“Now There Is Only You,” by Nathan Poole (Fiction ’11)
2011 fiction alum Nathan Poole was recently featured in Shenandoah. Read an excerpt of “Now There Is Only You” below:
Now There Is Only You
he day before her son eloped, the rains came and the river increased. She recalls the immense, confused sound in the woods behind their home. All day, dense endless thunder. In the evening hailstones gathered in strings along the iron lip of the gutter.
By then she’d forgotten the romantic overtones—eloped—word for lovers. She hears it still. The palm-warmed pebble tossed against the upstairs window, the trestle descent—but not for her child, her boy. Autistic children do not run away with lovers, they just run off with themselves. What must it be like to have such a slack sense of home, or attachment? “Elopement,” as the clinicians say, a behavior half of all autistic children engage in. Another form of wandering, of withdrawing, from her, from her love, her need of him, which grew stronger only as he grew older and more independent of her, more willing to shrug her off—to shrug the world off too, water off a duck’s back.
▴ ▴ ▴
If her son had shoes on when he left that morning, the river took them. The river took everything but his bicycle helmet. The bright orange one, perhaps the only reason the body was found at all, the parents were told, as though they should be grateful he had been wearing it.
▴ ▴ ▴
At night, the mother sees the orange helmet winking out from behind the stilt grass, flashes of it in the corner of her eyes, and when she turns she sees him, under the bright cap, the pale stamen of her son drifting, naked boy with his long hair—surely they thought he was a girl when they first came up on him—her darling in the bulrushes.
▴ ▴ ▴
Her son of so many shades. A gelding changing color. Their nonverbal son; their distant, open-mouthed son; their angry, self-absorbed son; their beauty queen son; their supple, warm-skinned son with the long fragrant hair; their stubborn son, barnacled to the steel pole in the supermarket; their ecstatic son, limbs outstretched on a bright fall day outside his grandparent’s house, dancing; all of their sons, all gone, all flown out like swallows into an aperture of severe self-light.
▴ ▴ ▴
He was diagnosed officially by four, suddenly stopped speaking at three-and-a-half, all in a few weeks, a month perhaps, from compound sentences, to phrases, then a few last words, like a good-bye. After that it was only gestures, if anything.
▴ ▴ ▴
Anything, that is how the mother remembers feeling, how acute her anger could become. She would take anything from him. She had never wanted to shake her child, but in those first months of regressive onset, she could not stop herself from asking him, “Thomas? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?” and how she hated her reliance on that question, how she never said anything else to him those days, only asking, pleading, was he okay in there, was he hurting in there, was he scared in there? Was he okay? Because he seemed in pain, or hurt, the way he scrunched his face, closed so tightly his eyes. And his silence was so awful, and sudden. Are you okay? Are you okay?
▴ ▴ ▴
How she wanted to hurt him, she admits this now, how she wanted to make his agonized gestures correspond to something real, to make his clinched eyes correspond to the world as it was. She wanted to place something hot in his hand and see him do something about it, to see him hurting because of something outside. Something she could then remove, and say, all better, all better. She is not ashamed.
They tickled him, but instead of the normal squeal, the look in the eyes that before had pleaded with delight, “no more,” he would instead go stiff, eyes wide as though listening to something far off.
In the mornings, she would go in to find him manipulating his tongue in his mouth, his eyes clamped shut as though focusing very hard on something. It reminded her of someone trying to tie a cherry stem into a knot, though more involved. Each time she found him this way she would pry the mouth open, convinced and scared he actually had something in there. And it was always empty. Empty and empty and empty. This lovely mouth with its full lips, mouth that had before held songs, and laughter, and such precise little demands.
▴ ▴ ▴
This is autism, she is told, over and over again. This and this and this. The word alone, whenever she hears it or is forced to use it, like a door getting slammed upstairs in a big drafty house, a house growing ever bigger now, big enough to contain all the new things she is fearful of.
The word itself was first used to describe a particular kind of self-absorption noted in schizophrenic patients in 1908. Auto. Self. Selfism. It sounds judgmental to her. Why would you do this to yourself? And then, in the forties, child psychologists decided it was not a form of schizophrenia at all, but something else, some other wilderness of the mind. That’s about as far as they have gotten. And yet, they kept Eugen Bleuler’s troubled word. Autism.
▴ ▴ ▴
His arms swung over his drawn-up knees again, his hands together, his whole body rocking, not wildly rocking, but gracefully, rhythmically, his long fingers interlaced and bumping up and down just so on his shins. His eyes remain fixed to the side, into an empty corner. The eyes are moving as though someone is there, dancing.
Read this piece in its entirety here: https://shenandoahliterary.org/701/now-there-is-only-you/
