The Speed of Dark (35 page)

“Maybe it does not bother you as much,” I say.

She gives me a look that I can tell is supposed to mean something, but I cannot tell what. Would I know if I were normal? How
do
normal people learn what these looks mean?

“Maybe it doesn’t,” she says. “I used to think it was always my fault. I used to worry about it more. But that is—” She pauses and I can tell she is searching for a polite word. I know that because so often I am slow speaking when I am searching for a polite word. “It is hard to know how much to worry about it,”

she says finally.

“Yes,” I say.

“People who want you to think everything is your fault are the problem,” Lucia says. “They always blame other people for their feelings, especially anger.”

“But some anger is justified,” Marjory says. “I don’t mean with Lou and Don; Lou didn’t do anything wrong. That was all Don’s jealousy getting the better of him. But I see what Lou means, that he doesn’t want to be the cause of someone else’s getting in trouble.”

“He won’t,” Lucia says. “He’s not the type.” She gives me a look, a different look than Marjory gave me. I am not sure what this look means, either.

“Lucia, why don’t you fight Simon,” Tom says. Everyone stops and looks at him.

Lucia’s mouth is a little open. Then she closes it with a little snap. “Fine,” she says. “It’s been a long
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time. Simon?”

“My pleasure,” he says, smiling.

I watch Lucia and Simon. He is better than she is, but he is not making as many points as he could. I can tell that he is fighting at the edge of her level, not using everything he could. That is very polite. I am aware of Marjory beside me, of the smell of the dry leaves that have drifted against the stone edging, of the chilly breeze on the back of my neck. It feels good.

BY NINE IT IS MORE THAN CHILLY; IT IS COLD. WE ALL GO
INSIDE,and Lucia fixes a kettle of hot chocolate. It is the first time this year. The others are all talking; I sit with my back against the green leather hassock and try to listen while I watch Marjory. She uses her hands a lot when she talks. A couple of times, she flaps them in the way that I was told was a sign of autism. I have seen other people do that, too, and always wondered if they were autistic or partly autistic.

They are talking about tournaments now—ones they remember from the past, who won and who lost and who was the referee and how people behaved. Nobody mentions Don. I lose track of the names; I do not know the people. I cannot understand why “Bart is such a toad” from what they say about Bart, and I am sure they do not mean that Bart is actually an amphibian with warty skin, any more than Don was an actual heel. My gaze shifts from Marjory to Simon to Tom to Lucia to Max to Susan and back, trying to keep up with who is speaking when, but I cannot anticipate when one is going to stop and another is going to start, or which. Sometimes there is a break of two or three seconds between speakers, and sometimes one starts while another is still talking.

It is fascinating, in its way. It is like watching almost-patterns in a chaotic system. Like watching molecules break apart and re-form as a solutions balance shifts this way and that. I keep feeling that I almost understand it, and then something happens I did not anticipate. I do not know how they can participate and keep track of it at the same time.

Gradually I am able to notice that everyone pauses if Simon speaks and lets him into the conversation.

He does not interrupt often, but no one interrupts him. One of my teachers said that the person who is speaking indicates who he expects to speak next by glancing at them. At that time I usually could not tell where someone was looking unless they looked there a long time. Now I can follow most glances. Simon glances at different people. Max and Susan always glance first at Simon, giving him priority. Tom glances at Simon about half the time. Lucia glances at Simon about a third of the time. Simon does not always speak again when someone glances at him; that person then glances at someone else.

But it is so fast: how can they see it all? And why does Tom glance at Simon some of the time and not the rest of the time? What tells him when to glance at Simon?

I realize that Marjory is watching me and feel my face and neck go hot. The voices of the others blur; my vision clouds. I want to hide in the shadows, but there are no shadows. I look down. I listen for her voice, but she is not talking much.

Then they start on equipment: steel blades versus composites, old steel versus new steel. Everyone seems to prefer steel, but Simon talks about a recent formal match he saw in which composite blades had a chip in the grip to emit a steel-like sound when the blades touched. It was weird, he says.

Then he says he has to go and stands up. Tom stands up, too, and Max. I stand up. Simon shakes Tom’s hand and says, “It was fun— thanks for the invitation.”

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Tom says, “Anytime.”

Max puts out his hand and says, “Thanks for coming; it was an honor.”

Simon shakes his hand and says, “Anytime.”

I do not know whether to put out my hand or not, but Simon quickly offers his so I shake it even though I do not like to shake hands—it seems so pointless—and then he says, “Thanks, Lou; I enjoyed it.”

“Anytime,” I say. There is a moment’s tension in the room, and I am worried that I said something inappropriate—even though I was copying Tom and Max—and then Simon taps my arm with his finger.

“I hope you change your mind about tournaments,” he says. “It was a pleasure.”

“Thank you,” I say.

While Simon goes out the door, Max says, “I have to leave, too,” and Susan uncoils from the floor. It is time to leave. I look around; all the faces look friendly, but I thought Don’s face looked friendly. If one of them is angry with me, how would I know?

ON THURSDAY WE HAVE THE FIRST OF THE MEDICAL BRIEFINGS
where we have been able to ask the doctors questions. There are two doctors, Dr. Ransome , with the curly gray hair, and Dr.

Handsel , who has straight dark hair that looks as if it had been glued onto his head.

“It is reversible?” Linda asks.

“Well… no. Whatever it does, it does.”

“So if we don’t like it, we can’t go back to being our normal selves?”

Our selves are not normal to start with, but I do not say that aloud. Linda knows it as well as Ido . She is making a joke.

“ Er… no, you can’t.Probably. But I don’t see why—”

“I’d want to?” Cameron says. His face is tense. “I like who I am now. I do not know if I will like who I become.”

“It shouldn’t be that different,” Dr. Ransome says.

But every difference is a difference. I am not the same person as before Don began to stalk me. Not only what he did but meeting those police officers has changed me. I know about something I didn’t know before, and knowledge changes people. I raise my hand.

“Yes, Lou,” Dr. Ransome says.

“I do not understand how it can
not
change us,” I say. “If it normalizes our sensory processing, that will change the rate and kind of data input, and that will change our perceptions, and our processing—”

“Yes, but you—your personality—will be the same, or much the same. You will like the same things; you willreact the same—”

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“Then what’s the change
for
?” Linda asks. She sounds angry; I know she is more worried than angry.

“They tell us they want us to change, to not need the supports we need—but if we do not need them, then that means our likes and dislikes have changed… doesn’t it?”

“I’ve spent so much time learning to tolerate overload,” Dale says. “What if that means I suddenly don’t pick up on things I should?” His left eye flickers, ticcing wildly.

“We don’t think any of that will happen,” the doctor says again. “The primatologists found only positive changes in social interaction—”

“I’m not a fucking chimp!” Dale slams his hand down on the table. For a moment his left eye stays open; then it starts ticcing again.

The doctor looks shocked. Why should he be surprised that Dale is upset? Would he like to have his behavior presumed on the basis of a primatologist’s studies of chimpanzees? Or is this something normals do? Do they see themselves as just like other primates? I can’t believe that.

“No one’s suggesting you are,” the doctor says, in a slightly disapproving voice. “It’s just that… they’re the best model we have. And they had recognizable personalities after treatment, with only the social deficits changed…”

All the chimps in the world now live in protected environments, zoos, or research establishments. Once they lived wild, in the forests ofAfrica . I wonder if the autistic-like chimpanzees would have been that way in the wild or if the stress of living as prisoners has changed them.

A slide lights up the screen. “This is the normal brain’s activity pattern when picking a known face from a photograph of several faces,” he says. There is a gray outline of a brain, with little glowing green spots.

Thanks to my reading, I recognize some of the locations… no, I recognize the slide. It is illustration l6-43.d, from chapter 16 of
Brain Functionality
.“And here—” The slide changes. “This is the autistic brain’s activity pattern during the same task.”Another gray outline with little glowing green spots.

Illustration 16-43.C from the same chapter.

I try to remember the captions in the book. I do not think that the text said the first was normal brain activity when picking a known face from a photographed group. I think it was normal brain activity when viewing a familiar face. A composite of… yes, I remember. Nine healthy male volunteers recruited from college students according to a protocol approved by the human ethics research committee…

Another slide is already showing. Another gray outline, another set of colored splotches, these blue. The doctor’s voice drones on. This is another slide I recognize. I struggle to remember what the book said and hear what he is saying, but I cannot. The words are tangling.

I raise my hand. He stops and says, “Yes, Lou?”

“Can we have a copy of this, to look at later? It is hard to take in all at once.”

He frowns. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Lou. This is still proprietary—very confidential. If you want to know more, you can ask me or your counselor questions and you can look at the slides again, though”—he chuckles—“I don’t think they’ll mean much since you’re not a neurologist.”

“I’ve read some,” I say.

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“Really…” His voice softens to a drawl. “What have you read, Lou?”

“Some books,” I say. Suddenly I do not want to tell him what book I have been reading, and I do not know why.

“About the brain?” he asks.

“Yes—I wanted to understand how it worked before you did anything with the treatment.”

“And… did you understand it?”

“It’s very complicated,” I say. “Like a parallel-processing computer, only more so.”

“You’re right; it’s very complicated,” he says. He sounds satisfied. I think he is glad I did not say I understood it. I wonder what he would say if I told him that I recognize those illustrations.

Cameron and Dale are looking at me. Even Bailey gives me a quick glance and looks away. They want to know what I know. I do not know if I should tell them, partly because I do not yet know what I know— what it means in this context.

I put aside thoughts of the book and just listen, meanwhile memorizing the slides as they come and go. I do not take in information as well this way—none of us do—but I think I can retain enough to compare it to the book later.

Eventually the slides change from gray outlines of brains with colored spots to molecules. I do not recognize them; they are not anything in the organic chemistry book. But I do recognize a hydroxy group here, an amino group there.

“This enzyme regulates gene expression of neural growth factor eleven,” the doctor says. “In normal brains, this is part of a feedback loop that interacts with attention control mechanisms to build in preferential processing of socially important signals—that’s one of the things you people have a problem with.”

He has given up any pretense that we are anything but cases.

“It’s also part of the treatment package for autistic newborns, those who weren’t identified and treated in utero , or for the children who suffer certain childhood infections that interfere with normal brain development. What our new treatment does is modify it—because it functions like this only in the first three years of development—so that it can affect the neural growth of the adult brain.“

“So—it makes us pay attention to other people?” Linda asks.

“No, no—we know you already do that. We’re not like those idiots back in the mid-twentieth century who thought autistics were just ignoring people. What it does is help you attend to social
signals
—facial expression, vocal tone, gesture, that kind of thing.”

Dale makes a rude gesture; the doctor does not attend to it. I wonder if he really did not see or he chose to ignore it.

“But don’t people have to be trained—like blind people were—to interpret new data?”

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“Of course.That’s why there’s a training phase built into the treatment. Simulated social encounters, using computer-generated faces—” Another slide, this one of a chimpanzee with its upper lip curled and its lower lip pouted out. We all break into roars of laughter, uncontrollable. The doctor flushes angrily.

“Sorry—that’s the wrong slide. Of course it’s the wrong slide. Human faces, I mean, and practice in human social interactions. We’ll do a baseline assessment and then you’ll have two to four months of post-treatment training—”

“Looking at monkey faces!”Linda says, laughing so hard she’s almost crying. We are all giggling.

“I said it was a mistake,” the doctor says. “We have trained psychotherapists to lead the intervention…

It’s a serious matter.”

The chimpanzee’s face has been replaced by a picture of a group of people sitting in a circle; one is talking and the others are listening intently.Another slide, this time of someone in a clothing store talking to a salesperson.Another, of a busy office with someone on a phone. It all looks very normal and very boring. He does not show a picture of someone in a fencing tournament or someone talking to the police after a mugging in a parking lot. The only picture with a policeman in it could be titled
Asking Directions