The car roared into the parking lot of the McJames school, and Michelle set off the vehicle’s safety alarms by opening the door to get out even before the vehicle stopped. She bounded up the front steps and frantically pounded the intercom button. The desk attendant on the screen smiled at her and buzzed her in.
“Where’s Adam!?! Where’s my brother?” Michelle demanded. The desk attendant visibly winced, then summoned the supervisor. Mrs. Sherfy hurried over and pulled Michelle along the hallway, whispering urgently.
“Adam’s fine, he really is. Please, let me explain.” She led Michelle into an empty classroom and closed the door, turned to Michelle and took a deep breath, hands out in front of her.
“Adam is fine. He’s doing really well.”
“Can I see him?”
“Not right now. He’s busy and shouldn’t be interrupted. But come back for the community performance tonight. He’s already doing well enough to have a part in our entry at the Dance Festival.”
“Where is he?”
“In therapy. It’s important not to disrupt the routines. You know that. He’s very happy, please trust me.”
Michelle shook her head emphatically. “No! I’m getting him and we’re going home. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I just have a very bad feeling.”
Mrs. Sherfy stepped forward and put her hands on Michelle’s forearm, gently squeezing. Michelle felt the pressure and found it oddly comforting.
“Michelle, you know Adam is very special. He’s everything we thought he would be, and more. He’s adapting well and learning quickly. You may not know this, but he has unique talents.”
Michelle’s confusion tangled her tongue. “What…he does?”
“At the other school, when he would spend so much time at the sand table, do you know what he was doing, running the sand through his hands?”
Michelle shook her head slowly. “I….just thought he, y’know, liked it. How it felt.”
Mrs. Sherfy smiled. “Have you ever heard of Stephen Wiltshire?” Mrs. Sherfy continued, softly stroking and kneading while she spoke, low and soft. “He’s an autistic man from England. He’s very old now, doesn’t do much, but when he was younger, he drew perfect reproductions of complex scenes he’d seen only once, whole cityscapes from memory, almost perfect in every little detail. He takes in enormous amounts of visual information and can process, store, and reproduce it with very high fidelity. He’s a visual savant. A prodigious visual savant.”
It sounded familiar. Savant stories were part of the life of families in the neurodivergent community, part of the never-ending search for hope that perhaps your child or sibling was one of the very special ones with some unusual gift that would lead them out of the silence and isolation. It was yet another potential point of controversy, another opportunity for snake oil, broken dreams, false promises, and frustration.
Mrs. Sherfy continued. “Adam is a hyperasthete, specifically, a tactile hyperasthete. Many of his frustrations and aggressive behaviors are from overstimulation. He also appears to have special mathematical abilities. What we’ve found is that he can be taught to use those skills in productive and fulfilling ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he runs his hand through the sand? He counts the grains, over and over again. That’s how sensitive his sense of touch is. And not just his hands. We are teaching him to use that special ability to connect to other people, the outside world. It is working.”
It was then that Michelle attended to Mrs. Sherfy touching her forearm, gently kneading, squeezing, and stroking it, her fingers making gentle fluttering motions as is if playing a piano, almost imperceptible, but quite soothing. Michelle looked down at her arm, then slowly up at Mrs. Sherfy’s warmly smiling face. Her fear and anxiety swirled, but gradually a blooming calm smoothed over her turmoil, a sense of well-being and comfort. It reminded her of the medications she was given before the surgery she had on her wisdom teeth, a wave of warmth and contentment. She heard Mrs. Sherfy’s words, oddly disconnected from the feeling, reassurance, even though nothing she’d said really explained anything, or even made much sense for that matter. The urge to run was gone, and though her sense of disquiet remained, now cocooned, she allowed herself to be led out to the lobby without protest.
“Come to the rehearsal tonight,” Mrs. Sherfy said. Michelle paused, considering. But then the image of the dark man at the lab intruded.
“Who is Dr. Isaac? Why is he here at the school?”
Mrs. Sherfy stopped and frowned.
“Why do you ask? Do you know Dr. Isaac?”
“So that was him I saw in the parking lot the other morning? A Black man, maybe mid-thirties?”
Mrs. Sherfy nodded slowly, a wary look on her face.
“He’s one of Dr. McJames’ colleagues, a geneticist. He helps with understanding the connection between different manifestations of autism in each individual. But why are you concerned about him?”
“What does he do out at the lab, the Research Lab?”
“I don’t know. He’s a brilliant man. They may consult him about their research. He is the one who gives the students problems to solve, the shapes of the molecules. One of the lab people said the students are just as fast at their computers, better in some ways, for figuring out the folding and binding problems they do at the lab. We’re all very proud of them. Dr. Isaac is like of one of our family.”
Mrs. Sherfy returned Michelle’s steady gaze, unflinching and open, devoid of any deception or deflection. Despite all the unusual questions, Michelle felt placated for the moment.
Robert Wack 