The Speed of Dark

CHAPTER TWELVE

The others arrive in a bunch, within just a couple of minutes. We move to the backyard, then stretch and put on our gear and start fencing. Marjory sits with me between bouts. I am happy when she sits next to me. I would like to touch her hair, but I do not.

We do not talk much. I do not know what to say. She asks if I got the windshield fixed, and I say yes. I watch her fence with Lucia; she is taller than Lucia, but Lucia is the better fencer. Marjory’s brown hair bounces when she moves; Lucia wears her light hair in a ponytail. They both wear white fencing jackets tonight; soon Marjory’s has little brown smudges where Lucia has scored hits.

I am still thinking about Marjory when I fence with Tom. I am seeing Marjory’s pattern, and not Tom’s, and he kills me quickly twice.

“You’re not paying attention,” he says to me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. My eyes slide to Marjory.

Tom sighs. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, Lou, but one reason to do this is to get a break from it.”

“Yes… I’m sorry.” I drag my eyes back and focus on Tom and his blade. When I concentrate, I can see his pattern — a long and complicated one — and now I can parry his attacks. Low, high, high, low, reverse, low, high, low, low, reverse… he’s throwing a reverse shot every fifth and varying the setup to it. Now I can prepare for the reverse, pivoting and then making a quick diagonal step: attack obliquely, one of the old masters says, never directly. It is like chess in that way, with the knight and bishop attacking at an angle. At last I set up the series I like best and get a solid hit.

“Wow!” Tom says. “I thought I’d managed real randomness—”

“Every fifth is a reverse,” I say.

“Damn,” Tom said. “Let’s try that again—”

This time he doesn’t reverse for nine shots, the next time seven — I notice he’s always using a reverse attack on the odd numbers. I test that through longer series, just waiting. Sure enough… nine, seven, five, then back to seven. That’s when I step past on the diagonal and get him again.

“That wasn’t five,” he says. He sounds breathless.

“No… but it was an odd number,” I say.

“I can’t think fast enough,” Tom says. “I can’t fence and think. How do you do it?”

“You move, but the pattern doesn’t,” I say. “The pattern — when I see it — is still. So it is easier to hold in mind because it doesn’t wiggle around.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Tom says. “So — how do you plan your own attacks? So they aren’t patterned?”

“They are,” I say. “But I can shift from one pattern to another…” I can tell this is not getting across to him and try to think of another way of saying it. “When you drive somewhere, there are many possible routes… many patterns you might choose. If you start off on one and a road you would use for that pattern is blocked, you take another and get onto one of your other patterns, don’t you?”

“You see routes as patterns?” Lucia says. “I see them as strings — and I have real trouble shifting from one to another unless the connection is within a block.”

“I get completely lost,” Susan says. “Mass transit’s a real boon to me — I just read the sign and get on. In the old days, if I’d had to drive everywhere, I’d have been late all the time.”

“So, you can hold different fencing patterns in your head and just… jump or something… from one to another?”

“But mostly I’m reacting to the opponent’s attacks while I analyze the pattern,” I say.

“That would explain a lot about your learning style when you started fencing,” Lucia says. She looks happy. I do not understand why that would make her happy. “Those first bouts, you did not have time to learn the pattern — and you were not skilled enough to think and fence both, right?”

“I… it’s hard to remember,” I say. I am uncomfortable with this, with other people picking apart how my brain works. Or doesn’t work.

“It doesn’t matter — you’re a good fencer now — but people do learn differently.”

The rest of the evening goes by quickly. I fence with several of the others; in between I sit beside Marjory if she is not fencing. I listen for noise from the street but hear nothing. Sometimes cars drive by, but they sound normal, at least from the backyard. When I go out to my car, the windshield is not broken and the tires are not flat. The absence of damage was there before the damage occurred — if someone came to damage my car, the damage would be subsequent… very much like dark and light. The dark is there first, and then comes light.

“Did the police ever get back to you about the windshield?” Tom asks. We are all out in the front yard together.

“No,” I say. I do not want to think about the police tonight. Marjory is next to me and I can smell her hair.

“Did you think who might have done it?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I do not want to think about that, either, not with Marjory beside me.

“Lou—” He scratches his head. “You need to think about it. How likely is it that your car was vandalized twice in a row, on fencing night, by strangers?”

“It was not anyone in our group,” I say. “You are my friends.”

Tom looks down, then back at my face. “Lou, I think you need to consider—” My ears do not want to hear what he will say next.

“Here you are,” Lucia says, interrupting. Interrupting is rude, but I am glad she interrupts. She has brought the book with her. She hands it to me when I have put my duffel back in the trunk. “Let me know how you get on with it.”

In the light from the street lamp on the corner the book’s cover is a dull gray. It feels pebbly under my fingers.

“What are you reading, Lou?” Marjory asks. My stomach tightens. I do not want to talk about the research with Marjory. I do not want to find out that she already knows about it.

“Cego and Clinton,” Lucia says, as if that is a title.

“Wow,” Marjory says. “Good for you, Lou.”

I do not understand. Does she know the book just from its authors? Did they write only one book? And why does she say the book is good for me? Or did she mean “good for you” as praise? I do not understand that meaning, either. I feel trapped in this whirlpool of questions, not-knowing swirling around me, drowning me.

Light speeds toward me from the distant specks, the oldest light taking longest to arrive.

I drive home carefully, even more aware than usual of the pools and streams of light washing over me from street lamps and lighted signs. In and out of the fast dark — and it does feel faster in the dark.

Tom shook his head as Lou drove away. “I don’t know—” he said, and paused.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Lucia asked.

“It’s the only real possibility,” Tom said. “I don’t like to think it, it’s hard to believe Don could be capable of anything this serious, but… who else could it be? He would know Lou’s name; he could find out his address; he certainly knows when fencing practice is and what Lou’s car looks like.”

“You didn’t tell the police,” Lucia said.

“No. I thought Lou would figure it out, and it’s his car, after all. I felt I shouldn’t horn in. But now… I wish I’d gone on and told Lou flat out to beware of Don. He still thinks of him as a friend.”

“I know.” Lucia shook her head. “He’s so — well, I don’t know if it’s really loyalty or just habit. Once a friend, always a friend? Besides—”

“It might not be Don. I know. He’s been a nuisance and a jerk at times, but he’s never done anything violent before. And nothing happened tonight.”

“The night’s not over,” Lucia said. “If we hear about anything else, we have to tell the police. For Lou’s sake.”

“You’re right, of course.” Tom yawned. “Let’s just hope nothing happens and it’s random coincidence.”

At the apartment, I carry the book and my duffel upstairs. I hear no sound from Danny’s apartment as I go past it. I put my fencing jacket in the dirty-clothes basket and take the book to my desk. In the light of the desk lamp, the cover is light blue, not gray.

I open it. Without Lucia to prompt me to skip them, I read all the pages carefully. On the page headed “Dedications,” Betsy R. Cego has put: “For Jerry and Bob, with thanks,” and Malcolm R. Clinton has put: “To my beloved wife, Celia, and in memory of my father, George.” The foreword, written by Peter J. Bartleman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, includes the information that Betsy R. Cego’s R. stands for Rodham and Malcom R. Clinton’s R. stands for Richard, so the R. probably has nothing to do with their coauthorship. Peter J. Bartleman says the book is the most important compilation, of the current state of knowledge on brain function. I do not know why he wrote the foreword.

The preface answers that question. Peter J. Bartleman taught Betsy R. Cego when she was in medical school and awakened a lifelong interest in and commitment to the study of brain function. The phrasing seems awkward to me. The preface explains what the book is about, why the authors wrote it, and then thanks a lot of people and companies for their help. I am surprised to find the name of the company I work for in that list. They provided assistance with computational methods.

Computational methods are what our division develops. I look again at the copyright date. When this book was written I was not yet working there.

I wonder if any of those old programs are still around.

I turn to the glossary in back and read quickly through the definitions. I know about half of them now. When I turn to the first chapter, a review of brain structure, it makes sense. The cerebellum, amygdala, hippocampus, cerebrum… diagrammed in several ways, sectioned top to bottom and front to back and side to side. I have never seen a diagram that showed the functions of the different areas, though, and I look at it closely. I wonder why the main language center is in the left brain when there is a perfectly good auditory processing area in the right brain. Why specialize like that? I wonder if sounds coming into one ear are heard more as language than sounds coming in the other ear. The tiers of visual processing are just as hard to understand.

It is on the last page of that chapter that I find a sentence so overwhelming that I have to stop and stare at it: “Essentially, physiological functions aside, the human brain exists to analyze and generate patterns.”

My breath catches in my chest; I feel cold, then hot. That is what I do. If that is the essential function of the human brain, then I am not a freak, but normal.

This cannot be. Everything I know tells me that I am the different one, the deficient one. I read the sentence again and again, trying to make it fit with what I know.

Finally, I read past it to the rest of the paragraph: “The pattern-analysis or pattern-making may be flawed, as with some mental diseases, resulting in mistaken analysis or patterns generated on the basis of erroneous ‘data,’ but even in the most severe cognitive failure, these two activities are characteristic of the human brain — and indeed, of brains much less sophisticated than human ones. Readers interested in these functions in nonhumans should consult references below.”

So perhaps I am normal and freakish… normal in seeing and making patterns, but perhaps I make the wrong patterns?

I read on, and when I finally stop, feeling shaky and exhausted, it is almost three in the morning. I have reached chapter 6, “Computational Assessments of Visual Processing.”

I am changing already. A few months ago, I did not know that I loved Marjory. I did not know I could fence in a tournament with strangers. I did not know I could learn biology and chemistry the way I have been. I did not know I could change this much.

One of the people at the rehab center where I spent so many hours as a child used to say that disabilities were God’s way of giving people a chance to show their faith. My mother would pinch her lips together, but she did not argue. Some government program at that time funneled money through churches to provide rehab services, and that was what my parents could afford. My mother was afraid that if she argued, they might kick me out of the program. Or at least she’d have to listen to more of the sermonizing.

I do not understand God that way. I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.

God is supposed to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.

Accidents happen to people; my mother’s friend Celia said most accidents weren’t really accidents, they were caused by someone doing something stupid, but the person who gets hurt isn’t always the one who did something stupid. I think my autism was an accident, but what I do with it is me. That is what my mother said.

That is what I think most of the time. Sometimes I am not sure.

It is a gray morning, with low clouds. The slow light has not yet chased all the darkness away. I pack my lunch. I pick up Cego and Clinton and go downstairs. I can read during my lunch break.

My tires are all still full. My new windshield is unbroken. Perhaps the person who is not my friend is tired of hurting my car. I unlock the car, put my lunch and the book on the passenger seat, and get in. The morning music I like for driving is playing in my head.

When I turn the key, nothing happens. The car will not start. There is no sound but the little click of the turning key. I know what that means. My battery is dead.

The music in my head falters. My battery was not dead last night. The charge level indicator was normal last night.

I get out and unlatch the hood of the car. When I lift the hood, something jumps out at me; I stagger back and almost fall over the curb.

It is a child’s toy, a jack-in-the-box. It is sitting where the battery should be. The battery is gone.

I will be late for work. Mr. Crenshaw will be angry. I close the hood over the engine without touching the toy. I did not like jack-in-the-box toys when I was a child. I must call the police, the insurance company, the whole dreary list. I look at my watch. If I hurry to the transit stop, I can catch a commuter train to work and I will not be late.

I take the lunch sack and the book from the passenger seat, relock the car, and walk quickly to the transit stop. I have the cards of the police officers in my wallet. I can call them from work.

On the crowded train, people stare past one another without making eye contact. They are not all autistic; they know somehow that it is appropriate not to make eye contact on the train. Some read news faxes. Some stare at the monitor at the end of the car. I open the book and read what Cego and Clinton said about how the brain processes visual signals. At the time they wrote, industrial robots could use only simple visible input to guide movement. Binocular vision in robots hadn’t been developed yet except for the laser targeting of large weapons.

I am fascinated by the feedback loops between the layers of visual processing; I had not realized that something this interesting went on inside normal people’s heads. I thought they just looked at things and recognized them automatically. I thought my visual processing was faulty when — if I understand this correctly — it is only slow.

When I get to the campus stop, I now know which way to go, and it takes less time to walk to our building. I am three minutes and twenty seconds early. Mr. Crenshaw is in the hall again, but he does not speak to me; he moves aside without speaking, so that I can get to my office. I say, “Good morning, Mr. Crenshaw,” because that is appropriate, and he grunts something that might have been, “Morning.” If he had had my speech therapist, he would enunciate more clearly.

I put the book on my desk and go out in the hall to take my lunch to the kitchenette. Mr. Crenshavy is now by the door, looking out at the parking lot. He turns around and sees me. “Where’s your car, Arren-dale?” he asks.

“Home,” I say. “I took the transit.”

“So you can take the transit,” he says. His face is a little shiny. “You don’t really need a special parking lot.”

“It is very noisy,” I say. “Someone stole my battery last night.”

“A car’s only a constant problem for someone like you,” he says, coming closer. “People who don’t live in secure areas, with secure parking, really shouldn’t flaunt having a car.”

“Nothing happened until a few weeks ago,” I say. I do not understand why I want to argue with him. I do not like to argue.

“You were lucky. But it looks like someone has found you out now, doesn’t it? Three episodes of vandalism. At least this time you weren’t late.”

“I was only late once because of that,” I say.

“That’s not the point,” he says. I wonder what the point is, besides his dislike of me and the others. He glances at my office door. “You’ll want to get back to work,” he says. “Or start—” Now he looks at the clock in the hall. It is two minutes, eighteen seconds past starting time. What I want to say is, You made me late, but I do not say that. I go in my office and shut the door. I am not going to make up the two minutes, eighteen seconds. It is not my fault. I feel a little excited about that.

I call up yesterday’s work, and the beautiful patterns form again in my mind. One parameter after another flows in, shifting the pattern from one structure to another, seamlessly. I vary the parameters across the permitted range, checking to see that there is no unwanted shift. When I look up again, it is an hour and eleven minutes later. Mr. Crenshaw will not be in our building now. He never stays this long. I go out in the hall for some water. The hall is empty, but I see the sign on the gym door. Someone is in there. I do not care.

I write down the words I will need to say, then call the police and ask for the investigating officer from the first incident, Mr. Stacy. When he comes onto the line, I can hear noises in the background. Other people are talking, and there is a kind of rumbling noise.

“This is Lou Arrendale,” I say. “You came when my car had its tires slashed. You said to call—”

“Yes, yes,” he says. He sounds impatient and as if he is not really listening. “Officer Isaka told me about the windshield the following week. We haven’t had time to follow that up—”

“Last night my battery was stolen,” I say. “And someone put a toy where the battery should be.”

“What?”

“When I went out this morning, my car would not start. I looked under the hood and something jumped at me. It was a jack-in-the-box someone had put where the battery should have been.”

“Just stay there and I’ll send someone over—” he says.

“I am not at home,” I say. “I am at work. My boss would be angry if I did not come on time. The car is at home.”

“I see. Where is the toy?”

“In the car,” I say. “I did not touch it. I do not like jack-in-the-box toys. I just shut the lid.” I meant “hood,” but the wrong word came in my mouth.

“I’m not happy about this,” he says. “Someone really does not like you, Mr. Arrendale. Once is mischief, but — do you have any idea who might have done it?”

“The only person I know who has been angry with me is my boss, Mr. Crenshaw,” I say. “When I came in late, that time. He does not like autistic people. He wants us to try an experimental treatment—”

“Us? Are there other autistic people where you work?”

I realize he does not know; he did not ask about this before. “Our section is all autistic people,” I say. “But I do not think Mr. Crenshaw would do this sort of thing. Although… he does not like it that we have special permits to drive and a separate parking lot. He thinks we should all ride the train like everyone else.”

“Hmmm. And all the attacks have been on your car.”

“Yes. But he does not know about my fencing class.” I cannot imagine Mr. Crenshaw driving around the city to find my car and then smashing the windshield.

“Anything else? Anything at all?”

I do not want to make false accusations. Making false accusations is very wrong. But I do not want my car to be damaged again. It takes my time away from other things; it messes up my schedule. And it costs money.

“There is someone at the Center, Emmy Sanderson, who thinks I should not have normal friends,” I say. “But she does not know where the fencing group is.” I do not really think it is Emmy, but she is the one person, besides Mr. Crenshaw, who has been angry with me in the last month or so. The pattern does not really fit for her or for Mr. Crenshaw, but the pattern must be wrong, because a possible name has not come out.

“Emmy Sanderson,” he says, repeating the name. “And you don’t think she knows where the house is?”

“No.” Emmy is not my friend, but I do not believe she has done these things. Don is my friend, and I do not want to believe he has done these things.

“Isn’t it more likely someone connected to your fencing group? Is there someone you don’t get along with?”

I am sweating suddenly. “They are my friends,” I say. “Emmy says they can’t really be friends, but they are. Friends do not hurt friends.”

He grunts. I do not know what that grunt means. “There are friends and friends,” he says. “Tell me about the people in that group.”

I tell him about Tom and Lucia first and then the others; he takes down the names, asking me how to spell some of them.

“And were they all there, these last few weeks?”

“Not all every week,” I say. I tell him what I can remember, who was on a business trip and who was there. “And Don switched to a different instructor; he got upset with Tom.”

“With Tom. Not with you?”

“No.” I do not know how to say this without criticizing friends, and criticizing friends is wrong. “Don teases sometimes, but he is my friend,” I say. “He got upset with Tom because Tom told me about something Don did a long time ago and Don wanted him not to have told me.”

“Something bad?” Stacy asks.

“It was at a tournament,” I say. “Don came to me after the match and told me what I did wrong, and Tom — my instructor — told him to let me alone. Don was trying to help me, but Tom thought he wasn’t helping me. Tom said I had done better than Don had at his first tournament, and Don heard him, and then he was angry with Tom. After that he quit coming to our group.”

“Huh. Sounds more like a reason to slash your instructor’s tires. I suppose we’d better check him out, though. If you think of anything else, let me know. I’ll send someone over to retrieve that toy; we’ll see if we can get some fingerprints or something off of it.”

When I have put the phone down, I sit thinking of Don, but that is not pleasant. I think of Marjory instead, and then Marjory and Don. It makes me feel a little sick in my stomach to think of Don and Marjory as… friends. In love. I know Marjory does not like Don. Does he like her? I remember how he sat beside her, how he stood between me and her, how Lucia shooed him away.

Has Marjory told Lucia she likes me? This is another thing that normal people do, I think. They know when someone likes someone and how much. They do not have to wonder. It is like their other mind reading, knowing when someone is joking and when someone is serious, knowing when a word is used correctly and when it is used in a joking way. I wish I could know for sure if Marjory likes me. She smiles at me. She talks to me in a pleasant voice. But she might do that anyway, as long as she did not dislike me. She is pleasant to people; I saw that in the grocery store.

Emmy’s accusations come back to me. If Marjory does see me as an interesting case, a research subject even though not in her field, she might still smile and talk to me. It would not mean she liked me. It would mean she is a nicer person than Dr. Fornum, and even Dr. Fornum smiles an appropriate smile when she says hello and good-bye, though it never reaches her eyes as Marjory’s smile does. I have seen Marjory smile at other people and her smile is always whole. Still, if Marjory is my friend, she is telling me the truth when she tells me about her research, and if I am her friend, I should believe her.

I shake my head to drive these thoughts back into the darkness where they belong. I turn on the fan to make my spin spirals whirl. I need that now; I am breathing too fast and I can feel sweat on my neck. It is because of the car, because of Mr. Crenshaw, because of having to call the police. It is not because of Marjory.

After a few minutes, my brain’s functionality returns to pattern analysis and pattern generation. I do not let my mind drift to Cego and Clinton. I will work through part of my lunch hour to make up the time I spent talking to the police, but not the two minutes and eighteen seconds Mr. Crenshaw cost me.

Immersed in the complexity and beauty of the patterns, I do not emerge for lunch break until 1:28:17.

The music in my head is Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2. I have four recordings of it at home. A very old one with a twentieth century soloist named Perlman, my favorite. Three newer, two fairly competent but not very interesting and one with last year’s Tchaikovsky Competition winner, Idris Vai-Kassadelikos, who is still very young. Vai-Kassadelikos may be as good as Perlman when she is older. I do not know how good he was when he was her age, but she plays with passion, pulling out the long notes in smooth, heartbreaking phrases.

This is music that makes it easier to see some kinds of patterns than others. Bach enhances most of them, but not the ones that are… elliptical is the best way I can say it. The long sweep of this music, which obscures the rosetted patterns Bach brings out, helps me find and build the long, asymmetrical components that find rest in fluidity.

It is dark music. I hear it as long, undulating streaks of darkness, like blue-black ribbons blowing in the wind at night, obscuring and revealing the stars. Now soft, now louder, now the single violin, with the orchestra just breathing behind it, and now louder, the violin riding up over the orchestra like the ribbons on a current of air.

I think it will be good music to have in mind while I am reading Cego and Clinton. I eat my lunch quickly and set a timer on my fan. That way the moving twinkles of light will let me know when it is time to go back to work.

Cego and Clinton talk about the way the brain processes edges, angles, textures, colors, and how the information flows back and forth between the layers of visual processing. I did not know there was a separate area for facial recognition, though the reference they cite goes back to the twentieth century. I did not know that the ability to recognize an object in different orientations is impaired in those born blind who gain sight later.

Again and again they talk about things I have had trouble with in the context of being born blind or having brain trauma from a head injury or stroke or aneurysm. When my face does not turn strange like other people’s do when they feel strong emotion, is it just that my brain doesn’t process the change of shape?

A tiny hum: my fan coming on. I shut my eyes, wait three seconds, and open them. The room is awash in color and movement, the spin spirals and whirligigs all moving, reflecting light as they move. I put the book down and go back to work. The steady oscillation of the twinkles soothes me; I have heard normal people call it chaotic, but it is not. It is a pattern, regular and predictable, and it took me weeks to get it right. I think there must be some easier way to do it, but I had to adjust each of the moving parts until it moved at the right speed in relation to the others.

My phone rings. I do not like it when the phone rings; it jerks me out of what I am doing, and there will be someone on the other end who expects me to be able to talk right away. I take a deep breath. When I answer, “This is Lou Arrendale,” at first I hear only noise.

“Ah — this is Detective Stacy,” the voice says. “Listen — we sent someone over to your apartment. Tell me again what your license number is.”

I recite it for him.

“Um. Well, I’m going to need to talk to you in person.” He stops and I think he expects me to say something, but I do not know what to say. Finally he goes on. “I think you may be in danger, Mr. Arrendale. Whoever’s doing this is not a nice guy. When our guys tried to get that toy out, there was a small explosion.”

Explosion!

“Yes. Luckily, our guys were careful. They didn’t like the setup, so they called the bomb squad. But if you’d picked up that toy, you might’ve lost a finger or two. Or the thing might’ve hit you in the face.”

“I see.” I could in fact see it, imagine it visually. I had almost reached out and grabbed the toy… and if I had… I feel cold suddenly; my hand starts to tremble.

“We really need to find this person. Nobody’s home at your fencing instructor’s—”

“Tom teaches at the university,” I say. “Chemical engineering.”

“That’ll help. Or his wife?”

“Lucia’s a doctor,” I say. “She works at the medical center. Do you really think this person wants to hurt me?”

“He sure wants to cause you trouble,” the officer said. “And the vandalism seems more violent each time. Can you come down to the station?”

“I cannot leave here until after work,” I say. “Mr. Crenshaw would be angry with me.” If someone is trying to hurt me, I do not want anyone else angry.

“We’re sending someone out,” Mr. Stacy says. “Which building are you in?” I tell him that and which gate to enter and which turns to take to arrive in our parking area, and he continues, “Should be there within a half hour. We have fingerprints; we’ll need to take yours to compare with the others. Your fingerprints should be all over that car — and you’ve had it in for repairs lately, too, so there’ll be others. But if we find a set that doesn’t match yours or any of the repair people… we’ll have something solid to go on.”

I wonder if I should tell Mr. Aldrin or Mr. Crenshaw that the police are coming here to talk to me. I do not know which would make Mr. Crenshaw more angry. Mr. Aldrin does not seem to get angry as often. I call his office.

“The police are coming to talk to me,” I say. “I will make up the time.”

“Lou! What’s wrong? What have you done?”

“It is my car,” I say.

Before I can say more, he is talking fast. “Lou, don’t say anything to them. We’ll get you a lawyer. Was anyone hurt?”

“Nobody was hurt,” I say. I hear his breath gush out.

“Well, that’s a mercy,” he says.

“When I opened the hood, I did not touch the device.”

“Device? What are you talking about?”

“The… the thing that someone put in my car. It looked like a toy, a jack-in-the-box.”

“Wait — wait. Are you telling me that the police are coming because of something that happened to you, that someone else did? Not something you did?”

“I did not touch it,” I say. The words he has just said filter through slowly, one by one; the excitement in his voice made it hard to hear them clearly. He thought at first that I had done something wrong, something to bring the police here. This man I have known since I started working here — he thinks I could do something so bad. I feel heavier.

“I’m sorry,” he says before I can say anything. “It sounds like — it must sound like — I jumped to the conclusion that you had done something wrong. I’m sorry. I know you would not. But I still think you need one of the company’s lawyers with you when you talk to the police.”

“No,” I say. I feel chilly and bitter; I do not want to be treated like a child. I thought Mr. Aldrin liked me. If he does not like me, then Mr. Crenshaw, who is so much worse, must really hate me. “I do not want a lawyer. I do not need a lawyer. I have not done anything wrong. Someone has been vandalizing my car.”

“More than once?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Two weeks ago, when all my tires were flat. Someone had slashed them. That is the time I was late. Then, the following Wednesday, while I was at a friend’s house, someone smashed my windshield. I called the police then, too.”

“But you didn’t tell me, Lou,” Mr. Aldrin says.

“No… I thought Mr. Crenshaw would be angry. And this morning, my car wouldn’t start. The battery was gone, and a toy was there instead. I came to work and called the police. When they went to look, the toy had an explosive under it.”

“My God, Lou — that’s… you could have been hurt. That’s horrible. Do you have any idea — no, of course you don’t. Listen, I’m coming right over.”

He has hung up before I can ask him not to come right over. I am too excited to work now. I do not care what Mr. Crenshaw thinks. I need my time in the gym. No one else is there. I put on bouncing music and begin bouncing on the trampoline, big, swooping bounces. At first I am out of rhythm with the music, but then I stabilize my movement. The music lifts me, swings me down; I can feel the beat in the compression of my joints as I meet the stretchy fabric and spring upward again.

By the time Mr. Aldrin arrives, I am feeling better. I am sweaty and I can smell myself, but the music is moving strongly inside me. I am not shaky or scared. It is a good feeling.

Mr. Aldrin looks worried, and he wants to come closer than I want him to come. I do not want him to smell me and be offended. I do not want him to touch me, either. “Are you all right, Lou?” he asks. His hand keeps reaching out, as if to pat me.

“I am doing okay,” I say.

“Are you sure? I really think we should have a lawyer here, and maybe you should go by the clinic—”

“I was not hurt,” I say. “I am all right. I do not need to see a doctor, and I do not want the lawyer.”

“I left word at the gate for the police,” Mr. Aldrin says. “I had to tell Mr. Crenshaw.” His brow lowers. “He was in a meeting. He will get the message when he gets out.”

The door buzzer sounds. Employees authorized to be in this building have their own key cards. Only visitors have to ring the buzzer. “I’ll go,” Mr. Aldrin says. I do not know whether to go in my office or stand in the hall. I stand in the hall and watch Mr. Aldrin go to the door. He opens it and says something to the man who is standing there. I cannot see if it is the same man I talked to before until he is much closer, and then I can tell that it is.