An acquaintance looked at me, having made some point in conversation, and I wondered if she’d been cut out of paper and then propped up. It’s the autistic demeanor, or one phase of it. Not hunched down, facing out. But facing out in a hopeless way, the way of somebody looking into the visual equivalent of a wind tunnel and doing so because everyone says that’s the normal thing, you’ve got to do it. The feebleness on display was provoking. I forget what she’d just said, but it was supposed to be a score of some sort, something that straightened me out or set straight some issue. Then she fixed herself in place, no retreat. Her whole face wavered, up and down, and I had to pretend she wasn’t being weird.
I remember the same look, the same feeling, from when I was growing up. Everyone in the family was autistic, none of us knew it, and we all thought we’d finally be normal if only the people out there, past our faces, would consent to put us on the books, to count us as normal. My father, my mother, my brother, me, we all felt stranded with each other, dumped among people who didn’t function right. We’d been born into a ditch, and out on the field everyone else was running around and having fun. We all wanted to feel like we belonged out there, so among ourselves we talked loud and had silly, pointless opinions, all the while hoping that our fellow rejects could pass for an audience. There one sees another phase of the autistic demeanor: the projection of noise out into the wind tunnel, done in the hope that somehow we’ll put ourselves into the mix, that we’ll enter the place where life is going on, the zone where regular people are talking to each other. No regular people were on hand, but we could pretend.
This pretending will take up much of an autistic’s life. The autistic sees social exchanges as cataclysmic occasions, readouts on a trapped creature’s ability to do that basic human thing: interacting with others. If your gaze can’t get out there, your voice can. Got to stay in the mix, where people do things. Hence the autistic’s irritating bray, always leading them out to the world of others, but with no regard to the others themselves. Needy people don’t need the other person’s well-being; they need the person to be on hand and serve. That person’s the immediate stand-in for the population at large, the placeholder for an idea—namely that there are humans separate from the autistic person. Condemned to this status, they can be the autistic’s bogeyman or stooge; being treated as anything else will prove difficult.