which he is; the story doesn’t give me enough information.”
She looks at the booklet. “Hmm. The scoring page says that C is the right answer, but I understand your dilemma. That’s good, Lou. You picked up on social nuances. Try another.”
I shake my head. “I want to think about this,” I say. “I don’t know which self is the new self.”
“But, Lou—” she says.
“Excuse me.” I push back from the table and stand. I know it is rude to do that; I know it is necessary to do that. For an instant, the room seems brighter, every edge outlined sharply with a glowing line. It is hard to judge depth; I bump into the corner of the table. The light dims; edges turn fuzzy. I feel uneven, unbalanced… and then I am crouching on the floor, holding onto the table.
The table edge is solid under my hand; it is some composite with a fake wood-grain top. My eyes can see the wood grain, and my hand can feel the non-wood texture. I can hear air rushing through the room vents, and the air whooshing in my own airway, and my heart beating, and the cilia in my ears—how do I know they are cilia?—shifting in the streams of sound. Smells assault me: my own acrid sweat, the cleaning compound used on the floor, Janis’s sweet-scented cosmetics.
It was like this when I first woke up. I remember now: waking up, flooded in sensory data, drowning in it, unable to find any stability, any freedom from the overload. I remember struggling, hour by hour, to make sense of the patterns of light and dark and color and pitch and resonance and scents and tastes and textures…
It is vinyl tile flooring, pale gray with speckles of darker gray; it is a table of composite with wood-grain finish; it is my shoe that I am staring at, blinking away the seductive pattern of the woven canvas and seeing it as shoe, with a floor under it. I am in the therapy room. I am Lou Arrendale, who used to be Lou Arrendale the autistic and am now Lou Arrendale the unknown. My foot in my shoe is on the floor is on the foundation is on the ground is on the surface of a planet is in the solar system is in the galaxy is in the universe is in the mind of God.
I look up and see the floor stretching away to the wall; it wavers and steadies again, lying as flat as the contractors made it but not perfectly flat, but that does not matter; it is called flat by convention. I make it look flat. That is what flat is. Flat is not an absolute, a plane: flat is flat enough .
“Are you all right? Lou, please… answer me!”
I am all right enough . “I’m okay,” I say to Janis. Okay means “all right enough,” not “perfectly all right.”
She looks scared. I scared her. I didn’t mean to scare her. When you scare someone, you should reassure them. “Sorry,” I say. “Just one of those moments.”
She relaxes a little. I sit up,then stand. The walls are not quite straight, but they are straight enough.
I am Lou enough. Lou-before and Lou-now, Lou-before lending me all his years of experience, experience he could not always understand, and Lou-now assessing, interpreting, reassessing. I have both— am both.
“I need to be alone for a while,” I tell Janis. She looks worried again. I know she’s worried about me; I know she doesn’t approve, for some reason.
“You need the human interaction,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “But I have hours of it a day. Right now I need to be alone and figure out what just happened.”
“Talk to me about it, Lou,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I need time…” I take a step toward the door. The table changes shape as I walk past it; Janis’s body changes shape; the wall and door lurch toward me like drunken men in a comedy—where did I see that? How do I know? How can I remember that and also cope with the floor that is only flat enough, not flat? With an effort, I make the walls and door flat again; the elastic table springs back to the rectangular shape I should see.
“But, Lou, if you’re having sensory problems, they may need to adjust the dosage—”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, not looking back. “I just need a break.” The final argument: “I need