Autistobiography, Chapter Four

     It was here that I first met Travis, a student who was a year ahead of me and was going to the same junior high that I would be attending.  He had a wealth of knowledge and experience with computers, and he was quite eager to share this information.  He seemed not to care about the complex web of social rules that usually governed meeting new people and making new friends.  It was quite refreshing to not have to try to navigate a murky set of customs that I didn’t understand, and we quickly became very good friends.  I visited his house within a few days, where he had various computers, programs, and books that were new to me, and I learned quite a lot from my friendship with him, even in that first summer.

     When we started school that fall at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School, Travis was an invaluable resource, showing me around the school and introducing me to people.  His openness to meeting people resulted in an impressive and diverse network of social connections, and by spending most of my time with him, I was spared the overwhelming task of trying to navigate my own way through this new social environment, for the most part.  He was a godsend for me in that respect.

     Early in the year, not long after my thirteenth birthday, I learned that the girl I had a crush on was dating another boy.  I recall a week or two of unusually intense pining, culminating in an awkward conversation with her outside her house, where I declared my love.  She was very nice about the whole thing and let me down easy, but at the time her gentle insistence that what I felt for her wasn’t really love didn’t sit well with me.  I insisted that I knew what I felt, and retreated into a period of sullen withdrawal.

     Junior high brought with it the social phenomenon of the school dance, and soon, my intense longing for the phenomenon of the romantic relationship found its outlet in these events.  A pattern was quickly established where I would arrive early, and circle the fringes of the dance floor for a bit, deciding who I would like to ask to dance.  I would then retreat to an adjoining outdoor area to marshal my nerve, and distract myself by hanging out with Travis or other people I knew.  As the event drew near to a close, I would gather my courage and return to the dance floor, seeking my chosen dance partner for that evening.  If she was still there and an opportunity presented itself to approach her without interrupting another conversation, I would awkwardly ask if she’d like to dance.

     I managed to go through with asking a girl to dance in perhaps half of such events, at most, and about half of those times, the girl would agree.  Once or twice the young lady in question didn’t even seem to mind that I had asked, and seemed to actually appreciate the dance.  On those occasions when I actually made it out to the dance floor, most of my thoughts were focused on processing the simple fact that I had actually managed to ask my partner to dance, and gotten a positive answer.  The wonder of this result left little room for awareness of my dance partner or the act of dancing with her, and so even on evenings when I achieved such a result, the night would end the same way.  I would go home and lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling and processing the confusing jumble of social experiences I had just been through, trying to make sense of them all.

     My obvious social awkwardness led to a certain amount of harassment and bullying from some of my classmates.  At one point, there was a particular boy who seemed unusually fixated on tormenting me.  I wanted to find a way to stop these unpleasant interactions, or failing that, to find a way to retaliate that my conscience could live with.  I think I had the idea that if I found an effective means of retaliation, it might discourage him from tormenting me further.

     I discussed these thoughts with a friend I’d met in art class, Nathan.  He was a mechanical genius, with a manic gleam in his eye and a house full of elaborate homemade devices, his favorite of which was a Tesla coil.  He suggested a simple plan that he thought would do the trick.  He instructed me in a technique to loosen the air valve of a bicycle tire, using a pair of tweezers, in such a way that the valve would no longer close and the tire would no longer hold air.  It was a simple procedure, and it was very difficult to spot the problem, once completed.  Attempts to refill the tire with air would result in failure for reasons that would not be at all obvious to the victim.

     I struggled with the ethics of the proposed course of action for some time, but eventually the torment escalated to the point where I felt such an action was justified.  I successfully performed the operation, but completely failed to disguise my actions from onlookers, and it was not long before a witness alerted the bully to what I had done.  I was jumped unexpectedly in the halls, and I fended off his blows as best I could.  He wasn’t substantially bigger or tougher than me, so I survived the incident without significant injury, but the experience was highly unpleasant nonetheless, and after that I just did my best to ignore such tormentors.

     My academic performance that first year was mixed, as the segregation into separate hour-long classes with different teachers for different subjects made it much easier for me to focus intensely on the subjects that interested me, and ignore those that held no draw for me.  Most of my attention went to the subject of math, which had become intricate enough to be very, very compelling to me.  I had received a brief overview from my stepfather as to what algebra was all about, so I was primed and ready, but the wondrous possibilities that the subject offered as the year went on far exceeded my expectations.

     There was a competitive math team available to the seventh and eighth graders, called MathCounts.  The top four or five finishers (I forget the exact number) on the qualifying exam made the team, and the top finisher would be the team captain.  The highest finisher that didn’t make the team itself would be an alternate, and practice with the rest of the team.  I found the test fascinating, with some very clever problems that had some hidden tricks that would make them much easier to solve, if you caught on.  I did pretty well on the test, and my placement earned me a spot as the alternate for that year’s team.  The practice sessions that followed offered me many more opportunities to play with these kinds of clever math puzzles, and I greatly enjoyed the activity.

     My performance in many other academic subjects, however, was often unsatisfactory, especially in the social sciences.  Subjects such as history and geography held absolutely no interest for me, and it was an effort not to receive a failing grade in any such class.  I also continued to suffer difficulties at home with household responsibilities and family dynamics, and my failure to live up to expectations both in school and at home was swiftly eroding my parents’ patience.

     My home became a place of turmoil, with heated arguments between me and my stepfather, me and my mother, and my mother and stepfather on a recurring basis.  These last would go late into the night, while my sister and I took shelter in our bedrooms, listening at our doors, though we could not fail to overhear in any event.  Mom would defend me against my stepfather’s ire in such discussions, then defend him against mine in my arguments with her.  I began to become dimly aware of the frequency with which her afternoon glasses of orange juice would contain a significant quantity of vodka.  It was a difficult time for all of us.

     It was around this time that I became an avid collector of comics.  DC Comics was taking steps to clean up some continuity issues in the fictional world their characters inhabited, and the Superman title was restarting at #1.  The opportunity to begin a complete collection moving forward from such a time was an irresistible lure, and the world of comic books became another avenue of escape for me, along with the fiction of Piers Anthony, an author that Nathan had recommended to me.

     My stepfather’s family cabin up at Tahoe became a regular travel destination for us, and that summer, I had the opportunity to invite Adam to come stay with us for several days.  I missed him, and wanted to try to maintain our friendship.  He happened to attend a camping expedition in the area, through his Boy Scout activities, which was ending at a convenient time for us to pick him up and have him stay with us for the remainder of our trip.

     It was good to see him; I usually spent such trips hiding out in my room with a book, taking shelter from the energetic gaggle of girls that was the trio of my sister and stepsisters.  It was nice to have a friend there for company.  One afternoon, my mother and stepfather summarily banished all five of us children from the cabin, with strict instructions not to return for at least an hour, for reasons that were obscure to me at the time.  We wandered the wooded areas outside, and while the girls involved themselves in discussing matters of interest to them, Adam and I amused ourselves by speculating as to how we might go about building a time machine to circumvent the mandated delay.

     With methodical, deliberate intent, we considered various precedents in science fiction as to how time travel might be accomplished.  We first considered the option of faster-than-light travel, though we had some awareness that the Theory of Relativity raised some technical barriers to such an accomplishment.  We eventually abandoned this approach on the grounds that we believed the creek we wandered would not be sufficient as a hydroelectric power source, and we could think of no better energy source that we could access at that point.

     The other option we settled on was a form of extra-dimensional travel.  We knew that Einstein’s work resulted in the idea that time could be considered a fourth dimension, in supplement to the three dimensions of space, but we weren’t really clear on what exactly that meant.  We realized, though, that if we could hash out just what the description of time as a fourth dimension was based on, the resulting understanding might provide additional insight as to how time travel could be accomplished.

     By this point, the mandated delay had passed, and we had made our way back to the cabin, indicating the success of our efforts to make the time pass more quickly.  We had far too much momentum at this point to abandon the project, however, and we continued to work with the issue as the family made its way down to the beach.

     As we swam in the lake, we decided to start with zero dimensions and work our way up through the three dimensions that we were familiar with, in the hopes that a progression might be revealed that could aid us in conceptualizing a fourth dimension.  As it turned out, this approach yielded fantastically successful results.

     We knew that zero dimensions could be described as a mathematical point, one dimension would be an infinite line, two would be an infinite plane, and three would be an infinite region of space.  Methodically, we considered the relationships between these objects, in an effort to take it one step further.

     We realized that a one-dimensional line could be seen as an infinite sequence of zero-dimensional points, laid out side-by-side.  Similarly, a plane could be formed by an infinite series of adjacent infinite lines, and a spatial region by an infinitely thick stack of infinite planes.  The next step suddenly presented itself with startling clarity; if one were to create an infinite sequence of spatial regions and line them up adjacently in some theoretical fourth dimension, the result could readily be conceptualized as a linear sequence of timeless three-dimensional “snapshots” of the universe, which, when strung together, would create a “timeline”, much like sequential frames on a strip of film.

     I was breathtaken.  Thoughts and concepts were arranging themselves in my mind in ways that made every previous epiphany I had experienced in my lifetime pale by comparison.  I had the vague sense that Adam was quite content to stop there, but something inside me was building to a crescendo, and would not be denied.

     In a two-dimensional planar region, two non-parallel lines would intersect in a point.  In a three-dimensional spatial region, two non-parallel planes would intersect in a line.  Thus, in a four-dimensional timeline, two non-parallel spatial regions would intersect in a plane.  It was weird to think about such planar slices of space, cutting through buildings, bodies, and planets, but the geometrical relationship appeared to be sound.  I took it one step further.  In a theoretical fifth dimension, two non-parallel timelines would intersect in a timeless region of space; in a single moment, in other words.

     The elegance of this idea created a feeling of rapture inside me like nothing I had ever felt before.  The ordered structure of the thoughts and concepts in my mind formed an object of such beauty that I was entranced.  I was holding in my mind a fully realized four-dimensional object, that I could perceive in all such dimensions simultaneously.  At the time I would say that I had successfully visualized four dimensions at once, although I would later come to understand that “visualized” was not the technically correct term, as my sensory impressions of thoughts and concepts in my mind are kinesthetic, not visual, in nature.  I lacked this self-awareness at the time, however, having insufficient experience with complex physical activities to make the connection that this was the same kind of awareness.  Concepts had always seemed more real to me than the physical world around me.  This new pinnacle of thought I had attained constituted a personal spiritual experience of communion with the universe that was orgasmic in its intensity.

     I shared these thoughts excitedly with Adam, explaining that if there existed only three dimensions of space and only one dimension of time, that would imply that time was fixed and unalterable, events were predestined, and nothing could be done to change them.  If, however, there existed additional temporal dimensions beyond the fourth, that implied the existence of an infinite realm of timelines that could run in parallel with each other, or intersect in moments from which the sequence of events could progress in a number of potential directions.  This matched my limited understanding of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory.

     It is very difficult to recall what Adam’s reaction to this was, as the intensity of my experience washed out almost all awareness of the world around me, including any perception of his conceptual or emotional state.  I retain only the faintest impression to suggest to me that, while he found the point about single vs. multiple timelines to be nifty and impressive, he did not really comprehend the extent of my euphoria, or the reason for such a powerful reaction.  I was far beyond the ability to take such concerns into account at that time, however.

     My euphoric state persisted into the weeks and months that followed, well into the beginning of my eighth grade career.  Within a few weeks, I was able to hold a fully-realized five-dimensional object in my thought-space, and set determinedly to work on achieving a sixth.  I could attain an intellectual understanding of these dimensions readily enough, but the difference between the theoretical grasp of the concept and the experience of holding a multi-dimensional object in my awareness was like the difference between reading a description of a place, and actually going there.

     My intense fixation on these attempts washed away other concerns to a degree unmatched by any previous fixation I had experienced.  My performance at school and at household chores undoubtedly suffered tremendously as a result, but I neither noticed nor cared.  Almost all my attention was on this unique form of mental masturbation, earning me very odd looks from my classmates and teachers as I wandered glassy-eyed through the halls and classrooms of my school... especially when, at long last, I achieved a full conceptualization of a six-dimensional object while ignoring a geography lesson.  The noise I made and the expression on my face attracted a fair amount of attention.

     Of course, by this age I had also begun to experiment with the more traditional form of physical self-stimulation common to that phase of sexual development.  My earlier indoctrination in the details of what to expect as I developed assured me that this was completely normal and acceptable behavior, while other experiences indicated that despite this, it was best to be discreet about it.  My difficulties with managing the practical details of navigating social expectations and of maintaining a clean body and environment, however, led to some difficulties in concealing my activities, which sometimes would lead to embarrassing experiences.  Given my early foundation in understanding sexual behavior as natural, however, I was able to recover from such embarrassments more easily than I might otherwise have, at least enough that I was not deterred in my personal explorations.

     Eventually, I came down from the high of my newly discovered ability to conceptualize large numbers of dimensions.  I think what finally did it was MathCounts; that year, I was the highest finisher on the qualifying test, and so I was assigned the role of team captain for our school.  I took my responsibilities seriously, attending every practice without fail and getting to know the capabilities of each member of my team, doing my best to help them understand areas in which they had difficulties.

     I developed an ability to perceive very accurately when someone was understanding a concept and when they weren’t, and what part of a concept was presenting difficulties, and what direction to lead their thoughts in to help them grasp the relevant idea.  It is difficult to describe what it felt like to perceive this information about their conceptual state, but it was very much akin to the mental exercises I had engaged in over the past months, and I now believe those exercises prepared me to be able to acquire this skill.  I no longer possess the same level of ability to read someone’s level of comprehension, but I am aware that the potential for it is there, and I have faith that this skill can be relearned if circumstances allow.

     Thanks to this level of attunement with my team, our performance in the regional competition was quite satisfactory.  The competition consisted of two individual tests and one test that was taken as a team, on which we were allowed to collaborate.  While other teams simply worked individually on this test and compared their results, our team functioned together like a well-oiled machine.  Just as we had practiced for weeks, I quickly and quietly divided the questions on the test among the members of my team according to their individual strengths, and those of us who finished our assigned questions ahead of the others helped those who had hit difficulties on a particular problem.  Thanks in large part to our performance on this part of the competition, we placed second in the regionals, allowing us to move on to the state-level competition, unlike the previous year.

     I participated in other diverse activities as the year went on, singing in the chorus and participating in school plays.  I had a long-standing affinity for theater, handed down from my uncle (Mom’s younger brother), who I looked up to and admired.  As a child I was entranced by his Bullwinkle imitations, and my desire to emulate him led me to an appreciation for performance art as I grew up.  I had enjoyed some notoriety, back in fourth grade, when his TV acting career hit its peak in a commercial where he uttered the famous words, “Parts is parts.”  My attentiveness to the details of actors’ performances as I watched TV as a child is probably largely responsible for my rudimentary understanding of and proficiency with body language, tone of voice, and other non-verbal cues.  If I had not developed an interest in acting, I suspect that my social abilities would have been much more impaired.  When I have time to script out my behavior in advance, I can interact in a way that looks normal, although lacking such lead time my social abilities are more limited.

     Despite this increase in my range of activities and in my personal successes, my difficulties at school and home continued.  I still struggled to maintain C grades in many classes.  I once again developed a romantic fixation, this time for a member of my math team, although this time I dealt with it better, so hopefully it was less of an imposition on the young woman than it had been for my previous crushes.  And my home life was steadily getting worse.

     Arguments about my behavior and attitude continued, and I noticed my mother beginning to behave more and more erratically as the stress began to wear on all of us.  By this time, I had a better understanding of the role alcohol played in her strange behavior, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it.  I was afraid to interact with her during such times.  It was highly disconcerting to see someone I had trusted to keep me safe and protect me act in such a way.  During the worst of it, she would yell incoherently at me, and sometimes even mount a clumsy physical assault of some sort.  By this point, I had grown enough that she was no physical threat to me whatsoever, given her own small stature, but such experiences still left me deeply rattled.

     I was not without my own share of erratic behavior.  The odd behaviors that had become prominent at age 10 grew worse with the onset of adolescence, and my episodes of intense emotion grew more frequent and volatile.  I began to throw and hit objects.  These bursts and flashes of violence frightened me to no end, even immediately in their wake, as I felt almost completely helpless to do anything about them.  With significant effort, I could ensure that I did not act with violence toward another person, only inanimate objects, but this exertion of effort left me powerless to control my behavior any further than that, no matter how hard I tried.  I had no idea what to do about this.

     My difficulties at school and home persisted into ninth grade.  Technically I was a high school freshman at this point, but our school district was structured such that ninth graders still studied at the junior high schools.  My productivity declined from the modest peak I had attained in mid-eighth grade, and I began oversleeping frequently, often missing school entirely.  My mother and stepfather found themselves at a loss as to how to deal with these problems, and resorted to a more drastic course of action.

     I was informed that, in the spring of 1989, I would be sent on a two-week Outward Bound “adventure”, which would include backpacking through a desert region, rock climbing, and similar activities.  It was hoped that this experience would build character and instill in me a greater sense of discipline.  I was dubious and defiant by turns, but in the end went along with it, with a sense of grim determination to prove myself equal to this challenge.

     When spring break arrived, the family drove down to Palm Springs for their vacation, in which I would participate for a day or two, after which I would be dropped off for my expedition into Joshua Tree National Monument.  As the moment itself approached, I think I recall getting cold feet and begging to back out, but if so, my parents were undeterred.  I was left with the camp counselors and an unfamiliar group of adolescents, in the middle of the desert.

     At fifteen, I was the youngest of the children there.  The older kids had been sent there due to issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, excessive sexual activity, and/or criminal behavior.  One or two had just gotten out of jail.  There were about eight of us, and three counselors.  Both the older kids and the counselors routinely used much more profanity than I was used to hearing, and I felt hopelessly adrift in unfamiliar territory.

     The backpacks we wore as we hiked through the desert weighed about 65 pounds, which I believe was over half of my body weight at the time.  Most of that weight was water, as desert hiking required vast supplies in order to keep ourselves hydrated.  For the first several days, I was miserable.

     As time wore on, there were a few activities that I was able to enjoy.  I discovered some aptitude for rock climbing, and learning to rappel was a terrifying but exhilarating challenge.  The night sky was beautiful, and I developed a keen appreciation for stargazing.  An exercise in orienteering was quite enjoyable for me, as well.

     About halfway through, there was a mandated two-and-a-half day period of solitude, where each of us would be taken to an isolated campsite and left alone with our thoughts, with only rare visits from counselors to check on our condition and safety.  I understand that this was intended to be a difficult challenge to suffer through, but for me it was by far the most restful and enjoyable part of the experience.  I thought about mathematics and sketched diagrams in the sand, made notes in a small journal, and wrote a poem about the experience that was applauded by many upon my return.  Sadly, the period of rest did not last, and the second half of the “adventure” was quite physically grueling.

     The hardest day soon followed, a hike of some fifteen miles or more.  After the period of isolation, I was in something that might be described as a dissociative state, and as the rest of the group struggled together with this formidable challenge, I wandered some distance from the rest, engaging in odd sing-song noises in time with my steps, laughing at odd times, and making strange attempts at humor that were utterly lost on the others.  At the conclusion of this long day, I set my backpack down distractedly and joined the others at the fire without really seeing them, declaring that I couldn’t believe I had made it through that day.

     A few days later, near the end of our time together, I found myself sitting in a circle with the rest of the kids, who had gathered as a group to raise a concern with me.  The counselors had apparently advised them in this matter, though they made themselves scarce for the encounter itself.  They explained to me that they were greatly upset at my behavior after the long hike, which caught me completely by surprise.  I listened in confusion as they went on to explain that the point of that day was supposed to be that we had gotten through it together, as a group, and my comment, that I couldn’t believe I had made it through the day, had felt dismissive of their own ordeal.

     I struggled mightily to make sense of this concept.  If we had made it through the day as a group, it also logically followed that each of us had made it through the day as an individual, as well.  I had no idea why my amazement at my personal accomplishment would detract in any way from any of theirs.  Also, I felt somewhat justified in exhibiting more surprise at my own accomplishment than theirs, since I considered myself to be physically inferior to the others.  Such explanations only frustrated the rest of them further, and most of them just gave up, with the exception of one who seemed genuinely curious and was willing to engage me in further discussion.  Ultimately, however, the intervention attempt was abandoned as a failure.  I remained utterly mystified as to the source of their upset, though I wished I could understand.

     There were a few rituals to observe as our time together came to a close.  We gathered at the public campsite that was the terminus point for our journey, and each of us was asked to say something nice about one of the others.  I chose to say something about the person with whom I had experienced the greatest social difficulty, to everyone’s great surprise.  It seemed an appropriate enough olive branch.

     Following that was a customary two-mile run to mark the end of our experience, at the end of which our parents would be waiting for us.  I didn’t expect to do particularly well, but set out to pace myself and perform as well as I could on the run.  Two of the more athletic kids quickly ran far ahead out of sight, while I ran at a pace I felt I could handle, near the forefront of the cluster that remained.

     As the run continued, the cluster thinned out as one by one, the other runners slowed and fell behind.  I concentrated on my own rhythm, and was surprised when I realized that not only had the last of that pack fallen into the distance behind me, but one of the faster runners was now visible up ahead, obviously winded and struggling.  I passed him in wonder and felt a rejuvenation of energy, stepping up my pace.  I soon passed the final runner, who was still maintaining a decent pace but nothing like what he had begun with, and shortly after that I discovered, much to my amazement, that I had finished the run very comfortably in first place.  The experience would lead me to a substantial shift in my perception of my physical capabilities.

     I waited with the counselors for the rest of the group to catch up, and then we all ran out together to meet our waiting parents.  I hugged both my mother and my stepfather enthusiastically, greatly relieved that the experience had finally come to an end.  Apparently, the language patterns of the others had had a more substantial effect on me than I realized; Mom later told me with amusement that my first words upon greeting them had been, “I am so fucking glad to see you guys.”  This type of language was quite out of character for me.