Somebody Somewhere (39 page)

“Do you know anything about autism?” I asked him on the way back to the cottage. “No,” said Ian. “Have you ever heard of autistic people?” I asked. “Yes. They are people who can do special things, aren't they?” said Ian. Ian had not read my book, and I had not told him I was autistic. I also never mentioned that I thought he was autistic, though I strongly suspected he was.

Some people believe that certain autistic people can grow out of autism. Some people believe that some autistic people become cured (and those who see no “cure” on the horizon often give up). When “cures” happen, some people decide the original diagnosis must have been incorrect. Some believe that the only true autistics are incurable ones.

I believe that autistic people have a wide range of social awareness, language skills, and sensory and perceptual deficits or excesses. I believe some environments are good at chiseling off edges or producing robots. I believe there are even occasionally “success” stories of some autistics finally appearing non-autistic.

I don't believe you can teach autistic people to experience everything they are able to perform. I don't believe you can make them feel emotionally for their images, “faces,” performances, and repertoires as though these are part of true self-expression. Actions are inspired by feelings. Trying to do it the other way around is a matter of analyzing the feelings a person
might
have felt doing the action. You might come up with an idea of a feeling but that doesn't make it your own, and an idea is never a feeling, just a memory or stored mental repertoire of how one appears. Some things just can't be done back to front.

Like files in a computer, people can mentally store copied performances of emotions, retrieve them, and act them out. But that doesn't mean the performance is connected to a real feeling or that there is any understanding of a portrayed emotion beyond the pure mechanics of how and possibly when to emulate it.

I believe, though, that no matter how much you succeed in distorting the various forms of expression that can be squeezed out if you are working back-to-front, the system remains an autistic one. Any other process of more real growth takes time and nobody advertises slow miracles.

Ian and I went walking and walking until I crossed the road to look through a paling fence. Beyond it was a wheat field. The sky was blue-purple and the wheat created a landscape of lines. I wanted to go in there. It looked like a painting. I called Ian over to look and found the way in. I lay down in the wheat field (I had always wanted to do that), looked up at the stars in the night sky, and thought of Vincent van Gogh.

Ian lay down in the wheat, too. We discussed “wisps” and “floaters” (dead cells inside the eye that can be seen sometimes on the surface of one's eyes), “stars” and “spots” (charged energy particles that fill the air and that most people tune out as irrelevant background information or do not have sensitive enough vision to see).

Ian ate some raw wheat. I joined him in silence. That is what best friends are, I said to myself.

Driving along, Ian and I decided suddenly to go to the ocean. The roads were winding, with an endless visual symphony of curves and lines.

We found ourselves on a bridge above a stream. “I want an island to escape to,” said Ian. “Me, too,” I said. I walked down to the water.

I slipped and hit my hand sharply upon a rock. Ian felt like I so often had as he stood there unable to physically help me. I didn't mind. I understood. I was fine. I wouldn't have been able to cope with the fuss anyway.

We were both captured by the sky and the clouds. “It's like the ocean up there,” I said. Ian wanted to walk up the middle of the road and was annoyed at the cars stopping him.

We walked on opposite sides of the bridge. We were living
symmetry. I knew him very, very well, without words, without history.

We came to a camp. It happened to be the same one Ian had been to as a child. He came to life with the smells and familiarity. He looked like he had been lost for a hundred years. We made our way over an embankment to the ocean. He looked at me as though I was so familiar.

I think he felt sad for all he'd lost and missed. At first, I think he had wondered if I needed help, perhaps to succeed in being more “the world.” But his gentle smile now seemed to tell me that he realized he was not there to help me and that my reality was a full one, with the exception of someone like myself to share it with. He seemed to reach out to “my world” more than ever before. “Sometimes I feel there is no other real person in the world except me,” Ian had said. “Sometimes you seem like the only other real person outside of myself.”

To Ian my invisible walls were not impenetrable. All he needed to break them down was to speak my language totally as his own. I was not teaching him this. He was rediscovering it. I could have stopped him. I didn't try to, even though I knew it would mean the end to my ability to disappear into myself, unreachable, because no one else but me had the keys.

Standing at the ocean's edge, I saw Ian as he had left himself once upon a time. We were both children in bodies that happened to be grown. Ian wanted to share. I was in “my world” and this seemed against the law. What we had, however, was “simply be.” We felt and smelled and saw and heard and were the ocean, the sand, the wind, and the shells under our feet. We were the long grass, the blue sparklers (jellyfish) appearing elusively in the water like magic lights. We were with our own selves and yet in company, together. For once, “together” was not a dirty word and “we” did not mean “you plus my body minus me.”

I think this was the first time I had seen Ian so totally at home with “simply be.” He gave in to it and seemed to have come home to his own beginnings.

I
an began to own himself and his life. He began to know what his own wants were and had a vague outline of his own personality. I was happy for him and still very much with my own self. I was happy that we could share being with our own selves in company instead of being with each other and losing perception of ourselves. I felt glad I had held on to “simply be” even without anyone to understand it (even though I kept withdrawing further into “my world” at times). Seeing Ian gave sense to the concept of having faith in the tunnel consumed by the Big Black Nothingness. I was out of the tunnel, and in each other's company, we were safe, accepted, and felt belonging.

I
t was nighttime and Ian and I built a fire together and sat around it in the backyard. The fire was a city of red lights.

I felt at home in company and was puzzled by the experience, uneasy at its newness, and confused by how far removed it was from how tense I had always been as the characters. Ian was like my best friend and brother.

We talked about sexuality and the lack of it. “The worst part is feeling that you're missing all of these feelings you're supposed to be having and having to pretend you've got them,” said Ian. I talked to Ian about my own asexuality. I talked to him about how, in the absence of physical attraction and sexuality, I had learned to feign and perform them, and how, in the absence of any connected inner body sense, I had learned to function regardless. We both talked about how it felt; we were a pair of comrades discussing a decade each of self-rape, a pair of prostitutes talking trade.

We both talked about how we'd come to accept the “the world” view that having no sexual feelings was extremely abnormal and how being taught to perform sexually was an extension of having been taught to perform being social.

“I thought there was something wrong with me,” said Ian. “I thought maybe I'm gay. I thought I was frigid. Even when I could go through the motions, though, there was no want. There was no attraction.”

“Asexuality has nothing to do with frigidity or being celibate or being gay,” I said. “I
have
no interest. I'm not holding myself back from anything. I think it is more normal to admit a lack of feelings and interest than to pretend to have them.” Ian looked sad. “What's wrong?” I asked. “I think of all the things that would have been different if I had understood all this before,” said Ian. “Nobody talks about things like this,” I said. “People know about homosexuality or fear of sexuality or a choice not to have sex, but they can't imagine an absence of it. They can't imagine that as a normal state anyway and nobody's talking about it because the lack of it is meant to mean there's something even more abnormal.” “I wonder how many other people are out there who don't know,” said Ian.

It seemed crazy that people assumed that because you have an adult body that your stage of mental, emotional, social, or sexual development is necessarily in sync with it. People know about mental retardation or emotional immaturity but they have no concept for a fixed state of social immaturity and the undeveloped or underdeveloped sexuality this often entails. The way an adult feels going through the motions of sex without a developed sense of sexuality is the same as in the case of a child. He or she feels molested, abused, and confused.

Ian and I talked about the status badges of so-called normality: the performance of being just like everyone else. We also talked about the ever-present fear of them finding out you are not.

I did not know why I had no sense of sexuality. It could have resulted from abuse, misuse, or my autism. All probably played a part. The causes were not important. The choices left in society for rewarding expression of intimacy with other people were the issue. There were so few who were like this and even fewer who were able to admit it.

Ian and I both experienced sensuality but it was sexuality that was
always thought to be the ultimate end result of closeness. Those who didn't see it this way too often ended up at the mercy of Hi-yo-Silver, save-the-world martyrs and their let-me-teach-you performance programs. Ian and I had both met our share of these. Guilty that we couldn't “grow up” despite their best efforts to teach us, we had both done the same thing—denied the “problem,” smiled, and polished the performance.