, and the first man I had loved with feelings. He belonged in my black coat.

For the first time in the six years I had known Bryn, he told me everything there was to know about himself. We walked in the darkness to nowhere, drank lots of tea and coffee, drove with the wind in our hair, and ate fish and chips on my red carpet floor till dawn. These moments were frightening but beautiful and they were numbered.

I would soon be going back to the United Kingdom for good. Big tears silently filled Bryn's eyes. “You're going to leave now,” he said, “now that I have finally found I can be myself, you will leave.” “I'll visit,” I said. “I'll write,” I said. “I won't forget,” I said. But Bryn was right. I had really come back only for the funeral of my past. I was going and I wasn't coming back.

I
went to visit the autistic school once more before I left Australia. I did not have to explain why I wanted to visit this time. Since the
school was now aware of my book, it was assumed that the staff might benefit from my visit.

Jody was still there and now had a new teacher. It had been six months since I had last seen her. I entered the room she was in. She looked intently at me and smiled.

Her Vegemite sandwiches were brought to her on a plate, brought to where she sat next to me in front of a mirror. Picking up one of her sandwiches, she fed herself independently and without difficulty. As she did so, she looked deeply into my eyes smiling, reached across to me, and began to tap me as I had tapped her six months ago. I felt she was saying she remembered. There are other forms of language beyond words.

Jenny had been moved to this school from the other special school. She had been reassessed since being at the special school, where her only prospects were for life on a production line.