The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

  “I’m not a fucking chimp!” Dale slams his hand down on the table. For a moment his left eye stays open; then it starts ticcing again.

  The doctor looks shocked. Why should he be surprised that Dale is upset? Would he like to have his behavior presumed on the basis of a primatologist’s studies of chimpanzees? Or is this something normals do? Do they see themselves as just like other primates? I can’t believe that.

  “No one’s suggesting you are,” the doctor says, in a slightly disapproving voice. “It’s just that… they’re the best model we have. And they had recognizable personalities after treatment, with only the social deficits changed…”

  All the chimps in the world now live in protected environments, zoos, or research establishments. Once they lived wild, in the forests of Africa. I wonder if the autistic-like chimpanzees would have been that way in the wild or if the stress of living as prisoners has changed them.

  A slide lights up the screen. “This is the normal brain’s activity pattern when picking a known face from a photograph of several faces,” he says. There is a gray outline of a brain, with little glowing green spots. Thanks to my reading, I recognize some of the locations… no, I recognize the slide. It is illustration l6-43.d, from chapter 16 of Brain Functionality. “And here—” The slide changes. “This is the autistic brain’s activity pattern during the same task.” Another gray outline with little glowing green spots. Illustration 16-43.C from the same chapter.

  I try to remember the captions in the book. I do not think that the text said the first was normal brain activity when picking a known face from a photographed group. I think it was normal brain activity when viewing a familiar face. A composite of… yes, I remember. Nine healthy male volunteers recruited from college students according to a protocol approved by the human ethics research committee…

  Another slide is already showing. Another gray outline, another set of colored splotches, these blue. The doctor’s voice drones on. This is another slide I recognize. I struggle to remember what the book said and hear what he is saying, but I cannot. The words are tangling.

  I raise my hand. He stops and says, “Yes, Lou?”

  “Can we have a copy of this, to look at later? It is hard to take in all at once.”

  He frowns. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Lou. This is still proprietary—very confidential. If you want to know more, you can ask me or your counselor questions and you can look at the slides again, though”—he chuckles—“I don’t think they’ll mean much since you’re not a neurologist.”

  “I’ve read some,” I say.

  “Really…” His voice softens to a drawl. “What have you read, Lou?”

  “Some books,” I say. Suddenly I do not want to tell him what book I have been reading, and I do not know why.

  “About the brain?” he asks.

  “Yes—I wanted to understand how it worked before you did anything with the treatment.”

  “And… did you understand it?”

  “It’s very complicated,” I say. “Like a parallel-processing computer, only more so.”

  “You’re right; it’s very complicated,” he says. He sounds satisfied. I think he is glad I did not say I understood it. I wonder what he would say if I told him that I recognize those illustrations.

  Cameron and Dale are looking at me. Even Bailey gives me a quick glance and looks away. They want to know what I know. I do not know if I should tell them, partly because I do not yet know what I know— what it means in this context.

  I put aside thoughts of the book and just listen, meanwhile memorizing the slides as they come and go. I do not take in information as well this way—none of us do—but I think I can retain enough to compare it to the book later.

  Eventually the slides change from gray outlines of brains with colored spots to molecules. I do not recognize them; they are not anything in the organic chemistry book. But I do recognize a hydroxy group here, an amino group there.

  “This enzyme regulates gene expression of neural growth factor eleven,” the doctor says. “In normal brains, this is part of a feedback loop that interacts with attention control mechanisms to build in preferential processing of socially important signals—that’s one of the things you people have a problem with.”

  He has given up any pretense that we are anything but cases.

  “It’s also part of the treatment package for autistic newborns, those who weren’t identified and treated in utero, or for the children who suffer certain childhood infections that interfere with normal brain development. What our new treatment does is modify it—because it functions like this only in the first three years of development—so that it can affect the neural growth of the adult brain.“

  “So—it makes us pay attention to other people?” Linda asks.

  “No, no—we know you already do that. We’re not like those idiots back in the mid-twentieth century who thought autistics were just ignoring people. What it does is help you attend to social signals—facial expression, vocal tone, gesture, that kind of thing.”

  Dale makes a rude gesture; the doctor does not attend to it. I wonder if he really did not see or he chose to ignore it.

  “But don’t people have to be trained—like blind people were—to interpret new data?”

  “Of course. That’s why there’s a training phase built into the treatment. Simulated social encounters, using computer-generated faces—” Another slide, this one of a chimpanzee with its upper lip curled and its lower lip pouted out. We all break into roars of laughter, uncontrollable. The doctor flushes angrily. “Sorry—that’s the wrong slide. Of course it’s the wrong slide. Human faces, I mean, and practice in human social interactions. We’ll do a baseline assessment and then you’ll have two to four months of post-treatment training—”

  “Looking at monkey faces!” Linda says, laughing so hard she’s almost crying. We are all giggling.

  “I said it was a mistake,” the doctor says. “We have trained psychotherapists to lead the intervention… It’s a serious matter.”

  The chimpanzee’s face has been replaced by a picture of a group of people sitting in a circle; one is talking and the others are listening intently. Another slide, this time of someone in a clothing store talking to a salesperson. Another, of a busy office with someone on a phone. It all looks very normal and very boring. He does not show a picture of someone in a fencing tournament or someone talking to the police after a mugging in a parking lot. The only picture with a policeman in it could be titled Asking Directions. The policeman, with a stiff smile on his face, has one arm outstretched, pointing; the other person has a funny hat, a little backpack, and a book that says Tourist Guidebook on the cover.

  It looks posed. All the pictures look posed, and the people may not even be real people. They could be—probably are—computer composites. We are supposed to become normal, real people, but they expect us to learn from these unreal, imaginary people in contrived, posed situations. The doctor and his associates assume they know the situations we deal with or will need to deal with and they will teach us how to deal with those. It reminds me of those therapists in the last century who thought they knew what words someone needed to know and taught an “essential” vocabulary. Some of them even told parents not to let children learn other words, lest it impede their learning of the essential vocabulary.

  Such people do not know what they do not know. My mother used to recite a little verse that I did not understand until I was almost twelve, and one line of it went: “Those who know not, and know not they know not, are fools…” The doctor does not know that I needed to be able to deal with the man at the tournament who would not call hits and the jealous would-be lover in the fencing group and the various police officers who took reports on vandalism and threats.

  Now the doctor is talking about the generalization of social skills. He says that after the treatment and training our social skills should generalize to all situations in everyday life. I wonder what he would have
thought of Don’s social skills.

  I glance at the clock. The seconds flick over, one after another; the two hours are nearly done. The doctor asks if there are any questions. I look down. The questions I want to ask are not appropriate in a meeting like this, and I do not think he will answer them anyway.

  “When do you think you would start?” Cameron asks.

  “We would like to start with the first subject—uh, patient—as soon as possible. We could have everything in place by next week.”

  “How many at once?” asks Bailey.

  “Two. We would like to do two at a time, three days apart—this ensures that the primary medical team can concentrate on those during the first few critical days.”

  “What about waiting after the first two until they complete treatment to see if it works?” Bailey asks.

  The doctor shakes his head. “No, it’s better to have the whole cohort close in time.”

  “Makes it faster to publication,” I hear myself say.

  “What?” the doctor asks.

  The others are looking at me. I look at my lap.

  “If we all do it fairly quickly and together, then you can write it up and get it published faster. Otherwise it would be a year or more.” I glance quickly at his face; his cheeks are red and shiny again.

  “That’s not the reason,” he says, a little loudly. “It’s just that the data are more comparable if the subjects—if you—are all close in time. I mean, suppose something happened that changed things between the time the first two started and finished… something that affected the rest of you—”

  “Like what, a bolt from the blue that makes us normal?” Dale asks. “You’re afraid we’ll get galloping normality and be unsuitable subjects?”

  “No, no,” the doctor says. “More like something political that changes attitudes…”

  I wonder what the government is thinking. Do governments think? The chapter in Brain Functionality on the politics of research protocols comes to mind. Is something about to happen, some regulation or change in policy, which would make this research impossible in a few months?

  That is something I can find out when I get home. If I ask this man, I do not think he will give me an honest answer.

  When we leave, we walk at angles, all out of rhythm with one another. We used to have a way of merging, accommodating one another’s peculiarities, so that we moved as a group. Now we move without harmony. I can sense the confusion, the anger. No one talks. I do not talk. I do not want to talk with them, who have been my closest associates for so long.

  When we are back in our own building, we go quickly into our individual offices. I sit down and start to reach for the fan. I stop myself, and then I wonder why I stopped myself.

  I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

  Starlight, one writer said, perfuses the entire universe: the whole thing glows. The dark is an illusion, that writer said. If that is so, then Lucia was right and there is no speed of dark.

  But there is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias. So I think there may be positive darkness, and I think dark can have a speed.

  The books tell me that my brain works very well, even as it is, and that it is much easier to derange the functions of the brain than to repair them. If normal people really can do all the things that are claimed for them, it would be helpful to have that ability… but I am not sure they do.

  They do not always understand why other people act as they do. That is obvious when they argue about their reasons, their motives. I have heard someone tell a child, “You are only doing that to annoy me,” when it is clear to me that the child was doing it because the child enjoyed the act itself… was oblivious to its effect on the adult. I have been oblivious like that, so I recognize it in others.

  My phone buzzes. I pick it up. “Lou it is Cameron. Do you want to go to supper and have pizza?” His voice runs the words together, mechanically.

  “It is Thursday,” I say. “Hi-I’m-Jean is there.”

  “Chuy and Bailey and I are going anyway, so we can talk. And you, if you come. Linda is not coming. Dale is not coming.”

  “I do not know if I want to come,” I say. “I will think about it. You will go when?”

  “As soon as it is five,” he says.

  “There are places it is not a good idea to talk about this,” I say.

  “The pizza place is not one of those places,” Cameron says.

  “Many people know we go there,” I say.

  “Surveillance?” Cameron says.

  “Yes. But it is a good thing to go there, because we go there. Then meet somewhere else.”

  “The Center.”

  “No,” I say, thinking of Emmy. “I do not want to go to the Center.”

  “Emmy likes you,” Cameron says. “She is not very intelligent, but she likes you.”

  “We are not talking about Emmy,” I say.

  “We are talking about the treatment, after pizza,” Cameron says. “I do not know where to go except the Center.”

  I think of places, but they are all public places. We should not talk about this in public places. Finally I say, “You could come to my apartment.” I have never invited Cameron to my apartment. I have never invited anyone to my apartment.

  He is silent a long moment. He has never invited me to his home, either. Finally he says, “I will come. I do not know about the others.”

  “I will come to eat supper with you,” I say.

  I cannot get to work. I turn on the fan and the spin spirals and pin-wheels turn, but the dancing colored reflections do not soothe me. All I can think about is the project looming over us. It is like the picture of an ocean wave towering over sorneone on a surfboard. The skillful surfer can survive, but the one who is less skilled will be smashed. How can we ride this wave?

  I write and print out my address and the directions from the pizza place to my apartment. I have to stop and look at the city map to be sure the directions are right. I am not used to giving directions to other drivers.

  At five, I turn off the fan, get up, and leave my office. I have done nothing useful for hours. I feel dull and thick, the internal music like Mahler’s First Symphony, ponderous and heavy. Outside, it is cool, and I shiver. I get into my car, comforted by all four whole tires, a whole windshield, and an engine that starts when I turn the key. I have sent my insurance company a copy of the police report, as the police suggested.

  At the pizza place, our usual table is empty; I am earlier than usual. I sit down. Hi-I’m-Jean glances at me and looks away. A moment later Cameron comes in, then Chuy and Bailey and Eric. The table feels unbalanced with only five of us. Chuy moves his chair to the end, and the rest of us shift a little: now it is symmetrical.

  I can see the beer sign easily, with its blinking pattern. Tonight it annoys me; I turn a little away. Everyone is twitchy; I am having to bounce my fingers on my legs, and Chuy is twisting his neck back and forth, back and forth. Cameron’s arm moves; he is bouncing his plastic dice in his pocket. As soon as we have ordered, Eric takes out his multicolored pen and starts drawing his patterns.

  I wish Dale and Linda were here, too. It feels odd to be without them. When our food comes we eat, almost in silence. Chuy is making a little rhythmic “hunh” between bites, and Bailey is clicking his tongue. When most of the food is gone, I clear my throat. Everyone looks at me quickly, then away.

  “Sometimes people need a place to talk,” I say. “Sometimes it can be at someone’s place.”

  “It could be at your place?” Chuy asks.

  “It could,” I sa
y.

  “Not everyone knows where you live,” Cameron says. I know he does not know, either. It is strange how we have to talk about something.

  “Here are directions,” I say. I take out the papers and put them on the table. One at a time, the others take the sheets. They do not look at them right away.

  “Some people have to get up early,” Bailey says.

  “It is not late now,” I say.

  “Some people will have to leave before others if others are staying late.”

  “I know that,” I say.

  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.”