The Meridians(23)

"So he's smart," said Robbie. "Shouldn't that be a good thing?"

"Mr. Randall," said the neurologist kindly. "No one is saying that Kevin is dumb. Indeed, he may be the smartest person in this room in certain respects. But that doesn't change the fact that he is not acting as a normally developing child does."

"You mentioned two other things," interjected Lynette. "What are they?"

"Well, color and symmetry, to put it simply," said the doctor. She pointed at the tower. "A perfect pillar, four blocks to a side, completely symmetrical. This is not only beyond most children Kevin's age, it wouldn't occur to them to try to do it even if they were capable of trying such a thing. Similarly, note that he has grouped all the colors in the tower together with other like colors. There is no helter-skelter mixing of hue, there is simply red with red, blue with blue, yellow beside yellow, and so on. Similar to the way he organizes his toy cars, he is organizing these blocks."

"Why does that mean autism?" asked Robbie, though he could feel his mental defenses and sense of denial against the diagnosis fading, along with his anger.

Doctor Chen steepled her fingers and leaned back in her chair. "Please understand that no one knows everything - or even terribly much - about autism. There are many theories why autistic children act the way they do. One of them is that they are born without certain filters."

"Filters?" said someone, and Robbie was in such a state of shock that he could not even tell if he had spoken or if it had been Lynette who had said the word.

"We are constantly bombarded by sensory information every moment of every day. Sights, smells, tastes, touches, sounds, they all combine to create a world that is terribly overwhelming."

"I've never noticed that," said Robbie instantly.

Dr. Chen smiled as though he had just fed her a soft pitch on a baseball diamond. "No. You wouldn't. Because you and I and your wife have filters that enable us to discard what is useless and take in only those things that matter most to us. But many people - myself included - believe that autism is a reaction to a lack of this filtering system. Imagine what it would be like if you had no way of throwing out extraneous matters - everything from the noise of the air conditioning in your house to the sound of the innocuous Muzak in an elevator - and were instead inundated with anything and everything. How would you react?"

"I'd want to crawl into a hole," said Robbie.

"Exactly. You would seek to find ways to limit your sensory inputs. For example, you might avoid eye contact, since eyes communicate incredible amounts of information. Or," she added, tapping the tower, "you might take a jumble of colored blocks and reduce it to one large block, with the colors grouped in the smallest sets possible."

Robbie couldn't talk for a moment. He wanted to, but no words that he could think of seemed either adequate or appropriate. Mostly, he just wanted to say some very nasty words, though whether he wanted to say them to himself, or Doctor Chen, or someone else was anyone's guess.

"What do we do?" asked Lynette.

The kind woman behind the desk sighed as though that were the real question, the only question. "We wait," she said. "There is no way to be sure of autism at this young an age. I'm going to order some tests to see if it isn't some other disorder that we can tag physiologically, but if they come back negative or inconclusive, then it is just a question of waiting to see what does - or does not - develop next."

Doctor Chen sent them home soon after that, along with some brochures and numbers of support groups, and Robbie and Lynette settled into the business of waiting to see what would happen. It looked more and more like autism as the days and weeks and months went by, however. Kevin grew more obsessed with creating order out of chaos, with bringing anything that smelled of randomness into some bivouac of categorization or pattern. He would no longer look at them, for anything.

Then, close to Christmas, Doctor Chen called and informed them that she had a colleague who wanted to give Kevin a series of tests that would give them a clearer picture of what was going on in his unique - and uniquely troubled - brain.

They went immediately, and spent the day in a place that looked more like a high paid lawyer's office than that of a doctor, with plush carpeting, comfortable seats, a fish tank, and many other indicators of wealth and rank. Doctor Chen was there, as was her colleague, Doctor Stanton, a man who looked too young to be a doctor but whom Doctor Chen assured them was a highly qualified neurologist and a specialist in abnormal cerebral physiology.

And then it was home again, home again, jiggity jog, to wait for the results. Christmas, easily Lynette's favorite holiday and one that Robbie himself also loved, came almost as an afterthought, and so it was almost appropriate that when Doctor Chen called, her first words were, "I'm so sorry to interrupt your Christmas, but I thought you'd want to hear what Doctor Stanton found."

"Of course," said Robbie, motioning for Lynette to get on the second phone extension and listen in.

"It's definitely autism," said Doctor Chen, having known them long enough now to know that they would want to hear the straight story, with no puffery or padding. Still, even though it was the way that Robbie preferred to get good or bad news, he still felt as though someone had hit him in the gut with a jackhammer.

"How can you tell?" said Lynette from the other phone.