take applied math and study computers.
There are jobs in computers. They said astronomy was not practical. If I live longer, it will not be too late anymore.”
This is the most I have ever heard Linda talk. Her face is pinker on the cheeks now; her eyes wander less.
“I did not know you liked stars,” I say.
“Stars are far apart from each other,” she says. “They do not have to touch to know each other. They shine at each other from far away.”
I start to say that stars do not know each-other, that stars are not alive, but something stops me. I read that in a book, that stars are incandescent gas, and in another book that gas is inanimate matter. Maybe the book was wrong. Maybe they are incandescent gas and alive.
Linda looks at me, actually makes eye contact. “Lou — do you like stars?
“Yes,” I say. “And gravity and light and space and— ”
“Betelgeuse,” she says. She grins, and it is suddenly lighter in the hall. I did not know it was dark before.
The dark was there first, but the light caught up. “Rigel. Antares. Light and all colors. Wavelengths…”
Her hands ripple in the air, and I know she means the pattern that wavelength and frequency make.
“Binaries,” I say. “Brown dwarfs.”
Her face twists and relaxes. “Oh, that’s old,” she says. “Chuand Sanderly have reclassified a lot of those— ” She stops. “Lou — I thought you spent all your time with normals. Playing normal.”
“I go to church,” I say. “I go to fencing club.”
“Fencing?”
“Swords,” I say. Her worried look does not change. “It’s… a kind of game,” I say. “We try to poke each other.”
“Why?” She still looks puzzled. “If you like stars— ”
“I like fencing, too,” I say.
“With normal people,” she says.
“Yes, I like them.”
“It’s hard…” she says. “I go to the planetarium. I try to talk to the scientists who come, but… the words tangle. I can tell they do not want to talk to me. They act like I am stupid or crazy.”
“The people I know, they are not too bad,” I say. I feel guilty as I say it, because Marjory is more than
“not too bad.” Tom and Lucia are better than “not too bad.” “Except for the one who tried to kill me."
“Tried to kill you?” Linda says. I am surprised that she did not know but remember that I never told her.
Maybe she does not watch the news.
“He was angry with me,” I say.
“Because you are autistic?”
“Not exactly… well… yes.”What was the core of Don’s anger, after all, but the fact that I, a mere incomplete, a false-person, was succeeding in his world?
“That is sick,” Linda says, with emphasis. She gives a great shrug and turns away. “Stars,” she says.
I go into my office, thinking of light and dark and stars and the space between them that is full of light they pour out. How can there be any dark in space with all the stars in it? If we can see the stars, that means there is light. And our instruments that see other than visible light, they detect it in a great blur—it is everywhere.
I do not understand why people speak of space as cold and dark, unwelcoming. It is as if they never went out in the night and looked up. Wherever real dark is, it is beyond the range of our instruments, far on the edge of the universe, where dark came first. But the light catches up.
Before I was born, people thought even more wrong things about autistic children. I have read about it.
Darker than dark.
I did not know Linda liked stars. I did not know she wanted to work in astronomy. Maybe she even wanted to go into space, the way I did. Do. Do still. If the treatment works, maybe I can—the very thought holds me motionless, frozen in delight, and then I have to move. I stand up and stretch, but it is not enough.
Eric is just getting off the trampoline as I come into the gym. He has been bouncing to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but it is too strong for what I want to think about. Eric nods at me, and I change the music, scrolling through the possibilities until something feels right. Carmen . The orchestral suite. Yes.
I need that excitement. I need that explosive quality. I bounce higher and higher, feeling the wonderful openness of free fall before I feel the equally wonderful compression, joints squeezing, muscles working to push me to