I tap my chest. “Rosni Gupta. Ros.”
“Ros,” she repeats. Then she taps her chest. “Malni,” she says. She has an accent.
It takes me a couple of times to get it. She works with me, showing me what she does with her mouth to make the sound. I fiddle with it as I write it down. I think about spelling it Emulni but Malni feels closer. She has a strong accent but I can’t place it. It’s not Spanish. I say a couple of words to her and gesture for her to say them back. She doesn’t make the retroflex consonants of the Indian subcontinent—the thing that everybody mangles trying to sound like Apu on The Simpsons. She watches me write.
I don’t use a laptop for my field notes. I like yellow legal pads. Just the way I started. She reaches out, wanting to use my pen. Her nails are a little long, her hands not very calloused. Her palms are pink. I hand her the pen and slide the pad across to her.
She writes an alphabet. It looks a lot like our alphabet but there’s no K, Q, or V. The G looks strange and there are extra letters after the D and the T and where we have a W she has something that looks like a curlicue.
She offers me the pen and says something. She gestures at me to take the pen. It’s the first time she’s really spoken to me in a full sentence. The language she speaks sounds liquid, like it’s been poured through a straw.
I take the pen and she points to the page. Points to the first letter. “A” she says. It sounds like something between A and U.
Eventually I write an A and she nods fiercely. I write our alphabet for her.
“Wait,” I say. I borrow Leo’s iPad and bring it back showing a Google map of the world. “Where are you from?” I ask.
She studies the map. Eventually she turns and she scrolls it a bit. I change it to a satellite version and I can see when she gets it. Her face is grim. She stabs her finger on the California coast. On where we are right now.
“No,” I say. “That’s where we are now, Malni. Where is home.”
She looks up at me leaning over the table. She stabs her finger in the same place.
I write up my report that she is not autistic and recommend a psychological follow-up. She might be bipolar. Leo tells me as I leave that the cop who brought her in and tazed her. I never got any sense she was violent. I was certainly never worried about my safety. I’ve done evals where I was worried about my safety—not many—but I take my safety very seriously, thank you.
I make dinner that night while Matt marks papers. Matt teaches sophomore English at the high school and is the faculty advisor for the literary magazine. For nine months of the year he disappears into the black hole that is teaching and we lose our dinner table. He surfaces for brief periods from the endless piles of papers and quizzes, mostly around Saturday night. He tells me about his students, I tell him about my clients.
Matt likes Bengali dishes but I don’t make them very often because I didn’t learn to cook until I was out of school. My go to, as you might have guessed, is Mexican. I like the heat. Tonight is carnitas à la Trader Joes.
“What’s this?” Matt asks. He’s sitting at the dining room table, papers spread, but he’s looking at my notes. We’ll end up eating in front of the television. We’re Netflixing, partway through some BBC thing involving spiffily dressed gangsters in post WWI England.
“What’s what?” I ask.
“Looks like someone’s writing the Old English alphabet in your notes.”
I bring out sour cream and salsa and look at what he’s pointing to. “That was my Jane Doe in Inglewood.”
“She’s a Beowulf scholar?” he asks.
“That’s Old English?” I ask.
“Looks like it,” Matt says.
I have a caseload and a lot of appointments but I call Leo and tell him I want to schedule some more time with Jane even though I shouldn’t take the time. He tells me she’s been moved to a halfway house. It could have been worse, she could have been just discharged to the street. He gives me the address and I call them and schedule an appointment.
I have to go in the evening because Malni—they call her Malni now—has a job during the day. She does light assembly work which is a fancy name for factory work. The halfway house is in Crenshaw, a less than desirable neighborhood. It’s a stucco apartment building, painted pale yellow. I knock on her door and her roommate answers.
“I’m looking for Malni?”
“She ain’t here. She be coming back, you might run into her if you look outside.” Her roommate’s name is Sherri. Sherri is lanky, with straightened hair and complicated nails. “You her parole?”
“No, I’m a speech therapist.”
“There ain’t no therapy to do,” Sherri says. “You know she don’t speak no English.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I like your nails.”
Sherri isn’t charmed by my compliment. But I do like them, they look like red and white athletic shoes, like they’ve been laced up across each nail. I’m terrible at maintenance. Hair, make-up, nails. I admire people who are good about things like that.
I head outside and spot Malni coming from a couple of blocks. Malni walks with her shoulders back, not smiling, and she makes eye contact with people. You’re not supposed to make eye contact with people in the city. It’s an unwritten rule. There’s a bunch of boys hanging on the corner and Malni looks straight at their faces. It’s not friendly, like she knows them. It’s not unfriendly. It’s… I don’t know. The way people cue looking at people and away from people is something to look for when determining if they’re autistic or if they’re exhibiting signs of psychosis. I’m trained to look for it. Persons on the autism spectrum generally don’t make eye contact. A lot of persons with schizophrenia don’t look at people and look away in the normal rhythms of conversation; they stare too much, too long, for example. When I assessed Malni at Arrowhead, she cued normally.
Malni walks the boys down, looking right in their faces. The boys move out of her way. I suspect they don’t even realize that they’re doing it. I remember her file says she was tazed when police apprehended her. A homeless woman of color speaking gibberish who kept looking them in the face and wouldn’t drop her eyes. Did they read that as aggressive? I bet she didn’t have to do much to get tazed. It’s a wonder she didn’t get shot.
Malni sees me when she gets closer and lifts her hand in a little wave. “Hi Ros,” she says and smiles. Totally normal cueing.
I follow her back into the apartment she shares with Sherri.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” Sherri announces from in front of the television. “I worked all day.” There’s a Styrofoam box of fried chicken and fried rice nearly finished on the coffee table in front of her.
“That’s okay,” I say.
Malni and I sit down at the kitchen table and I open up my laptop. I call up images of Beowulf in Old English and turn the screen around so Malni can see them.
She frowns a moment and then she looks at me and smiles and taps my forehead with her index finger like she’s saying I’m smart. She pulls the laptop closer to her and reads out loud.
It’s not the same liquid sound as when she talked, I don’t think (but that was two weeks ago and I don’t remember exactly). This sounds more German.
Sherri turns around and leans against the back of the couch. “What’s that she’s talking?”
“Old English,” I say.
“That ain’t English,” Sherri says. It’s like everything from Sherri has to be a challenge.
“No, it’s what they spoke in England over a thousand years ago.”
“Huh. So how come she knows that?”
Malni is learning modern English. She can say all the things that you learn when you start a new language—My name is Malni. How much does that cost? Where’s the bathroom? Everyone keeps asking her the same question, “Where are you from?”