“I call it a framework.”
He said it the way a carpenter names a tool. Plain. Without ceremony. The name of a thing he had worked with for forty-one years and respected too much to dress up.
I waited. The body had gone still. The body had learned to be still when a thing important was about to be said, the way a hitter goes still in the box when the ball has just left the pitcher’s hand. Stillness was its own kind of attention.
“A framework.” Both hands came off the mug and went flat on the table. He had brought no paper, so the hands did the pointing. “A scaffolding. A structure your brain put in place when you were small because the world wasn’t going to organize itself for you. So you organized it for yourself. The doorframe. The pen cap. The schedule book. The pre-leaving check. Those weren’t symptoms. Those were architecture.”
The mug was still warm in my hands. The coffee had settled into the temperature where I could finally take a sip if I wanted to. I didn’t. The body wanted the heat to keep being a thing I was holding.
He looked at the tabletop where the Formica had been burned and burned again by people who no longer smoked. Not for effect. A man about to say a word he had said in this booth before — the same word, in the same booth, to a different body — making sure he said it the way it deserved to be said.
“A lot of people call it autism.”
The word landed in the booth between us the way a ball lands in a glove when the catch is clean — no slap, no echo, just the small soft thump of a thing arriving exactly where it was meant to arrive.
I didn’t move.
The body didn’t move.
The mug was warm. The coffee was the right temperature now. The pie sat between us, the whipped cream collapsing into a small white pool around the edges of the slice. Outside, the parking lot was full of stadium-light glare.
Autism.
I had heard the word before. Of course I had. It was a word that lived in the world. It had been on TV. It had been in news articles I’d skimmed on long flights and forgotten before the plane landed. It had been said about other people. Children, mostly. Children who couldn’t talk, or who talked too much, or who lined up their toys in rows. Children who weren’t me.
I lined up my toys in rows.
I had lined them up in rows on the floor of the bedroom in the Niles house when I was four years old. Hot Wheels by color. Then by year. Then by color and year, the system getting more elaborate the older I got, the rows multiplying into grids.
The sand-table at the preschool — I had built the same town in the sand every Tuesday for six months. The teacher had tried to encourage variety. “Build something different today, Thane.” I had built the same town. The teacher had finally stopped asking.
The town had been correct. There had been only one correct configuration of the town, and I had known what it was, and the building of it had been the point.
The word autism had never been said about me. Not by anyone who would know.
Now it had been said.
By a stranger in a diner. At seven in the morning. While a piece of coconut cream pie melted between us.