Somebody Somewhere (25 page)

“Hello, Bryn,” I said one day when out of the blue, I called him. He was floored. He had never heard me address him so directly, personally, and spontaneously. When I had used his name it had always been his full title. Anything less formal, too close, would have made the effort cost too much.

It had been roughly six years since I had seen this man who had changed my life. He was the first person I had met—since the real Carol—who moved in “my world” enough to call into question the very possibility that there was no “my world” after all. In knowing Bryn I had come to question if there was some sort of “our world.”

My time knowing Bryn had been one of the most beautiful and the most painful. I had finally found someone whose ways were like my own enough to finally catch a glimpse of belonging. But a
lifetime without it and a terror of emotions crippled my communication with him, leaving me unable to ask him anything or talk directly in any way
with
him rather than merely in front of him.

Bryn didn't even need to shatter the façades of Carol and Willie. With Bryn, I just couldn't hold on to the characters, despite the fear. Trust, as only found in the company of oneself (or one like oneself), stood firmly in the way, despite my best efforts to “disappear.” So I shook, and broke out in a nervous rash, and was unable to hide behind word games and topic knowledge.

But life's merry-go-round doesn't stop for the slow ones to get on or catch up, so having gotten a grip on relating as the characters, I was not prepared at that time to face my fears and jump off for any length of time. The closer I became to Bryn, the more dangerous the vision of a crumbling façade had become. I had left Bryn behind almost six years ago, and with him, I had for a long time in so many ways, left myself.

I stood at Bryn's door shaking from head to toe. The stress was like being at my own funeral, doing exams with someone pacing beside me, and seeing my mother all at the same time. Finally I knocked.

Bryn answered the door, his eyes as blue as ever and his wavy hair and accent unchanged. But six years of being thought useless, hopeless, crazy, and odd, as well as the constant use of alcohol as an emotional anesthetic had left their mark.

We sat in the garden, surrounded by tall weeds, wood, red bricks, and an overhead clothesline—dotted with pegs—that cut the sky in half. Bryn dotted the brick path with cigarette after nervous cigarette as I let go cold the ritual cup after cup of black tea.

I had never been to his place. I had hardly been able to bear having lunch with this man six years ago, and now I was actually visiting him at his own home. What I had to say and what I had to confront were too important to let fear get in the way.

Bryn's big hands were shaking. It was clearly still as hard for this gentle giant as it had been for me then, and was still now. Yet now that I stood without my façades, able to communicate personally and directly with him, Bryn was a walking repertoire of all I'd been.

“What was I like six years ago?” I asked him. He laughed nervously to himself. “It was like being with someone on LSD,” he said. “Why?” I asked. Bryn cleared his throat and put on the role of narrator.

“Well, you spoke in a way that most people couldn't understand. You could never be quite sure what you were talking about, but if you didn't think about it you could understand it. You were way off with the fairies. You just stared intensely into what looked to me like nothing but you seemed really captured by it. I wondered if you might have been hallucinating. Then you'd just go off on your own track, seeing something in the grass or the pattern of something.” “Did you think I was strange?” I asked. “Strange but familiar,” said Bryn.

I explained to him about the characters. “What about Carol?” I asked. “Could you tell the difference?” “Oh, yeah,” said Bryn, “but mostly you weren't like that when you were with me; you were like that, though, as soon as other people were around.” “How did it make you feel?” I asked. “It scared me,” said Bryn. “It confused me. It was out of control.”

“Do you know what autism is?” I asked him. “Autistic people are in psychiatric hospitals and places like that, aren't they?” said Bryn, looking for confirmation. “They rock all the time and don't speak.”

Bryn had never had a friend until he was in his teens, and up until then had largely been unable to talk with other people. Neither his parents, himself, nor the people now surrounding him considered him usual, although he passed for normal-like, eccentric, scatty, and, because of his egocentricity, selfish.

Bryn seemed oddly mechanical to most people and he himself was aware of it. Conversation for him with most people was a series of well-rehearsed lines and the calculated occasional “yeah?” and “that's interesting.”

Although he was generally unable to work out the meaning of what people said in conversation, Bryn had a great memory for strings of words, and when people told him off for not listening, he would use my strategy of repeating their words back, to “prove” that he was.

“I'm autistic,” I told Bryn. “No you're not,” he said breezily. The only other high-functioning people I was in touch with were people I had spoken to through letters. In person, I had only met so-called less able autistic people. I was in no way going to argue.

“So when do I get to read this book of yours,” said Bryn, looking at my hands clutching the manuscript upon my lap. Too afraid to leave a copy of the manuscript with Bryn, I told myself I had done enough to let him know he was in it. I had wanted to let him read it, but mostly I had wanted to soften the blow of what he might later come to understand. “I can't give it to you just yet,” I said, my hands shaking. Bryn had had no idea how much he had meant to me or why I considered him in some ways to be “like me.”

I could tell from Bryn's cheery mechanical “conversation” that he was not ready to give up the props yet. Before, I had been so occupied with my own war, I had hardly “seen” him and only enough to sense he was like me and to know I was not alone. And yet now that his strategies stood out so blatantly as a crude mockery of what “the world” turned him into, I was not about to knock him or expose him. Yet knowing how much fuller the world was with one's eyes open, I would also not leave him in the bliss of his own ignorance. “In the book, I wrote that you were like me,” I told him. I left the rest for him to piece together.

Bryn and I stood at the front door to his house. It seemed as if the ground itself was shaking. I picked a flower and gave it to him. I looked deeply into his eyes in a way that had never been possible before. He looked back with an overwhelming air of vulnerability that a newly orphaned three-year-old would have struggled to achieve.

I felt I was abandoning him. I also felt I was on the verge of freeing him. “Come back again sometime,” said Bryn casually. Echoes of earlier times left a haunting ring in that phrase. I said nothing, turned, and left.

T
heo Marek asked if I might give a talk to some of the students at his university. They were teachers and nurses and people with psychology backgrounds who, for one reason or another, were learning about autism.

I wanted to give something back for the help I'd been given. The talk was organized and I felt it would be good practice for the upcoming book publicity I would soon be facing overseas with the impending publication of
Nobody Nowhere
.

Dr. Marek promised to make sure I stayed on track, so I didn't have to worry about being embarrassed or not understanding the expectations of the questioners.

Willie had given a few talks throughout my university course but these had neither invited nor allowed questioning. I had taken classes with children, but if I didn't understand them distinctly it wasn't as noticeable because I was assumed to be the clever one. I could always say, “hmm, that's interesting,” and select another student to comment on what was said.

I felt great after my lecture to Dr. Marek's class. I had answered all of the people clearly, without waffling or going wildly off track. My language was slow and jerky, like wading through mud. The words were hard to find and I spoke in pictures more than words. I had spoken not from stored repertoires but from myself and my emotions. I spoke with an awareness of self. I had, however, wanted to leave, and as time rolled on and on, I waited for the lecture organizers to tell me it was time to go. No one did. It was easy with a lesson plan to follow, but here there was none and I seemed at their mercy.

After over an hour, I was exhausted. My words were still answering but I was slipping away from them as they hung on the wind at the end of each utterance. My mind was losing awareness of what I had said. My eyes grew wide, looking for signs and indications that the meaning of the words to which I had for now become deaf, did in fact make sense. It was like peeing in the darkness of the Australian bush on a moonless night: one wonders and waits to know if one has peed on one's own feet. Theo Marek called a stop and I looked at him with relief.

I
t was the second-to-last teaching round. I felt secure about returning to school. There were no fellow student teachers to worry about and I would have the comforting distance of teaching in German to a bunch of children who struggled to speak it just as I struggled to make meaning of their words in English. It seemed a fair swap, neutral territory. I felt I was almost home free.

Yet the return to this school was a double-edged sword. I felt good to be familiar with the physical surroundings but the personal familiarity with the children meant the threat of becoming known. The continuity of relationships had never been a strong point for me even if I was now committed to working on making it so. I had always preferred anonymity and indifference.

As I entered the staff room, my stomach scrunched itself up at the sight of the smiling welcoming faces of three unfamiliar fellow student teachers. Their smiling faces and eager curiosity seemed to crawl across the table like a virus threatening my anonymity and detachment.

The three smiling faces were all introduced to me. I jabbed myself in the back to answer each one of them. I asked myself if any of them would treat me as had Vanessa, the fellow student who had shoved my lack of social awareness down my throat. “Hello,” I said mechanically in response to each one as I choked upon the word.

These faces attempted to make conversation and it was like how it feels when the dentist tries to make conversation before taking your teeth out in a room that reeks of what is about to happen. I answered each of them, feeling ill and needing a toilet break and mental space. Their smiles merged with the memory of Vanessa's and became a category in my mind that signaled danger.

I wasn't too sure when I had to go into the staff room the next day whether I had passed the last staff room sociability test or not but the atmosphere had changed. I wasn't sure whether to take it as a sign of “the world” failure or “my world” relief that few further efforts were made to speak to me.

The staff room—dentist feeling had taken its toll. My confidence level dropped to zero. You would have had to chisel a smile onto my face for me to at least appear approachable. I was in knots; it was as though I was back at the beginning of my teaching course.

My supervisor at this school was too ill to be there on the first day. Thank you, God, I said to myself, grateful she wouldn't see that I was functioning so poorly that I'd hardly have made it on a factory production line, let alone in a classroom. I was like a wind-up toy and needed constant prompting even to remember what room I had to be in or when the next class was or what level it was that I was teaching for any given lesson. I was in a permanent state of stage fright and if not for the lesson plans I took with me to each class, I would have had no idea what to do.

By the time my supervisor arrived the second day, I must have looked like I was having a mental breakdown. She was recovering from a serious illness and lumbered herself with the guilt of my apparent impending failure. This did nothing to help and just made me feel guilty about her guilt.

I groaned my way through my second day, with inattentive zombie eyes, deaf ears, and a blank expression. I left each lesson not remembering what I had taught. “So how was it?” I asked my supervisor, cringing in anticipation of the reply. “Well, the lessons were disjointed. You hardly realized the students were there. You didn't involve them in any way,” she said gently but honestly.

Every day those three student teachers smiled more, chatted more among themselves, and I sat there feeling more and more hopeless and exposed for all my hopelessness.

I couldn't get Vanessa out of my head, and her pleasant demeanor as she had given me that letter like a scorpion's sting. Day after day, I just waited for another letter telling me what a failure and an embarrassment I was, and for the knots that came with being told not to mention it to anyone.

By the middle of the week, my stomach ached all the time. I was full of tears that could not come out because my mind couldn't recognize what feeling I was having. I wondered if I was sick.

The flu hit me like a tornado. My nose was like a tap, my lungs were under water, my head felt like a blocked toilet, and my limbs felt like they were encased in lead. I was so disoriented, I couldn't have done worse if drugged to the eyeballs on tranquilizers.

“Damn you, you bastard. You won't get me,” I told the flu. But there was something else. This aching feeling inside was frightening me and I shook with fear like one confronted by a ghost, the ghost of my emotions.

I
had grown very close to the Marek family. We were on a first-name basis now (which was a big deal for me, because it could take forever to spontaneously call someone by a casual and familiar first name). I loved their house, which had become one of my prized objects and stood for my closeness to them. I could touch the Mareks' things and express my curiosity and enjoyment of them in a way that was still too hard to express to them directly.

I was due to go away soon. In eight weeks I would leave for overseas to promote my book. I felt the heavy weight of this and its haunting reminder of too many other “too lates.” I felt bad about leaving my friends without being able to directly express the physical-emotional feeling I did not yet have a name for.

“I've got this awful feeling in my stomach,” I told my supervisor. “It feels like rocks.” She was wonderful, more concerned about my soul than my course. She was the only one of my supervising teachers at the various schools to whom I had explained autism and my impending trip overseas.

“I think you are going to miss the people you are soon leaving,” she said. “This feeling is ‘missing'?” I asked. “Does this mean I am feeling ‘attached' to these people?” “I think so,” she said.

I smiled from ear to ear. Unbelievable. It was incredible how bad a good feeling can feel when you don't know what it is called or why it is there. I was overjoyed at my humanness.

I had tried for years to appear attached. I had done so many things, and in doing so hurt myself so much and yet persisted because I wanted to appear to have feelings and to be like everyone else. I could never bear to be told I didn't care about anyone but myself. I had developed a huge ability for mental emotions but they were almost never linked to these awful feelings that affected my heart, my stomach, my throat, and my shaking hands.

As a teacher, I had failed the day miserably. As a teacher, I had failed the whole damned week miserably. But I had passed as a human being with flying colors. I went home happy at being real and complete.

The Mareks were in no way mirrors. They were nothing at all like me, and yet I was attached to them. I was moving beyond the mirror to the real world.

I sat up all night at the Millers', drawing pictures and diagrams and passing them back and forth in a dialogue about emotions and the effect people have on one another. Despite the flu, half a dozen handkerchiefs, several crying bouts, and a lot of pacing and tablecloth tracing, I emerged from their house carrying pages of life on paper to hold the slippery concepts in my mind, build upon them, and understand them. I stole an hour of much-needed sleep time to do hurried lesson plans for the next day and took a handful of vitamin C.

The lessons in the classroom seemed miles and miles away from the lessons I was going through in my own life. Earth to Donna, Donna to earth, come in please, is anybody home? Huh? came the answer.

The smiling faces in the staff room had left. The student teachers on placement here from other universities had now finished and gone. And yet the relief was too much for my emotions. When the floodgates opened, I broke down and finally told my supervising teacher about Vanessa. That was all I needed. Once it was out, the fear and inadequacy could no longer eat away at my insides. We talked about
why other people say or do things. I had taken it all onto myself, as I had the behavior of the men who had capitalized upon my situation. It was Vanessa's damned ego baggage just as it had been theirs. She and they could carry their own crap from here on.

As I taught, I began to come back to life. Each class was becoming more linked with the last and with the next. I realized the links between bits of what I was saying, which had till now been mechanical, disjointed, and totally reliant upon detailed, step-by-step lesson plans. I involved the children again, brought music and life and color and objects back into the lessons. I was just getting back to my old self when the assessor from my university arrived to watch my lesson and decide if I would pass or fail.

My assessor, as it turned out, was a sharp, crisp visiting lecturer who happened to have seen me in Theo Marek's department when I had given a talk to his students. She was friendly in a polite matron-like way and I had, despite my apprehension about her, been pleasant back.

“How was the lesson?” I asked her. “It was okay,” she said, showing me her notes. I had done brilliantly in comparison with the totally nonfunctioning, daydreaming, distracted zombie teacher I had been the week before.

My supervisor was proud of me. I was proud of me, too. It seemed she had helped pull me out of the quicksand just in time.