The Speed of Dark

It is vinyl tile flooring, pale gray with speckles of darker gray; it is a table of composite with wood-grain finish; it is my shoe that I am staring at, blinking away the seductive pattern of the woven canvas and seeing it as shoe, with a floor under it. I am in the therapy room. I am Lou Arrendale, who used to be Lou Arrendale the autistic and am now Lou Arrendale the unknown. My foot in my shoe is on the floor is on the foundation is on the ground is on the surface of a planet is in the solar system is in the galaxy is in the universe is in the mind of God.

I look up and see the floor stretching away to the wall; it wavers and steadies again, lying as flat as the contractors made it but not perfectly flat, but that does not matter; it is called flat by convention. I make it look flat. That is what flat is. Flat is not an absolute, a plane: flat is flat enough.

“Are you all right? Lou, please… answer me!”

I am all right enough. “I’m okay,” I say to Janis. Okay means “all right enough,” not “perfectly all right.” She looks scared. I scared her. I didn’t mean to scare her. When you scare someone, you should reassure them. “Sorry,” I say. “Just one of those moments.”

She relaxes a little. I sit up, then stand. The walls are not quite straight, but they are straight enough.

I am Lou enough. Lou-before and Lou-now, Lou-before lending me all his years of experience, experience he could not always understand, and Lou-now assessing, interpreting, reassessing. I have both — am both.

“I need to be alone for a while,” I tell Janis. She looks worried again. I know she’s worried about me; I know she doesn’t approve, for some reason.

“You need the human interaction,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “But I have hours of it a day. Right now I need to be alone and figure out what just happened.”

“Talk to me about it, Lou,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I need time…” I take a step toward the door. The table changes shape as I walk past it; Janis’s body changes shape; the wall and door lurch toward me like drunken men in a comedy — where did I see that? How do I know? How can I remember that and also cope with the floor that is only flat enough, not flat? With an effort, I make the walls and door flat again; the elastic table springs back to the rectangular shape I should see.

“But, Lou, if you’re having sensory problems, they may need to adjust the dosage—”

“I’ll be fine,” I say, not looking back. “I just need a break.” The final argument: “I need to use the bathroom.”

I know — I remember, from somewhere — that what has happened involves sensory integration and visual processing. Walking is strange. I know I am walking; I can feel my legs moving smoothly. But what I see is jerky, one abrupt position after another. What I hear is footsteps and echoes of footsteps and reechoes of footsteps.

Lou-before tells me this is not how it was, not since he was tiny. Lou-before helps me focus on the door to the men’s toilets and get through it, while Lou-now rummages madly through memories of conversations overheard and books read trying to find something that will help.

The men’s toilet is quieter; no one else is there. Gleams of light race at my eyes from the smooth curving white porcelain fixtures, the shiny metal knobs and pipes. There are two cubicles at the far end; I go into one and close the door.

Lou-before notices the floor tiles and the wall tiles and wants to calculate the volume of the room. Lou-now wants to climb into a soft, dark place and not come out until morning.

It is morning. It is still morning and we — I — have not had lunch. Object permanence. What I need is object permanence. What Lou-before read about it in a book — a book he read, a book I do not quite remember but also do remember — comes back to me. Babies don’t have it; grownups do. People blind from birth, whose sight is restored, can’t learn it: they see a table morphing from one shape to another as they walk by.

I was not blind from birth. Lou-before had object permanence in his visual processing. I can have it, too. I had it, until I tried to read the story…

I can feel the pounding of my heart slow down, sink below awareness. I lean over, looking at the tiles of the floor. I don’t really care what size they are or about calculating the area of the floor or the volume of the room. I might do it if I were trapped here and bored, but at the moment I’m not bored. I’m confused and worried.

I do not know what happened. Brain surgery? I have no scars, no uneven hair growth. Some medical emergency?

Emotion floods me: fear and then anger, and with it a peculiar sensation that I am swelling and then shrinking. When I am angry, I feel taller and other things look smaller. When I am scared, I feel small and other things look bigger. I play with these feelings, and it is very strange to feel that the tiny cubicle around me is changing size. It can’t really be changing size. But how would I know if it were?