Somebody Somewhere (38 page)

Ian was both afraid and intrigued by my apparent understanding of him. We decided to meet at the train station.

Ian stood waiting outside of the station with a sort of posed expectancy. We were going to visit a castle not far away. He seemed curious about this strange person he had just met. I think I seemed to break all the rules.

Ian's version of being social was to apply himself totally to working out the other person's expectations and wants and meeting them unquestioningly. He searched for my expectations and wants, for some kind of expression to read or read into, for some verbal cues to pick up on, but there were none. Ian was stumped, unable to find an image to meet my expectations because I had none.

I got into his car and looked at the circles on the visor, the slots along the interior roof, and the shiny paint. I mentally mapped where everything was. Ian got in.

“So what style of music are you into?” said Ian, falling back on a well-rehearsed, standard musician's line. Oh God, I thought. “What do you mean?” I asked. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “It was just something to say.”

We drove past a Chinese restaurant and I saw a chandelier there that made me buzz. Ian seemed taken and somehow strangely familiar
with my reaction. He smiled to himself and looked straight ahead.

We arrived at the castle. Ian was very composed. In his rigidity, he seemed somehow dwarfed and vulnerable in the shadow of my own spontaneity. I bounded off ahead, captured by the castle and still secure in his strangely familiar company. It was as though no amount of image mattered. I knew who I was with. I could sense it.

Ian looked at me strangely. It was like he was knocking upon glass, watching me in a private world. I could feel the atmosphere climbing. I could see he was visiting some distant and buried part of himself through me.

“Have we met before?” he asked, his eyes staring into my eyes like someone face to face with a dream. His face was almost chiseled in its seriousness. “How do you know so much about me?” He seemed almost afraid to hear an answer.

“Close your eyes, can you see me? In your mind am I real? In your heart can you feel me? Do you dare believe in time beyond the present, past, or future? Can your mind conceive of a place where someone's thoughts can reach you? Do you recall I've seen you there? For when we met, I saw you look beyond the ‘when,' beyond the ‘where,' ” I recited the lyrics to a song I'd written.

Ian seemed stunned and yet moved. He said nothing. He seemed to be crumbling in on himself. I sat down on the rocks. I buzzed on the flowers. I climbed up in the castle ruins and looked out at him through the bars down below.

Ian faced into the wind. “I feel I was born in the wrong time,” he said out loud to himself. “How can you be like this?” he asked. “I own myself,” I said, matter-of-factly. He looked at me, understanding from inside himself the words that his “the world” ears were not yet accustomed to. “I love myself,” I clarified, “I am at home with me.” “I don't like myself at all,” said Ian, staring straight ahead, “I am not at all happy with my life.” “You have to own yourself,” I told him.

“I don't know who I am,” said Ian. “I have a different face for every different situation, every different person.”

Where I called these images “characters,” he called them his “faces.” He had one for family, one for work, one for friends, and one
he felt most sad and disturbed about—one for bedroom performances. He was a programmed “the world” success story.

Like I had once been, Ian became terrified if someone who knew him as one “face” entered a context where he normally functioned as another “face.” He spent his life not only anticipating people's every expectation and buying their day-to-day acceptance but also concentrating on keeping these spheres sharply cut off and unconnected from one other, a world of guarantees within his control.

Many people put on an image in a certain situation. Many people have vague hints of an alternate personality. The difference for Ian, as for me with my characters, was that our images were too total, and involved a total denial of self. It was like entering into an altered state of consciousness, like living dream-selves. We were the actors who couldn't get off the stage because we hadn't admitted we'd got on in the first place.

The choice of words used, the stances, pitch, intonation, belief systems, likes, dislikes, facial expressions, and interests were distinct for each image, a merging with the people they were stolen from. We were like single-bodied clones.

Like me, when people threatened to expose him by bringing one face's sphere into collision with another, Ian would rather give up, disown, or move away from whatever he was involved in. The cost is never too high; as much as it is feigned self-convincingly, there is no personal cost to such losses when there is no self to lose out.

We kept walking. I looked at the golden, rolling hills and the hay bales. I picked up a piece of straw and split the fibers, making a cage out of it. I turned it before my eyes and then looked at Ian through it. He was safe to look at. He was in a cage. “Do you know what it is?” I asked him. “Straw,” said Ian. “It is a cage,” I said, twirling it before my eye and looking at him through it against the background of a blue sky. “I am looking at you through the bars of a cage.”

We stopped as a procession of cows passed by. I was moved by the angles, the balance, the symmetry, the color. I put them all into
a picture frame made by my fingers. Ian could see it as I did. His perception seemed to come to life, his rigidity temporarily put aside. I smiled within myself.

As we left through the gate, I placed my straw cage upon the post. I was leaving it as a marker for “the world” people. This was to be our special place. I explained that in ten years, it would be lucky if even one person would pass by this straw cage and understand.

“Do you want to see an island?” asked Ian suddenly on the way back.

We rounded bend after bend before stopping at a pub. Ian and I went in to get drinks. I sat at a table near the door. I was concerned he would sit near the people. Tuning into the sound of their voices and their blah blah, I would be unable to focus or feel comfortable. “Outside?” he inquired. I was relieved. “Yeah,” I said. “I can't stand the bright lights in there,” he said. “It's too noisy and everybody's moving about.” I know, I thought.

I went straight for the grass embankment. Ian, composed, looked at me as if to say, “I'm meant to do that, too?” At the top of the embankment, I heaved myself up onto the sea wall.

I was almost convinced he was like me, and was reveling in the secrecy. He looked at me, exposed, discovered, enquiring. I asked him questions about language, conversation, school years, learning, childhood friends, and how he felt about his family.

His answers confirmed all I suspected. He had trouble reading faces, emotions, behavior, and body language and getting consistent meaning from spoken and written words. Yet he could imitate and mirror and merge with the skill of a great illusionist.

He could teach himself but had a lot of trouble being taught, was good at certain things and very poor at others, had trouble making friends and had been bullied throughout his school years for being different. I asked him about hunger, pain, tiredness, and cold. All of these sensations either eluded him or had to be pushed to extreme limits to be felt. His own body messages were very inconsistent and poor. I was ecstatic.

“How about the need to go to the toilet?” I asked him finally. “Do you hold on, or not notice until you are about to go on the spot?”
I asked. “Is this written on my face or something?” said Ian, full of embarrassment, not at the question of toilet matters, but at the exposure of quirks that he thought were private and somehow unique to him alone.

“You
are
an alien,” I announced boldly, quite overjoyed to have discovered a comrade. Bouncily, I jumped from the wall and walked off along its length, throwing my hands suddenly into the air in joy and disbelief.

I walked back to where Ian was still sitting rather bewildered. I did not realize he had thought he had stuffed everything up and that my comments in “the world” terms were taken to mean I rejected him. He thought he had, yet again, failed to read the messages and done something terribly and unforgivably wrong. I was so happy to be with him. I was so happy that he was like me. His searching eyes made chinks against my invisible glass wall. I, too, was knocking from my side.

Ian went to get another drink. Bright lights overhead, noise from every direction, and a room full of people who didn't seem to give too much of a damn about personal space; I would not go inside with him. He came out and I walked ahead, going down onto the rocks at the other side of the sea wall.

I pointed at the lights and the lines, tracing them, my hands sweeping through the air, cutting lines, my eyes speaking far more than my words. Ian pointed out the symmetry of everything in this same way. We spoke the same language.

We both looked at the sparkles on the water, my fingers dancing out in front of me as though I were playing piano upon the air. Ian glanced quickly at me and smiled. I felt the wind and smelled the ocean on the air. Ian was a comrade who had come home after a long, long journey. I was speaking to him in a language that was mine and, I felt, had once somehow been his, too. It was the language of “simply being.”

I climbed down the slippery rocks toward the water. Ian put his hand anxiously up to his chin. He seemed scared. “What's wrong?” I asked. “I won't be able to help you if you fall. I wouldn't be able
to touch your hand,” he told me. “Is this because of how I feel about touch?” I asked him. “Is this for me or for you?” “It's for me,” he said; touch was difficult for him, too. I didn't mind at all. I understood this totally. I knew it meant that I could be safer in his company than with anyone else.

On the drive back, Ian talked about symmetry and the lines of lights. He talked about looking into the reflection of his car hood and driving into what appeared to be an inverted world. It was Ian's version of my mirror world, though different from mine because his mirror world had other people and their things in it. He talked about picturing symmetrical lines bouncing off everything, creating imaginary, uncrossable, untouchable boundaries through the air and upon the road. He talked about trapping cars that drove into his borderlines, which he created by viewing the traffic in front of him through two fingers positioned on top of the steering wheel. He talked about his own special piece of sky and the way he felt himself flying out in a direct line when the overhead lines of power poles lined up in perfect symmetry in front of him.

Ian seemed to have come to life but also seemed a little sad. Perhaps it was because he had never had anyone to share such things with. Perhaps because having had no one to share them with, he had almost given up, turned his back upon them and lost them.

We went back to the cottage. From the time we entered, Ian scanned the room constantly, not eyeing what was in it but mapping its every curve and angle. Occasionally he set about straightening things here and there that were not symmetrical, even, neat, categorized, or systematic.

Ian sat in one of my two chairs, hugging the cushion and looking like a cornered rat—the cushion, a wall between himself and me.

We ate coconut and he played a tape with a song he had written. I asked him to play me the music he had considered I might put words to. “I don't want to,” he said, “I'm ashamed.” “Why?” I asked. “It's all commercial crap,” he said. He had written what he thought other people's version of good music was. I think he must have
realized I had had a bad dose of reality and that commercial crap would not have impressed me one bit. I think, in my company, he was hit with the impact of his own falsity and it didn't impress him either.

Ian seemed to become more and more vulnerable as he sat there. His reliance upon his learned “the world” reality began to seem more and more irrelevant, meaningless, and redundant in my company. My own ways were so devoid of the performances of “the world” roles and playing to “the world” expectations. His own adherence to them began to disintegrate too easily. Perhaps this was because they had been learned but never really identified with in the first place.

We arranged to get together again and Ian arrived with a picture he had drawn. It was a black-and-white picture of the interior of my cottage with everything in detail down to the placement of objects in the room and the baseboards and curtain rods. He handed it to me in silence.

It was late and my muscles twitched and drove me crazy. I felt anxious and wanted to walk. I needed the rhythm of walking.

We found ourselves at the skeleton of an outdoor market. The uncovered bars of row upon row of market stalls created lines, lines, lines, and more lines. Ian was watching, sort of distant.

He told me about painting his room with red stripes. He had visualized the symmetrical lines bouncing off everything and had painted them across the ceiling, the furniture, and everything that got in the way.

I was on the edge of “my world,” distant and somehow “over there.” He looked like he wanted to share it on my terms. I felt Ian could easily become special to me, but I told myself he had become a “the world” person, even if he was once like me. He belongs to them, I told myself. He knows his lines, performances, and images too well. Sharing “simply be” with him would be to condemn him if I would not be around to share it. I asked myself if I was capable of sharing it in any ongoing way even if I was going to be around. I wasn't sure.

“I'm going overseas,” I said. Ian seemed to sink. “I'll be back,” I
said. He looked like I was abandoning him. He looked at me like Bryn had, as though the special friend he had always waited for was here only to make a token appearance and disappear.