“He doesn’t want to know it himself,” I say. I am not sure why I think that, but I do. It is something we said. I need to know what it was.
“There was something, back around the turn of the century,” Bailey says. “In one of the science journals, something about making people sort of autistic so they would work harder.”
“Science journal or science fiction?” I ask.
“It was — wait; I’ll look it up. I know somebody who will know.” Bailey makes a note on his handcomp.
“Don’t send it from the office,” Chuy says.
“Why-? Oh. Yes.” Bailey nods.
“Pizza tomorrow,” Linda says. “Coming here is normal.”
I open my mouth to say that Tuesday is my day to shop for groceries and shut it again. This is more important. I can go a week without groceries, or I can shop a little later.
“Everybody look up what you can find,” Cameron says.
At home, I log on and e-mail Lars. It is very late where he is, but he is awake. I find out that the original research was done in Denmark, but the entire lab, equipment and all, was bought up and the research base shifted to Cambridge. The paper I first heard about weeks ago was based on research done more than a year ago. Mr. Aldrin was right about that. Lars thinks much of the work to make the treatments human-compatible has been done; he speculates on secret military experiments. I do not believe this; Lars thinks everything is a secret military experiment. He is a very good game player, but I do not believe everything he says.
Wind rattles my windows. I get up and lay a hand on the glass. Much colder. A spatter of rain and then I hear thunder. It is late anyway; I shut down my system and go to bed.
Tuesday we do not speak to one another at work, other than “good morning” and “good afternoon.” I spend fifteen minutes in the gym when I finish another section of my project, but then I go back to work. Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Crenshaw both come by, not quite arm in arm, but as if they were friendly. They do not stay long, and they do not talk to me.
After work, we go back to the pizza place. “Two nights in a row!” says Hi-I’m-Sylvia. I cannot tell if she is happy or unhappy about that. We take our usual table but pull over another one so there is room for everybody.
“So?” Cameron says, after we’ve ordered. “What have we found out?”
I tell the group what Lars said. Bailey has found the text of the old article, which is clearly fiction and not nonfiction. I did not know that science journals ever published science fiction on purpose, and apparently it only happened for one year.
“It was supposed to make people really concentrate on an assigned project and not waste time on other things,” Bailey said.
“Like Mr. Crenshaw thinks we waste time?” I say.
Bailey nods.
“We don’t waste as much time as he wastes walking around looking angry,” Chuy says.
We all laugh, but quietly. Eric is drawing curlicues with his colored pens; they look like laughing sounds.
“Does it say how it was going to work?” Linda asks.
“Sort of,” Bailey says. “But I’m not sure the science is good. And that was decades ago. What they thought would work might not be what really works.”
“They don’t want autistic people like us,” Eric says. “They wanted — or the story said they wanted — savant talents and concentration without the other side effects. Compared to a savant we waste a lot of time, though not as much as Mr. Crenshaw thinks.”
“Normal people waste a lot of time on nonproductive things,” Cameron says. “At least as much as we do, maybe more.”
“It would take what to turn a normal person into a savant without the other problems?” Linda asks.
“I don’t know,” Cameron says. “They would have to be smart to start with. Good at something. Then they would have to want to do that instead of anything else.”
“It wouldn’t do any good if they wanted to do something they were bad at,” Chuy says. I imagine a person determined to be a musician who has no rhythm and no pitch sense; it is ridiculous. We all see the funny side of this and laugh.
“Do people ever want to do what they aren’t good at?” Linda asks. “Normal people, that is?” For once she does not make the word normal sound like a bad word.
We sit and think a moment; then Chuy says, “I had an uncle who wanted to be a writer. My sister — she reads a lot — she said he was really bad. Really, really bad. He was good at doing things with his hands, but he wanted to write.”
“Here y’are, then,” Hi-I’m-Sylvia says, putting down the pizzas. I look at her. She is smiling, but she looks tired and it is not even seven yet.
“Thank you,” I say. She waves a hand and hurries away.
“Something to keep people from paying attention to distraction,” Bailey says. “Something to make them like the right things.”
“ ‘Distractibility is determined by the sensory sensitivity at every level of processing and by the strength of sensory integration,’” Eric recites. “I read that. Part of it’s inborn. That’s been known for forty or fifty years; late in the twentieth century that knowledge had worked its way down to the popular level, in books on parenting. Attention control circuitry is developed early in fetal life; it can be compromised by later injury…”
I feel almost sick for a moment, as if something were attacking my brain right now, but push that feeling aside. Whatever caused my autism is in the past, where I cannot undo it. Now it is important not to think about me but about the problem.
All my life I’ve been told how lucky I was to be born when I was — lucky to benefit from the improvements in early intervention, lucky to be born in the right country, with parents who had the education and resources to be sure I got that good early intervention. Even lucky to be born too soon for definitive treatment, because — my parents said — having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.
What would they have said if this treatment had been available for me when I was a child? Would they have wanted me to be stronger or be normal? Would accepting treatment mean I had no strength of character? Or would I find other struggles?
I am still thinking about this the next evening as I change clothes and drive to Tom and Lucia’s for fencing. What behaviors do we have that someone could profit from, other than the occasional savant talents? Most of the autistic behaviors have been presented to us as deficits, not strengths. Unsocial, lacking social skills, problems with attention control… I keep coming back to that. It is hard to think from their perspective, but I have the feeling that this attention control issue is at the middle of the pattern, like a black hole at the center of a space-time whirlpool. That is something else we are supposed to be deficient in, the famous Theory of Mind.
I am a little early. No one else is parked outside yet. I pull up carefully so that there is the most room possible behind me. Sometimes the others are not so careful, and then fewer people can park without inconveniencing others. I could be early every week, but that would not be fair to others.
Inside, Tom and Lucia are laughing about something. When I go in, they grin at me, very relaxed. I wonder what it would be like to have someone in the house all the time, someone to laugh with. They do not always laugh, but they seem happy more often than not.
“How are you, Lou?” Tom asks. He always asks that. It is one of the things normal people do, even if they know that you are all right.
“Fine,” I say. I want to ask Lucia about medical things, but I do not know how to start or if it is polite. I start with something else. “The tires on my car were slashed last week.”
“Oh, no!” Lucia says. “How awful!” Her face changes shape; I think she means to express sympathy.
“It was in the parking lot at the apartment,” I say. “In the same place as usual. All four tires.”