Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  The moment ends with a single word. Reidier’s need to contain, to categorize and quantify, takes over. His habitualized training is reflex at this point, but also a protective effort to bottle up the emotions threatening to bubble up and overwhelm. It is the best way he’s learned to manage the unknown. He falls back on the scientific method itself, and offers up a hypothesis: “Autism?”

  “It was simultaneously surprising yet expected,” Bertram shares with me in our interview. “Here he had gone for so long, not telling me anything, letting me see for myself, not muddying the water. He wanted, as I told you, my complete and unbiased opinion. And half an afternoon into my investigation, he tosses out his hypothesis, rippling the surface, blurring my view into the depths of his son.

  “That being said, it was his son. And a boy who exhibited enigmatic behavior that was amplified when brought into disturbing relief with his twin brother. Otto was a doppelgänger of normalcy that only accentuated Ecco’s otherness. A contrast so painful, so glaring, that Eve, his mother, couldn’t even see Ecco anymore. Blinded by the difference.”

  Bertram stops for a moment, looking down and to the left. His eyes fill with sadness. “As much as Reidier wanted my professional perspective, I think he craved my personal support more. He needed to voice his fear. And he couldn’t with Eve. He wanted me for himself as much as for his son. Sharing his suspicion with me made it easier to bear. Heal his son, his wife, his family. He could lean on me a little.”*

  * * *

  * Sometimes voicing a fear is the worst thing you could do. Speaking it out loud is what wakes the dogs of fury. Gets their attention. Makes your presence known, and you either find yourself running like hell, ’cause as crazy as it sounded in your head, turns out your fear was right, or you find yourself in a tight jacket on the way to Bellevue (the nuthouse, not the bar that shares a backdoor with Siberia up on 40th).

  No, fear is your friend. Fear keeps you safe. Fear’s what makes sure you don’t just pack this whole thing up, lock the door behind you, run out, and go cry to Lorelei.

  Fear’s my guardian angel.

  * * *

  “As a friend and a professional?” I ask.

  Bertram pauses in surprise. “Now that I think about it, maybe Kerek was relying on my professionalism more than I realized. Maybe he knew, deep down, that he couldn’t possibly remain objective, but hoped that somehow I could pull him back to center. Keep him grounded. Guide him past the fear.”

  Fear is a powerful motivator.* A constant presence that dominates all of our lives, more than most of us care to admit. We treat it as something to be avoided, tamped down, repressed. We encourage each other not to live in fear. Devise methods to cope with it. Go to any Barnes & Noble and you’ll find entire aisles of self-help literature. No matter what the context, each of these books has the same basic spine, a core of fear.

  * * *

  * Agreed.

  * * *

  What’s rarely discussed, though, is how necessary fear has been for our survival. Fear has been shaped by evolution over thousands of years. Individuals who were sufficiently afraid successfully avoided dangerous predators, precarious cliff edges, lethal rip tides, dark labyrinthine caverns, and the likes thereof. The fearful maximized their probability for survival, living long enough to successfully procreate and instill those same fears in their offspring so that they could also go on to procreate.

  Fear is our inheritance.

  Fear is in our DNA. We are wired for it.

  At Carnegie Mellon’s Infant Cognition Laboratory, David Rakison has been using innovative techniques to uncover how and when babies learn about the world. He says that “babies are born with a tendency to pay more attention to the shapes of snakes and spiders than to other kinds of creatures.”84 Even five-month-olds pay more attention to drawings of spiders on a video screen than they do to a scrambled version of the same picture. In other studies, psychologists have found that both adults and children detect images of snakes from among a variety of nonthreatening objects much faster than they pick out fish, butterflies, or flowers. Similarly, Susan Mineka at Northwestern University, working with monkeys, showed that primates’ brains are wired to react more strongly to snakes. We’re biologically disposed to be afraid. This tendency, along with our unparalleled ability to also pass down knowledge of danger, is one of the reasons we’ve been such a successful species.

  Obviously fear is an inhibitor. Although popular opinion takes the stance that it retards development by curtailing risk taking, in fact it culls development by balancing it with need. When sufficient need arises for an individual or group to overcome their fears and take risks, progress is achieved. We don’t hunt the woolly mammoth until we have to, for food, for warmth, for crucial needs.* And when we do, we take care, and make sure we maximize whatever advantage we can. Because we are scared of what will happen if we don’t.

  * * *

  * So it’s not that I’m too scared to answer the door, it’s that my need to know isn’t great enough. I’m not a coward, I’m a survivor. And the reason I don’t act on my impulse to seek out Lorelei, well, that’s just me biding my time until necessary, considering how to maximize my advantage. Ensure a successful hunt.

  So why am I shaking?

  * * *

  Fear is our reaction to not being able to predict the future. It is sublimated frustration at our inability to successfully parse cause and effect. It is the unknown. It is the dark, the other side, the question mark.*

  * * *

  * Hilary’s theory doesn’t adhere to the good ol’ transitive property, however. While fear might equal the unknown, the unknown does not necessarily equal fear. I might not know what happened to her, but that doesn’t mean I’m scared of finding out.

  I didn’t go in to work today. Didn’t e-mail. Didn’t call. Couldn’t risk it. Haven’t even put the battery back in my cell phone. It might not be a problem though. Today might not be Monday. Could be Sunday. Not sure. Kind of lost track.

  Guess my peculiar little Michelin Man visitor had an effect. Let’s say he wasn’t a “tourist.” Was this just a reconnaissance mission, see what’s what? Or was he beating the bushes? Seeing what he could flush out onto 39th Street into an evenly spaced-out semicircle of Department hunters, nets ready?

  I thought about this in the hallway last night. Had cleaned everything up. Packed it all into the briefcase, which I shoved out of sight in the crawl space underneath the stairs. Took the bead necklace off the wall and pulled it over my head. My amulet of one past parent against another. Locked both the top and bottom locks, walked across the iron bridge, past the garbage bins, down the well-lit hallway to the glass security door, when I realized how dark it had gotten outside.

  With the sun having long since gone down, the glass door appeared nothing more than a reflection of the fluorescent-lit hallway, streaked by headlights passing by in the night outside.

  I was a brightly framed sitting duck at a carnival shooting range, blinded by light intended to promote security. Safe, as long as I didn’t open up the locked front door.

  My hand dropped back to my side. I stood there for several minutes, staring at the reflection of myself in the glass, when all of a sudden, it pushed open the door from the outside.

  At least that’s what it looked like to me. Turns out it was just a woman who lived up on the third floor. Hidden by the glare of my reflection, she had walked right up, opened the door, and catapulted my heart right out of the back of my rib cage.

  She held the door open a moment, looking at me questioningly.

  I mumbled something or other and shook my head no.

  Guess the look in my eye was none too comforting, ‘cause she closed the door slowly and then headed up the stairs two at time.

  Once I heard the dead bolts lock behind her, I shot right back down the hall, across the iron bridge, and into the carriage house. I sure as hell wasn’t going out, at night, all lit up with a silhouetted bull’s-eye on my chest.
<
br />   I looked around the second floor. Nothing new. The windows on the far wall, across from the door, were no help. Two feet by two feet, glass-bricked windows that I couldn’t even see through, let alone open or crawl out of.

  Back on the iron bridge I checked out the courtyard. The five stories of 357 rose up directly across from me; to the left a ten-story building walled me in, to the right the back of a tenement building. Straight up was the roof of my secret little house. The gutters ringed with barbed wire stretched out like an oversized, angry slinky.

  Once again my own “security” had me trapped.

  I decided to stay in my little barbwired briar patch.

  Wait for the cover of day.

  Let them beat the bushes senseless. I had my mom’s report to keep me company, and my fears to keep me safe.

  * * *

  So what then is Reidier afraid of?

  The worst has already happened. Reidier’s child is already, for lack of a better term, damaged in a profound way. His marriage is strained by the deformity. As evidenced by the basement, Eve does not manage brokenness well.85 Diagnosing Ecco would only help to provide a catalog of information based on case studies and treatment histories, a way to at least put the situation in rational context.

  But if the present damage is known, what’s the fear? The answer must lie in the past or the future, the cause or the effect.

  Yet there is no past, only memory.

  There is no future, only hope.

  Is it Reidier’s memory or his hope that’s the present question mark?

  Is he anxious for the future, or guilty about his past?

  A few years ago, a patient was referred to me by her child’s surgeon. The woman was young, vibrant, athletic, and above all, positive. But she was racked with guilt for her son being born with a damaged cochlea and subsequently deaf. During the pregnancy, her husband had won a trip at work to attend a conference in Hawaii. It fell on the cusp of her second and third trimester of gestation. After consulting with her ob-gyn, she and her husband decided to take the trip. Unfortunately, while on vacation there was a complication. She had to be transported via helicopter to the hospital on the main island. At the end of the day, everything was fine, and a few months later, she gave birth to her deaf son.

  No matter how often her doctor assured her that flying had nothing to do with her son’s deafness, she couldn’t let go of the idea that all would have been well if only she hadn’t taken the trip. Even after working with me for months, the only progress she seemed to make was accepting blame as a proactive lesson, carrying it around with her as a reminder to be a good mother and always put her child first.

  Ultimately, it took the birth of her second son two years later for her to find absolution. Like his brother, he was born with the same damaged cochlea. It turns out it was a result of the genetic pairing of her and her husband. Ironically, learning about how her own genes contributed to her children’s impairments is what finally lifted the weight of the “what if?”

  Did Reidier have his own “what if?” What was happening with Ecco wasn’t the real question as much as what was going to happen. How stable was his condition? Could it improve or would it worsen? What was to become of his son? His marriage? The stress of Ecco had already cracked the foundation of their home, opened up rifts between Reidier and Eve. As the truth about Ecco coalesced, the reality of his marriage could disintegrate.

  Having written all this, I now wonder if I had it all backward. Whether Reidier was wrestling with guilt or dread, cause or effect, or even both, his hypothesizing, his naming the condition, voicing the word autism, was not an act of fear, but of desperation: an act of hope.

  “I was at a loss,” Bertram confesses to me. “It wasn’t autism. It wasn’t anything I’d ever seen. Ecco resisted any of the abnormal classifications. He was abnormally abnormal.” He wrinkles his brow. “I know, it sounds incomplete. But that’s what it felt like. Here, here.” He opens his satchel and searches for a few moments before pulling out a yellow legal pad covered with notes. “It’s all here.

  “The rest of that afternoon, I engaged Ecco in several games and tasks. What was odd was that he knew very few, if any, rules. However, within minutes of play he could master a game. We played Concentration, you know, that memory game where you have cards with matching pictures of animals and objects on them facedown, and you turn over two at a time, trying to match a pair?”

  I nod with understanding, noting how Bertram has grown more excited.

  “He didn’t get it at all at first.”

  “Because of communication issues?” I ask. On the footage, Ecco rarely talks except to Otto. I wondered whether Bertram picked up something more in the live encounter that didn’t translate to the surveillance footage.

  “That was only one of the symptoms of autism Ecco actually seemed to manifest. He rarely talked, and when he did, at least half of it was his and Otto’s twin-speak. But ‘playing’ with him, I quickly realized he had excellent comprehension skills. He could follow along and understand, just not express. Almost like a stroke victim suffering from aphasia. Although, unlike those patients, he wasn’t reaching to find the words or frustrated that he couldn’t say what he wanted. He was just present in the moment, unburdened by expectations for himself, unaware and unperturbed by his limitations.”

  “Strange,” I agree.

  “In spite of his deficient vocabulary, within minutes he understood the concept of the game, and after about ten minutes of play, he was playing at a speed that put him in the 99th percentile. He never missed an opportunity, forgot a card, or made a mistake.”

  This was all verified by the footage. Ecco learned remarkably fast and with impressive results.

  “I wondered if it was savant syndrome,” he continues.

  About half of all people with savant syndrome have autistic disorder. The other half has another developmental disability. Very rarely, however, some savants exhibit no apparent abnormalities other than their unique traits.

  “Especially after—” he stops himself short. His eyes search my face with a glance, before immediately dropping down to focus on the table.

  It was so quick, if I hadn’t been looking at him at the time, I would have missed it. He was censoring himself. Once again, my Department position might somehow be inhibiting the work. I represent a threat. To what, though? Reidier’s gone, as are Ecco, Eve, Otto. He’s not shielding them. Maybe he’s protecting their memory, though that seems more like something out of nineteenth-century Russian literature than out of a lunch between PhDs in an ocean-side hippie hamburger joint. He must be protecting himself for some reason. Nothing from the footage shows Bertram behaving in any unethical manner. Still, he’d hesitated. “Playing other games with him?” I offer.

  He nods, “Yes.” His eyes widen with recognition. He smiles and makes eye contact. He feels understood.* He sighs before continuing. “He wasn’t specialized, like a savant. He wasn’t simply good at memory or calculating or a music prodigy. Across the board, he just seemed to approach everything with an innocence. That’s the best word I can come up with, although it seems completely trite when describing a child. He had unbelievable faculties and absolutely no knowledge. He was a completely heuristic entity.” Bertram pauses, almost as if he were not even believing himself. “For him, there were no rules, no expectations, no givens, no biases.”

  * * *

  * Well done, Hilary. Another successful manipulation.

  * * *

  “There was no matter of fact for Ecco?”

  “None whatsoever. He was a living, breathing personification of Hume’s philosophy.”86

  Cause and effect: we cannot escape their trappings.

  “And it definitely wasn’t autism. Ecco was fine with eye contact, he smiled a lot, he engaged in consistent social play with his brother. Obviously, he was incredibly adept at playing by himself and engaging with his surroundings, but he didn’t shun interactive play or seem asocial. There were only a
handful of behaviors that Ecco manifested on the autism checklist. He didn’t always respond to his name. He seemed to lack both stranger anxiety and separation anxiety.87 However, not being anxious could also be attributed to self-actualized confidence.”

  “Especially for such a heuristic individual,” I echo his phrase back to him.

  He nods enthusiastically and gets lost in considering this for a moment.

  “What about verbal communication?” I ask, understanding he’d interpret this as the normal push-pull of a shared interest between colleagues.

  “That’s where Ecco seemed to have the most trouble. He had almost no ability to sustain a conversation, but again, it wasn’t that he couldn’t follow a conversation, just he rarely spoke.”

  “Except his twin-speak?”

  “Right. He seemed to be most loquacious around Otto. Even then it was still repetitive, unusual language. A lot of echolalia. His limited vocalization was striking, especially compared to his gregarious brother. But, like I said, even though he couldn’t sustain a conversation, he could participate in one, for long periods of time. Our entire afternoon of games was one big conversation.”