Elizabeth Moon - The Speed of Dark

“But Mr. Arrendale has had two episodes of vandalism against his car in less than a week… That’s pretty significant.” She waits; no one says anything. Finally she shrugs and goes on.

“It’s like this. If the car was headed east, on the right-hand side of the road, the driver would have had to stop, get out, break the glass, run around his own car, get in, and drive off. There’s no way to break the glass while in the driver’s seat of a car going the same way your car was parked, not without a projectile weapon — and even then the angles are bad. If the car was headed west, though, the driver could reach across with something — a bat, say — or lob a rock through the windshield while still in motion. And then be gone before anyone got out to the front yard.”

“I see,” I say. Now that she has said it, I can visualize the approach, the attack, the escape. But why?

“You have to have some idea who’s upset with you,” the police officer says. She sounds angry with me.

“It does not matter how angry you are with someone; it is not all right to break things,” I say. I am thinking, but the only person I know who has been angry with me about going fencing is Emmy. Emmy does not have a car; I do not think she knows where Tom and Lucia live. I do not think Emmy would break windshields anyway. She might come inside and talk too loud and say something rude to Marjory, but she would not break anything.

“That’s true,” the officer says. “It’s not all right, but people do it anyway. Who is angry with you?”

If I tell her about Emmy, she will make trouble for Emmy and Emmy will make trouble for me. I am sure it is not Emmy. “I don’t know,” I say. I feel a stirring behind, me, almost a pressure. I think it is Tom, but I am not sure.

“Would it be all right, Officer, if the others left now?” Tom asks.

“Oh, sure. Nobody saw anything; nobody heard anything; well, you heard something, but you didn’t see anything — did anyone?”

A murmur of “no” and “not me” and “if I had only moved faster,” and the others trickle away to their cars. Marjory and Tom and Lucia stay.

“If you’re the target, and it appears you are, then whoever it is knew you would be here tonight. How many people know you come here on Wednesdays?”

Emmy does not know what night I go fencing. Mr. Crenshaw does not know I do fencing at all.

“Everyone who fences here,” Tom answers for me. “Maybe some of those from the last tournament — it was Lou’s first. Do people at your job know, Lou?”

“I don’t talk about it much,” I say. I do not explain why. “I’ve mentioned it, but I don’t remember telling anyone where the class is. I might have.”

“Well, we’re going to have to find out, Mr. Arrendale,” the officer says. “This kind of thing can escalate to physical harm. You be careful now.” She hands me a card with her name and number on it. “Call me, or Stacy, if you think of anything.”

When the police car moves away, Marjory says again, “I’ll be glad to drive you home, Lou, if you’d like.”

“I will take my car,” I say. “I will need to get it fixed. I will need to contact the insurance company again. They will not be happy with me.”

“Let’s see if there’s glass on the seat,” Tom says. He opens the car door. Light glitters on the tiny bits of glass on the dashboard, the floor, in the sheepskin pad of the seat. I feel sick. The pad should be soft and warm; now it will have sharp things in it. I untie the pad and shake it out onto the street. The bits of glass make a tiny high-pitched noise as they hit the pavement. It is an ugly sound, like some modern music. I am not sure that all the glass is gone; little bits may be in the fleece like tiny hidden knives.

“You can’t drive it like that, Lou,” Marjory says.

“He’ll have to drive it far enough to get a new windshield,” Tom says. “The headlights are all right; he could drive it, if he took it slow.”

“I can drive it 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.