Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Another major indicator of autism is obsession. “Would you say he was obsessive in his attentiveness to the interaction?”

  “I thought about that of course. But no. He was focused. But not in a rigid way. He was happy to explore tangential paths as they presented themselves within the dynamic. No limit to his interests, no tics or repetitive movements. Nor did he have any sensory symptoms.” He shrugs. “The language was the most profound deficit in all his behavior. And lack of presupposed ideas.”

  “Korsakoff syndrome?”

  Bertram’s eyes rise up to meet mine again. He scratches at his beard, smiling at me knowingly. “We played another type of matching game. I’d show him variety of cards and ask him to put the ones that go together into piles. So, for instance, one group of cards would all have pictures of animals on them, a bear, a monkey, a snake; another group would be of buildings, an office building, a church, a house; a third group had vegetables, corn cobs on the stalk, apples on the tree, tomatoes on the vine, you get the gist. Ecco had no sense of association whatsoever. No concept of categories. He’d put the house, the bear, and the tomatoes in one pile; the church, the apple, and the snake in another. However, when I used objects in the room, various cushions from the couch and chairs, a collection of toys like Legos, action figures, and blocks, or the remote control, a DVD case, and a DVD disk, he grouped them all perfectly.”

  “So what, he had an issue with interpreting two-dimensional information?” I ask.

  “No. He could point out family members in photographs without any problem. But the test was inconclusive and unimportant, ultimately. What was critical was what happened after the test.”

  Bertram stares at me for a few moments, biting his lip in concentration. He’s evaluating me. “We had been at it for quite some time, and I needed to use the restroom. So I left Ecco in the den. I was gone maybe three minutes or so. Ecco was right where I left him. Piles of grouped objects surrounded him. All of the couch cushions stacked together, a tower of DVD cases balanced next to the television, a mound of magazines and books. A heap of Legos and next to it, all of the cards we had played with, the photograph of tomatoes at the top of the deck.”

  The footage from the afternoon confirms Bertram’s story. It shows Ecco, relaxed yet determined, crisscrossing the room, reorganizing any object he could lift and carry to its “proper” pile. He seems neither rushed nor hesitant. He neither makes a mistake nor considers which pile to place something in. He seems almost like a worker ant completing his rounds, and once finished, takes his place sitting where he began, waiting for Bertram’s return.

  I laugh. “So he got into the game.”

  “He did,” Bertram continues in a measured tone. “It was, overwhelming. I, of course, went off to find Reidier, to show him. Once again, it was several minutes at best.”

  The footage shows Bertram’s surprise, as he takes it all in. He smiles down at Ecco, softly telling him he’ll be right back, just needs to go find his daddy.

  According to the footage counter, it took Bertram four minutes and forty-eight seconds to return. Ecco remains seated, but fidgets with what I now assume are Legos. Due to limited camera angles and Ecco’s placement, it is impossible to see his activity. The microphones, however, do pick up the slight, rhythmic clicking of plastic being snapped together.

  When Ecco finishes, he places his project out of sight on the floor, stands up, and wanders out of the room. Four minutes and twenty-two seconds have elapsed. Twenty-six seconds later, Bertram leads Reidier into the room, finishing up his explanation of the grouping game. Reidier takes in the room, noting all the various organized piles. A bemused smile curls at the corners of his mouth. “He did this all on his own?” Reidier asks.

  Bertram doesn’t really hear the question, though. He’s staring at the floor, where Ecco was sitting. “Kerek, look.” Bertram points at the spot out of sight.

  Reidier follows the line of Bertram’s finger. The curled corners of his mouth immediately flatten out. His eyes narrow. “You didn’t do that together?”

  “That wasn’t here when I left.”

  Reidier bends over and delicately picks up the object of focus, lifting it into view. It’s a nearly flawless sculpture of a tomato on a vine, made entirely out of Legos, spanning roughly one foot in diameter. “I guess I should have known that. Huh.”

  Due to the box-like shape of the Legos themselves, the tomato appears as if it were a “digitized” or “pixilated” version of itself, in three dimensions. Regardless, Ecco has successfully captured the curve of the fruit, the topography of its texture, the bright red sphere, green leaves, stem, all of it.*

  * * *

  * What the fuck is up with this kid?!

  * * *

  Bertram bends down near Reidier and picks up a second object. It is one of the cards from the grouping game. On it is a picture of a tomato on a vine.

  While Reidier and Bertram contemplate Ecco in the den, Eve sequesters herself in the kitchen with Otto. It is a stark, almost cliché, contrast of gender performance. As the men in her house set out to explore and fathom the depths of one boy’s mind, Eve, the sole woman, simply feeds the other boy’s stomach. The men hunt for answers, while the woman gathers together the fruits and vegetables for supper as she works to achieve a state of nonthinking. The men want to find, the women want to have. The men seek out the secrets unknown, the women seek the comfort of the known. She chops and organizes on the cutting board, while Otto sits on the counter next to her, his young legs dangling off the edge, and passes her another bunch of produce for cleaving.

  The quiet symbiosis between mother and son is almost hypnotic. The longer they continue in this manner, though, the more strained it becomes. The meditative sense of it warps into something fervent, something obsessive. The rhythmic taps of the knife on the wood fill the silence between them, but eventually transform into a pitiless, unforgiving metronome.

  The two are ultimately rescued by their own limited supply of greens. Eve holds out her hand to Otto, who has nothing left to fill it with. Breaking out of her disciplined trancelike state, Eve looks up at her son, who holds both his palms up in the air and shrugs.

  “All done,” he says.

  Eve guffaws. Otto, unable to resist, joins in, laughing along with his mother. She moves over, rests her hands on the counter on either side of him, and kisses his forehead. He mimics his mother, but succeeds in only kissing the air between her chin and neck.

  The tension dissolves out of the air.

  “You are a perfect helper,” she says, as she brushes his hair back and looks into his eyes.

  He nods, “I know.”

  She laughs again and hugs him. A smothered giggle squeezes out from the embrace.

  “’Ere,” she says, handing him a slice of green pepper and taking one for herself. “Your reward.”

  He dutifully crunches down on it. While chewing away, he suggests, “Maybe next time, we should cut up Twizzlers.”

  Eve laughs again, wagging a half-eaten slice of pepper at him. “So your reward would be candy?”

  “Oui.”

  She brushes his hair back again, cups the back of his head with her hand, and leans him forward for another kiss.

  Scooching back on the counter, he contemplates the remaining piece of pepper in his hand. “Mommy, is the green I see the same as the green you see, or is your green red while my green’s green?”*

  * * *

  * Something I always used to wonder myself. It bothered me that there was never a way to get to a consensus. No possibility of a resolution. Toby, on the other hand, revels in this little vortex. He delights in the infidelity of language.

  “Forget color,” he said when I brought it up. “It’s so basic. None of it tracks. Not a single word. You say one thing, and I hear another. We’re all in our own little worlds. Worlds of words. Take for example something a little more abstract than color. Something that comes from within, something that we define, untainted by the iffi
ness of the material world. Take a more stimulating touchstone, like love. What does it mean?

  “No matter what the whiny poets say, love isn’t as all encompassing, eternal, and fervent as the Romantics have led us to believe. It can be compartmentalized, momentary, and considered. I can fall in love twelve times walking down the block. Once with a smile, another time with the sway of a ponytail as it bounces left to right with every step, and again with the way a girl places a hand on her boyfriend’s shoulder absentmindedly. But when we express love, when we voice a term that we all define together, we get lost. You say one thing, she hears another. Each of us tells himself a story about what this other person means. But words aren’t fixed. Words are merely containers that we pour meaning into and try to give it shape. If people could just accept that, they’d be a whole lot happier.”

  “Accept that we’re each of us trapped in our own lonely worlds and can never actually connect with another person?” I ask.

  “Accept that we have a lot more to do with the creation of reality than we care to admit. Come on, you know this more than anybody I know.”

  I do. I did. I don’t even know why I’m on this right now. For that matter, I don’t know why I’m even bothering to write at all. No matter how hard I write green, you still just see red.

  * * *

  Eve pauses a moment. Her chin wrinkles in thought. “That depends,” she answers.

  “On what?”

  “On whether you are a little boy or a little philosopher.”

  Otto gnaws on his bottom lip, considering her statement. Finally, after several moments he says, “I know that I’m a little boy. But I don’t know if I’m not . . . the other thing.”

  “A philosopher.”

  “What’s a phisophiler?”

  “Someone who thinks a lot about how to answer the unanswerable questions.”

  “Can I only be one or the other?”

  Eve takes a step back, bends down a little, resting her hands on her knees so she’s face to face with Otto. “Until this very moment, I would ’ave said yes. You can only be one or the other. But clearly, I was mistaken, mon petit trognon.” She taps his nose with the tip of her finger and smiles.

  “So what would a phisophiler say?”

  Eve sighs, and leans against the counter next to her son, looking down at the chopped vegetables. “A philosopher would ask how do you even know the pepper exists, let alone that it’s green?”

  “’Cause it’s there.” Otto points in protest. “I see it.”

  “You also felt it and tasted it, no?”

  Otto nods.

  “But don’t you do those very same things when you dream? See things, feel things, hear things?”

  He nods again.

  “And are your dreams real?”

  “As real as the pepper?” Otto responds with precocious insight.

  “Oui, oui. It looks like I do ’ave a little philosopher. I don’t know where you got it from. Not your father, scientists are the opposite of philosophers.88 And I failed my philosophy final in college.”

  Otto’s eyes widen, “You did?”

  “Oui.”

  “Did you not do your homework?”

  “Non, no, I studied plenty. But the test only had one question, and it wasn’t on the reading.”

  “What was it on?”

  “The teacher asked us to prove that the chair we were sitting on didn’t exist. I filled two blue books with ideas from every philosopher that we had read that seemed remotely on topic. Mais pas, it was to no avail,” she says as she takes down various salad bowls from the cupboard. “Your mère is not a philosopher. I am a reader and a writer.”

  “That’s ok, maman. We can’t all be.”

  She laughs and kisses the top of his head.

  “So what do writers say about my green and your green?”

  She casts him a sideways glance, tosses a bunch of chopped vegetables into a bowl, and purses her lips to the side in thought. “That the actual physical color of the pepper is unimportant. It’s not whether the color we see is the same, but whether we share ’ze same experience. Your green, my green,” she holds up a piece of pepper, “the object is unimportant. We don’t really deal with actual physical objects, but only our impressions of them.* Everything around us is a sign, what gives it meaning is how we read it. A red light at an intersection means what?”

  * * *

  * Toby would love this chick.

  * * *

  “Stop,” Otto replies dutifully.

  “Oui. But not because red lights have always meant stop. But because we decided, we agreed that red lights mean stop for us. The pepper, its color is unimportant. What is important is how you interpret it, how you feel about it. And whether or not I understand how you feel about it. The most important thing is knowing and understanding each other. Knowing how we feel.”

  Otto nods. He helps pick up the pieces of vegetables still straggling on the counter and tosses them in the bowl. “You didn’t feel very good about your phisopholy test, did you, maman?”

  Eve tilts her head toward her son sympathetically and frowns. “No. I didn’t feel very good, at all. Pass me the can of beans, by you.”

  He turns and does as his mother asks. In the handoff, he says, “I know what you should have written.”

  “Oh really?” She raises an eyebrow, while emptying the can of beans into another bowl. “And what is that, my little Descartes?”

  “What chair?”

  Outside, in the backyard, Reidier and Bertram talk in excited, hushed tones at the picnic table.

  “On intelligence testing, he showed excellent ability, no difficulty solving puzzles, deciphering rules and patterns,” Bertram reported. “Even tempered, quick to smile and experience joy. Logical comprehension levels were very high. Psychologically, developmentally, Ecco’s not just normal but exceptional.”

  “Except . . .” Reidier gestures, opening his hands outward, palms up, to indicate something is missing.

  “Yes. Except for the obvious,” Bertram agrees.

  “There’s no damage that you can determine?”

  “Nothing psychologically. We still need physical scans. But he lacks basic knowledge. Seems to have no understanding of the world around him, how it works, what things do. Yet it’s as if this lack of knowledge makes him so wise.”

  “So you’re telling me my son’s the Buddha?”

  Bertram lets out a huge belly laugh.

  “What was so funny?” Eve asks, as she sets down a platter of antipasto and a bowl of salad.

  Otto, trailing behind, delivers a pile of paper plates and plastic silverware.

  Bertram looks up at Eve with a smile. “Just the magical nature of your son.”

  Eve places a hand lovingly on Otto’s head. “You should hear his philosophical insights.”

  “Oh,” Bertram says apologetically, “I was referring to Ecco. Though I would be fascinated to hear young master Otto’s musings on the nature of life.”

  Bertram pokes Otto in the stomach. He giggles and retreats behind his mother’s leg. Eve grunts, picks up Otto, and heads back into the kitchen for more food.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Bertram asks.

  Reidier shakes his head no. “It’s the whole Ecco thing.”

  “She blames you?”

  Reidier stares at his friend with surprise. “How did you get that?”

  “I don’t know, really. I guess I just picked up on some subtle cues. Did something happen to Ecco? An accident?”

  Reidier nods. “Yes. In Chicago, a few months ago.” Reidier shifts in his seat. “He was with me at work one day.” Reidier lets out a long sigh. “My printer was out of toner, so I had sent the document to the one in the main office. It was just down the hall.”

  Reidier’s eyes search the surface of the picnic table, never focusing on anything in particular. “It was a few minutes. Five at most. But, on my way back, I heard his crying from down the hall and sprinted to the lab.”r />
  He stops, his eyes now set, focused through the table, at this image from the past. “He was just lying there, curled into a fetal position, wailing. I don’t know what happened. My equipment, nothing was turned over or upset in any way. Exactly how I left it. I scooped him up off the platform. Everything seemed fine, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I rocked him in my arms for over half an hour until he finally calmed down.”

  Reidier picks at the wood grain on the tabletop for a few moments before looking up at Bertram. “What happened is a complete mystery.”

  Bertram frowns in sympathy. “That’s when Ecco . . . started being this way?”

  Reidier nods slightly.

  “Was it a gradual deterioration? Or all at once?”

  “The Ecco you met today began that afternoon.”

  It was also the same day Eve had her episode.89

  In discussing what is obviously a very painful topic, Reidier exhibits very little emotion. Rather his distress manifests itself through a stilted delivery, filled with pauses, and a syntax that ultimately deteriorates into this sterile declarative structure, one that sounds almost mystical. Unable to manage whatever guilt he holds inside, or navigate the culpability insinuated by Eve, Reidier can only manage to discuss it through simple statements of fact, tinted with almost cosmological overtones. Ecco began that afternoon.

  This absence is only further accentuated by the lack of any footage covering this incident, any examination in Eve’s journal, or examination in Reidier’s notes. Was it so painful that it had to be eradicated from their personal history, like Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s pruning of the Hundred Schools of Thought?* Or is it not even the truth? Another fiction perhaps, a riddle deciphered by the algebra of lying.

  * * *

  * Sometimes Hilary is a little too erudite for her own good. In 213 BCE, the Emperor commanded the burning of all philosophy and history books from every state except Qin. He also made sure to bury alive a large number of intellectuals in case they caught the writing bug. The guy erased history.