The Speed of Dark

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

There are only two visitor slots in the parking lot, but I know there is room for my visitors’ cars; most of the residents do not keep cars. This apartment building was built back when everyone had at least one car.

I wait in the parking lot until the others have arrived. Then I lead them upstairs. All those feet sound loud on the stairs. I did not know it would be this loud. Danny opens his door.

“Oh— hi, Lou. I wondered what was happening.”

“It is my friends,” I say.

“Good, good,” Danny says. He does not close his door. I do not know what he wants. The others follow me to my door, and I unlock it and let them in.

It feels very strange to have other people in the apartment. Cameron walks around and finally disappears into the bathroom. I can hear him in there. It is like when I lived in a group residence. I did not like that much. Some things should be private; it is not nice to hear someone else in the bathroom. Cameron flushes the toilet, and I hear the water running in the basin, and then he comes out. Chuy looks at me, and I nod. He goes into the bathroom, too. Bailey is looking at my computer.

“I do not have a desk model at home,” he says. “I use my handheld to work through the computer at work.”

“I like having this one,” I say.

Chuy comes back to the living room. “So — what now?”

Cameron looks at me. “Lou, you have been reading about this, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” I get Brain Functionality off the shelf where I put it. “My— a friend loaned me this book. She said it was the best place to start.”

“Is it the woman Emmy talks about?”

“No, someone else. She is a doctor; she is married to a man I know.”

“Is she a brain doctor?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why did she give you the book? Did you ask her about the project?”

“I asked her for a book on brain function. I want to know what they are going to do to our brains.”

“People who have not studied do not know anything about how the brain works,” Bailey says.

“I did not know until I started reading,” I say. “Only what they taught us in school, and that was not a lot. I wanted to learn because of this.”

“Did you?” Cameron asks.

“It takes a long time to learn everything that is known about brains,” I say, “I know more than I did, but I do not know if I know enough. I want to know what they think it will do and what can go wrong.”

“It is complicated,” Chuy says.

“You know about brain function?” I ask.

“Not much. My older sister was a doctor, before she died. I tried to read some of her books when she was in medical school. That is when I lived at home with my family. I was only fifteen, though.”

“I want to know if you think they can do what they say they can do,” Cameron says.

“I do not know,” I say. “I wanted to see what the doctor was saying today. I am not sure he is right. Those pictures they showed are like ones in this book—” I pat the book. “He said they meant something different. This is not a new book, and things change. I need to find new pictures.”

“Show us the pictures,” Bailey says.

I turn to the page with the pictures of brain activitation and lay the book on the low table. They all look. “It says here this shows brain activation when someone sees a human face,” I say. “I think it looks exactly like the picture the doctor said showed looking at a familiar face in a crowd.

“It is the same,” Bailey says, after a moment. “The ratio of line width to overall size is exactly the same. The colored spots are in the same place. If it is not the same illustration, it is a copy.”

“Maybe for normal brains the activation pattern is the same,” Chuy says.

I had not thought of that.

“He said the second picture was of an autistic brain looking at a familiar face,” Cameron says. “But the book says it is the activation pattern for looking at a composite unknown face.”

“I do not understand composite unknown,” Eric says.

“It is a computer-generated face using features of several real faces,” I say.

“If it is true that the activation pattern for autistic brains looking at a familiar face is the same as normal brains looking at an unfamiliar face, then what is the autistic pattern for looking at an unfamiliar face?” Bailey asks.

“I always had trouble recognizing people I was supposed to know,” Chuy says. “It still takes me longer to learn people’s faces.”

“Yes, but you do,” Bailey says. “You recognize all of us, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Chuy says. “But it took a long time, and I knew you first by your voices and size and things.”

“The thing is, you do now, and that’s what matters. If your brain is doing it a different way, at least it’s doing it.”

“They told me that the brain can make different pathways to do the same thing,” Cameron says. “Like if someone is injured, they give them that drug — I don’t remember what it is — and some training, and they can relearn how to do things but use a different part of the brain.”

“They told me that, too,” I say. “I asked them why they didn’t give me the drug and they said it wouldn’t work for me. They did not say why.”

“Does this book?” Cameron asks.

“I don’t know. I haven’t read that far,” I say.

“Is it hard?” Bailey asks.

“In some places, but not as hard as I thought it would be,” I say. “I started reading some other stuff first. That helped.”

“What other?” Eric asks.

“I read through some of the courses on the Internet,” I say. “Biology, anatomy, organic chemistry, biochemistry.” He is staring at me; I look down. “It is not as hard as it sounds.”

No one says anything for several minutes. I can hear them breathe; they can hear me breathe. We can all hear all the noises, smell all the smells. It is not like being with my friends at fencing, where I have to be careful what I notice.

“I’m going to do it,” Cameron says suddenly. “I want to.”

“Why?” Bailey asks.

“I want to be normal,” Cameron says. “I always did. I hate being different. It is too hard, and it is too hard to pretend to be like everyone else when I am not. I am tired of that.”

“ ‘But aren’t you proud of who you are?’ ” Bailey’s tone makes it clear he is quoting the slogan from the Center: We are proud of who we are.

“No,” Cameron says. “I pretended to be. But really — what is there to be proud of? I know what you’re going to say, Lou—” He looks at me. He is wrong. I was not going to say anything. “You’ll say that normal people do what we do, only in smaller amounts. Lots of people self-stim, but they don’t even realize it. They tap their feet or twirl their hair or touch their faces. Yes, but they’re normal and no one makes them stop. Other people don’t make good eye contact, but they’re normal and no one nags them to make eye contact. They have something else to make up for the tiny bit of themselves that acts autistic. That’s what I want. I want — I want not to have to try so hard to look normal. I just want to be normal.”

“ ‘Normal’ is a dryer setting,” Bailey says.

“Normal is other people.” Cameron’s arm twitches and he shrugs violently; sometimes that stops it. “This — this stupid arm… I’m tired of trying to hide what’s wrong. I want it to be right.” His voice has gotten loud, and I do not know if he will be angrier if I ask him to be quieter. I wish I had not brought them here. “Anyway,” Cameron says, slightly softer, “I’m going to do it, and you can’t stop me.”

“I am not trying to stop you,” I say.

“Are you going to?” he asks. He looks at each of us in turn.

“I do not know. I am not ready to say.”

“Linda won’t,” Bailey says. “She says she will quit her job.”

“I do not know why the patterns would be the same,” Eric says. He is looking at the book. “It does not make sense.”

“A familiar face is a familiar face?”

“The task is finding familiar in different. The activation pattern should be more similar to finding a familiar nonface in different unfaces. Do they have that picture in this book?”

“It is on the next page,” I say. “It says the activation pattern is the same except that the face task activates the facial recognition area.”

“They care more about facial recognition,” Eric says.

“Normal people care about normal people,” Cameron says. “That is why I want to be normal.”

“Autistic people care about autistic people,” Eric says.

“Not the same,” Cameron says. He looks around the group. “Look at us. Eric is making patterns with his finger. Bailey is chewing on his lip, Lou is trying so hard to sit still that he looks like a piece of wood, and I’m bouncing whether I want to or not. You accept it that I bounce, you accept it that I have dice in my pocket, but you do not care about me. When I had flu last spring, you did not call or bring food.”

I do not say anything. There is nothing to say. I did not call or bring food because I did not know Cameron wanted me to do that. I think it is unfair of him to complain now. I am not sure that normal people always call and bring food when someone is sick. I glance at the others. They are all looking away from Cameron, as I am. I like Cameron; I am used to Cameron. What is the difference between liking and being used to? I am not sure. I do not like not being sure.

“You don’t, either,” Eric says finally. “You have not been to any meetings of the society in over a year.”

“I guess not,” Cameron’s voice is soft now. “I kept seeing — I can’t say it — the older ones, worse than we are. No young ones; they’re all cured at birth or before. When I was twenty it was a lot of help. But now… we are the only ones like us. The older autistics, the ones who didn’t get the good early training — I do not like to be around them. They make me afraid that I could go back to that, being like them. And there is no one for us to help, because there are no young ones.“

“Tony,” Bailey says, looking at his knees.

“Tony is the youngest and he is… what, twenty-seven? He’s the only one under thirty. All the rest of the younger people at the Center are… different.”

“Emmy likes Lou,” Eric says. I look at him; I do not know what he means by that.

“If I’m normal, I will never have to go to a psychiatrist again,” Cameron says. I think of Dr. Fornum and think that not seeing her is almost enough reason to risk the treatment. “I can marry without a certificate of stability. Have children.”

“You want to get married,” Bailey says.

“Yes,” Cameron says. His voice is louder again, but only a little louder, and his face is red. “I want to get married. I want to have children. I want to live in an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood and take the ordinary public transportation and live the rest of my life as a normal person.”

“Even if you aren’t the same person?” Eric asks.

“Of course I’ll be the same person,” Cameron says. “Just normal.”

I am not sure this is possible. When I think of the ways in which I am not normal, I cannot imagine being normal and being the same person. The whole point of this is to change us, make us something else, and surely that involves the personality, the self, as well.

“I will do it by myself if no one else will,” Cameron says.

“It is your decision,” Chuy says, in his quoting voice.

“Yes.” Cameron’s voice drops. “Yes.”

“I will miss you,” Bailey says.

“You could come, too,” Cameron says.

“No. Not yet, anyway. I want to know more.”

“I am going home,” Cameron says. “I will tell them tomorrow.” He stands up, and I can see his hand in his pocket, jiggling the dice, up and down, up and down.

We do not say good-bye. We do not need to do that with each other. Cameron walks out and shuts the door quietly behind him. The others look at me and then away.

“Some people do not like who they are,” Bailey says.

“Some people are different than other people think,” Chuy says.

“Cameron was in love with a woman who did not love him,” Eric says. “She said it would never work. It was when he was in college.” I wonder how Eric knows that.

“Emmy says Lou is in love with a normal woman who is going to ruin his life,” Chuy says.

“Emmy does not know what she is talking about,” I say. “Emmy should mind her own business.”

“Does Cameron think this woman will love him if he is normal?” Bailey asks.

“She married someone else,” Eric says. “He thinks he might love someone who would love him back. I think that is why he wants the treatment.”

“I would not do it for a woman,” Bailey says. “If I do it, I need a reason for me.” I wonder what he would say if he knew Marjory. If I knew it would make Marjory love me, would I do it? It is an uncomfortable thought; I put it aside.

“I do not know what normal would feel like. Normal people do not all look happy. Maybe it feels bad to be normal, as bad as being autistic.” Chuy’s head is twisting up and around, back and down.

“I would like to try it,” Eric says. “But I would like to be able to get back to this self if it didn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I say. “Remember what Dr. Ransome said to Linda? Once the connections are formed between neurons, they stay formed unless an accident or something breaks the connection.”

“Is that what they will do, make new connections?”

“What about the old ones? Won’t there be” — Bailey waves his arms — “like when things collide? Confusion? Static? Chaos?”

“I do not know,” I say. All at once I feel swallowed by my ignorance, so vast an unknowing. Out of that vastness so many bad things might come. Then an image of a photograph taken by one of the space-based telescopes comes to mind: that vast darkness lit by stars. Beauty, too, may be in that unknown.

“I would think they would have to turn off the circuits that are working now, build new circuits, and then turn on the new ones. That way only the good connections would be working.”

“That is not what they told us,” Chuy says.

“No one would agree to having their brain destroyed to build a new one,” Eric says.

“Cameron—” Chuy says.

“He does not think that is what will happen,” Eric says. “If he knew…” He pauses, his eyes closed, and we wait. “He might do it anyway if he is unhappy enough. It is no worse than suicide. Better, if he comes back the person he wants to be.”

“What about memories?” Chuy asks. “Would they remove the memories?”

“How?” Bailey asks.

“Memories are stored in the brain. If they turn everything off, the memories will go away.”

“Maybe not. I have not read the chapters on memory yet,” I say. “I will read them; they are next.” Some parts of memory have already been discussed in the book, but I do not understand all of it yet and I do not want to talk about it. “Besides,” I say, “when you turn off a computer not all the memory is lost.”

“People are not conscious in surgery, but they do not lose all their memories,” Eric says.

“But they do not remember the surgery, and there are those drugs that interfere with memory formation,” Chuy says. “If they can interfere with memory formation, maybe they can remove old memories.”

“That is something we can look up on-line,” Eric says. “I will do that.”

“Moving connections and making new ones is like hardware,” Bailey says. “Learning to use the new connections is like software. It was hard enough to learn language the first time; I do not want to go through that again.”

“Normal kids learn it faster,” Eric says.

“It still takes years,” Bailey says. “They’re talking about six to eight weeks of rehab. Maybe that’s enough for a chimpanzee, but chimps don’t talk.”

“It is not like they never made mistakes before,” Chuy says. “They used to think all sorts of wrong things about us. This could be wrong, too.”

“More is known about brain functions,” I say. “But not everything.”

“I do not like doing something without knowing what will happen,” Bailey says.

Chuy and Eric say nothing: they agree. I agree, too. It is important to know the consequences before acting. Sometimes the consequences are not obvious.

The consequences of not acting are also not obvious. If I do not take the treatment, things will still not stay the same. Don proved that, in his attacks on my car and then on me. No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

“I am thirsty,” Eric says suddenly. He stands up. I stand up, too, and go to the kitchen. I get out a glass and fill it with water. He makes a face when he tastes the water; I remember then that he drinks bottled water. I do not have the brand he likes.

“I am thirsty, too,” Chuy says. Bailey says nothing.

“Do you want water?” I ask. “It is all I have except one bottle of fruit drink.” I hope he will not ask for the fruit drink. It is what I like for breakfast.

“I want water,” he says. Bailey puts his hand up. I fill two more glasses with water and bring them into the living room. At Tom and Lucia’s house, they ask if I want something to drink even when I don’t. It makes more sense to wait until people say they want something, but probably normal people ask first.

It feels very strange to have people here in my apartment. The space seems smaller. The air seems thicker. The colors change a little because of the colors they are wearing and the colors they are. They take up space and breathe.

I wonder suddenly how it would be if Marjory and I lived together — how it would be to have her taking up space here in the living room, in the bathroom, in the bedroom. I did not like the group home I used to live in, when I first left home. The bathroom smelled of other people, even though we cleaned it every day. Five different toothpastes. Five different preferences in shampoo and soap and deodorant.

“Lou! Are you all right?” Bailey looks concerned.

“I was thinking about… something,” I say. I do not want to think about not liking Marjory in my apartment, that it might not be good, that it might feel crowded or noisy or smelly.

Cameron is not at work. Cameron is wherever they told him to go to start the procedure. Linda is not at work. I do not know where she is. I would rather wonder where Linda is than think about what is happening to Cameron. I know Cameron the way he is now — the way he was two diys ago. Will I know the person with Cameron’s face who comes out of this?

The more I think about it, the more it seems like those science fiction films where someone’s brain is transplanted into another person or another personality is inserted in the same brain. The same face, but not the same person. It is scary. Who would live behind my face? Would he like fencing? Would he like good music? Would he like Marjory? Would she like him?

Today they’re tellirg us more about the procedure.

“The baseline PET scans let us map your individual brain function,” the doctor says. “We’ll have tasks for you to do during the scans that identify how your brain processes information. When we compare that to the normal brain, then we’ll know how to modify yours—”

“Not all normal brains are exactly alike,” I say.

“Close enough,” he says. “The differences between yours and the average of several normal brains are what we want to modify.”

“What effect will this have on my basic intelligence?” I ask.

“Shouldn’t have any, really. That whole notion of a central IQ was pretty much exploded last century with the discovery of the modularity of processing — it’s what makes generalization so difficult — and it’s you people, autistic people, who sort of proved that it’s possible to be very intelligent in math, say, and way below the curve in expressive language.”

Shouldn’t have any is not the same thing as won’t have any. I do not really know what my intelligence is — they would not give us our own IQ scores, and I’ve never bothered to take any of the publicly available ones — but I know I am not stupid, and I do not want to be.

“If you’re concerned about your pattern-analysis skills,” he says, “that’s not the part of the brain that the treatment will affect. It’s more like giving that part of your brain access to new data — socially important data — without your having to struggle for it.”

“Like facial expressions,” I say.

“Yes, that sort of thing. Facial recognition, facial expressions, tonal nuance in language — a little tweak to the attention control area so it’s easier for you to notice them and it’s pleasurable to do so.”

“Pleasure — you’re tying this to the intrinsic endorphin releasers?”

He turns red suddenly. “If you mean are you going to get high on being around people, certainly not. But autistics do not find social interaction rewarding, and this will make it at least less threatening.” I am not good at interpreting tonal nuances, but I know he is not telling the whole truth.

If they can control the amount of pleasure we get from social interaction, then they could control the amount normal people get from it. I think of teachers in school, being able to control the pleasure students get from other students… making them all autistic to the extent that they would rather study than talk. I think of Mr. Crenshaw, with a section full of workers who ignore everything but work.

My stomach is knotted; a sour taste comes into my mouth. If I say that I see these possibilities, what will happen to me? Two months ago, I would have blurted out what I saw, what I worried about; now I am more cautious. Mr. Crenshaw and Don have given me that wisdom.

“You mustn’t get paranoid, Lou,” the doctor says. “It’s a constant temptation to anyone outside the social mainstream to think people are plotting something dire, but it’s not a healthy way to think.”

I say nothing. I am thinking about Dr. Fornum and Mr. Crenshaw and Don. These people do not like me or people like me. Sometimes people who do not like me or people like me may try to do me real harm. Would it have been paranoia if I had suspected from the first that Don slashed my tires? I do not think so. I would have correctly identified a danger. Correctly identifying danger is not paranoia.

“You must trust us, Lou, for this to work. I can give you something to calm you—”

“I am not upset,” I say. I am not upset. I am pleased with myself for thinking through what he is saying and finding the hidden meaning, but I am not upset, even though that hidden meaning is that he is manipulating me. If I know it, then it is not really manipulation. “I am trying to understand, but I am not upset.”

He relaxes. The muscles in his face release a little, especially around his eyes and in his forehead. “You know, Lou, this is a very complicated subject. You’re an intelligent man, but it’s not really your field. It takes years of study to really understand it all. Just a short lecture and maybe looking at a few sites on the ’net aren’t enough to bring you up to speed. You’ll only confuse and worry yourself if you try. Just as I wouldn’t be able to do what you do. Why not just let us do our work and you do yours:

Because it is my brain and my self that you are changing. Because you have not told the whole truth and I am not sure you have my best interest — or even my interest at all — in mind.

“Who I am is important to me,” I say.

“You mean you like being autistic?” Scorn edges his voice; he cannot imagine anyone wanting to be like me.

“I like being me,” I say. “Autism is part of who I am; it is not the whole thing.” I hope that is true, that I am more than my diagnosis.

“So — if we get rid of the autism, you’ll be the same person, only not autistic.”

He hopes this is true; he may think he thinks it is true; he does not believe absolutely that it is true. His fear that it is not true wafts from him like the sour stink of physical fear. His face crinkles into an expression that is supposed to convince me he believes it, but false sincerity is an expression I know from childhood. Every therapist, every teacher, every counselor has had that expression in their repertoire, the worried/ caring look.

What frightens me most is that they may — surely they will — tinker with memory, not just current connections. They must know as well as I do that my entire past experience is from this autistic perspective. Changing the connections will not change that, and that has made me who I am. Yet if I lose the memory of what this is like, who I am, then I will have lost everything I’ve worked on for thirty-five years. I do not want to lose that. I do not want to remember things only the way I remember what I read in books; I do not want Marjory to be like someone seen on a video screen. I want to keep the feelings that go with the memories.