Somebody Somewhere (37 page)

Meeting Malcolm showed me the contrast between what I had once termed “my world” and that which I now called the world of “simply be.” “Simply be” was a place of richness and beauty where language did not need to be through words in the usual “the world” way. “My world” outside of “simply be” was a place where the only bliss is nonexistence, and survival strategies are those that maintain the security found in not existing.

Within the system of “simply be,” the point of all company was to better experience a sense of one's self without fear of losing control. The system of “simply be” was a way to experience the self you are normally deaf, blind, and dead to in “the world.” Malcolm had his own world. He had either never known the addictive beauty and peace of “simply be” as Susan, Olivier, and I had, or else he had lost it too long ago to remember. In its place seemed to be the empty world of the prison sanctuary that is autism, and his repertoire of rehearsed “the world” faces. The world of objects, nature, pattern, color, sound, rhythm, and texture seemed as dead to Malcolm as the people world around him and his own dead façades.

I was going. I looked into Malcolm's eyes and put my hand up. “Mirror hands,” I said to him and put his hand up to my hand. I caught his fear with my eyes and gave back only peace. For a moment a real Malcolm was there, without fear. I took my hand away. “Bye,” I said. Malcolm broke back into characterizations and verbal diarrhea.

I
settled into the cottage and its garden of weeds and broken concrete. I put up floral curtains and collected weeds and dried-out flowers and hung them around the place so that the indoors was more like the outdoors. During the day I played the piano and composed, painted pictures very alive with subtle rainbow skies, and set about writing my second book.

Day after day letters arrived from different countries. There were letters from parents, relatives, brothers, sisters, professionals, and “people like me.”

I was feeling content with having so much time to myself and owning myself totally without characters. I bounced into the bathroom. “Hello,” I said to myself in the mirror.

Sometimes I would spend some time there conversing. Sometimes I would just get deeply lost in my own eyes.

I painted a mirror that sat against the living room wall. I painted long grass in the foreground and vines of wild, multicolored roses around the boundary. I lay in front of it, so that I appeared to be lying in long grass in the mirror world, the sunlight in the picture playing wildly upon the grass and turning it every shade of green, gold, and brown.

I brought my lunch in to eat in the company of myself in the mirror. Both of us sat together in the beautiful, wild, tall, animated grass. Together, surrounded by roses, there was only I and me in the mirror. There was no room. No world. No loneliness. Other people were now not so much of an invasion because I had so much time to be with me.

I
decided to buy myself my own piano. I made a call and caught a train to go and look at one.

The dingy and crowded old shop tucked away from other shops was stuffed full of secondhand pianos. The smell of wood and varnish
and dust filled the air. A blind man made his way around the clutter with a combination of sixth sense and a good inner map.

I found a piano I could afford and decided to buy it before realizing I had no money. I would have to go to the bank. I took off down the road.

I had always been captured by music shops. When I was small there had been a hardware shop and a music shop down the road.

The hardware shop had jingling keys and wild doorbells I could set off into a symphony of bells and chimes. There were
clack-clack-clack
shiny plastic toilet seats and
chink-chink-chink
glass and porcelain tap and door handles. There were shiny silk-like bathroom tiles with patterns to trace and enamel bathtubs to categorize. There were rolls of linoleum. I would stand among them as one of them, run my hands along the shiny surface, and be caught up in the smell of them.

Music shops were the same. There were percussion instruments made of
ting-ting-ting
metal. There were
clonk-clonk-clonk
wooden musical bits and pieces painted brightly in enamel paint and varnish that cracked under your teeth. There were guitars with pattern pieces of mother-of-pearl and false tortoiseshell to visually swim in.

On my way to the bank I stumbled across another music shop and entered. This shop was relatively boring. Rows of latest-style electric pianos were set out for latest-style trendy people to explore the mechanics. It was the sort of place where would-be-if-they-could-be musicians dropped in to talk pseudo-professional hoo-ha.

I thought I would have a look at the instruments in this shop but there was little to discover. If the salespeople approached me, I figured I would feign interest and ask what one of their contraptions might do for a would-be-if-she-could-be songwriter-composer like me.

I was talking to some Mr. Impressive Salesperson type when a quiet and willowy figure began to hover about. He had overheard me talking about something and it turned out that we both wrote music. He seemed totally in control, partly indifferent, partly serious, partly poised to run. He was very reactive, with occasional bursts of spontaneity breaking through.

I remembered how I had sensed a sameness between myself and Bryn. I remembered how I had felt so exposed by feeling this sameness after meeting someone else like Bryn when I had met the Welshman years ago on a train. The Welshman was only the second person I had met who was like myself and I had only been with him for about fifteen minutes when I had known he was like me. We had used the same system. Right now, something about this man's ways was again hauntingly familiar.

“Play me some of your music,” I said. He found this hard. I paid little direct attention to the music. He got nervous, ridiculed his music, took out the cassette halfway into a song, and wandered off into the other room. I smiled to myself. I was in the company of someone familiar.

He came back out. We had been talking on and off. In contrast to the other salesman working with him, his approach to me was strikingly indirect: involved but distant and impersonal in spite of an abundance of polite friendliness and pleasant smiles.

We seemed to disarm each other by seeing in each other the exposing reflection of our own defensive self-control. We considered getting together to write. He had written his name on a business card that he left sitting on the counter for me to pick up, then he left the room. I felt somehow voyeuristic because I had some idea of why he was like me and he probably did not.

As he entered the room again, I addressed him by the name he had written on his business card. I was curious and wanted to see just how much like me Ian was.

He appeared momentarily struck by his own name as though it were a slap. Then, a casual façade again fell across his face. Ian was good at “disappearing,” too.

I
t had been four weeks since I had spoken to Ian. I had told him I wouldn't be able to call and had left him my number. Ian had finally called.

“Can you read music?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “I have trouble with reading, all types of reading.” This struck a chord. I wondered if he was dyslexic. A large proportion of the brothers and sisters of autistic people were dyslexic. Maybe this had something to do with why I found him to be like me.

“What happens with your reading?” I asked. “Oh, I can read,” he said, “it just all ends up a jumble of words and I don't know what I've read.”

“Is your hearing the same?” I asked. “I'm a bit deaf,” he said. “Do you mean you can't hear the sounds properly?” I continued. “No, I can hear the sounds,” he said, “I just don't understand what people say to me a lot of the time.” “I hope you don't mind me asking these things,” I said. “No,” he said, “I'm just shocked how you seem to know things about me which nobody else does.”