The Meridians (10 page)

The crying happened day and night, for no apparent reason. One moment he would be watching Sesame Street or Teletubbies happily, the next he would be screaming. One moment he would be eating his dinner quietly, shoving mashed potatoes into his mouth - and hair and nose and belly button as though he was determined to become the first human to perfect the process of osmosis - and the next he would be curled up on his high chair, crying so hard that it was only the small seatbelt that kept him from falling to the tile floor of the kitchen. One moment he would be holding his mother, the next he would be shrieking and gnashing at her like a rabid dog.

The crying continued, and one day Lynette discovered that, rather than holding Kevin tightly to her, if she dangled him on her knee as far away from her as possible, he would quiet. He didn't want to be put completely down, but nor did he want to be cuddled. It was as though he hungered for human companionship, but could not stand the feel of another person's skin on his own.

Then, right about the time that they came up with this new way of caring for their unique (not strange, never strange or Lynette would draw and quarter him for saying such a thing) son, he began doing something more subtle but much more troubling than merely crying.

Robbie was the one who noticed it first. He was the designated peek-a-booer in the family. Lynette would do in a pinch, but she just didn't have the
je ne sais quois
to be more than a merely competent peek-a-boo partner. Robbie, however, was ready to turn in his amateur card and go on the professional circuit. He was a master of silly faces and sounds, of making his eyes blink in just the right way, of sticking out his tongue at just the right moment so that Kevin would collapse in laughter. Over and over they could play, with Robbie invariably being the one to tire of the exercise first.

But after a while he started noticing that Kevin's peek-a-boo game was off. Not that he wouldn't play; he was as game as ever to play. But when they
did
play, Kevin gradually changed his
manner
of playing. He would pull Robbie's hands apart like a pair of barn doors as he always had, but instead of looking at Robbie's newest funny face and laughing, he would look
beyond
Robbie. He would look
through
Robbie, as though he were examining Robbie's soul...and more than that, as though he were finding it wanting somehow. Nor would he laugh. Just open the hands, look through his father, then shove the hands back. What had been a joy for both of them became something more like a rote exercise.

When Robbie brought it up to Lynette, she immediately worried. The threat of mental handicap that Doctor Cody had mentioned over a year previously hung over every day of their lives, casting a light shadow that lent a dimness to even the brightest moments. But when they took Kevin to the pediatrician, a genial older man named Doctor Abernathy, the man had not been able to find much at all to be worried about.

Still, it troubled Robbie greatly, that his son no longer looked him in the eye. No longer looked at much of anything.

And then there were the cars.

For his first birthday, Robbie had given Kevin a package of ten wooden toy cars. Kevin had played with them relentlessly for a few days, then they somehow made their way to the corner of his room and were forgotten for more interesting toys. Until one day when Kevin was fourteen months old, and Robbie came home from work to the sound of wretched crying.

And it wasn't Kevin. It was Lynette. Robbie hurried to the back of the apartment, and found Lynette sitting next to Kevin, who was playing - rather nicely, Robbie thought - with the cars. Robbie actually smiled when he saw his son playing that way, and felt slightly irritated with Lynette for just sitting next to their son and crying her eyes out. Both of them had decided very early on that they would try not to yell or cry in front of Kevin, would instead try to shower him with happiness and positive feelings only.

"What's going on, Lynny?" he asked, and even as he did so his irritation tempered into concern and shame. Concern for Lynette, who was clearly devastated about something, and shame at his own first reaction. Why would I be angry when someone I love is crying? he thought. Why would I want to reprimand instead of comfort?

"It's Kevin," said Lynette between tears.

"What about him?"

"He's playing with the cars."

"So?" Robbie looked again at his son. He still didn't see anything amiss. "That's what we bought them for."

"But look at
how
he's playing with them," said Lynette.

And Robbie did. He
really
looked. And realized that his wife was definitely right that there was something wrong about the way Kevin was playing with the cars. There was no
vroom-vrooming
, no crashing and bashing of the cars together.

Instead, he was simply lining the cars up. Over and over he would line them up, then move them apart, then realign them again.

"It's a little weird," admitted Robbie, but he still didn't understand why Lynette would be crying the way she was just because the kid wasn't having a demolition derby with the vehicles. "But why are you crying, sweetie?"

"It's not a
little
weird. It's a
lot
weird. Watch what he's doing."

Robbie did. He watched even harder, and eventually he saw what Lynette was alluding to. He cocked his head as he watched, unsure for a few moments if he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.

Yes. He was.

He tested what he thought he was seeing, and took a few of the cars out of line, then mixed all the cars up in a jumble.

Kevin lined them up again.

Robbie repeated the exercise.

Kevin lined the cars up
again
.

And this time, Robbie gasped. The cars were all different shapes and sizes, most of them about the size of his fist, with wheels of different colors. There was a purple pickup truck, a red tow truck, a yellow sports car, and so on and so on. Not one of them was the same. But each time he mixed up the cars, Kevin would line them up according to length and height, smallest to largest.

Moving slowly now, Robbie took one of the cars away, and this time instead of merely moving it away from the group, he put it in his pocket.

Kevin's reaction was instantaneous. He began screaming and banging his hand against his head, hitting himself so hard that Robbie could see the vague tattoo outline of the boy's handprint against his skin.

He's not saying anything, thought Robbie. Just screaming.

And not looking at me.

Robbie took the car back out of his pocket and gave it back to Kevin, who immediately quieted and began putting the cars in line, then moving them apart, then putting them back in line again. They watched him do it until late in the night, and Kevin never stopped. Not even when his diaper was so full that it made an audible squishing sound against the carpet, not even when it was well past dinnertime, not even when it was way beyond his normal bedtime. He just kept moving the cars together, then apart, then together, then apart.

And made not a single sound the entire time.

The next day, Robbie took off work and took Kevin to Doctor Abernathy, who this time agreed that something might be amiss and gave them a referral to a neurologist. The neurologist listened patiently while Robbie explained what had been happening, with Lynette sitting beside him and Kevin in a corner, still playing with the cars.

The neurologist, a diminutive woman in her fifties named Doctor Chen, nodded, then came back with a box. She dumped the box out in front of Kevin, burying his cars in a pile of Megablocks, the large version of Legos that were built with toddlers in mind - though not for children of Kevin's young age.

Kevin looked like he might be considering screaming, then took hold of one of the blocks. He held it in his hand as though weighing it, then put it together with one of the other blocks. Then put together another, and another. Soon he had a tower almost as tall as himself, twelve inches to a side and straight up in a perfect pillar, like a rainbow obelisk.

Doctor Chen picked up the tower, and Kevin immediately moved back to playing with his cars as though the blocks had never existed. The doctor brought the tower to her desk, then looked at Robbie and Lynette for a long time.

Finally, she said, "Do you want the hard version or the soft version?"

"Just tell us," whispered Lynette.

"I'll have to run tests, but I suspect that your son is autistic."

Robbie had been worried about this very thing, but he felt rage growing within him like a scythe-bearing beast, ready to cut down everything in its path. He half-rose from his seat. "How can you say that?" he asked in a harsh voice. "How can you say that after listening to us for less than ten minutes and then just having him build with your stupid blocks?"

Doctor Chen waited patiently, looking at him with kind eyes, and slowly Robbie sat back down. "I'm sorry," she said then, "but I've been doing much more than simply listening to you. I've been watching your son, and he is displaying classic symptoms of the disorder: marked impairment in the ability to make eye contact, which I tested when I went over and gave him the blocks. He also shows a marked and abnormal preoccupation with repetitive tasks, based on your telling of what he's been doing with his toys and what I observed of him with his cars. Then there's this," she said, and touched the tower.

"What about it?" asked Robbie, still trying to calm the anger that continuously wanted to boil up within him. "It looks like he did a damn fine job."

"He did," agreed Doctor Chen. "Too good a job, in fact. Note the fact that he has done three things with this tower that are completely beyond the abilities of most normally functioning children his age."

"What?" asked Lynette in a quiet voice. "I didn't see anything." But Robbie got the impression she
had
seen something, and that it had scared her tremendously.

Doctor Chen spoke softly, but firmly. "First of all, I would like to point out the tremendous amount of focus that your child put into this task. There was no break, there was no wandering gaze. As soon as he had assessed what the blocks were for - in itself unusual for someone of his age - he put them together, without any kind of cajoling or need for someone to make him do it."

"So he's smart," said Robbie. "Shouldn't that be a good thing?"

"Mr. Randall," said the neurologist kindly. "No one is saying that Kevin is dumb. Indeed, he may be the smartest person in this room in certain respects. But that doesn't change the fact that he is not acting as a normally developing child does."

"You mentioned two other things," interjected Lynette. "What are they?"

"Well, color and symmetry, to put it simply," said the doctor. She pointed at the tower. "A perfect pillar, four blocks to a side, completely symmetrical. This is not only beyond most children Kevin's age, it wouldn't occur to them to try to do it even if they were capable of trying such a thing. Similarly, note that he has grouped all the colors in the tower together with other like colors. There is no helter-skelter mixing of hue, there is simply red with red, blue with blue, yellow beside yellow, and so on. Similar to the way he organizes his toy cars, he is organizing these blocks."

"Why does that mean autism?" asked Robbie, though he could feel his mental defenses and sense of denial against the diagnosis fading, along with his anger.

Doctor Chen steepled her fingers and leaned back in her chair. "Please understand that no one knows everything - or even terribly much - about autism. There are many theories why autistic children act the way they do. One of them is that they are born without certain filters."

"Filters?" said someone, and Robbie was in such a state of shock that he could not even tell if he had spoken or if it had been Lynette who had said the word.

"We are constantly bombarded by sensory information every moment of every day. Sights, smells, tastes, touches, sounds, they all combine to create a world that is terribly overwhelming."

"I've never noticed that," said Robbie instantly.

Dr. Chen smiled as though he had just fed her a soft pitch on a baseball diamond. "No. You wouldn't. Because you and I and your wife have filters that enable us to discard what is useless and take in only those things that matter most to us. But many people - myself included - believe that autism is a reaction to a lack of this filtering system. Imagine what it would be like if you had no way of throwing out extraneous matters - everything from the noise of the air conditioning in your house to the sound of the innocuous Muzak in an elevator - and were instead inundated with anything and everything. How would you react?"

"I'd want to crawl into a hole," said Robbie.

"Exactly. You would seek to find ways to limit your sensory inputs. For example, you might avoid eye contact, since eyes communicate incredible amounts of information. Or," she added, tapping the tower, "you might take a jumble of colored blocks and reduce it to one large block, with the colors grouped in the smallest sets possible."