Marcelo in the Real World (6 page)

I turn around briefly. Jasmine has finished collecting the stacks of paper and is now putting them inside plastic binders. She’s doing this at the big wooden desk that’s behind me. That must be her desk. I turn around again. There is more stuff written on the wall, but I decide not to read it. I wonder if the last person who sat at this desk was also forced to work at the law firm.

“Your father said you had your own laptop.” It’s Jasmine speaking behind me. I try to turn around but when I do, I slide halfway across the room.

“Oh,” I say.

Jasmine walks out of the mailroom without saying a word. I sit there not knowing what to do next. In a few minutes she returns with a giant plastic square that she drops in front of my desk. So that’s the rubber mat she was talking about.

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes what?” she asks.

“Yes. My father informed you correctly. I have my own laptop. Would you like to see it?”

“Not necessarily. There’s a connection under your desk you can hook up with. I’ll tie you in to the office server when we get back from the mail run.”

“Thank you.” A sense of relief comes over me. With my laptop, I will feel less lost. If I don’t understand something someone says, I can look it up. I bend down to take the laptop out of my backpack. I place it on the desk and open it. I think that perhaps now will be a good time to show Jasmine all the special software that I have.

“I’m not happy about you being here.”

It takes me a few seconds to realize that Jasmine is talking to me. I turn in her direction. “I understand,” I say. I’m wondering where I should put my hands. Whenever I say something I don’t mean, I become conscious of my hands.

“You understand?”

I want to explain that I understood
what
she said not
why
she had said it, but it takes me too long to figure out how to say this.

“Let’s do the mail run.” I follow her to a corner of the room. “This is the mail cart. You can read, right?”

I wonder why she asks me that. Perhaps it’s a joke of sorts that I don’t understand.

“Yes,” I answer.

“When the mail comes in, you put it in the folder with the person’s name. The folders are arranged in geographical order. They follow the way the offices are laid out, so when you go around the office you just move from one folder to the next.”

I think to myself that that’s an excellent idea.

She continues, “There’ll be some mail that is not addressed to anyone specifically and you’ll have to figure out where it goes. Lots of it is junk mail. If you can’t figure out where it goes, put it in this box. I’ll look at it later. Nothing gets thrown away without me looking at it first, do you understand?”

This time I really do understand. “Yes,” I say confidently.

“This morning I sorted out the mail already. We do four scheduled runs: One first thing in the morning, which we are about to do now, then at eleven-thirty, one-thirty, and at three. Of course, if something comes in by hand delivery or by overnight mail, we deliver it right away. You’ll also deliver the newspapers. What time are you planning to get here in the morning?”

I do some quick calculations in my head. It took Arturo and me twenty minutes to walk from South Station to the law firm,
but we went three blocks out of the way so that Arturo could show me where the chapel was. The train arrived at eight-twenty and then if I go to the chapel…

“Never mind,” Jasmine says. “You’ll do it whenever. They can wait for their newspapers. You
are
coming to work every day, right?”

“Every day,” I say. I wonder if that includes Saturday and Sunday. Arturo comes to work on those days frequently. Perhaps he expects me to do the same.

“Let’s go then.” She pushes the cart full of green folders. When we are out of the mailroom, she hands me a piece of paper. “This is a layout of the office with all the attorneys’ and secretaries’ names and where they sit. You need to memorize that so you won’t waste time looking for people. Like I said, besides the scheduled mail runs, you’ll need to deliver hand deliveries and overnight mail as soon as they arrive. All mail, deliveries, packages, etcetera come to the mailroom first. We log them in and then deliver them.” She waits for me to catch up to her and looks at me. “I guess you can log the stuff in if I’m not around. Everything these people do is urgent and everything needs to be done yesterday.”

“Yesterday already happened.”

“Tell that to the lawyers who work here.”

We stop at the first office. A woman is sitting at a desk in front of the office. “Hello, Marcelo,” the woman says. “Remember me? From the summer barbecue at your house?”

I remember her face but I don’t remember her name. Does that mean that I answer yes or no to her question? I decide to say yes since it is at least partially correct. I stretch out my
hand. “Nice to meet you,” I tell her. As soon as I say it, I know that’s not the thing to say to someone whom you’ve just told you remember.

“Nice to meet you…again,” says the woman. “Wow, you’re even more handsome than your father.” She looks me up and down just like Jasmine did, but unlike Jasmine, her inspection of me is slower and lingers on the middle part of my body. “My goodness! First Mr. Holmes brings Wendell and now this. How’s a girl supposed to concentrate with all the young fellows walking around?”

“Stay away from him,” Jasmine says.

“Let’s not be selfish,” the woman responds. Jasmine starts to push the cart away from the woman.

“Oh, you’re just jealous ‘cause you’re undersized,” the woman says.

Jasmine stops the cart and looks at her. “For your information I’m not jealous, but I am envious. I’m envious that if we’re both in a plane flying over the ocean and the plane goes down, I won’t have the same natural flotation advantages that you have.”

“Oh, you rat!” The woman laughs and pretends to take a swipe at Jasmine.

We move on. Flotation devices. I know the meaning of these words, but the context in which they are being used is baffling. I take the notebook out of my pocket while we’re walking and write down:
What is the difference between jealous and envious?
The distinction between those two inner states is something that has always confused me.

Once I finish writing, Jasmine says, “I’d stay away from the secretaries if I were you.”

“How can I deliver the mail to them if I stay away from them?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t let them get too friendly with you, especially the ones that are single and desperate, like Martha back there.”

“Why?”

“Martha for one would not hesitate to jump your bones.”

I think of the passage in the Bible where the prophet Ezekiel jumps up and down on a pile of skulls and bones. The rapidity with which I am encountering new concepts is making me dizzy.

“What’s wrong with you anyway?”

“You need to speak clearly. I don’t know what the phrase ‘jump your bones’ means. It would be very helpful if you were more literal.”

“Literal?”

“If you used words in accordance with their primary literal meaning, not their metaphorical meaning.”

“I
was
being literal. Martha would literally bounce on your bones if she could.”

“Oh.”

“I meant what’s wrong with you, with the way you think. Your father said you had some kind of cognitive disorder.”

“He said that.” It surprises me to hear Arturo refer to me that way. He has always insisted that there’s nothing wrong with me. The term “cognitive disorder” implies that there is something wrong with the way I think or with the way I perceive reality. I perceive reality just fine. Sometimes I perceive more of reality than others.

“I’m pretty sure those are the words he used.”

“‘Cognitive disorder’ is not an accurate description of what happens inside Marcelo’s head. ‘Excessive attempt at cognitive order’ is closer to what actually takes place.”

“Yeah? I like excessive order myself. Is that an illness?”

“If it keeps you from functioning in society the way people think a normal person should, then our society calls that an illness.”

“Well, society is not always right, is it?”

I don’t answer her because I am still thinking about my father’s description of my condition. He has taught me to always question the labels that others want to stick on me. I hesitate for a few seconds, and then I speak. “From a medical perspective, the closest description of my condition is Asperger’s syndrome. But I don’t have many of the characteristics that other people with Asperger’s syndrome have, so that term is not exactly accurate.”

“Like what? What characteristics?”

This is a topic of conversation that I am knowledgeable about but not particularly fond of. Explanations about my condition are based on the assumption that there is something wrong with the way I am, and at Paterson I have learned through the years that it is not helpful to view myself or the other kids there that way. I view myself as different in the way I think, talk, and act, but not as someone who is abnormal or ill. But how do I explain the differences to people? It is easier to say that AS best describes my differences. It makes people more comfortable to have a scientific-sounding term. But actually, I feel dishonest when I say I have AS because the negative effects of my differences on my life are so slight compared to other kids who have AS or other forms of autism and truly suffer. I always feel like I’m doing the people
who have these conditions a disservice when I use the medical term, because then people say, “Oh, that doesn’t seem so bad. What’s all the fuss about?”

Reluctantly, I attempt to answer Jasmine’s question. “The primary characteristics of AS, which is what Asperger’s syndrome is called for short, occur in the areas of communication and social interaction, and there is usually some kind of pervasive interest. The AS person is different than most people in these areas.”

“Really?”

I take my hands out of my pockets and button the top button of my shirt again. We are standing in the middle of the hall and people are passing us by as they arrive in the office. A few say good morning to Jasmine, but Jasmine is too absorbed in what I am saying to respond to them. “Yes, generally speaking,” I say to her.

“That pretty much sums up every guy I’ve ever dated.”

“Yes.” I take this to be an attempt at humor on Jasmine’s part so I try to laugh, but the laugh comes out more like a cough.

“And what is your particular pervasive interest?”

I put my hands back in my pockets and close my fists. This is the part that is always tricky. I have seen something like a glass wall descend between me and other people as soon as I talk about this. Therefore, I hesitate and ponder how open I should be with Jasmine. After a while I say, “Some people use the word ‘obsessive’ rather than ‘pervasive.’ But obsessive interest is not the right term. It implies some kind of compulsion or inability to stop the same thoughts and behavior from recurring. At Paterson—that’s the school I attend—we prefer to use the term ‘special or pervasive interest.’ It’s an interest that the person chooses to think
about because he gets pleasure and even joy from doing it. It absorbs the attention of the AS person to the exclusion of other interests because it is more important and more fun than other interests. AS persons with special interests become experts in that field.”

“Like train schedules or adding up numbers real fast in your head.”

“Those particular examples come to mind for a lot of people. But memorizing train schedules and a facility with numbers are somewhat of a caricature. A lot of AS people have special interests that require complex thinking and understanding.”

“So what’s yours?”

I wish I had a glass of water. There is no saliva whatsoever in my mouth. I cough again. “My special interest is God.”

“Excuse me?”

“Religion. What humankind has experienced and said and thought about God. I like to read and think about that.”

“Is that right?”

“I don’t know if it is right or not. It just is.”

She starts to push the cart again but this time very slowly. I think,
Now she thinks I’m weird. I don’t want to be here anyway. At Paterson no one regards me with suspicion or stays away from me because I have an interest in religion. I have to remember never to talk about anything religious while I’m here. It scares people.
Then it occurs to me to say, “That is my special interest. But I also enjoy listening to music. I have hundreds of CDs at home.” For some reason this has never been considered abnormal.

She stops the cart and asks, “What kind of music?”

“It is called classical music. Bach is my favorite. My favorite
instrument is the piano. The violin is second. Solo pieces by piano or violin are what I enjoy the most. The reason for that is that in solo pieces I can hear the different notes and the different combinations of notes separately. I like that very much.”

“Really?” Her lips are partly opened, like she’s never heard anyone speak like that before. I think I might have overdone it in the description of my second interest.

“Yes.”

It makes me happy to finally see her smile.

“I also like horses, particularly Haflinger ponies.”

“Really?” She widens her eyes, which means that she is surprised.

“Yes. Really. My job at Paterson this summer was going to be to take care of the fifteen ponies the school owns.” I realize that by telling Jasmine about the ponies right after I told her about religion and classical music, I am saying that the ponies are also a special interest, although I myself have never put them in this category. A special interest is something that absorbs your brain with a curiosity to know all there is to know. I never felt this way about the IM or the ponies. The IM is the IM and the ponies are the ponies. They just are. I like spending as much time as I can with them, but I do not care to know all there is to know about them.

We start walking again. After we drop off the next bundle of letters, she says, “Do you want to know why I’m not happy that you’re here?”

“Yes.”

“Until three months ago I had an assistant. His name was Ron. To make a long story short, I had to fire Ron. But lazy as Ron was,
he was still a help to me, and when we fired him, your father promised that I would be able to replace him. I found this girl Belinda who worked here one summer when she was in high school and I was delighted because she was great. Am I going too fast for you?”