The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

  Even though I don’t remember much of the past, I don’t think I spent my time tossing a ball back and forth with someone. Real ball games, if real people play them, must be more complicated than this.

  THIS MORNING I WOKE UP FEELING RESTED AND STRONGER. I remembered yesterday and the day before and something from the day before that. I was dressed before the orderly, Jim, came to check on me, and walked down to the dining room without needing directions. Breakfast is boring; they have only hot and cold cereal, bananas, and oranges. When you’ve had hot with bananas, hot with oranges, cold with bananas, and cold with oranges, that’s it. When I looked around, I recognized several people though it took me a minute to think of their names. Dale. Eric. Cameron. I knew them before. They were also in the treatment group. There were more; I wondered where they are.

  “Man, I’d love some waffles,” Eric said when I sat down at the table. “I am so tired of the same old thing.”

  “I suppose we could ask,” Dale said. He meant “but it won’t do any good.”

  “It’s probably healthy,” Eric said. He was being sarcastic; we all laughed.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but it was not the same old cereal and fruit. Vague memories of foods I’d liked wafted through my head. I wondered what the others remembered; I knew that I knew them in some way, but not how.

  We all have various therapies in the morning: speech, cognitive, skills of daily living. I remembered, though not clearly, that I’d been doing this every morning for a long time.

  This morning, it seemed incredibly boring. Questions and directions, over and over. Lou, what is this? A bowl, a glass, a plate, a pitcher, a box… Lou, put the blue glass in the yellow basket—or the green bow on the red box, or stack the blocks, or something equally useless. The therapist had a form, which she made marks on. I tried to read the title of it, but its hard to read upside down like that. I think I used to do that easily. I read the labels on the boxes instead: DIAGNOSTIC MANIPULATIVES: SET 1, DAILY LIVING SKILLS MANIPULATIVES: SET 2.

  I look around the room. We weren’t all doing the same thing, but we were all working one-on-one with a therapist. All the therapists have white coats on. All of them have colored clothes underneath the white coats. Four computers sit on desks across the room. I wonder why we never use them. I remember now what computers are, sort of, and what I can do with them. They are boxes full of words and numbers and pictures, and you can make them answer questions. I would rather have a machine answer questions than me answer questions.

  “Can I use the computer?” I ask Janis, my speech therapist.

  She looks startled. “Use the computer? Why?”

  “This is boring,” I say. “You keep asking silly questions and telling me to do silly things; it’s easy.”

  “Lou, it’s to help you. We need to check your understanding—” She looks at me as if I were a child or not very bright.

  “I know ordinary words; is that what you want to know?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t when you first woke up,” she says. “Look, I can switch to a higher level—” She pulls out another test booklet. “Let’s see if you’re ready for this, but if it’s too hard don’t worry about it…”

  I’m supposed to match words to the right pictures. She reads the words; I look at the pictures. It is very easy; I finish in just a couple of minutes. “If you let me read the words, it’ll be faster,” I say.

  She looks surprised again. “You can read the words?”

  “Of course,” I say, surprised at her surprise. I am an adult; adults can read. I feel something uneasy inside, a vague memory of not being able to read the words, of letters making no sense, being only shapes like any other shapes. “Didn’t I read, before?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t read right away after,” she says. She hands me another list and the page of pictures. The words are short and simple: tree, doll, truck, house, car, train. She hands me another list, this one of animals, and then one of tools. They are all easy.

  “So my memory is coming back,” I say. “I remember these words and these things…”

  “Looks like it,” she says. “Want to try some reading comprehension?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  She hands me a thin booklet. The first paragraph is a story about two boys playing ball. The words are easy; I am reading it aloud, as she asked me to do, when I suddenly feel like two people reading the same words and getting a different message. I stop between “base” and “ball.”

  “What?” she asks when I have said nothing for a moment.

  “I—don’t know,” I say. “It feels funny.” I don’t mean funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar. One self understands that Tim is angry because Bill broke his bat and won’t admit it; the other self understands that Tim is angry because his father gave him the bat. The question below asks why Tim is angry. I do not know the answer. Not for sure.

  I try to explain it to the therapist. “Tim didn’t want a bat for his birthday; he wanted a bicycle. So he could be angry about that, or he could be angry because Bill broke the bat his father gave him. I don’t know which he is; the story doesn’t give me enough information.”

  She looks at the booklet. “Hmm. The scoring page says that C is the right answer, but I understand your dilemma. That’s good, Lou. You picked up on social nuances. Try another.”

  I shake my head. “I want to think about this,” I say. “I don’t know which self is the new self.”

  “But, Lou—” she says.

  “Excuse me.” I push back from the table and stand. I know it is rude to do that; I know it is necessary to do that. For an instant, the room seems brighter, every edge outlined sharply with a glowing line. It is hard to judge depth; I bump into the corner of the table. The light dims; edges turn fuzzy. I feel uneven, unbalanced… and then I am crouching on the floor, holding onto the table.

  The table edge is solid under my hand; it is some composite with a fake wood-grain top. My eyes can see the wood grain, and my hand can feel the nonwood texture. I can hear air rushing through the room vents, and the air whooshing in my own airway, and my heart beating, and the cilia in my ears—how do I know they are cilia?—shifting in the streams of sound. Smells assault me: my own acrid sweat, the cleaning compound used on the floor, Janis’s sweet-scented cosmetics.

  It was like this when I first woke up. I remember now: waking up, flooded in sensory data, drowning in it, unable to find any stability, any freedom from the overload. I remember struggling, hour by hour, to make sense of the patterns of light and dark and color and pitch and resonance and scents and tastes and textures…

  It is vinyl tile flooring, pale gray with speckles of darker gray; it is a table of composite with wood-grain finish; it is my shoe that I am staring at, blinking away the seductive pattern of the woven canvas and seeing it as shoe, with a floor under it. I am in the therapy room. I am Lou Arrendale, who used to be Lou Arrendale the autistic and am now Lou Arrendale the unknown. My foot in my shoe is on the floor is on the foundation is on the ground is on the surface of a planet is in the solar system is in the galaxy is in the universe is in the mind of God.

  I look up and see the floor stretching away to the wall; it wavers and steadies again, lying as flat as the contractors made it but not perfectly flat, but that does not matter; it is called flat by convention. I make it look flat. That is what flat is. Flat is not an absolute, a plane: flat is flat enough.

  “Are you all right? Lou, please… answer me!”

  I am all right enough. “I’m okay,” I say to Janis. Okay means “all right enough,” not “perfectly all right.” She looks scared. I scared her. I didn’t mean to scare her. When you scare someone, you should reassure them. “Sorry,” I say. “Just one of those moments.”

  She relaxes a little. I sit up, then stand. The walls are not quite straight, but they are straight enough.

  I am Lou enough. Lou-before and Lou-now, Lou-before lending me all his years of experience, experience he could not always understan
d, and Lou-now assessing, interpreting, reassessing. I have both— am both.

  “I need to be alone for a while,” I tell Janis. She looks worried again. I know she’s worried about me; I know she doesn’t approve, for some reason.

  “You need the human interaction,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “But I have hours of it a day. Right now I need to be alone and figure out what just happened.”

  “Talk to me about it, Lou,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I need time…” I take a step toward the door. The table changes shape as I walk past it; Janis’s body changes shape; the wall and door lurch toward me like drunken men in a comedy—where did I see that? How do I know? How can I remember that and also cope with the floor that is only flat enough, not flat? With an effort, I make the walls and door flat again; the elastic table springs back to the rectangular shape I should see.

  “But, Lou, if you’re having sensory problems, they may need to adjust the dosage—”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, not looking back. “I just need a break.” The final argument: “I need to use the bathroom.”

  I know—I remember, from somewhere—that what has happened involves sensory integration and visual processing. Walking is strange. I know I am walking; I can feel my legs moving smoothly. But what I see is jerky, one abrupt position after another. What I hear is footsteps and echoes of footsteps and reechoes of footsteps.

  Lou-before tells me this is not how it was, not since he was tiny. Lou-before helps me focus on the door to the men’s toilets and get through it, while Lou-now rummages madly through memories of conversations overheard and books read trying to find something that will help.

  The men’s toilet is quieter; no one else is there. Gleams of light race at my eyes from the smooth curving white porcelain fixtures, the shiny metal knobs and pipes. There are two cubicles at the far end; I go into one and close the door.

  Lou-before notices the floor tiles and the wall tiles and wants to calculate the volume of the room. Lou-now wants to climb into a soft, dark place and not come out until morning.

  It is morning. It is still morning and we—I—have not had lunch. Object permanence. What I need is object permanence. What Lou-before read about it in a book—a book he read, a book I do not quite remember but also do remember—comes back to me. Babies don’t have it; grownups do. People blind from birth, whose sight is restored, can’t learn it: they see a table morphing from one shape to another as they walk by.

  I was not blind from birth. Lou-before had object permanence in his visual processing. I can have it, too. I had it, until I tried to read the story…

  I can feel the pounding of my heart slow down, sink below awareness. I lean over, looking at the tiles of the floor. I don’t really care what size they are or about calculating the area of the floor or the volume of the room. I might do it if I were trapped here and bored, but at the moment I’m not bored. I’m confused and worried.

  I do not know what happened. Brain surgery? I have no scars, no uneven hair growth. Some medical emergency?

  Emotion floods me: fear and then anger, and with it a peculiar sensation that I am swelling and then shrinking. When I am angry, I feel taller and other things look smaller. When I am scared, I feel small and other things look bigger. I play with these feelings, and it is very strange to feel that the tiny cubicle around me is changing size. It can’t really be changing size. But how would I know if it were?

  Music floods my mind suddenly, piano music. Gentle, flowing, organized sound… I squeeze my eyes shut, relaxing again. The name comes to me: Chopin. An etude. An etude is a study… no, let the music flow; don’t think.

  I run my hands up and down my arms, feeling the texture of my skin, the springiness of the hairs. It is soothing, but I do not need to keep doing it.

  “Lou! Are you in here? Are you all right?” It is Jim, the orderly who has taken care of me most days. The music fades, but I can feel it rippling under my skin, soothing.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I can tell that my voice sounds relaxed. “I just needed a break, is all.”

  “Better come out, buddy,” he says. “They’re startin’ to freak out here.”

  Sighing, I stand up and unlatch the door. Object permanence retains its shape as I walk out; the walls and floor stay as flat as they should; the gleam of light off shiny surfaces doesn’t bother me. Jim grins at me. “You’re okay then, buddy?”

  “Fine,” I say again. Lou-before liked music. Lou-before used music to steady him… I wonder how much of Lou-before’s music I could still remember.

  Janis and Dr. Hendricks are waiting in the hall. I smile at them. “I’m fine,” I say. “I really did just need to go to the bathroom.”

  “But Janis says you fell,” Dr. Hendricks says.

  “Just a glitch,” I say. “Something about the confusion while reading sort of… made a confusion in the senses, but it’s gone now.” I look down the hall both ways to be sure. Everything seems fine. “I want to talk to you about what actually happened,” I say to Dr. Hendricks. “They said brain surgery, but I don’t have any scars that I can see. And I need to understand what’s going on in my brain.”

  She purses her lips, then nods. “All right. One of the counselors will explain it to you. I can tell you that the kind of surgery we do now doesn’t involve cutting big holes in your head. Janis, set up an appointment for him.” Then she walks away.

  I don’t think I like her very much. I sense that she is a person who keeps secrets.

  WHEN MY COUNSELOR, A CHEERFUL YOUNG MAN WITH A BRIGHT red beard, explains what they did, I am almost in shock. Why did Lou-before agree to this? How could he risk so much? I would like to grab him and shake him, but he is me now. I am his future, as he is my past. I am the light flung out into the universe, and he is the explosion from which I came. I do not say this to the counselor, who is very matter-of-fact and would probably think that is crazy. He keeps assuring me that I am safe and will be taken care of; he wants me to be calm and quiet. I am calm and quiet on the outside. Inside I am split between Lou-before, who is figuring out how that pattern on his tie was woven, and my current self, who wants to shake Lou-before and laugh in the counselor’s face and tell him that I do not want to be safe and taken care of. I am past that now. It is too late to be safe in the way he means safe, and I will take care of myself.

  I AM LYING IN BED WITH MY EYES CLOSED, THINKING ABOUT the day. Suddenly I am suspended in space, in darkness. Far off tiny chips of light, many-colored. I know they are stars and the blurry ones are probably galaxies. Music starts, Chopin again. It is slow, thoughtful, almost sad. Something in E minor. Then some other music comes in, with a different feel: more texture, more strength, rising up under me like a wave on the ocean, only this wave is light.

  Colors shift: I know, without analyzing it, that I am racing toward those distant stars, faster and faster, until the wave of light tosses me off and I fly faster yet, a dark perception, toward the center of space and time.

  When I wake up, I am happier than I have ever been, and I do not know why.

  THE NEXT TIME TOM COMES, I RECOGNIZE HIM AND REMEMBER that he has been here before. I have so much to tell him, so much to ask him. Lou-before thinks Tom knew him better than just about anybody. If I could I would let Lou-before greet him, but that doesn’t work anymore. “We’ll be out in a few days,” I say. “I’ve already talked to my apartment manager; she’ll turn the power back on and get things ready.”

  “You’re feeling all right?” he asks.

  “Fine,” I say. “Thanks for coming all these times; I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  He looks down; I can see tears in his eyes; he is embarrassed by them. “It’s not your fault, Lou.”

  “No, but I know you worried,” I say. Lou-before might not have known that, but I do. I can see that Tom is a man who cares deeply about others; I can imagine how he felt when I didn’t know his face.


  “Do you know what you’re going to do?” he asks.

  “I wanted to ask you about signing up for night school,” I say. “I want to go back to college.”

  “Good idea,” he says. “I can certainly help you with the admissions process. What are you going to study?”

  “Astronomy,” I say. “Or astrophysics. I’m not sure which, but something like that. I’d like to go into space.”

  Now he looks a little sad, and I can see he is forcing the smile that comes after. “I hope you get what you want,” he says. Then, as if he doesn’t want to be pushy, “Night school won’t give you much time for fencing,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “I’ll just have to see how it works out. But I’ll come visit, if that’s okay.”

  He looks relieved. “Of course, Lou. I don’t want to lose track of you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say.

  He cocks his head sideways, then shakes it once. “You know, I think you will. I really think you will.”

  Epilogue

  I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT, EVEN THOUGH EVERYTHING I’VE done for the past seven years has been aimed at exactly this. I am sitting here at a desk entering my notes, and the desk is in a ship and the ship is in space, and space is full of light. Lou-before hugs the series to him, dancing inside me like a joyous child. I feign more sobriety, in my workaday coverall, though I can feel a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. We both hear the same music.

  The identifier code on my ID gives my academic degree, my blood type, my security clearance… no mention there that I spent almost forty years of my life defined as a disabled person, an autist. Some people know, of course: the publicity surrounding the company’s unsuccessful attempt to market an attention-control treatment to employers brought us all more notoriety than we wanted. Bailey, in particular, made a juicy tidbit for the media. I didn’t know how badly it went for him until I saw the news archives; they never let us see him.