It took me another few weeks to understand that the look was one of respect.
—
Because there was no need to talk about any of this, we enjoyed each other’s company. Unlike the rest of humanity, Jack Sweat had no constant throbbing need to say something to fill empty spaces.
Jack preferred to avoid useless conversation. In his case, I think there was a secondary motivation: Jack Sweat truly didn’t like people. He strove to be outside the centre of attention. When he spoke, he preferred to speak of things with purpose, with a point.
Our friendship began soon after the Butcher agreed to teach me to box. Two weeks into my training, he took me upstairs to his apartment and showed me DVDs of famous boxing matches.
The three of us sat in the living room while the Butcher played key rounds from Ali–Foreman, Leonard–Hagler, and Tyson–Lewis. Jack’s father, and sometimes Jack, talked throughout, but it didn’t bother me, because I knew no one expected a response from me. They were instructing me, and I liked being instructed. I could listen without having to construct responses.
This became a regular occurrence. We would review old fights, with the Butcher pointing out subtleties in the stances, the shifts of momentum, the ebbing moments. He talked throughout each round and even as he got up, walked to the kitchen, and took three Heinekens from the fridge. He talked as he came back and gave us each a bottle of beer.
The first time he did this, I held the beer in front of me and stared at it.
Jack noticed my reticence. “Have you ever had a beer before?” he asked. I shook my head. He reached over and twisted off the cap.
“Just sip it slowly,” he said. I did. It tasted terrible, but I said nothing, for it was apparent that drinking beer with Jack and the Butcher was a required activity.
I didn’t mind. That day the Butcher sat on the couch, and both Jack and I remained silent, for over an hour, as he talked rapidly and non-stop about each fight.
He was like Oscar Tolstoy, except with less data and more visual aids.
I would sit in a sofa chair, and Jack would sit with his father on the couch, and we’d watch the fights, while Jack and the Butcher talked. To me. To the television. To each other.
We sat, we three, and I never had to speak, yet I was still a part of the group. It made me want to stay. It made me want to watch more old fights.
It made me happy.
A TEXT CONVERSATION
Saskia sent text messages frequently. They came in randomly, with no connection to anything either of us was doing. They were usually jumbled words from songs she was listening to. Sometimes, they were words from books she was reading. None of them required a reply.
But on the fifth day after she added herself to my contacts, at study hour, I found her sitting in the library at a round table. An Asian girl with a short blue skirt and a shock of red in her black hair also sat at the table. Saskia wasn’t pleased about it. She rocked. The Asian girl pretended not to notice, but it was clear she was annoyed by the stimming.
For a moment, I wondered if I had made a mistake switching my schedule. Saskia’s study hour was significantly more crowded than my study hour had been. Every table had at least one person sitting at it. But, having made the choice, I now had to live with it.
I sat across from Saskia, who immediately stopped rocking. The Asian girl glanced up, but otherwise ignored me.
I began to do my homework.
Five minutes later, Saskia texted me.
say, are you having a good day
Are you having a good day?
yes
good night
It’s not night.
good notnight
Good notnight.
I opened my chemistry textbook and read for a few minutes, and she texted me again.
i don’t like the cafeteria
I stared at my phone for a few moments, then replied.
Why?
it makes my brain ache
Why do you go to the cafeteria?
to eat
why do you go to the cafeteria
To eat.
i wear my headphones
my ears hurt in the cafeteria
it’s loud
You should take an aspirin.
i’m not allowed to have aspirin
it’s medicine
are you allowed to take an aspirin
Yes.
what does it taste like
It tastes like ink.
i’m not allowed to have ink
A TEXT AT NIGHT
I opened my eyes and I was seventeen again, waiting out the night. I sat on my bed, stared at the clock on the wall, and waited to fall asleep. The night was quiet.
A soft buzzing noise began. It took me a moment to recognize that it was my phone vibrating with a text message alert.
Up until last week, any text messages I received had come from Bill. Beginning last week, Saskia peppered me with mostly nonsense texts. Up until this moment, I had only received text messages from either of them during the day. No one texted me when I was at home.
My phone vibrated again.
This was an entirely unexpected event. I handled it well. I stared at my desk with suspicion. And then I picked up the phone.
The message was from Saskia.
what are you doing
I’m sitting on my bed.
do you like sitting on your bed
Yes.
say, what are you doing Saskia
What are you doing, Saskia?
i’m sitting on my bed
Okay.
I wrote a poem on the bus
Did you wash it off?
no no no no
I wrote a poem
I was on the bus
It was a joke.
say, did you like my joke saskia
Did you like my joke, Saskia?
no
now say tell me your poem saskia
Tell me your poem, Saskia.
A bead is a bead
But only with other beads
A bead is bound to beads
Forever
Is that the poem?
YES
It’s a short poem.
say, I like your poem saskia
I like your poem, Saskia.
say, what are you wearing saskia
What are you wearing, Saskia?
a blue night gown
goodnight
Goodnight.
—
I changed into my pyjamas and sat back on my bed, flipping pages in my book. After a few minutes, my phone vibrated again.
write me a poem
I’m not a poet.
you are a poet
No.
your heart is a poet
My heart is an internal organ.
write me a poem
I don’t know how.
say, I can try
I can try.
good notnight
Good notnight
MY FIRST POEM IN RECURSIVE
Listen: On March 3, 2010, I read a poem:
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder.
Why, I wonder.
Why?
Its simplicity trapped me. It paused me. It made me stare at it for thirteen minutes, reading it over and over again. I wrote it down. Then I wrote it down again. I got up from my desk, left my bedroom, went downstairs, ate a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal (I did it silently because it was two in the morning). I went back upstairs. I sat at my desk, I read the poem again.
It bothered me. It elated me. It braced me and forced my eyes to stare at it.
I realized I was wondering about a poem that was wondering about itself. I realized that I was staring at a written rabbit hole.
I was staring at a thread embodied.
Could we please not look at this anymore, the threads wailed.
I wrote the poem down again. This time, I tried to vary it.
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why.
I sat for the next half hour, expanding the poem. Each sentence grew in length. The meaning of each sentence changed slightly as it grew. Each sentence was self-contained, yet it depended on the sentence before it. It only made sense in the context that the writer was actually wondering about the previous sentence. Wondering why he wrote it.
I stayed up until four in the morning, staring at the poem, writing it down, writing it down, writing it down again. By the time I put my pen down and crawled under the covers, I had written twenty-eight pages. The final sentence was half a page long.
I was still wondering.
—
I still have the poem. I thought about giving it to Saskia, but decided it wasn’t one to send to her. I suspected she would understand it, perhaps even enjoy it. But it would take too long to type into a phone.
Then one of the threads argued that it was a private poem, and that Saskia needed a public poem. Something less about me. Something more about her.
Something more about us, the threads advised.
NEITHER AN ARTIST NOR A POET
When I was four, my mother tried to teach me to draw. She bought forty-eight pencil crayons and we sharpened them together. She bought a drawing pad and we made drawings together. She wanted to make a record of my progress as an artist, so she made me draw in the drawing pad and nowhere else.
We sat side by side. She would draw a scene on the left-hand side of the open pad. I would copy the scene onto the right-hand side of the pad. If Mom drew a circle, I drew a circle. If Mom drew a straight line, I drew a straight line. In that manner, we drew trucks and cows and houses and Imperial Walkers from the movie The Empire Strikes Back.
Every time I completed a rendition of my mother’s drawing, she praised it. She pointed out the lines that were the straightest. She showed me which circles were the roundest. She told me I was a Fine Artist. Then she took my sheet from the pad and put it on the fridge. She left her own drawing on the pad, because there was no need to put it on the fridge.
I was an artist for six months, and then my mother stopped teaching me. We completed the sketch pad. My drawings were on the fridge, on walls, or just lost to recycling. The sketch pad itself didn’t have a single drawing by me. Every drawing that remained was by my mother.
Her progression in ability over the six months was noticeable.
—
I am not an artist. Nor am I a poet.
If I were a poet, I would be able to Immortalize in Words the day I first met Saskia Stiles for the second time. I could capture in a metaphor the moment when I first recognized her as I walked toward my lunch table.
I don’t understand poetry.
I don’t understand how to compose sentences that, by themselves, have no significance, but together create narratives that write on the pages of someone’s heart. I don’t understand any of this because I don’t have those sorts of feelings. I can’t be a poet because I don’t feel love.
I have never felt love. I can’t say that this saddens me. I can’t say it concerns me. I carry on fine without it: when my father tells me he loves me, for instance, I tell him back, “I love you too,” and he appears satisfied. I don’t love him, but he’s none the wiser.
—
I may have loved my hamster, Gordon, because I liked to spend hours watching him run on his wheel. But I felt no grief when he died. Only curiosity.
“What did he die of?” I asked as I held his lifeless body.
“Probably old age,” Bill said, and I was skeptical.
“It could have been cancer,” I ventured.
“Perhaps,” said Bill. “I guess we’ll never know.”
“We could do an autopsy,” I said and started toward the kitchen.
—
Recently, I have wondered about love. Mostly, I have wondered why it’s been on my mind at all. I wondered if it was because Saskia Stiles one day sat down at the seventh table in the third row of the cafeteria.
I considered the question, then concluded that Saskia wasn’t the reason I thought about love. After all, we never talked. We never exchanged glances. That couldn’t be love. The weeks in between when we first met again and the first night of texting didn’t offer any evidence that proved otherwise.
I was thinking about this now only because it struck me that a poet would want to immortalize the moment in the cafeteria when I first saw Saskia Stiles, due to its serendipity. That the planks on which we were floating drifted together one more time.
I have an analytical mind. I don’t subscribe to beliefs of destined coincidences or divinely placed chess pieces. I don’t feel love, and I don’t feel guidance. What is, is. Who is, is. And it’s all very curious.
Yet, here I was, ten years later, and Saskia and I sat together and helped each other get through the day. We did it for each other, because it was the rational thing to do. We did it for mutual benefit.
Now she wanted me to write a poem. I wasn’t sure how the benefit was mutual. I didn’t see any clear benefit to writing a poem, but I suspected I could attempt something without it exploding in my face.
—
For the first hour of my attempt, I stared at an empty notepad, my pencil poised to strike.
In the second hour, I did research using Wikipedia.
I reviewed the more popular forms of poetry and settled on a limerick. The poem was short. The structure was rigid, probably easier to work with. Knowing that a poem had to come from the heart, and my heart was a foreign land, I didn’t pause to consider the poem deeply. I plunged into it without giving it any thought:
There once was a lady from Nantucket
Her name was Saskia and she had a bucket
She was in the lunchroom
I was in the lunchroom
And then she ate her lunch so just fucket
I regarded it afterwards for a half hour, reading it over and over again.
I’m not sure what any of that means, said a thread.
I’m trying.
Try again.
THE BELFRY
I opened my eyes and a poem came to me. I sat up in bed and turned on the light. Outside, the alder branches tapped at the window, asking to be let in. I reached for The Twentieth Century in Review, then stopped. For a full two minutes, I stared at nothing, not the wall, not the window, not my book, listening to a dim voice, straining to hear its words.
I climbed out of bed and took a pad of paper and a pen from my desk drawer. Slowly, carefully, I wrote out the words. They came effortlessly, as if I was simply taking dictation.
Ten lines.
Then I stopped, folded the paper in half, and stared at it for another minute.
My mind was empty. No threads speaking to me.
I climbed back into bed and went to sleep immediately.
—
Listen: Three years ago, I read a blog post by Susanne Olcrofft. The About Me page of her website stated that she was an autistic poet. The post was titled “What is it like to be an autistic poet?” I remembered a section of her blog and I heard pieces of it when I awoke. This is what Susanne Olcrofft’s paragraph said, originally:
You rest in the belfry of your mind, at the top of your tower, the same tower as mine, which we all visit, at times; the same tower in which you gaze across the land. The world sits outside the window and beckons, and you will only so long in the belfry stand, before you stand at the window. But I have stayed to read from the book of my soul.
This is what I wrote for Saskia:
She rests in the belfry of her mind,
At the top of her tower.
The same tower as yours a
nd mine,
The same tower that we visit,
The same tower in which we gaze across the land.
The world sits outside the window and beckons,
And we will only so long in the belfry stand,
Before we stand at the window.
But Saskia Stiles has stayed to read,
From the book of my soul.
This is not plagiarism, I must argue. It’s artistic licence.
—
The next morning, I read the poem. I surprised myself: I changed the possessives. It was no longer the top of your tower, but the top of our tower. I don’t know why I wrote it, but I wrote it, and I felt pleased with it. I understand that it is okay to be pleased with a poem even if you don’t know its meaning. I can honestly say I am pleased by many poems whose meaning I don’t understand. Almost all of them, actually.
In my poem, I didn’t convert one of the possessives correctly. I wrote, “But Saskia Stiles has stayed to read, from the book of my soul.” I meant to write, “But Saskia Stiles has stayed to read, from the book of her soul.”
I was about to erase the mistake when it created a new thread in my mind. Why did you write that? it asked.
People sometimes write incorrect things. It’s nice to be normal.
But, the thread asked, how can the poem be correct if you wrote it wrong?
Because grammatical errors are acceptable in a poem if they further the meaning of the poem.
What is the meaning of the poem?
I wish that Saskia would read the book of my soul.
Oh, the thread answered. Oh my.
I realized this was not a poem I was going to share. I needed a new one.
Well, that’s just great, said the threads.
H
I opened my eyes and the Hampton Park cafeteria was out of white buns.
My day was difficult enough as I wrestled poetry from the rusty creative engines of my mind. The threads were backed up, clamouring, arguing, and I was ignoring them.
I had no poem for Saskia. I stood in line and tried to think of a Plan B. My breathing quickened, as if a panic attack was encroaching.
Do You Think This Is Strange? Page 13
