An Aversion to Ladders

A Memoir/Novel in Late-Diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome

By Michael Lowell Teague

© 2007

(revisions © 2008)

For Emir,

PROLOGUE
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:”

–William Wordsworth

A SLEEP

It was called the Information Age, although Michael had never known a time in his life when he felt more cut off from everything. The new technology possessed the virtues of speed and transparency, but these attributes not so much got at truth as readily exposed the politics of a sausage-making enterprise. A fact (to the degree such a thing ever existed) was trounced on in the blogsphere, abridged in text messaging, passed through two stomachs of a cow, and made the subject of a libel suit—all within a twenty-four hour news cycle. In short, no truth could be conjured out of the world that was safe from the world.

Nevertheless, an aroma of omniscience had been in the air. Or maybe it was only arrogance in retrospect. With supercomputers habitually stuck in remedial reading classes, and NASA quietly returning to the low-tech, low-risk parachute reentry method of Apollo capsules, there should have been cause for doubt, or reason for humility, but there was surprisingly little of either. Depending on whom you asked, the shape of the Universe changed almost on a weekly basis, going from flat to spherical back to flat again, with brief excursions through dodecahedrons and trumpet-like cones. Yet the cosmic forest could never be seen for the galactic trees, and the happy campers, snug and smug under their little tent of blue, had no idea there could be a bear sniffing around the stakes.

It was Halloween. But it was always Halloween in a Midwestern college town. Win or lose the Homecoming game, the students never needed much of an excuse to drink and terrorize the citizenry. Michael walked along the dark sidewalk, certain his lack of costume made him invisible. Only leaves, still crisp like tart apples, kicked up at his shoes to betray his presence among the sodden and unblessed. A familiar derelict was passed in an alleyway. He was sleeping on a flattened cardboard box, and resolutely horizontal when all else was struggling to stay vertical. He too wore no costume, only an inadequate windbreaker to stave off the brutal chill of an unseasonably cold October. Michael did not know his name, but he was one of those homeless types who are made more conspicuous in small towns by their rarity. Still, on this one night a year, eccentricity made all men brothers. The story connected to him was sketchy and, owing to the nature of the community, borderline mythical. Mental illness tends to sever the present tense from the past, and in a town known for having a transient population the past was easier to lose track of than in most places. The pedestrian stepped around the poor fellow and hoped he would have sense enough to get out of the cold.

Arriving at his dungeon-of-a-coffeehouse, Michael had his pick of tables, so settled on one by the large window where he could watch his village of blissful idiots stroll by at leisure. He opened his newest spiral bound notebook and gazed on its first blank page like a man about to jump from one moving train car to the next. Admittedly, there was little “there” there in his life, which meant it was easiest to portray himself as a ghost, or the world and its inhabitants as ghosts.

The storylines left him on his de-peopled landscape were necessarily too familiar: Every man who is dead and doesn’t know it winds up in a grave; every man who is insane and doesn’t know it winds up in a padded cell; every man whose life is made up in a dream or story is rudely made aware of his true ontological state in a tidy conclusion. All monsters begin sublimely in illogic, but by the last page logic requires they all be made incarnate and explained away. There was no way to escape logic that would appease the petulant, popcorn-throwing mind in these cases, but the soul, by its very nature, wants to defy gravity to the bitter end in hope of just such redemption. Michael’s spectral life was evenly divided between these irreconcilable spheres of heart and head. One could say, too evenly divided.

The homeless man came in during these intractable negotiations. They sometimes gave him free coffee at the counter, and one of the local dead-enders outside would light the trademark soggy cigarette hanging from his mouth. This evening, however, he was satisfied to warm his bones in a plush chair, even as his twitching, hot-wired legs had him still pacing the mean streets. Newspaper lined his sneakers with below-the-fold headlines, but he clearly had something weightier with which he wanted to part.

“The Universe is no more,” he boldly announced.

Michael looked up, immediately mired in the man’s runny yolk eyes.

“I’ve seen it,” he claimed. “Up in the skyscrapers. Up in the windows like stars.”

(There were no skyscrapers for miles.)

He babbled on with urgency, gesturing at the ceiling. “Up there. Billions of years to reach our eyes. Lights in windows. Fire in windows. Mothers screaming with babies at windows. Men falling from windows to keep from burning.”

Michael put down his pen.

“No one looks up,” the fellow said. “No one ever looks up to see the end of everything.”

With no coffee, or match, he bounded to his feet and left as abruptly as he came in. The patron watched him meld back into the inebriated throng to reclaim the balance of his anonymity, yet could not think why he—a scribbler sitting alone at a table in an empty coffeehouse—should have been privy to the odd proclamation. Closing the cover on the first lines of his notebook, the writer reluctantly followed on the homeless man’s disquieted heels.

As he walked along in the darkness, and just as out of sync and out of time as the down-and-out soothsayer, Michael could not help but think of another invisible man: the Belgian painter, James Ensor. Ensor lived in a seaside resort called Ostend, and understood what it was like to be a sober man always among drunk strangers. In his masterpiece, Christ’s entry into Brussels, he depicted Christ entering a carnival town on a donkey. Oblivious revelers in ghoulish masks milled around the Nazarene, and Ensor, with an outsider’s eye, chronicled their decadence and banality with an acid brush. No one caught in his painter’s gaze deserved to be saved; and yet, Christ had come to save all. Among these beer-guzzling undead, Michael doubted he would see a redeemer on a donkey come “to liberate the miraculous from the mundane,” but where better to look for a miracle than in the last place one would expect to find it.

The wind had picked up with a further drop in temperature, and on passing the same alleyway the painter-turned-writer paused to size up the derelict once again huddled on his cardboard bed. He stood there for a long minute and waited on a sign of life. Impatient, and freezing, he inched up to the man and nudged his shin with a shoe. An audible grunt rose up from the shadows, but the fellow would not be coaxed out of his grave-like sleep. Michael moved on, though not sure why the pathetic vagrant clung so obstinately to his thin, corrugated edge of oblivion.

Victorian houses emerged halfway to somewhere. Their steep-pitched roofs converged along imaginary lines in the sky. Beneath their bulwark of gables, unclouded, unwary windows looked down on the dark sidewalk. There were no stares out in these bright portals—no alarmed faces to clue-in passersby below something was up. The curtained backdrop of stars above them was equally mute in the conspiracy. Each splintery point of light, in its pokerfaced way, resembled a dangling ladder without rungs.

Michael returned to a colder house than he left and climbed the stairs without the benefit of light. He was about to pass a window off the landing when he spied someone standing across the street through the drapes. The man was too far away to see well, but his gaze was squarely on the house. He was not smoking or talking on a cell phone, so it was presumed he was preoccupied with the property. Michael did not remember being followed, although it was possible. A sense of fright overtook him as he pondered the voyeur’s motives, and nothing could account for the onset of it. Leaning into the glass, he made a menacing face to drive the stranger away. It was unlikely he could be seen since the Moon was on the other side of the house, but one menacing face required another—and then another. Each face was intended to be more terrifying than the one before it, but the only one being scared in the venture was Michael. The loitering man eventually moved on, and the resident was at last free to retire to his bedroom.

It had been weeks since he slept—really slept. Before dropping his head on the pillow, he took two melatonin tablets and turned off the ringer on the phone. He did not expect a phone call, but his lack of sleep was at such a critical stage he needed to guard against any intrusion. A floor fan was turned on to baffle any other unanticipated noises, leaving him to crawl onto the threadbare mattress with threadbare thoughts. The bruising bed offered little relief, and his ribs ached with each turn. An image of the dark gentleman on the street crossed from one side of his brain to another, as if to underline something that had been missed. Michael finally found a place under his elbow that yielded, so eased down into its disintegrating edges. The stranger stopped again in front of the house only when the sleeper committed to falling all the way down. A meatier thought, moving contrarily in the slide, tore loose to float up into consciousness:

The man’s eyes were not on the house, or even on the window. He was staring at something over the house.

The whirl of the industrial-grade fan rose to drown out the distant shrieks of drunken college students, but not the stilt-legged star kicking at shingles on the roof.