The Meridians(22)

And Robbie did. He really looked. And realized that his wife was definitely right that there was something wrong about the way Kevin was playing with the cars. There was no vroom-vrooming, no crashing and bashing of the cars together.

Instead, he was simply lining the cars up. Over and over he would line them up, then move them apart, then realign them again.

"It's a little weird," admitted Robbie, but he still didn't understand why Lynette would be crying the way she was just because the kid wasn't having a demolition derby with the vehicles. "But why are you crying, sweetie?"

"It's not a little weird. It's a lot weird. Watch what he's doing."

Robbie did. He watched even harder, and eventually he saw what Lynette was alluding to. He cocked his head as he watched, unsure for a few moments if he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.

Yes. He was.

He tested what he thought he was seeing, and took a few of the cars out of line, then mixed all the cars up in a jumble.

Kevin lined them up again.

Robbie repeated the exercise.

Kevin lined the cars up again.

And this time, Robbie gasped. The cars were all different shapes and sizes, most of them about the size of his fist, with wheels of different colors. There was a purple pickup truck, a red tow truck, a yellow sports car, and so on and so on. Not one of them was the same. But each time he mixed up the cars, Kevin would line them up according to length and height, smallest to largest.

Moving slowly now, Robbie took one of the cars away, and this time instead of merely moving it away from the group, he put it in his pocket.

Kevin's reaction was instantaneous. He began screaming and banging his hand against his head, hitting himself so hard that Robbie could see the vague tattoo outline of the boy's handprint against his skin.

He's not saying anything, thought Robbie. Just screaming.

And not looking at me.

Robbie took the car back out of his pocket and gave it back to Kevin, who immediately quieted and began putting the cars in line, then moving them apart, then putting them back in line again. They watched him do it until late in the night, and Kevin never stopped. Not even when his diaper was so full that it made an audible squishing sound against the carpet, not even when it was well past dinnertime, not even when it was way beyond his normal bedtime. He just kept moving the cars together, then apart, then together, then apart.

And made not a single sound the entire time.

The next day, Robbie took off work and took Kevin to Doctor Abernathy, who this time agreed that something might be amiss and gave them a referral to a neurologist. The neurologist listened patiently while Robbie explained what had been happening, with Lynette sitting beside him and Kevin in a corner, still playing with the cars.

The neurologist, a diminutive woman in her fifties named Doctor Chen, nodded, then came back with a box. She dumped the box out in front of Kevin, burying his cars in a pile of Megablocks, the large version of Legos that were built with toddlers in mind - though not for children of Kevin's young age.

Kevin looked like he might be considering screaming, then took hold of one of the blocks. He held it in his hand as though weighing it, then put it together with one of the other blocks. Then put together another, and another. Soon he had a tower almost as tall as himself, twelve inches to a side and straight up in a perfect pillar, like a rainbow obelisk.

Doctor Chen picked up the tower, and Kevin immediately moved back to playing with his cars as though the blocks had never existed. The doctor brought the tower to her desk, then looked at Robbie and Lynette for a long time.

Finally, she said, "Do you want the hard version or the soft version?"

"Just tell us," whispered Lynette.

"I'll have to run tests, but I suspect that your son is autistic."

Robbie had been worried about this very thing, but he felt rage growing within him like a scythe-bearing beast, ready to cut down everything in its path. He half-rose from his seat. "How can you say that?" he asked in a harsh voice. "How can you say that after listening to us for less than ten minutes and then just having him build with your stupid blocks?"

Doctor Chen waited patiently, looking at him with kind eyes, and slowly Robbie sat back down. "I'm sorry," she said then, "but I've been doing much more than simply listening to you. I've been watching your son, and he is displaying classic symptoms of the disorder: marked impairment in the ability to make eye contact, which I tested when I went over and gave him the blocks. He also shows a marked and abnormal preoccupation with repetitive tasks, based on your telling of what he's been doing with his toys and what I observed of him with his cars. Then there's this," she said, and touched the tower.

"What about it?" asked Robbie, still trying to calm the anger that continuously wanted to boil up within him. "It looks like he did a damn fine job."

"He did," agreed Doctor Chen. "Too good a job, in fact. Note the fact that he has done three things with this tower that are completely beyond the abilities of most normally functioning children his age."

"What?" asked Lynette in a quiet voice. "I didn't see anything." But Robbie got the impression she had seen something, and that it had scared her tremendously.

Doctor Chen spoke softly, but firmly. "First of all, I would like to point out the tremendous amount of focus that your child put into this task. There was no break, there was no wandering gaze. As soon as he had assessed what the blocks were for - in itself unusual for someone of his age - he put them together, without any kind of cajoling or need for someone to make him do it."