“Day and night he lived in the poisonous vapors of his nightmares, and death itself was not more frightful than her raving, monstrous forerunners.“ ~Lazarus, Leonid Andreyev
In a normal life, interruptions, through family, friends, and colleagues, create barriers to the immediacy of a place, but the aging house was unshackled from these commitments. Its routines and timetables became nonverbal mechanisms through which mother and son communicated.
Dust was rarely visible in the dark house throughout the day, although low morning light, where the drapes allowed penetration, set off the fine particles like embers. Coffee should have been brewing by eight, but Blythe was not stirring from her room. The eldest son strove to prolong the life of his deteriorating mother. Utensils and nonperishable foodstuffs were moved to the lowest cupboards to facilitate preparation in what little she ate, although Lucien was always trying to improve her diet with calorie-rich drinks and overly generous cuts of meat.
His primary concern was oxygen for her failing lungs, and keeping the lengthy hose, which hooked up her tanks of compressed air, untangled. Wall holes that originally supported a room-to-room intercom system were used to run an auxiliary hose from her bedroom to the den, thus sparing her the onus of dragging yards of tubing behind her walker.
She initially scoffed at these “improvements” as inconveniences and dust traps, but as her resolve and eyesight failed, she trusted Lucien first to vacuum, and then to keep the hallway cleared between her bedroom and kitchen. The rest of the house, of which she came to visit less, disappeared under a screen of late afternoon shadow.
Veins of the old house darkened and hardened from neglect, and belied little of the coursing blood within them: Framed portraits of relations, attired in their Sunday best, hung along the primary hallway. Equipoised on facing walls, their visages might have graced a palace salon at Versailles, where an aging queen strolled by once a day to view them.
For Lucien, their features evoked chains of reminiscence—not of the individuals themselves (of whom the son had little memory) but of long ago places that possessed more emotion as geography than as history. His mother, in her prime, made many weekday excursions across the river to visit her kin; and her children were her indifferent traveling companions.
And yet, no sky was remembered from those day trips that was not boundless. No tree limb branched that did not branch infinitely.
In times past, the mother’s extended family used to stay over at the house regularly, but almost never his father’s relations. When the married couple was younger, there were even friends who were not family who stayed weekends. Meals, conversations, and card games shared around the den table sometimes stretched into the morning hours.
Had his mother not cultivated these relationships proactively—had she not clung fiercely to her sisters and eldest brother—, her husband may have retired to his “office” in the family house decades before he did. It was only with failing health that she became a prisoner to his sedentary lifestyle.
The children, when younger, thrived on this periodic stimulation. This was as close as they would come to being a normal family related through anecdote and bloodline. Adulthood offered too many stratagems by which they could go their separate ways, tailor individualized forms of introversion, and still appear connected in the broadest sense.
For Blythe, cordialness and being well behaved was the stuff of acquaintance. Family involved messiness and crisis, with regular infusions of unsolicited advice, stern lecturing, and catching up on gossip. In her mid-forties, the matriarch became briefly addicted to codeine and walled herself off in her bedroom from members of her immediate, uncommunicative family.
In looking over that stressful year, Lucien realized how his mother had unmet emotional needs, since he was convinced that everyone else in the household (including himself) was afflicted with high-functioning autism. For these members, displays of emotion were mostly avoided in favor of the equanimity of unvaried (though stimulating) routine. Had one of her children had a drug addiction, Blythe would never have formed one herself. Through the crises of others, she came alive and found purpose. As it was, she was a battleship that never left port—except this one time she deliberately sprang a leak. When she was forced into hospice decades later, and befriended nurses and staff with their own personal problems, she rallied—blossomed—in finding the society she always required.
The son, brother, and uncle was making modest repairs in his life, and truthfully the worst social aspects of his autism were behind him in his self-absorbed youth, although his empathetic wiring remained spotty. He dealt with his demons, but only because he knew them by their root name. Foreknowledge was being forearmed, and where autistics are readily acclimated to routines, Lucien improved himself through practice.
To the extent he thought about the world outside the family house, it was through the abstraction of inexperience. His mother mostly ignored his aristocratic opinions; and he would have had it no other way. Because she slept so much, he had many hours of daylight to himself.
Leisure offered as much idleness as opportunity, and might feed pathology as readily as creativity. Still, Lucien no longer felt embarrassment when it came to his lack of interest in conventional ambitions. Age had seen something to this, though, more critically, in looking over lives more prosperous than his own, he saw nothing in them he coveted: nothing that merited lasting regret.
His greatest fear was becoming homeless, as he could never navigate around the impenetrable, opaque failure of his life.
On days when his mother expected a hospice worker, he visited a local coffee shop; and because this was his one interaction with the world where he pondered impediments, he paid attention to its society:
Transients routinely filed through the door. Infrequent visitors might not notice them, but Lucien studied their behavior carefully. For the price of a cup of coffee, a homeless individual would pitch tent at a table near his and surround him or herself with recycled bags stuffed with winter apparel and a great deal of bother. Homelessness was a full time job where one is constantly on the move, carrying every possession like a wandering gypsy, and forever sizing up your thin welcome wherever you passed time. Counterpoised to this example was the light traveler who, eternally amused, appears one day on the scene wearing a sherpa hat and tethered to an equally amused one-eared dog.
The patron hoped the baristas did not judge his turning up in the afternoon in the same light. They genuinely appeared, against this possibility, to look forward to his abstruse witticisms and napkin origami.
Lucien had wanted to be a hipster when younger, and was drawn to coffeehouse society chiefly because of this desire. Over time he came to understand that he no more fit into this lifestyle than any other. Whether it was picket fences, suburban SUVs, or cliques dressed in bohemian black, it was different shades of the same herd mentality: one composed of neuro-typical people needing to mingle by tribal affiliation or team colors, and in dress rehearsals for the staid, procreative lives they would eventually embrace.
He was persuaded (after time provided perspective) that most autistics were essentially asexual. They might occasionally hazard biology, or mold themselves to a societal convention for a period. Love was somewhere within it, though known more as an empirical item than through intimate acquaintance.
It was easy to understand why the Gnostics regarded this world as the creation of a lesser god. Doubtless this was a judgment on sexual desire, and how, in the main, it makes ugly souls of all but those few who are capable of unswerving fidelity to a single individual. To regard sexual carnality as a “healthy curiosity” was a vulgar pagan notion: Interchangeable lovers, treachery, and littering one’s life with the broken hearts of others may be regarded as the lively sport of lion-hearted youth, but it is the bloody-heeled ethics of the Roman coliseum that gets dragged untidily into the street, and only there begins to stink.
For what little interest Lucien professed to have in these matters, his sins erred on the side of omission. Their lack of casualty could not be construed as virtue. Real and imagined obstacles always provided a fortress against rashness on his part: against soiling his solitary nest, and against surrendering the joy of hopeful anticipation in love for the genuine article, which could never be (he thought) genuine enough. As long as there were days ahead, and blue skies, he convinced himself that some process of self-selection would leave one woman standing in the forefront of his distraction; and there was technically one such woman…
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