EPILOGUE:
Michael’s Journal:
When I wake up in the morning, movie dialog is often playing in my head on a loop. Not a speech or scene, but a few obscure, often oddly prosodic words I have heard that form a musical hook in my head. I sometimes tap into this “music” as soon as my feet hit the floor, repeating it off and on like nonsense verse until I give myself an occupation. This is a form of echolalia, or echoed speech.

I daily engage in conversations with myself where I keep repeating the same things over and over. Sometimes I rewrite the same things, or reread the same things. Once I was almost thrown out of a store by a store detective because I kept circling the premises and returning to a vacuum cleaner I could not adequately assess as a reasonable purchase. I take strange satisfaction in revisiting a thought process where its reason for being is long forgotten. This is called perseveration, and though it can induce stress on occasion, it, like my echolalia, often serves a purpose.

As all-consuming behaviors, neither my echolalia nor my perseverations are so compulsive as to be completely involuntary; and owing to their demonstrated value I have been late in piecing together the underlying truth of them: They are insidiously subtle traits of Asperger’s Syndrome.

I am locked in my head much like a solipsist, and must “affect” the feelings of others as an ongoing mental exercise. It is like standing in front of a mirror and pretending it is a window. I have cultivated the ability to empathize with others over time, and the authenticity of it is like Pascal’s promise to the learned atheist, who, by acting as though he believes in God, comes to believe.

I cannot help but see my “affliction” as a liberal-minded prison warden who gives me liberty to reinvent myself and my prison cell as I choose, and because of this I am “sheltered from” as much as “locked out” of a world that plays by a less flexible set of rules. I can only describe my life this way: What in one sense burns, in another illuminates. What in one guise facilitates an accidental life, in another becomes an accidental gift. What in one view is a blind spot is in another a differently-abled form of thinking. One does not resolve such paradoxes. One chases them to the chasm’s edge and peers, respectfully, into their domain.

THE UNKNOWABLE THING-IN-ITSELF

Michael sat in front of the grubby window remembering his time in front of Ensor’s masterwork, Christ’s entry into Brussels, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Louver panels in the ceiling chased the light of a thin blue sky across the travertine mountain that day, while outside, in the pavilion’s tiered garden, sticks of fire belied the true cursed ground. It was easy to forget Hell in the City of Angels, that somewhere beyond the promontory, over the hazy hillside toward Sunset, is where Marilyn Monroe and Nicole Simpson met their ends.

He held out his hand to adjust the blinds, and was struck by the simplicity of it. He pushed through the gesture without being conscious of motor coordination, or in how the action might be perceived by others. It was as if he inhabited not only a new body, but also a new mind.

The drub of the faucet in the bathroom joined him from a distance; he blinked.

The view out the window was less exalted, but no less memorable. A drink machine was in sight under an awning at the bus depot. With no change in his pockets, he returned to the nightstand to probe the bottom of her purse; all he scratched up were Dentyne gum wrappers. The suitcase was opened on the dresser, and a stack of hundreds was removed from the neatly ordered rows of large bills that constituted his cash settlement, leaving him to sneak out the door and down the metal stairs.

The soda dispenser, predictably, took nothing bigger than a single.

A pretty little Hispanic girl sat on a nearby bench, bundled in a winter coat the same color as his sticks of fire. Several paper grocery sacks, filled with drabber clothing, surrounded her. Michael looked toward the door of the bus station and spotted her likely mother buying tickets at the counter. He stepped up to the child on seeing her hover protectively over a dented cardboard box. The Sun was directly above them, having trimmed the shadows down to nothing to hide; its light gleamed brightly off four quarters lying beside the girl on the bench: the precise number needed to buy a lime cola. The glare also allowed a view into the guarded box. The odd object inside resembled an asteroid, but on closer inspection it was more toy-like, putting him in mind of a giant scoop of melting vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate sauce and topped with a flattened cherry.

Removing his sunglasses, he asked, “What is it?”

The little girl did not speak, and perhaps did not know English. Poking at a hole in the object, her finger struck something unseen. Michael knelt beside her, and on seeing his interest, she withdrew her hand so he could take a turn. He hooked a finger down into the opening, but did not anticipate feeling the top of a melted doll’s head. The rest of the picture fell into place on smelling the fused plastic. The chocolate sauce was a roof; the cherry, a molten chimney; and the hole, a shrunken window. He was looking at the remains of a dollhouse rescued from a house fire. Tears began to stream down his cheeks.

“You can’t get your dolly out,” he mumbled despairingly. Michael removed his finger from their shared conduit and stood up to wipe his face on a shirtsleeve. With a broad gesture, he pointed at the four quarters on the bench.

The child stared at his hand, not where he pointed.

He gently set the stack of hundreds down beside her before making his trade. As he raked away the quarters, he watched her watch his hands. She did not protest the exchange, and in keeping with their mute agreement, he returned quietly to the drink machine.

The louver panels again moved, like a cloud over the shimmering trees of Corot. He re-crossed the street, but did not look back on his painting, wanting only to remember the bright coat and the little girl who sat under it as a star.

No running water greeted him on his return to the motel room. He knocked on the half-closed bathroom door and let his voice slip in through the crack. “I bought you a soda.”

Emma, nauseous, sat in the cold floor beside the commode, having managed to get into her bra and panties. A scent of Glade’s baby powder air refresher clung to the towels, though aimed to mask a fainter odor. He flushed the toilet and gently coaxed her back to bed. By the time he finished brushing her hair on the pillow, his body melded into the line of hers. Her every molecule had become an extension of his body; her every sigh, an extension of his will. Both made some pretense at taking a nap, yet between caresses and languorous looks, the two only managed to whet the edge of sleep.

When twilight fell on the windowsill, its presence pushed their listless shadow off the bed. The painter aided in dressing his lover, and with the attentiveness he brought to preparing his artist’s materials for work. The dress was a simple white one with pleats, and apart from the bands on their fingers, and her glow, there was nothing ostentatious or formal in their secret vows.

Hooking the remaining strap on her heel, he turned to sit on the bed; Emma, without delay, slid down her husband’s legs to the floor and dropped her lips into the palm of his hand. With him drawn fully under her wings, she declared, “I will be ostracized for what I have done.”

Michael cradled her knotted cheek, letting the faintly sad smile wallow around in his loose fingers. He was only half-wanting to extract her thoughts, half-wanting to know what she sacrificed for him.

Collected, the bride tore at a plastic bag covering a rental tuxedo flung over the back of a chair, letting out a scent of dry-cleaning solution. The groom’s arm threaded the snug jacket with her still-needed assistance.

He glanced lastly at the re-latched suitcase on the bureau.

“Leave it,” she said. “We don’t need it. We’ve never really needed it.”

With this, the newlyweds left their hideaway to walk down to Emma’s car.