Do You Think This Is Strange?

by Aaron Cully Drake

  He looked at me. “Betty had a tough time getting past that stage.”

  I waited.

  “There was the stage where we believed that it would come to an end soon. And there was the stage where we decided that by the time you were fifteen or sixteen you’d be cured.”

  “Cured of what?” I asked.

  He nodded and pointed a finger at me. “Exactly,” he said. He sat back, his shoulders relaxed like a great truth had been spoken. “Exactly.”

  Clink, clink.

  “Then there was the stage where we stopped pretending that some things were getting better. Because some things weren’t. That’s the stage where we knew it would be like this forever. This isn’t like the flu. Autism isn’t acute.” He looked me directly in the eye as he said this, then he was quiet for a while.

  “And when you realize something like that,” he said at last, “your world collapses like a mud hut. It drops down on you, and there’s no more lying about it. Your son has autism. He has it and he’ll have it the rest of his life.” He pulled out another cigarette, his fingers shaking. “That’s the worst stage because the question becomes: how far will your son make it in life? And the answer is now back in your court.” He pointed a finger at me. “Where you end up depends on what I do right here, right now. This is the stage where I realize that your future is in my hands, and it scares me to death. For the past ten years, I’ve been afraid that I don’t have what it takes.”

  Not good enough, the threads said.

  “Why did Mom leave?”

  He sighed and dropped his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she realized she wasn’t up to the challenge, or if she thought that I wasn’t up for the challenge. Either way, she left.”

  He took a long drag of his cigarette and looked at me as he drank the last of his scotch, then set his glass on the table. “And she didn’t take you.”

  THIS, MY MOTHER

  That night my father told me that my mother left me behind was an inflection point in my life. It marked the end of seven years of wondering why she left. Now I finally knew: she left because of me.

  So began the three years since, wondering what to do about it.

  This is what I remember of my mother: her hair was blond and it hung two inches past her shoulders. Her eyes were blue. She was three inches shorter than my father. She wore dresses. Her favourite flowers were orchids. She smelled like strawberries off a knife. She liked to wear red lipstick. Her housecoat was pink and came down to just above her knees. On weekends, she liked to make a morning pot of coffee and sit with my father in the living room for an hour, looking out the window, talking about the years ahead and what would be. I was not allowed to take part. Until the last cup of coffee was finished, I was not supposed to interrupt. My mother called it their Special Morning Time.

  My father called it his Time Out from Me.

  I remember my mother liked to dance in the living room, or fuss with her orchids, ignoring my father’s complaints about the expense. I remember she liked to hop up and down with me when I got excited or agitated, and it ended up calming me. Sometimes, we clapped our hands for twenty minutes until I stopped bouncing on the couch. I remember when we did it on our feet and my father walked in and took a bow because he said he thought we were giving him a standing ovation.

  “No, we’re NOT!” I shouted, jumping up and down.

  I remember at night, sometimes, I would sit in my bed and stare at the wall and listen to my mother crying. At the time, I didn’t understand what she was crying about. On the night my father told me why my mother left, I realized she was crying about me. I realized that when they yelled, they were yelling about me.

  For days after I realized this, the thread consumed me, this question of what I did to make her leave. It appropriated my time until it became my Most Favourite Thing. I still stared at the giant clock, and still watched the time pass, but my mind was no longer empty. It was filled with questions and thoughts and logical rabbit holes.

  Over those days, I withdrew. When outdoors, I was especially unresponsive to others. My head went down when I walked. My eyes went distant when I stood. I thought about my mother and watched the time tick away.

  A week after our conversation over the candle, as I sat at the bus stop and turned the pages of my book, a group of boys chatted among themselves, pushing at each other and laughing. I stared at a grey wall in the distance, watching the clock tick time. 4:32, 4:33, 4:34. But it was difficult to stay focused because one of the four boys was directly in my line of sight.

  “Could you not stand there?” I asked him.

  That was how it began.

  PARAMEDICS

  I opened my eyes and I was fourteen years old. I lay on my back and looked straight up into the sky. Rain fell on my face. The wheels of my stretcher rattled, and two paramedics rolled me to the ambulance, put me inside, closed the doors, and took me to Eagle Ridge Hospital.

  It was unusual that I went willingly on a stretcher. I’m not fond of things with small wheels, like shopping carts, or skateboards, or ottomans. I don’t feel the same way about Hot Wheels cars, which also have small wheels. The wheels aren’t small in proportion to the rest of the toy car. Small wheels are disconcerting when the chassis is disproportionately larger than the wheels. I don’t like large airplanes for that reason.

  It took the paramedics a small amount of coercing and shepherding to get me on the stretcher. They didn’t know I was autistic, and thought I was just injured. So they went slow. They put a collar around my neck. They slid a board under me.

  “What are you looking at, sport?” the paramedic first asked me, then shone a light in my right eye.

  What happened? a thread finally asked.

  It may have been a troll that did this to me. Perhaps there’s a subspecies of troll, shaped like teenage boys, with rings and baseball caps and thick green coats. If so, it was trolls that did this to me.

  On the way to the hospital, they asked too many questions.

  “Can you understand me?”

  When I tried to reply, they interrupted me with a different question.

  “Can you tell me what day it is?”

  I didn’t reply. Fool me twice, and all that.

  I was disoriented and frightened, but mostly I was annoyed at the two paramedics for asking questions that didn’t require immediate answers. I could tell them the date later. It wasn’t the most pressing question.

  The most pressing question was: why did this happen?

  —

  I lay on the stretcher, even though I wanted to stand, and I remember they put an oxygen mask over my mouth, even though I wasn’t having trouble breathing. Their actions kept spawning new questions in my mind, and I was overwhelmed. I lay back, closed my eyes.

  “Okay, he’s shutting down,” said the first paramedic, alarmed.

  “Stay with me, sport,” said the second.

  “Stop talking, please,” I said.

  I closed threads:

  The stretcher has small wheels, said a thread.

  I knew that the gurney was tall relative to its wheels, probably unstable, and therefore dangerous. But I was inside the back of an ambulance, in a confined space. Further, the paramedics collapsed the gurney so that it was only inches off the floor. There was little chance that the gurney could tip over.

  Okay, said the thread.

  However, the ambulance door could open at a stoplight, the ambulance could accelerate, and I could spill into traffic, strapped to the stretcher. I did a memory search for any examples of a patient accidentally sliding out the back door of an ambulance at a traffic light and found nothing. Okay, said another thread.

  A thread remembered a news story I read, two years, three months, and four days ago, about an enraged mob blocking an ambulance carrying a suspected rapist. The mob dragged him from the back of the ambulance and beat him to death.

  But I wasn’t suspected of rape. In fact, I was the victim of violence, not the suspect of
violence. It was unlikely that an enraged mob would attack the ambulance and beat me. Works for me, said the thread.

  One thread remained: the four boys could pull me from the ambulance and complete my beating. They had motivation and had indicated they weren’t done. The one in the thick green coat warned me that the beating was incomplete.

  “If they ask you who did this,” he said, picking me up by the scruff of my shirt, “you tell them you don’t know nuthin’. Otherwise, we’ll find you and finish the job.”

  “This isn’t a job,” I said weakly, and he hit me again with my book before throwing it to the pavement.

  —

  In the emergency room, a nurse examined me and concluded I wasn’t so special that she could spare me any more attention. She left me sitting on the gurney in the hall. I sat for two hours. The bleeding from my nose stopped, then congealed, then crusted. A front tooth wiggled but didn’t come out. My left eye swelled shut. I wondered if it would stay shut forever.

  I don’t like to wonder about things. I am not good at it. If you were to ask me why my eye was swollen shut, I could tell you that it was because the other boy’s right fist hit me there. If you asked me why he hit me, I could tell you that it was because the other boy was angry with me. If you asked me why the other boy was angry with me, I wouldn’t be able to answer.

  I’m not good at subjective questions.

  —

  Years ago, at Excalibur House, they had warned me about this: that people may often misinterpret the things I say. But I’ll never understand why people get angry with me when they fail to understand what I say. They could be angry with me if I deliberately told them a lie, but I rarely tell lies. Although I’m capable of telling them, I’m not good at it. And I’m not good at identifying lies. This makes sarcasm a minefield of misinterpretation.

  If someone said, “Well, that’s just great,” I used to believe the person was satisfied with the thing that was Just Great. It turns out that it can mean the opposite. This phrase gets me into trouble, especially with my father. He says “That’s just great” often. It’s usually not.

  Once, when I was five years old, I knew I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was watching Dora the Explorer, and I wanted to hear her say what her Favourite Part was. I could never guess the reason beforehand. It frustrated me to no end.

  “What was your favourite part?” Dora the Explorer asked and I became frantic.

  “Crossing the Foggy Ocean!” I shouted.

  “I liked that part, too,” she replied, after considering my reply. “My favourite part was when the Rocky Rocks sang to me!”

  “Son of a BITCH!” I shouted in frustration. I learned that phrase from my father.

  I peed in my pants because I was waiting for her answer, and my father got angry. He saw the wet stain on my pants and said, “Well, that’s just great.”

  “It’s not great,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  I tried to spread my legs while standing, so the pants would hang from me. “I’m uncomfortable.”

  “Good for you,” he answered.

  “Peeing pants is not good,” I said.

  “Then why the Christ did you do it?”

  “I wanted to watch Dora the Explorer.”

  He closed his eyes and his jaw muscles clenched, unclenched, clenched again. “It’s a DVD, kid. A goddamn DVD. You could have asked me to pause it.”

  He saw my sopping wet socks. “Look at that, it’s all over the rug now. Well, that’s just great.”

  “It’s not great,” I said. “You will have to clean it up with soap.”

  “Shut the fuck up, will you?” he said.

  —

  At the hospital, a doctor with thick black glasses and red hair tied back in a ponytail examined me. She lifted my chin and shone a small flashlight in my eyes. “Do you know your name?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  She waited for me to say more. I stared past her at the wall.

  “Do you know your name?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I still do.”

  The doctor clicked off her flashlight and straightened up, frowning at me.

  “He’s not showing any symptoms,” she said to a nurse. “I think he’s just a smartass.” She looked at me. “Tell me your name.”

  “Freddy Wyland,” I said. “I’m here against my will.”

  “Aren’t we all?” she said, leaning forward and feeling under my jaw.

  “Am I going to need glasses?” I asked her.

  “Why would you need glasses?”

  “If my eye can’t be repaired, will I need to wear glasses as a result?”

  She looked in my ear.

  “Freddy,” she said, “you won’t need to wear glasses. Do you hear a ringing?”

  “I don’t hear a ringing,” I said. “Not right now.”

  “Did you hear a ringing before?”

  “I heard it six times,” I explained. “I also heard nine sirens and two car horns.”

  “In your head?”

  “No,” I said.

  “How old are you, Freddy?”

  “I’m fourteen years old. I’m closer to fifteen years old than fourteen years old, but I’m not supposed to tell people I am fourteen-point-six years old.”

  She smiled wryly. “Most people can’t do math,” she said. “Do your parents know where you are?”

  “If you asked, Bill would say yes, but he’s wrong because he thinks I’m at home.”

  “Why aren’t you at home?”

  “Because I’m in the emergency room of Eagle Ridge Hospital.”

  “Hah, hah, you are quite the sarcastic teenie, aren’t you? Okay, Danny—”

  “My name is Freddy,” I corrected.

  “Can you tell us your parents’ phone number?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She waited. I looked at the wall. Annoyed, the doctor waved a hand at me and said to the nurse, “I’ll be back in a bit. Get this kid’s parents, okay?”

  As the doctor moved to the next patient in the hall, the nurse frowned. “Do you know where you are?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can you tell me your phone number?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She gritted her teeth. “Tell me your phone number, Freddy Wyland.”

  “393-3200,” I said.

  I don’t know why they made it so hard.

  —

  Two hours, seven minutes after I arrived at the emergency room, they moved me to a bed and pulled the curtain around it. Two hours and nine minutes later, I heard the doctor say, “He’s fine. A little bit beat up is all.”

  She opened the curtain, and there was my father, unsmiling.

  “Maybe a little bit of a smartass,” the doctor said, with a small smile.

  Bill nodded. “That’s Freddy, all right.” He quickly walked over to me, slowing as he reached out. He looked me over and lightly touched the side of my head.

  “Champ,” he said.

  “I’m not a champion,” I told him.

  The nurses had cleaned the blood from my face. The eye that was swollen shut had a red and purple bruise underneath. A patch of hair was shaved away above my right ear, and the doctor sewed seven stitches. She also used three stitches to sew a tear in my lip.

  “Oh, Christ,” my father said. “This is great. This is just great.”

  I began to reply that it wasn’t great, but stopped myself. “You know what’s great?” I said instead. “These stitches are great.”

  My father blinked. At first, he cocked his head sideways, as if I had spoken in a different language. “What? The stitches are great?”

  “No,” I answered. “They’re not. I was being sarcastic.”

  For moment, he didn’t speak. Having never heard me say anything sarcastic before, it took a moment before he realized I was doing it now.

  He turned his head slowly to the doctor. “How bad did he hit his head?” he asked.

  WHY M
Y MOTHER LEFT

  My mother left because of me. My father never said those words exactly, but he said all the words around them.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked, the day after she was gone.

  “She’s out,” he told me, swirling ice cubes in his drink, with a stare focused a thousand yards away. “She needs some time alone for a bit, Freddy. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Where’s Mom?”

  He didn’t answer.

  On the second day, I asked again.

  “She left us, Freddy,” he said, and I asked again the next day. Then again the next day, and for days on end, weeks on end.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked, every morning, when I came downstairs and walked into the kitchen.

  Every morning, he was up first, waiting for me, sitting at the breakfast table, drinking a cup of coffee, reading a book. Every morning, he waited until I sat at the table.

  “She’s gone, Freddy.”

  “Where did she go?”

  He said, “She left us, Freddy, and I don’t know where she went. I don’t know when she’s coming back.”

  I said, “Will she bring me a present when she does?”

  He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

  His eyes were red.

  The orchids in the living room wilted, and the soil became desiccated. One day, the orchids in the living room were gone.

  I no longer went to Excalibur House. My father sold our home, and I was glad to be out of it. The place echoed like a crypt, and my father moved through it like a grave keeper.

  We moved to Heritage Mountain, down the road, to a townhouse complex, still on the edge of the forest. I went to Templeton College.

  Saskia Stiles was gone from my life.

  “It’s just too far away,” my father said of Excalibur House. “I can’t get you there anymore.”

  “I can walk,” I said and went to the hall to get my coat.

  “It’s night, Freddy,” he said. “Besides, it would take you hours to get there.”

  “Mom can drive me,” I offered.