Somebody Somewhere (40 page)

“Do you know anyone else like this?” asked Ian. I told him about two other autistic people I knew of. “There's one who writes to me about his ‘bedroom academy awards,' ” I said, “there's another who laughed to me about being out of his body and watching it going through the motions. He took this to be so normal that he never even thought of the extreme anxiety he must have been under to cause him to have to cut off to such an extent. He doesn't know any different.”

The lives of these people were filled with the day-to-day lie that this form of passive self-rape was called an expression of “love” and that the act itself was meant to be proof that one was worth something. They lived with the fact that there appeared to be no alternatives or, at least, no one was speaking about them.

I wondered if Ian would be better off not knowing. Perhaps he would know no better. Perhaps he would like the structure of knowing his role and performance in a “the world” relationship. “I can't deny my experiences,” he said. “I can't deny how it makes me feel inside, feeling afraid they'll find out, feeling ashamed at not being ‘normal.' ” He looked at me helplessly and then asked, “But what are the alternatives?” “You could be in a platonic relationship with someone who was more special than a friend,” I said.

There was absolutely no suggestion that this person could be me. Intimacy had had no place in my life. It had had no place in “my world,” where closeness to people and touch were against the law. It held no allure for me in “the world,” where it was haunted by too many sickening echoes of its limitless distortions.

I thought of the chances of Ian finding a “the world” person who would understand him as himself, someone who would accept a
platonic asexual relationship as a first choice. I knew how he would feel spending his life being understood only from the outside, forever alien, the only albatross for miles.

T
here were roadside gravel pits and winding driving. Ian was happy to “simply be” in the world he had just begun to rediscover. I was trying to reconcile how to break the laws of “my world” and contemplate the possibility of being intimately and asexually involved with someone else in a “simply be” way.

We stopped and sat in the sunshine. Ian was exploring the concept of relationships. He would have to find this with himself first, I thought. Until he did, he would be incapable of self-love, let alone being able to freely be with anyone out of want and not just out of insecurity. “If you had the choice of being alone and living according to your own reality or living against it with someone else, what would you choose?” I asked. “I'd choose to stay alone,” he answered. That was what I needed to know.

We went walking. I threw visions of his possible future at him. I saw him as a puppet at the hands of someone who played to his characters, his meeting their every expectation with a mechanical, well-rehearsed smile: all world, no self—all self, no world. Ian had known this for the past ten years and had the chiseled edges to prove it. Condemning him to his inability to assert his own reality had visibly stung. “What about Ian?” he asked with tears in his eyes. So he did have a self to stand up for after all.

We went walking in the wheat field. In the heat and sunshine, I could feel his tension as my own but I could not reach him until he learned to reach and fight for himself. Otherwise, I would reach only a shell, a performing façade obsessively anticipating
my
wants.

Ian picked up a crystal with birds on it and approached the shop assistant. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I'm buying it,” said Ian. “Who for?” I asked. “You,” he said. I didn't want it. “Crystals are for
discovering more than owning,” I said (even though I had a few). Gifts that come from one who has no self are devoid of the person giving them. There was too much “I want to please
you
” in the air. There was too much “let me escape me by focusing totally on you.” I could accept nothing in this atmosphere. “Put it back,” I said, “I don't want it.” I felt bad but was sure of how I felt and why.

W
e decided to take a trip. Ian arrived to pick me up. Bags packed, he had called me the night before to tell me that our proposed one-day trip could take up to four days if I wished because he had taken time off work. We would go away together for four days.

Both of us feared the bedroom arrangements but said nothing. Finally beds were mentioned and we were both hugely relieved to hear that we were equally insistent that we wanted single beds.

I was nervous. What if he ended up like every other guy? I thought. What if he moved on me? I was sure of one thing: no characters would play along in order to help me deny I had been made a victim once again. I would catch a train back straightaway, no matter where, no matter how late.

We drove into the night. The green and gold of the fields whisked by, the sunset played colorful visual symphonies through the car window and crept slowly behind the hills. The symmetry of the overhead power lines created a visual rhythm. We drove and “simply were.”

It was getting late and we pulled into a plastic, mass-production Travelodge. I felt really bad. I was so worried about staying in the same room. But I also wanted to. I wanted to know sooner or later if I was safe with Ian. I wanted to know if he was really like me.

At the entrance to the Travelodge were two people in the midst of a great slobbery kiss. My stomach turned. Bad omen, I thought, full of echoes. I looked at Ian. He seemed as anxious and haunted by echoes as me. He is a comrade and an equal, I thought. I will survive.

The Travelodge was full. Hooray! I thought.

We drove on until we came to a hotel. The tall, shady trees, the gravel drive, a huge old building, and a sign over the door told me this was the place.

I went on ahead. Lanterns, bridges, a stream, and colored flowers. I was buzzing. Velvet, wood, carved furniture, and the smell of age and homeliness swept me away.

Up the wooden spiral staircase we went, around and around, looking up at the skylight dome overhead. We entered the room and claimed a bed each. We were both nervous about going to sleep. Both of us got dressed and undressed in the bathroom.

I got up early and went out into the frosty morning. It was strange to creep out—without the feeling I was avoiding sex—while a man slept in my room. It was strange to be outside in the frost without the feeling I was biding time until the next bedroom performance. It was strange to have a good memory of having stayed overnight in a hotel with someone without it having been poisoned by them having gotten good value out of the hotel room at the expense of my soul.

This was so foreign. It was sad that it should have been. I picked some purple flowers that had caught my attention. Purple had always been a color that I feared. I took them back to the room to show Ian.

W
e drove through the day to arrive not far from the Welsh-English border. We were on our way to a country homestead where Ian, with his “family face,” had stayed with his father. Ian seemed distant, his eyes staring out into nowhere as though he had fallen into a trance.

We stopped by a lake. “What are you feeling?” I asked. “Nothing,” said Ian, “I feel nothing at all. It feels strange but familiar. Do I seem the same?” “No,” I said. “I feel like I've died,” he said.

Suddenly Ian didn't have any feelings to care about. He would
have been scared about being like this, but he didn't even have any capacity for fear. He was in a state of total emotional shutdown. He was entering the void of the Big Black Nothingness and there was nothing I could or would do to help him. He would have to fight for his own self.

Normally, this was the state that led to my own breakdown into characters. Ian squatted by the side of the lake unable to work out what he thought or felt about anything whatsoever. “I feel nothing. I think nothing,” he said helplessly. He needed something or someone to react to as fuel to break into one of his “faces.” With me there were no expectations to meet. I simply had no wants to do with him. There was nothing to read well enough to react to. I was giving out none of the cues to his learned triggers. Ian sat there stuck in limbo and I watched myself.