home,” I say. “I will go carefully.” I put the sheepskin pad in the backseat and sit very gingerly on the front seat.
At home, later, I think about things Tom and Lucia said, playing the tape of it in my head.
“The way I look at it,” Tom said, “your Mr. Crenshaw has chosen to look at the limitations and not the possibilities. He could have considered you and the rest of your section as assets to be nurtured.”
“I am not an asset,” I said. “I am a person.”
“You’re right, Lou, but we’re talking here of a corporation. As with armies, they look at people who work for them as assets or liabilities. An employee who needs anything different from other employees can be seen as a liability—requiring more resources for the same output. That’s the easy way to look at it, and that’s why a lot of managers do look at it that way.”
“They see what is wrong,” I said.
“Yes. They may also see your worth—as an asset—but they want to get the asset without the liability.”
“What good managers do,” Lucia said, “is help people grow. If they’re good at part of their job and not so good at the rest of it, good managers help them identify and grow in those areas where they’re not as strong—but only to the point where it doesn’t impair their strengths, the reason they were hired.”
“But if a newer computer system can do it better—”
“That doesn’t matter. There’s always something. Lou, no matter if a computer or another machine or another person can do any particular task you do… do it faster or more accurately or whatever… one thing nobody can do better than you is be you ."
“But what good is that if I do not have a job?” I asked. “If I cannot get a job…”
“Lou, you’re a person—an individual like no one else. That’s what’s good, whether you have a job or not.”
“I’m an autistic person,” I said. “That is what I am. I have to have some way… If they fire me, what else can I do?”
“Lots of people lose their jobs and then get other jobs. You can do that, if you have to. If you want to.
You can choose to make the change; you don’t have to let it hit you over the head. It’s like fencing—you can be the one who sets the pattern or the one who follows it.”
I play this tape several times, trying to match tones to words to expressions as I remember them. They told me several times to get a lawyer, but I am not ready to talk to anyone I do not know. It is hard to explain what I am thinking and what has happened. I want to think it out for myself.
If I had not been what I am, what would I have been? I have thought about that at times. If I had found it easy to understand what people were saying, would I have wanted to listen more? Would I have learned to talk more easily? And from that, would I have had more friends, even been popular? I try to imagine myself as a child, a normal child, chattering away with family and teachers and classmates. If I had been that child, instead of myself, would I have learned math so easily? Would the great complicated constructions of classical music have been so obvious to me at first hearing? I remember the first time I heard Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor … the intensity of joy I felt. Would I have been able to do the work I do? And what other work might I have been able to do?
It is harder to imagine a different self now that I am an adult. As a child, I did imagine myself into other roles. I thought I would become normal, that someday I would be able to do what everyone else did so easily. In time, that fantasy faded. My limitations were real, immutable, thick black lines around the outline of my life. The only role I play is normal.
The one thing all the books agreed on was the permanence of the deficit, as they called it. Early intervention could ameliorate the symptoms, but the central problem remained. I felt that central problem daily, as if I had a big round stone in the middle of myself, a heavy, awkward presence that affected everything I did or tried to do.
What if it weren’t there?
I