The Speed of Dark

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

On Friday, the police arranged to have me picked up and taken to work. My car was towed to the police station for examination; they say they will bring it back by Friday night. Mr. Crenshaw does not come to our section. I make a lot of progress on my project.

The police send a car to take me home, but first we go by a store to buy a replacement battery for my car and then to the place where the police keep cars. It is not the regular police station but a place called an impoundment. That is a new word to me. I have to sign papers stating that my car is my car and that I am taking custody of it. A mechanic puts the new battery I just bought into my car. One of the policemen offers to drive home with me, but I do not think I need help. He says that they have put my apartment on a watch list.

The inside of my car is dirty, with pale dust on the surfaces. I want to clean it, but first I need to drive home. It is a longer drive than coming straight home from work, but I do not get lost. I park my car next to Da

I am not supposed to leave my apartment, for my own safety, but it is Friday night and I need to do my laundry. The laundry room is in the building. I think Mr. Stacy meant I should not leave the building. It will be safe in the building, because Da

I put the dark things into the dark basket and the light things into the light basket, balance the detergent on top, and carefully look through the peephole before opening the door. No one, of course. I open the door, carry my laundry through, relock the door. It is important to lock the door every time.

As usual on Friday evening, the apartment building is quiet. I can hear the television in someone’s apartment as I go down the stairs. The hall outside the laundry room looks the same as usual. I do not see anyone looking in from outside. I am early this week, and no one else is in the laundry room. I put the dark clothes in the right-hand washing machine and the light clothes in the one next to them. When no one is here to watch me, I can put the money in both boxes and start both machines at the same time. I have to stretch my arms to do it, but it sounds better that way.

I have brought Cego and Clinton, and I sit in one of the plastic chairs by the folding table. I would like to take it out into the hall, but there is a sign that says: RESIDENTS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO TAKE CHAIRS OUT OF LAUNDRY AREA. I do not like this chair — it is a strange ugly shade of blue-green — but when I am sitting in it I do not have to see it. It still feels bad, but it is better than no chair.

I have read eight pages when old Miss Kimberly comes in with her laundry. I do not look up. I do not want to talk. I will say hello if she speaks to me.

“Hello, Lou,” she says. “Reading?”

“Hello,” I say. I do not answer the question, because she can see that I am reading.

“What’s that?” she says, coming closer. I close the book with my finger in my place, so that she can see the cover.

“My, my,” she says. “That’s a thick book. I didn’t know you liked to read, Lou.”

I do not understand the rules about interrupting. It is always impolite for me to interrupt other people, but other people do not seem to think it is impolite for them to interrupt me in circumstances when I should not interrupt them.

“Yes, sometimes,” I say. I do not look up from the book because I hope she will understand that I want to read.

“Are you upset with me about something?” she asks.

I am upset now because she will not let me read in peace, but she is an older woman and it would not be polite to say so.

“Usually you’re friendly, but you brought in that big fat book; you can’t really be reading it—”

“I am,” I say, stung. “I borrowed it from a friend Wednesday night.”

“But it’s — it looks like a very difficult book,” she says. “Are you really understanding it?”

She is like Dr. Fornum; she does not think I can really do much.

“Yes,” I say. “I do understand it. I am reading about how the visual processing parts of the brain integrate intermittent input, as on a TV monitor, to create a stable image.”

“Intermittent input?” she says. “You mean when it flickers?”

“In a way,” I say. “Researchers have identified the area of the brain where the flickering images are made smooth.”

“Well, I don’t see the practical use of it,” she says. She takes her clothes out of the basket and begins stuffing them into a machine. “I’m quite happy to let my insides work without watching them while they do it.” She measures out detergent, pours it in, inserts the money, and pauses before pushing START. “Lou, I don’t think it’s healthy, too much concern with how the brain works. People can go crazy that way, you know.”

I did not know. It never occurred to me that knowing too much about the way my brain worked could make me insane. I do not think that is a true statement. She pushes the button and the water whooshes into that machine. She comes over to the folding table.

“Everybody knows psychiatrists’ and psychologists’ children are crazier than average,” she says. “Back in the twentieth century, there was a famous psychiatrist who put his own child in a box and kept it there and it went crazy.”

I know that is not true. I do not think she will believe me if I tell her it is not true. I do not want to explain anything, so I open the book again. She makes a sharp blowing sound and I hear her shoes click on the floor as she walks away.

When I was in school, they taught us that the brain is like a computer but not so efficient. Computers do not make mistakes if they are correctly built and programmed, but brains do. From this I got the idea that any brain — even a normal brain, let alone mine — was an inferior sort of computer.

This book makes it clear that brains are a lot more complex than any computer and that my brain is normal — that it does function exactly like the normal human brain — in many ways. My color vision is normal. My visual acuity is normal. What is not normal? Only the slightest things… I think.

I wish I had my medical records from childhood. I do not know if they did all the tests on me that this book discusses. I do not know if they tested the transmission speed of my sensory neurons, for instance. I remember that my mother had a big accordion file, green on the outside and blue on the inside, stuffed with papers. I don’t remember seeing it after my parents died, when I packed up things from their house. Maybe my mother threw it away when I was grown up and living on my own. I know the name of the medical center my parents took me to, but I do not know if they would help me, if they even keep records of children who are now grown.

The book talks about a variation in the ability to capture brief transitory stimuli. I think back to the computer games that helped me hear and then learn to say consonants like p and t and d, especially at the ends of words. There were eye exercises, too, but I was so little that I don’t remember much of them.

I look at the paired faces in the illustration, which test discrimination of facial features by either placement or type. All the faces look much the same to me; I can just tell — with the prompting of the text labels — that these two have the same eyes, nose, and mouth, but one has them stretched out, farther from the other features. If they were moving, as on a real person’s face, I would never notice. Supposedly this means something wrong with a specific part of the brain involved in facial recognition.

Do normal people really perform all these tasks? If so, it’s no wonder they can recognize one another so easily, at such distances, in different clothes.