supposed to say good-bye in public. I go back to the campus. I want to watch my whirligigs and spin spirals for a while before going home to bed.
CAMERON AND I ARE IN THE GYM, TALKING IN BURSTS AS WE bounce-on the trampolines.
We have both done a lot of good work in the last few days, and we are relaxing.
Joe Lee comes in and I look at Cameron. Joe Lee is only twenty-four. He would be one of us if he hadn’t had the treatments that were developed too late for us. He thinks he’s one of us because he knows he would have been and he has some of our characteristics. He is very good at abstractions and recursions, for instance. He likes some of the same games; he likes our gym. But he is much better—he is normal, in fact— in his ability to read minds and expressions. Normal minds and expressions. He misses with us, who are his closest relatives in that way.
“Hi, Lou,” he says to me. “Hi,Cam." I see Cameron stiffen. He doesn’t like to have his name shortened.
He has told me it feels like having his legs cut off. He has told Joe Lee, too, but Joe Lee forgets because he spends so much of his time with the normals. “Howzitgoin?” he asks, slurring the words and forgetting to face us so we can see his lips. I catch it, because my auditory processing is better than Cameron’s and I know that Joe Lee often slurs his words.
“How is it going?” I say clearly, for Cameron’s benefit. “Fine, Joe Lee.” Cameron breathes out.
“Didjahear?” Joe Lee asks, and without waiting for an answer he rushes on. “Somebody’s working on a reversal procedure for autism. It worked on some rats or something, so they’re trying it on primates. I’ll bet it won’t be long before you guys can be normal like me.”
Joe Lee has always said he’s one of us, but this makes it clear that he has never really believed it. We are “you guys” and normal is “like me.” I wonder if he said he was one of us but luckier to make us feel better or to please someone else.
Cameron glares; I can almost feel the tangle of words filling his throat, making it impossible for him to speak. I know better than to speak for him. I speak only for myself, which is how everyone should speak.
“So you admit you are not one of us,” I say, and Joe Lee stiffens, his face assuming an expression I’ve been taught is “hurt feelings.”
“How can you say that, Lou? You know it’s just the treatment—”
“If you give a deaf child hearing, he is no longer one of the deaf,” I say. “If you do it early enough, he never was. It’s all pretending otherwise.”
“What’s all pretending otherwise?Otherwise what?” Joe Lee looks confused as well as hurt, and I realize that I left out one of the little pauses where a comma would be if you wrote what I said. But his confusion alarms me—being not understood alarms me; it lasted so long when I was a child. I feel the words tangling in my head, in my throat, and struggle to get them out in the right order, with the right expression. Why can’t people just say what they mean, the words alone? Why do I have to fight with tone and rate and pitch and variation?
I can feel and hear my voice going tight and mechanical. I sound angry to myself, but what I feel is scared. “They fixed you before you were born, Joe Lee,” I say. “You never lived days—one day—like us.”
“You’re wrong,” he says quickly, interrupting. “I’m just like you inside, except—”
“Except what makes you different from others, what you call normal,” I say, interrupting in turn. It hurts to interrupt. Miss Finley, one of my therapists, used to tap my hand if I interrupted. But I could not stand to hear him going on saying things that were not true. “You could hear and process language sounds—you learned to talk normally. You didn’t have dazzle eyes.”
“Yeah, but my brain works the same way.”
I shake my head. Joe Lee should know better; we’ve told him again and again. The problems we have with hearing and vision and other senses aren’t in the sensory organs but in the brain. So the brain does not work the same if someone doesn’t have those problems. If we were computers, Joe Lee would have