Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

“So you get inside his head how, exactly?” his mama said. “Is this what Carmela keeps describing as ‘magic telepathy’?”

Kit shook his head. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “I’m still working out how to describe it.

Ponch sees it as making a new world to go to…or finding that world ready-made. Once you make it, or find it, you go there.”

“ Ponch sees it…” His mother shook her head, sloshed the coffee around in her cup, drank some, and made a face: It was going cold.

“We’ll go there and look around,” Kit said. “We’ll see what his world looks like to him.

Assuming we can get in all right. If that doesn’t work… I’ll have to think of something else. But at least this is a place to start.”

His mother put the cup down and pushed it away. “If you do actually get to talk to him,” she said, looking thoughtful, “there’s possibly something you should keep in mind. Autistic people have trouble, sometimes, predicting what other human beings’ minds are going to do. It’s a skill they have to develop with practice, whereas we take it almost completely for granted, that prediction inside: ‘If I do this, then she’ll do that,’ and so on. So you have to be prepared for the things you say to really upset him, more than would seem reasonable. He may even have trouble believing in you.“

Kit looked at her, wondering what she meant. “It’s not that he’d think he was hallucinating you, exactly,” his mama said. “This isn’t that kind of perceptual problem. But some autistic people have trouble conceiving of anything existing outside the workings of their own minds. The concept of ‘the other’ seems to take a long time forming. That’s part of why so many of them can’t make or keep eye contact with other people. Yet for the same reason, a lot of them seem not to know what fear is.”

“Weird,” Kit said.

“Not as such,” said his mother. “Different, yes. You may not scare him, but you may upset him… so be ready for that.”

“Okay,” Kit said.

His mother sat back and looked sad. “The problem is that there are probably as many kinds of autism as there are people who have it,” she said. “And not enough of them come back from that side of things to tell us how what’s happened to them looks or feels.” She shook her head. “Some of the few who have say that the world just got too overwhelming to be borne. They felt like they were surrounded by sounds that were too intense, sights they couldn’t bear to see. So they had to withdraw inside themselves to get away, or even hurt themselves over and over again as a way to blot out the pain outside. It’s the only way they can control it. Others tell about feeling so sealed away from the world and the things and people in it that they hurt themselves just to be able to feel something. You get kids who are autistic from age two, and others who’re perfectly normal until suddenly they turn ten or twelve and something just goes wrong…and they turn inward and don’t come out again for years. If ever.” Kit’s mama looked haunted.

Kit nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this complicated.”

“It is.”

“You know anything that would be good for me to read?”

“There are lots of books,” his mother said. “Some of the ones in the hospital library are going to be too technical for you.” She looked over Kit’s shoulder at the books spread out on the floor. “But some won’t be, and they’re more recent than these. Let me see what I can bring you.”

“Great. One thing, though. I really need to take tomorrow off to work on this. Can you call school and get me off?”

She scowled at him. “You don’t have a test or anything tomorrow?”

“Huh? No.”

“I’m not going to make a habit of this…”

“’m not asking you to, Mama! But it’s going to take more than just lunch hour to make a start on this, and I don’t want to have to run off all of a sudden in the middle of something that’s going to make a difference.”

His mother sat thinking. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. You can have a stomach bug or something.”

“No, Mama! Don’t lie to them. Just tell them I need a personal day.”

She gave him a slightly approving look. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Mama. You’re the best.” He got up and kissed her, and took her coffee cup. “You want some more?”

“Yes.” His mother leaned back on the sofa. “Two sugars. And then I want you to explain to me why I can hear the DVD player and the remote yelling at each other in Japanese in the middle of the night.”

Kit shut his eyes briefly in horror, and went to get the coffee.

Quite early the next morning, Kit came downstairs to find his sister sitting in front of the TV with a plate of half-finished toast, and a most peculiar expression on her face. “Brother dear…”

Carmela said.

This tone of voice usually meant that something bad was going to happen. And I haven’t even had my cornflakes yet

, Kit thought. “What?”

“I need to talk to you about the TV.”

“Uh… what about it?” He went into the kitchen to make a start at least on the cornflakes, before she really got rolling.

“Why did Pop tell me not to watch it?”

“Uh,” Kit said, “maybe I should ask you first — if Pop told you not to watch it, then what’re you doing?”

If he hoped that taking the offensive with his sister would help him even a little, the hope was misplaced. “Why do what they say until you can figure out why?”

Carmela said from the living room. “And with Pop at work and Mama asleep, there’s no way I’m going to find out the whys from them for hours. So I ask you, instead… while having a look myself.”

Kit said nothing, just rummaged enthusiastically in the fridge for the milk.

“Most of the shows don’t make much sense,” Carmela said. “And a lot of others are in weird languages. This has to do with all the yelling in Japanese the other day, am I right?”

“To a certain extent,” Kit said, getting a bowl out of the cupboard and then opening a drawer for a spoon.

His sister sighed. “You know,” she said, “you’re bad at covering your tracks when you’ve busted something. Hey, that’s a local phone number!”

Kit’s eyes widened with shock. He hurried in to find his sister goggling at a screen full of billowing white smoke and a number with a 516 area code…both of which, to his vast relief, then dissolved into whangy guitar music and an offer for cut-rate Elvis CDs.

Carmela looked up at Kit, registering his reaction, and shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re into this retro stuff,” she said, changing channels to her more usual morning fare, the channel with all the cartoons. “It’s a good thing you’ve got Nita, because it’s gonna be a long time before anybody else wants to date you, the taste you’ve got.”

“I have not ‘got’ Nita,” Kit said through gritted teeth. “And as for taste, you shouldn’t be talking.

Tom and Jerry cartoons? Give me a break.”

“I’m waiting for the Road Runner,” Carmela said, managing to sound both pitying and incredibly stuck-up. “A symbol of innocence endlessly pursued by the banality of evil.”

Kit went back to his cornflakes. “I wish the evil I keep running into was a little more banal,” he muttered as he picked up his bowl and started eating. The Lone Power’s favorite tool, entropy, had already struck locally: His cornflakes had gone soggy.

Resigned, he sat down and ate them anyway. Shortly Carmela came wandering into the kitchen and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “You got today off, huh?”