The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon Page B

labeled with an “attention deficit” (which used to be quite common), I was simply given stimuli to which I could attend.
    I can remember the time before I was exposed to the computer-assisted primary language-learning program… when the sounds that came from people’s mouths seemed as random—no, more random—than a cow mooing and moaning in the field. I couldn’t hear many consonants—they didn’t last long enough. Therapy helped—a computer stretched the sounds out until I could hear them, and gradually my brain learned to capture briefer signals.But not all of them. To this day, a fast-talking speaker can lose me, no matter how I concentrate.
    It used to be much worse. Before the computer-assisted language-learning programs, children like me might never learn language at all. Back in the mid-twentieth century, therapists thought autism was a mental illness, like schizophrenia. My mother had read a book by a woman who had been told she had made her child crazy. The idea that autistic people are, or become, mentally ill persisted right through the end of the twentieth century, and I even saw an article about that in a magazine a few years ago. That is why I have to visit Dr. Fornum , so that she can be sure I am not developing a mental illness.
    I wonder if Mr. Crenshaw thinks I am crazy. Is that why his face gets shiny when he talks to me? Is he frightened? I don’t think Mr. Aldrin is frightened of me—of any of us. He talks to us as if we were real.
    But Mr. Crenshaw talks to me as if I were a stubborn animal, one he had a right to train. I am often scared, but now, after the rest under the pillows, I am not.
    WHAT I WISH IS THAT I COULD GO OUT AND LOOK UP AT THE stars. My parents took me camping in the Southwest; I remember lying there and seeing all the beautiful patterns, patterns that went on and on forever. I would like to see the stars again. They made me feel calm when I was a child; they showed me an ordered universe, a patterned universe, in which I could be a small part of a large pattern.
    When my parents told me how long the light had traveled to reach my eyes—hundreds, thousands, of years—I felt comforted though I could not say why.
    I cannot see the stars from here. The safety lights in the parking lot next to our building are sodium vapor lights emitting a pinkish yellow light. They make the air seem fuzzy, and the stars can’t show through the blurry black lid of sky. Only the moon and a few bright stars and planets show at all.
    Sometimes I used to go out in the country and try to find a spot to look at the stars. It is hard. If I park Page 27

    on a country road and turn off the lights of the car, someone could run into me because he can’t see me. I have tried parking beside the road or in some unused lane that leads to a barn, but someone who lives nearby may notice and call the police. Then the police will come and want to know why I’m parked there late at night. They do not understand wanting to see the stars. They say that is just an excuse. I don’t do this anymore. Instead, I try to save up enough money that I can take my vacations where there are stars.
    It’s funny about the police. Some of us have more trouble than others. Jorge, who grew up inSan Antonio , told me if you are anything but rich, white, and normal they think you are a criminal. He had been stopped many times when he was growing up; he didn’t learn to talk until he was twelve and even then couldn’t talk very well. They always thought he was drunk or on drugs, he said. Even when he wore a bracelet that explained who he was and that he couldn’t talk, they’d wait until they’d taken him to the station to look at it. Then they’d try to find a parent to take him home, rather than taking him back across town themselves. Both his parents worked, so he usually had to sit there for three or four hours.
    That didn’t happen to me, but sometimes I’ve been stopped for no reason I can understand, like with