Somebody Somewhere Read Online Free PDF

peripheral vision. Robbie was peripheral.
    Object in hand, Robbie paced in an apparently aimless, sleep-walking way. Was it possible that my “not being there” allowed
him
to be there enough to hold the objects passed to him? In the system of “all world, no self” versus “all self, no world,” the rules were simple. Take away awareness of the world, and the overload on the self is drained. The self can dare to come back.
    With each new object I handed him, I took away the last one, always without looking at him. I looked only into the distance or fixed sharply upon the object itself. It didn’t matter what I handed him. The more impersonal and less obviously interesting the better: a doily, a block, a sponge, a plastic fork, a tea towel. Dumping them, I turned sharply and walked away, with every expectation and assumption Robbie would hold them, and with no need to watch or wait for confirmation. There was no look of anticipation, no expression of excitement when he met my expectations. We spoke a silent dialogue.
    Pacing up and down, Robbie began to wander in and out of a small side room, appearing all the while as if it were just part of the general nowhere to which he was going.
    —
    Don’t wake up the mind. Don’t tell it what you are doing. Otherwise, the hand will not be allowed to grasp, the eyes will never be allowed to look. Do not show an expression or have a thought, or your mind will know you are there and send “tidal waves” to drown you. Affect, when it brakes through mile-high walls, hits with the impact and devastation of a sudden “tidal wave,” an emotional fit.
    —
    Robbie’s face was as dead and bland as a McDonald’s hamburger as he ambled into the small room holding the latest object I had passed him. For an instant on his way back out, I had caught him smiling as he glanced momentarily for the first time at one of the objects he had been given. It was a book, and he had smiled as he glanced at the colorful cover just before the curtains were drawn once again across his face, returning him to his “the world” face: a nobody nowhere.
    I laughed inwardly to myself and expressed nothing. I had seen a Robbie in there. If only for a day, Robbie had dared to accept. If only for a minute, he had dared to have an interest. If only for an instant, he had dared to have a self. If only for one day in his life, it was worth it.
    —
    Entering the infant room, I saw a girl about four years old curled up in the dark interior of a crate. Her eyes were sharply crossed, her fists clenched into balls. The staff had been advised that in the safety of her self-controlled isolation, she might begin to explore her surroundings. Hung inside the crate were various mobiles and objects.
    —
    Fabrics dangled in front of me in my dark cupboard, the security of my chosen darkness. Here the bombardment of bright light and harsh colors, of movement and blah-blah, of unpredictable noise and the uncontrollable touch of others were all gone. Here was a world of guarantees, where things were controlled for long enough that I could calm down and have a thought or become aware of a feeling. I reached out to touch the fabric in front ofme. I ran my hand over the silky surface of the patent leather shoes at my feet. I picked them up and ran them across my cheek. Here, there was no final straw to send me from overload into the endless void of shutdown.
    —
    The two supervising staff were excited by the novelty of their ideas and the equipment for the little girl. Like overenthusiastic relatives on the first meeting with a newborn child, they were half in the tiny crate with her. I stood there feeling ill as they bombarded her personal space with their bodies, their breath, their smells, their laughter, their movement, and their noise. Almost manically, they shook rattles and jiggled things in front of the girl as if they were a pair of overzealous witch doctors hoping to break the evil spell of autism. Their