The Meridians

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Dreaming, he thought again. I was dreaming.

  He looked forward quickly as he realized he must have been asleep on the road, and wondered if he was about to find himself going over the edge of a cliff or veering into the lane of an oncoming semi.

  Neither was the case. He was still firmly on his side of the road, his position as centered as it could have been under the best circumstances. But that did not mean that he was out of danger.

  Because Mr. Gray was standing in the road right in front of him.

  Scott had no time to crank the wheel to the side, only a split-second in which to decide whether or not to even try to brake.

  Bastard killed my family, he thought, and instead of stamping on the brake his foot came heavily down on the accelerator.

  Mr. Gray's face, illuminated in the bright lights of the oncoming truck, smiled. Actually, he leered, as though he could see into the darkest portions of Scott's heart...and liked what he saw.

  "No!" Scott screamed, and in that single word he packed all the longing and despair that he had felt these long months and years since he had lost his family, his job, his life. "No!" he shrieked again, and his foot was an anvil resting on the accelerator, an immovable object pressing the van to its top speed limit.

  "Been seeing you," said the old gray man.

  And in the instant before Scott's truck plowed into him, in the fraction of a second before which he should have been converted to nothing more than a smear across Scott's windshield, he once again did what he had done on every encounter before.

  The gray man smiled, and disappeared.

  Scott was alone, not even the black dogs on the side of the road deigning to accompany him in his travels any more.

  Meridian, he thought. The middle, the center, the halfway point. And with the thoughts he shuddered. Because he could not bear the thought of the events of the past months and years continuing on for months and years in the future. He prayed - no, hoped; prayer was a pastime he no longer engaged in - that the name of his destination was not a harbinger of things to come. He did not know what was going on, whether he was going mad or instead suffering from some other malady, at once darker and far harder to explain than mere insanity, or whether perhaps he had in fact died on the day that Mr. Gray had put a gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

  Perhaps that's it, he thought. Maybe I'm in Hell.

  The thought had a certain appeal, mostly because certainly if Hell existed, its very definition would be to cut him off from the people and things he loved most in the world.

  But no. Hell had no more meaning to Scott now than did Heaven. There was only madness, and the interminable sanity of what was left of his life.

  Perhaps he was going mad.

  If he was lucky.

  But until then, he kept the truck in gear, and sped down the dark road toward the small town of Meridian. The small town that marked the center of things past and things to come, the middle of all things that had and would happen, the confluence of past and future in a permanent present.

  Scott shuddered. The present was something he dreaded. Only in the past could he find solace from the wounds he had suffered. Only in the past could he be with his family again.

  Not in the present. Not in Meridian.

  But he had nowhere else to go, so he continued on the long stretch of road, making good time, and seeing no more black dogs, no more Mr. Gray. And if he did see the beasts again, he intended to pull out the gun he had kept after leaving the LAPD from its place in the moving truck's glove compartment, to put it under his chin, and to pull the trigger.

  And Hell be damned.

  ***

  16.

  ***

  Kevin's eighth birthday came and went as most days did. His schedule was set and he did not enjoy deviations from it, not even for an event as important as a celebration of the anniversary of his birth.

  Autistic children were even more dependent on routines than other children their age, and the slightest deviations could be cause for problems or even self-destructive tendencies. Luckily for Lynette and for Kevin, he was developing into a very high-functioning autistic child, with real hope for becoming an independent member of society some day, though he would always face challenges and problems.

  Equally lucky-seeming today was the fact that, though Kevin resisted the smallest changes to schedule and diet, he was able to make concessions in one very important area: he was willing to have cake if it was presented to him properly: on his Thomas the Tank Engine plate, laying on its side in an unbroken wedge. The last condition was a bit infuriating for Lynette since she was not a skilled cake cutter and tended to end up with several pieces of cake rather than one perfect slice, but if presented with irregular chunks of cake - even on his Thomas the Tank Engine plate - Kevin would either continue with his other activities as though the plate did not exist or, worse, would throw a tantrum until the offending broken sweet was removed from his sight.

  After three tries, however, Lynette managed to get a neat slice of cake maneuvered onto his plate, unbroken and unblemished. She resisted the urge to put a candle in it. As much as she wanted to try doing so, she had put a candle in his cake two years ago and the resulting fallout had been traumatizing for both of them. Kevin was a child who seemed to identify with things better than with people, and he appeared to view his cake as being threatened with fire, and screamed in terror until she removed the candle and then put a Band-Aid over the resulting hole in the cake. Even then he refused to eat that particular slice, but insisted that it go on a place of protection and honor, sitting at his right side at the kitchen table for the entirety of his birthday meal.

  So no, no candle. Just as perfect a wedge of cake as she could manage, and a party hat - for Kevin, not the cake. Granted, the party hat was mostly for her benefit, as that was one thing that Kevin barely seemed to register about his birthdays, suffering the indignity of having a pointy hat placed on his head with a certain gravitas, as though he knew that the hat was important for his mother and so permitted it to be placed on his head for her benefit. This could in fact be true, or it could simply be Lynette placing her own emotive interpretation on his actions. It was often impossible to tell with Kevin what he was thinking, or even whether he enjoyed something or not. New things had to be introduced with care, however, for if they were simply thrown into his schedule without a proper integration the reaction would, again, be something resembling an emotional nuclear strike, with both Lynette and Kevin standing at ground zero.

  Kevin was typing on his laptop, as he usually was mid-morning. The discovery that he enjoyed typing had been a boon to Lynette, who had gone back to school and finished a degree in accounting and then gotten certified as a CPA subsequent to Robbie's death. She worked at home as a freelance consultant, which was perfect for her since it enabled her to keep an eye on Kevin while working. Still, the first few years had been something of a difficulty, with Kevin insisting on her attention and her trying to find a way to deal with the special needs of her very special boy at the same time as she did the work that kept a roof over their head and food in their mouths. She had barely touched the money that Robbie had left to her, preferring to keep that in an interest-bearing account where it would be ready for a rainy day - or at any rate, a rainier day, since most of Lynette's days were punctuated by at least minor cloudbursts. Though to be fair, each cloudburst ended with a sunny dose of love and caring from her boy, her love, her life.

  The laptop had solved the stormy problem of what Kevin could do while his mother was working, at least. Lynette had brought a laptop into the front room one day so she could work while Kevin played with his favorite toys. He had long ago discarded the wooden toy cars in favor of a sleek and gleaming collection of Hot Wheels cars that he could play with for hours on end.

  The two red balls, tattered and dark with sweat and use, were still an integral part of his collection, however. And though Lynette still could not look at the aging orbs without a sm
all shudder of remembrance, she could at least function around them now.

  But the day that Lynette brought the laptop into his presence, little Kevin dropped what he was doing instantly and came over to do something highly unusual: directly watch what she was doing. Like most autistic children, new things had a tendency to render him overwrought in an eyeblink, so such were to be treated with care. One way that he dealt with novelty was to avoid looking at it directly. Sideways glances from across the room were his preferred mode of examining some article that had newly come into his life.

  Not so with the laptop. When she opened up the computer and began inputting figures into the accounting program she was using, Kevin immediately dropped his Hot Wheels in a pile on the floor - in itself a small wonder, since he usually refused to stop playing with them until each had been properly parked in its spot in his Little People Ramps Around Garage - and walked directly over to stand at her arm to watch what she was doing.

  Aware what a signal occurrence this was, Lynette carefully avoided making eye contact or even slowing what she was doing. She simply worked on, her son at her arm, for a full ten minutes before finally speaking. Then, without altering her cadence of typing or inputting, she said, "Do you like the computer, Kevin?"

  Kevin nodded. He had started talking soon after the night she had heard him speaking in those strange whispers in his bed, saying "Witten was white" over and over, but had never developed what anyone could fairly call a scintillating conversational persona. His conversation tended toward the esoteric, the oblique, and the repetitive. It took her years to crack "the Kevin Code," as she jokingly described her son's mode of conversation to her friends.

  The day she had brought out the laptop was no exception to his preferred mode of speech. Rather than say anything as crass as "Can I try?" the then five-year-old started sucking his fingers loudly. After waiting for a suitable time, she asked without looking at him, "Do your fingers hurt, Kevin?" She did not look at him because, like many autistics, Kevin had an aversion to eye contact. To look directly into his eyes was to establish a connection too strong to be borne, and so would often signal the early demise of any conversation. Discussions had to be had within the framework of sideways glances from under heavily-veiled lids.

  Kevin nodded, but said, "No hurting, no pain, no owies, no discomfort." It was a typically repetitive speech pattern, but within it Lynette felt sure that there was something more hiding. Some meaning she would have to apprehend.

  "So your hands don't hurt, then why are you sucking on them?"

  Kevin said nothing. Rather, he licked his fingers like a lollipop.

  "Are they tasty? Are you hungry?"

  Still no answer, just continued sucking.

  Lynette had a burst of inspiration. "Are your fingers thirsty?" Kevin still said nothing, but he paused in his strange actions, a sure signal that she was getting warmer. "Do they need something?" Another pause. Lynette looked at her computer and then, still moving intuitively, she saved her work, closed the application she had been using, and then opened a Microsoft Word document, a blank page, and moved away from the computer, leaving the chair where young Kevin could easily perch on it.

  Sure enough, within only a few seconds, her son knelt on the chair, put his little fingers on the keyboard, and began to type. It was gibberish, of course, nonsense letters and numbers strung together without any kind of rational thought, but then she noticed that several of the numbers looked familiar.

  She pointed over Kevin's shoulder. "Is that two plus two, Kevin?"

  "Four," answered her son without ceasing his play typing.

  Lynette was agog. Kevin was only five years old the first time he started typing, and she had never so much as hinted to him that such a thing as addition, subtraction, or mathematics in general existed.

  She gently moved his hands away from the keyboard, waiting for Kevin to explode at the intrusion in what he was doing, but he allowed her to move him away and watched as she typed a string of characters into the computer:

  3 + 2 4 + 6 5 + 8

  7 - 4 10 - 8 14 - 1

  2 x 2 4 x 7 8 x 12

  Kevin started speaking before she was even done typing: "Five, ten, thirteen, three, two, thirteen." Then he was silent.

  Lynette again felt her jaw drop open. The answers were the answers to the first two rows of problems. Apparently multiplication was beyond him, but somehow her son had picked up on - and absorbed - basic addition and subtraction.

  Hurriedly, she entered another ten or so addition problems, with an equal number of subtraction questions. This time, however, rather than speaking the answers, Kevin typed them, his little hand guiding the mouse to insert the answers, at first slowly, then with greater confidence as he continued working. When he was done, she had a page of basic equations. And all of them had been answered correctly.

  That had been the start of a wonderful thing for her. She discovered that, with the computer, Kevin was almost another person. Just as she imagined that Stephen Hawking used his chair and voice simulator to interact with others where his physical limitations did not otherwise allow, so the notebook computer she later purchased for her son became a special way for him to communicate with the outside world. He still spoke, but when he was stressed or upset in any way, he preferred to communicate via the computer. It was as though in the steady stream of ones and zeros floating through the quantum levels of the machine Kevin had finally found a place where he felt completely safe and so could act correspondingly at ease, even extroverted at times.

  And so it was that every day Kevin spent at least a few hours typing on the computer. Most of the time he typed strange strings of synonyms, starting with one word that Lynette would provide and from thence proceeding through a daisy-chain of vocabulary that would have astounded any English professor.

  "Drop" she would write. And within seconds Kevin would have followed the single word up with "spot, tear, bead, crumb, fall, cut, descent, percolate, splash, trickle, sag, slide, fall-off, lowering, rain." Then rain would apparently become the genesis of a new list of words: "downpour, cloudburst, mist, pour, barrage, profusion, torrent, shower, stream, mist..." and on and on and on. Occasionally he got stuck on a word, and would be unable to think of a new one. This frustrated him enormously - could disrupt his schedule for days on end as he tried to come up with a proper synonym to some tricky word. Luckily, early on Lynette had shown him - over the course of several hours, to be sure - the thesaurus.com website, and after that whenever Kevin got confused or stuck on a difficult word he could simply enter a word and get a long list of synonyms, each of which he apparently memorized at a glance.

  Lynette had heard of this kind of thing happening with other autistic children: though unable to complete certain basic tasks such as having a normal conversation or conducting their own personal hygiene with regularity, some discovered themselves capable of amazing feats of intellect, such as being able to do long division in their heads, or being able to tell a person what day of the week a given date fell on in any time during the last thousand years. Still, when she discovered Kevin had such a prodigious skill at finding synonyms to words that most eight year olds would not have understood if you stood and explained them to the kids, and when she realized that his math skills were at least the equal of his English abilities, she was constantly amazed. It was as though Kevin was a blind man, and just as a blind man's other senses developed keenly to offset the loss of sight, so Kevin's skills in certain endeavors had sharpened to a razor's edge to counteract the dulling of his abilities in certain other arenas.

  "Arena," he typed, and followed it up with "gridiron, battlefield, coliseum, field, stadium...."

  "Kevin," she whispered, and touched his arm gently in the gesture that signaled she was going to interrupt his work. Kevin had become more and more capable of handling such interruptions over time, but he did require advance notice.

  Without any apparent further thought, Kevin immediately withdrew his hands from the k
eyboard and sat motionless, clearly waiting for whatever his mother had in mind.

  "Happy birthday to you," she sang.

  Kevin, of course, did not sing along, but she thought she saw him glance quickly at the cake she held, and then appeared to smile ever so slightly. It wasn't much - just a tiny upturn of one corner of his mouth, the slightest unbunching of eyebrows that usually huddled together like opposing teams over his eyes - but it was a smile, and Lynette's heart soared. She lived for the small moments, the moments like this when she knew that her son, though different from other children, could still find what anyone in the world most hoped for: happiness.

  She sang the rest of the song, then put the cake down in front of Kevin.

  He typed something: "Happy birthday to me."

  Lynette laughed, and held her son tightly for a second. Just the barest fraction of a moment, so quickly that a hummingbird would have missed it if it had blinked. She didn't want to make her son uncomfortable, but she also knew that if she didn't hug him - even for the smallest instant - she would explode with love for her wonderful, special, amazing, loving, beautiful boy.

  "My Kevin Angel," she whispered in his ear.

  "Angel," he typed. "Archangel, guardian, spirit, beauty, darling, dear...."

  "Yes, my sweet," she answered. "You are all of those things."

  "Guardian," he typed. "Attendant, defender, sentinel."

  It took a moment for Lynette to realize what Kevin was saying. Her years with him had given her a greater ability to crack the Kevin Code, but it still took some time occasionally. She didn't hug him this time, but touched him on his shoulder, a "bug hug" as she had come to call the gesture.

  "Yes, honey, you are my angel, my guardian. Because without you, I'd be totally lost. I'd be wandering without a hope of finding my way. You keep me safe, honey, more than anyone ever has except for your daddy."