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Jacob wheezes. It sounds like one, two, three, five. ‘You’re counting. You’re down for the count?’ I stare at him. This is like playing charades with someone who has no arms and no legs.
Once Theo asked me if there was an antidote for Asperger’s, would I take it? I told him no. I am not sure how much of me is wrapped up in the part that’s Asperger’s. What if I lost some of my intelligence, for example, or my sarcasm? What if I could be afraid of ghosts on Halloween instead of the color of the pumpkins? The problem is that I do not remember who I was without Asperger’s, so who knows what would remain?
When you have to try so hard to be normal, that means you’re not.
She’s crying, but there’s a smile on her face. For God’s sake, is it any wonder I can’t ever understand what you people are feeling?
He doesn’t look like the kid I interviewed a week ago. No wonder his mother wants my head.
his math notebook, lying open, is a disaster – loose-leaf pages haphazardly stuffed, papers falling out, handwriting so messy it looks like modern art.
Even school is off-limits now, so my mother has found textbooks and is home-schooling both Theo and me. It’s sort of nice, actually, not having to stress out about the next time I will be accosted by another student and will have to interact; or if a teacher will say something I don’t understand; or if I’ll need to use my COP pass and look like a total loser in front of my peers. I wonder why we never thought of this before: learning without socialization. It’s every Aspie’s dream.
A joke: A guy is flying in a hot-air balloon and he’s lost. He lowers himself over a cornfield and calls out to a woman. ‘Can you tell me where I am and where I’m headed?’ ‘Sure,’ this woman says. ‘You are at 41 degrees, 2 minutes, and 14 seconds north, 144 degrees, 4 minutes, 19 seconds east; you’re at an altitude of 762 meters above sea level, and right now you’re hovering, but you were on a vector of 234 degrees at 12 meters per second.’ ‘Amazing! Thanks! By the way, do you have Asperger’s syndrome?’ ‘I do!’ the woman replies. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Because everything you said is true, it’s
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As an afterthought I add, ‘The jury is supposed to be twelve peers, but technically that would mean every single person on the jury should have Asperger’s syndrome, because then they’d really understand me.’
‘Jacob, what would you do if a witness told a lie on the stand?’ I feel my fingers start to flutter, so I clamp my other hand down on top of them. ‘How would I know?’ I say. ‘Only the liar knows that he’s lying.’
I remember an art history course I took in college: in Michelangelo’s Pietà, Raphael’s Madonna and Child, da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks, Mary was never seen smiling. Was it because she knew what was coming down the pike?
After interviewing staff for several hours, and hearing how Jacob used to sit by himself during lunch and how he’d move from class to class wearing bulky headphones to block out the noise (and the rude comments of classmates), there is a part of me wondering how Jacob managed to wait eighteen years to commit murder.
She is quiet for a moment. ‘For what it’s worth, Emma,’ Tanya says, ‘you’re the last person in the world who deserves this. You’ve already got your cross to bear.’ ‘Jacob,’ I say, ‘is not a cross to bear. He’s my son.’ My hand is shaking where it holds the phone. ‘Go edit your own fucking Sunday section,’ I tell her, and I hang up.
I admit that I’ve taken our legal system for granted. I assumed that the innocent prevail, that the guilty get their due. But as it turns out, it isn’t as simple as saying you’re not guilty if you’re not guilty. As Oliver Bond has pointed out, the jury has to be convinced. And connecting with strangers is Jacob’s weakest link.
He may be freaking brilliant, but sometimes whatever’s cooking in his brain doesn’t quite translate onto the page. I guess it’s a little like being the world’s fastest bullet train but your wheels don’t fit the rails.
I remember how once, when my mother was getting on Jacob’s back because he refused to make small talk at a distant cousin’s wedding, he said that he would have asked Aunt Marie how she was doing if he really truly cared . . . but he didn’t, so pretending he did would be a big lie. There are times when Jacob’s world makes a lot more sense to me than the one the rest of us live in. Why do we ask people how they’re doing when we don’t give a crap about the answer? Is Mr Jennison asking me that question because he’s worried about me, or because it’s something to say to fill up the air between us?
All those little autistic kids you see smacking their heads against walls? They’re not doing it because they’re mental. They’re doing it because the rest of the world is so loud it actually hurts, and they’re trying to make it all go away.
Nobody ever asks Superman if X-ray vision is a drag; if it gets old looking into brick buildings and seeing guys beat their wives or lonely women getting wasted or losers surfing porn sites. Nobody ever asks Spider-Man if he gets vertigo. If their superpowers are anything like mine, it’s no wonder they’re always putting themselves in harm’s way. They’re probably hoping for a quick death.
‘That’s just plain wrong,’ I mutter. ‘It is?’ ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘How come he gets to drink Coke on White Food Day?’ It takes a moment, and then, for the very first time, I hear the music of Emma Hunt’s laugh.
And before I know it, I am laughing so hard I cannot catch my breath. Because when you get right down to it, it’s funny when I ask my son, How did you sleep? And he answers: On my stomach. It’s funny when I tell Jacob I’ll be there in a minute and he starts counting down from sixty. It’s funny that Jacob used to grab my collar every time I came home, his interpretation of ‘catch you later.’ It’s funny when he begs for a forensics textbook on Amazon.com and I ask him to give me a ballpark figure and he says, Second base. And it’s funny when I move heaven and earth to give Jacob white food on
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And I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s guilt that gets me to take care of Jacob in the future, or love, because I’ll do it. It just would have been nice to be asked, you know?
In the meantime, Emma danced around us in circles, as if she was trying to find the best spot to sink her knife into me.
‘Can you tell me what it means to waive your rights?’ I hold my breath as Jacob hesitates. And then slowly, beautifully, the right fist he’s been banging against the wooden railing unfurls and is raised over his head, moving back and forth like a metronome.
I don’t want my son to be the poster child for anything. I just want my life to go back to the way it used to be.
He hesitates at the door, a small, sad smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. ‘It’s a neurotypical world, Ms Hunt. We’re just taking up space in it.’
The term stir-crazy comes from the early 1900s. Stir was slang for prison, based on the Gypsy word stariben. Stir-crazy was actually a play on an older expression, stir-bugs, which described a prisoner who became mentally unstable due to being locked up too long.
At any rate, whether I have simply been cooped up too long or whether I am suffering acute mental distress from my soon-to-be missed opportunity with Dr Lee, I do the only thing that seems justifiable at the time. I call 911 and tell them I am being abused by my mother.
We are both quiet for a second, and then Jacob glances at me from the corner of his eye. ‘I don’t understand your voice.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It should be angry because I made you come all the way out here. But it’s not angry. And it wasn’t angry when I talked to you at the police station, either. You treated me like I was just a friend of yours, but then you arrested me at the end, and people don’t arrest their friends.’ He clasps his hands between his knees. ‘Frankly, people don’t make sense to me.’ I nod in agreement. ‘Frankly, people don’t make sense to me, either,’ I say.
‘I shouldn’t have called the cops. Asperger’s impulsiveness.’ My mother’s face freezes, and so does the detective’s. Only after I’ve said it do I realize that they’re probably assuming Jess’s death was Asperger’s impulsiveness, too. Or in other words, talking about my Asperger’s impulsiveness was a bit too impulsive.
At home, we don’t talk about my father. In world studies class we learned about indigenous cultures who no longer speak the names of the dead – well, we no longer say the name of the person who quit when the going got tough.
One of the reasons I like having Asperger’s is that I don’t have an active imagination. To many – teachers and guidance counselors and shrinks included – this is a great detriment. To me, it’s a blessing. Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.
Friends. I loved him; I created children with him, and this is what we have been demoted to.
‘Your family,’ I say. ‘They’re perfect.’ But what I’m really saying is, Why didn’t I deserve this with you?
I realize why my father seems familiar. It’s not because we have anything in common, much less share a genetic code. It’s because, with his obvious discomfort and the way he won’t look at me now and the fact that he doesn’t want physical contact, he reminds me so much of my brother.
‘Do you understand that what you did, Jacob, was wrong in the eyes of the law?’ ‘The law doesn’t have eyes,’ I tell her. ‘It has courts and judges and witnesses and juries, but no eyes.’ I wonder where Oliver dug this one up. I mean, honestly
I stand up and start walking, bouncing up and down on my toes because sometimes it helps me jog the rest of my brain and body into sync.
‘Do you think Jess was scared that day?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘How do you think you would have felt, if you were the victim?’ For a moment, I consider this. ‘Dead,’ I say.
‘What does the way I look have to do with you telling the jury the truth?’ ‘Because they still see you,’ I answer. ‘So you need to make a good first impression.’ He turns away. ‘They’re not going to like me anyway. Nobody ever does.’ He doesn’t say this in a way that suggests he feels sorry for himself. More like he’s just telling me a fact, relating the way the world works.
‘I’ll find him a collared shirt,’ she promises. ‘But you’ll have to get it on him.’
It isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled my brother into a coat and tie. ‘Jesus, Jacob, cut it out before you give me a black eye,’ I mutter, holding his hands pinned over his head and straddling his body, which twists like a fish that’s suddenly found itself on a dock. My mother is working her hardest to make a knot in his tie, but Jacob’s thrashing so much that it’s practically a noose. ‘Do you really need to button it?’ I yell, but I doubt she can hear me. Jacob’s got us beat in sheer decibels. I bet the neighbors can hear him, and I wonder what they think. Probably that we’re sticking pins in
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All I know is that before I told Alan I had AS he was willing to make excuses along with me, and afterward, he just wanted me gone. This is the story of my life.
Oliver looks away from me. ‘I’m nervous,’ he admits. This doesn’t seem like a great thing to hear from one’s attorney before going into a trial, but I like the fact that he’s not lying to me.
Every day we had to end with a circle time, where we each gave a compliment to the person next to us. Robbie always said the same thing, no matter whom he was placed beside: I like terrapins. (He did, too. He knew more about them than anyone I’ve ever met since and probably ever will, and if not for him I’d still be confusing them with box turtles.)
I have a brief flash of myself sitting on Jacob’s chest so that I can button his shirt, of him sprinting down the divided highway. ‘Never better, Your Honor,’ I say.
I turned around so fast that I forgot about the skis and fell down in a heap again. ‘I’m not retarded,’ I shouted, but that statement is somewhat less resonant when one cannot even untangle one’s own legs.
He was faster than Jacob, big surprise, and he tackled my brother to the ground. He lifted his hand to deck Jacob, but by then I was on his back, yanking him off and straddling his body as the Frisbee went spinning into the street. ‘You don’t fucking touch him,’ I yelled into Tyler’s face. ‘If anyone’s going to beat up my brother, it’s going to be me.’
He kicked at the dirt. ‘I wish I could be the big brother.’ Technically, he was, but he wasn’t talking about age. He just didn’t know how to say what he meant.
am sure that the jury isn’t absorbing anything that Marcy Allston, the CSI, is saying. She’s so drop-dead gorgeous that I can practically imagine the dead bodies she stumbles across sitting up and panting.
I find Oliver staring at me. ‘Do you miss Jess?’ ‘Yes. She was my friend.’ ‘Then why don’t you show it?’ ‘Why should I?’ I ask, sitting up. ‘If I know I feel it, that’s what counts. Don’t you ever look at someone who’s hysterical in public and wonder if it’s because they really feel miserable or because they want others to know they’re miserable? It kind of dilutes the emotion if you display it for the whole world to see. Makes it less pure.’
I walk into my own bedroom, and all of a sudden I’m grabbed and pulled against the wall, and there’s a knife at my throat. Okay, I’m just going to say it’s pretty depressing that this is not the first time I’ve found myself in this scenario with my brother. I do what I know works: I bite his wrist.
