Somebody Somewhere (7 page)

I reminded myself there was no threat. I was busy taking in the contents of the room. The window, the blinds, the view outside, the number of floors in the building I could see through the window, the surface and color of the walls, the position of the seats, the marks on the floor, the surface of the table, and, of course, the placement of the door.

Dr. Marek spoke. It was hard to grasp what he said. I was too busy adjusting—to the new surroundings and new person, both at once, and to the feeling of being observed, as well. Where was Willie?

Willie would have sat there like a well-dressed, polished quiz-show contestant calmly seizing upon key words and elaborating upon them with the refined posture and tone of a respected colleague, a role refined largely in two years of psychotherapy. I was not so impressive but I was relatively whole. I had feelings intact even if they were painful.

Dr. Marek had some games and papers with him and wanted to do some tests. There's no war here, I said silently in response to rising agitation. The book had already exposed everything that the war had protected and defended. The war was over.

Puzzles, strings of numbers, categorizing and matching things, finding patterns in things, and dictionary definitions of words. I was being given tests on the things I could do blindfolded. I didn't mind too much.

Then came comprehension tests for novel-type stories and the arrangement of pictures that had no pattern to them. I knew these sort of tests all right. These were the sort that made you look like an idiot. These were the sort that made you feel stupid and angry at the people who gave them to you to do. I looked at this doctor. So you weren't on my side after all, I said silently in response to the feeling of having been sold out. There are no sides, I corrected myself. There are no sides when there is no war.

“What do these things tell you?” I asked, finally having found the question. They were some sort of intelligence test, but instead of just showing an overall intelligence level, they showed which areas a person was intelligent in. It seemed I was exceptional in some areas and very backward in others. I was both genius and retarded.

The highs dragged the lows up, the lows dragged the highs down, and the final figures showed I was of average intelligence. Dr. Marek explained that extremes in ability in these particular areas were typical of autistic people.

I felt guinea-pigged. I also felt relieved. I could finally understand why I felt this way and had been treated sometimes like a genius and sometimes like an idiot; I was, in fact, both. It also threw new light on the creation of Willie. In the months to come, Dr. Marek would help me understand more and more bits of the puzzle. A million things came to mind.

February 1991

Dr. Theo Marek,

When you first gave me those ability tests, I didn't really understand their significance outside the things they reflected. What they showed had little personal significance.

When I grasped what you told me the results meant, I was pleased with myself that I could understand this but I didn't put it together with many other things. For example, when I asked you about wanting to do teaching and you replied that it was a bit unrealistic, I agreed with you deep down but I really didn't understand why.

In my book I had an intuitive understanding that I was in some ways very old and in some very young…. I knew I was clever and also stupid and that I was stable and also mixed-up. What has begun to dawn on me now is how I can use this understanding to plan for a future where I will not feel torn apart by being asked too much or having no opportunities to express and help develop my less brilliant parts of me.

Whenever I had a job, I tried to run it and make it totally systematic. Whenever I had an intellectually demanding job, I kept falling into “holes” all the time. I now know these are holes in the consistency of my own abilities—on all levels.

I could never reconcile (nor could employers or friends) why I wanted to work as a cleaner or clerk when I had abilities that could be used in higher-skilled jobs, but now I understand that in order to hold it together my ultimate aim ought to be to find a comfortable place that falls somewhere in the middle of my abilities.

Teaching would stretch a few of my abilities to cover for the ones I don't have (a lot of bluff and shortcuts to do with reading and understanding). Socially it is way beyond me and I stick out like a sore thumb.

Still, I think, in the future when I have some security, I will be able to afford the luxury of telling an employer the score to do with my abilities and difficulties so I can really feel okay to stay in a job and others can feel okay with me, too.

I have thought too short-term before and didn't realize how obvious some of my difficulties can be after a while. I also thought it was better to feel “on the run” than tell others what was happening (and I didn't know how to explain what was happening). Needing work badly also meant I had to try to really impress people why I should get a job, but they never lasted.

From writing to other high-functioning autistic people, I understand some of them are working for employers who understand their difficulties and they get a lot more patience and proper help that way. I think I can now accept that I am disabled, with a very big
abled
and still quite a
dis.
(Smiling works wonders though—smile, and people think you can do almost anything, you know.) Anyway, what life is about is finding a place where you can be comfortable and safe and it doesn't mess you up or use parts of you while leaving the rest to rot…

That's it,

      Donna.

I
moved to the country to live with my father and his girlfriend. I brought in my cardboard boxes of things and put them out along the wall in a row. There were things that needed to be hung but the
closet was full of my father's girlfriend's things. She had shown me the bit of space I could have in the closet but as I stood there with some clothes draped over my arm, I could hardly bear what I would have to inflict upon them.

Her clothes didn't smell like mine. Her clothes didn't look like mine. Her clothes had never lived with mine and yet they were meant to be cooped up in the same wardrobe together. My things were symbolic extensions of myself. If they were touched by others I would have to disown them as non-me. I felt choked with impending claustrophobia. “Sorry clothes,” I said, as I put one of her coat hangers into a jacket and hung it up. I moved her things aside. Not far enough. I thought of what to put between them. Other people's things always seemed contaminating, merely by virtue of being theirs; “my world,” “the world.”

I drew back the sheets. They were a trendy in-between color. I wished I had sheets. Then I wished I had a bed. Then I wished I had a room. Then I wished I had a home. Then I got depressed and gave up.

These sheets, whether they were on my bed or not, were not in any way mine. They didn't smell like me. They had no patterns with which I was familiar, under which I could lie in the morning light, safe and enclosed, the sheet a tent over my head. I didn't like the “lovely” sheets.

Just as I got used to them, I drew back the covers one day to find my father's girlfriend had changed them. Trying to control the tension in my voice, I asked, “Have you washed the sheets?” “Yes,” replied my father's girlfriend authoritatively. “I don't like to wash them,” I informed her. “Well around here you do,” she said crisply and invited no response.

I went to the room and sat on the floor, screaming silently in my head. No words came out but I felt deafened. I felt trapped, my life taken out of my control. I wanted out of this prison.

This social claustrophobia was an old pattern. It drove me crazy and I knew it wasn't good for me. I tried to think of whether leaving was a logical response or not. I tried to imagine why this woman might be upset. I thought about how I might feel if someone responded
to my changing the sheets on one of the beds in my own house if I had had one. I wouldn't have done it. I did a lot of deep breathing.

I had peed in bed again. I was nine and too old for this. I could hold on for days when I was awake but something within me was free in the land of Nod, where I could fly and pee with equal ease. In the land of Nod there was no fear of losing control.

Carol climbed down the stairs with the sheets and a smile and went to the washing machine. “Put those fucking sheets back on that bed or I'll break your neck,” said the snarl in the kitchen. I had already seen the kittens go to God in the laundry room.
Crack,
came the noise each time as they went to God at the hands of the snarl who stood next to the washing machine. “Stop bringing fucking cats home,” the snarl had said. But Carol never remembered. There were no cats. To Carol, the cats were symbols of me. She was bringing me home and trying to prove again and again it would one day work.

Carol climbed the stairs with the pissy sheets and put them back on the bed.

My father's girlfriend had a high-pitched voice that hurt my ears, and my body language must have made her feel like she had the plague. Every time she entered the room I disappeared. I discovered I could use cotton wool in my ears in order to try to tolerate the pitch and intonation of her voice but it still set my nerves on end so that I kept feeling I was going to explode.

I could drive past a row of trees and focus sharply upon one leaf of each tree, down to the detail of the contrast in the width of each vein. That was the way it was on automatic pilot. Like a handful of other autistic people, I could drive, paint, compose, and speak several foreign languages, all without thought or effort, but while I did I would be tuned out and everything that happened or was taken in in the course of these actions came in without being filtered. It was like having a brain with no sieve, but the consequences of my “success” and “high functioning” were shutdown, overload, dissociation, and losing time. There are two ways to be a nobody nowhere. One is to be frozen and unable to do anything spontaneously for
yourself. The other is to be able to do anything based on stored mirrored repertoires without any personal self-awareness yet being otherwise virtually unable to do anything complex with awareness. And then there are different combinations of both.

It gave me a headache when my senses got flooded like this; it was like watching a cartoon in fast motion. Driving by the shape of the road, stored rules on road dots and lines, stored responses to curves and obstacles, I had driven home many times with only the dream of how I got there. Sometimes I drove the same route in a circle several times, having got the role but lost the intention. If a familiar road was changed, there was a repertoire for that, too, and many times I found myself repeating the drive of a strip of road somehow subconsciously assuming a reconstruction would “fix up” the reality and restore it to how it used to be.

In eight years there were eight accidents and no one but me ever got hurt. I had done every manner of automobile acrobatics but still considered myself a good driver. I guess you can be anything in your dreams and I had lived continuously in and out of one. I guess Willie was my driver in any stressful situation. Yet it seems far from normal that after flipping, rolling, and landing the car upside down on an unlit mountain bend that anyone would merely unbuckle the seat belt, drop to the roof, unwind and climb out the window, run down the road to flag down oncoming lights, and then sit on a rock saying “shit” over and over without a tear, without a shake. Rainman may have freaked out in a traffic jam, but on automatic pilot in a state of self-denial and a step away from consciousness and awareness “I” was sometimes so normal it was chillingly abnormal.

For so long this tentative balance of denial had been the best compromise I had found. But the price tag was too high; to merely function was no longer such a good exchange for “to live.” The choice was not an easy one though. I had to accept the harsh reality that to live would involve being so much less than I could seem and be so much more difficult than sleep-walking. Everything was too colorful, too invasive, too constantly changing. I could switch off emotion and self, it would be tolerable; a film of someone else's life with my body cast in the leading role. I could hold on to self and
emotion and awareness and overload under the weight of everything coming into a mind with no sieve. Listening to the girlfriend's voice was the auditory equivalent of this. I'd be tuned out to cross the room or eat a meal or talk, and at the same time my ears would take in every minute detail with a clarity that sent my head spinning.