The Meridians(35)

Kevin nodded. He had started talking soon after the night she had heard him speaking in those strange whispers in his bed, saying "Witten was white" over and over, but had never developed what anyone could fairly call a scintillating conversational persona. His conversation tended toward the esoteric, the oblique, and the repetitive. It took her years to crack "the Kevin Code," as she jokingly described her son's mode of conversation to her friends.

The day she had brought out the laptop was no exception to his preferred mode of speech. Rather than say anything as crass as "Can I try?" the then five-year-old started sucking his fingers loudly. After waiting for a suitable time, she asked without looking at him, "Do your fingers hurt, Kevin?" She did not look at him because, like many autistics, Kevin had an aversion to eye contact. To look directly into his eyes was to establish a connection too strong to be borne, and so would often signal the early demise of any conversation. Discussions had to be had within the framework of sideways glances from under heavily-veiled lids.

Kevin nodded, but said, "No hurting, no pain, no owies, no discomfort." It was a typically repetitive speech pattern, but within it Lynette felt sure that there was something more hiding. Some meaning she would have to apprehend.

"So your hands don't hurt, then why are you sucking on them?"

Kevin said nothing. Rather, he licked his fingers like a lollipop.

"Are they tasty? Are you hungry?"

Still no answer, just continued sucking.

Lynette had a burst of inspiration. "Are your fingers thirsty?" Kevin still said nothing, but he paused in his strange actions, a sure signal that she was getting warmer. "Do they need something?" Another pause. Lynette looked at her computer and then, still moving intuitively, she saved her work, closed the application she had been using, and then opened a Microsoft Word document, a blank page, and moved away from the computer, leaving the chair where young Kevin could easily perch on it.

Sure enough, within only a few seconds, her son knelt on the chair, put his little fingers on the keyboard, and began to type. It was gibberish, of course, nonsense letters and numbers strung together without any kind of rational thought, but then she noticed that several of the numbers looked familiar.

She pointed over Kevin's shoulder. "Is that two plus two, Kevin?"

"Four," answered her son without ceasing his play typing.

Lynette was agog. Kevin was only five years old the first time he started typing, and she had never so much as hinted to him that such a thing as addition, subtraction, or mathematics in general existed.

She gently moved his hands away from the keyboard, waiting for Kevin to explode at the intrusion in what he was doing, but he allowed her to move him away and watched as she typed a string of characters into the computer:





3 + 2 4 + 6 5 + 8

7 - 4 10 - 8 14 - 1

2 x 2 4 x 7 8 x 12





Kevin started speaking before she was even done typing: "Five, ten, thirteen, three, two, thirteen." Then he was silent.

Lynette again felt her jaw drop open. The answers were the answers to the first two rows of problems. Apparently multiplication was beyond him, but somehow her son had picked up on - and absorbed - basic addition and subtraction.

Hurriedly, she entered another ten or so addition problems, with an equal number of subtraction questions. This time, however, rather than speaking the answers, Kevin typed them, his little hand guiding the mouse to insert the answers, at first slowly, then with greater confidence as he continued working. When he was done, she had a page of basic equations. And all of them had been answered correctly.

That had been the start of a wonderful thing for her. She discovered that, with the computer, Kevin was almost another person. Just as she imagined that Stephen Hawking used his chair and voice simulator to interact with others where his physical limitations did not otherwise allow, so the notebook computer she later purchased for her son became a special way for him to communicate with the outside world. He still spoke, but when he was stressed or upset in any way, he preferred to communicate via the computer. It was as though in the steady stream of ones and zeros floating through the quantum levels of the machine Kevin had finally found a place where he felt completely safe and so could act correspondingly at ease, even extroverted at times.

And so it was that every day Kevin spent at least a few hours typing on the computer. Most of the time he typed strange strings of synonyms, starting with one word that Lynette would provide and from thence proceeding through a daisy-chain of vocabulary that would have astounded any English professor.

"Drop" she would write. And within seconds Kevin would have followed the single word up with "spot, tear, bead, crumb, fall, cut, descent, percolate, splash, trickle, sag, slide, fall-off, lowering, rain." Then rain would apparently become the genesis of a new list of words: "downpour, cloudburst, mist, pour, barrage, profusion, torrent, shower, stream, mist..." and on and on and on. Occasionally he got stuck on a word, and would be unable to think of a new one. This frustrated him enormously - could disrupt his schedule for days on end as he tried to come up with a proper synonym to some tricky word. Luckily, early on Lynette had shown him - over the course of several hours, to be sure - the thesaurus.com website, and after that whenever Kevin got confused or stuck on a difficult word he could simply enter a word and get a long list of synonyms, each of which he apparently memorized at a glance.