Falling like the Stars

16

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m real. Most of the time, yeah, I know, this is the sort of self-important navel-gazing a lot of kids my age do, but I think I’ve got more reason than most to wonder. 

When it comes to the old “I think, therefore I am,” I meet the qualifications. In fact, I’d have to guess that I’ve put a lot more thought into the nature of my existence than the average seventeen year old. Because accomplishing even the simplest tasks takes a lot of observation, planning and luck when no one can remember you. 

Take this moment, right now, for example. I’m having breakfast. In a diner, of course, because—let’s get this out of the way—I am by necessity, homeless. A normal boy might come in, sit in a booth, order his food, eat, pay and leave. Not me. I have to sit at the counter front and center, where the waitress can see me all the time. Otherwise, she’ll forget about me, and I won’t get my food. It helps, too, to eat in one of those diners that has a window right through to the kitchen so the cooks see me when they’re making my food, because otherwise, even if the waitress remembers me, if the cook doesn’t, the order slip might disappear and I won’t get my food. I make a point of catching the cook’s eye right away, increasing the chances that they’ll glance up at me now and then. 

Today, I make it easier on myself. “Cornflakes and orange juice,” I tell Lindy, my waitress. Cereal is something Lindy can get herself, the boxes are right on the counter behind her, so I don’t need to worry about the cooks. 

“You here on a trip or something?” Lindy asks as she pours the milk. As friendly as she is, she doesn’t recognize me, although she’s been my waitress every morning for the past month or so. I’ve been in the kitchen here, it’s very clean. For New York, that’s about all I could ask for. 

“I might check out a museum this morning,” I say. It’s true. Metropolitan Museum of Art is on my list today. It’s not my favorite, but I’m kind of getting bored with the Natural History one. 

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go there,” Lindy says, pausing for a moment with one hand on her angular hip. I watch as her rings slide down to the knuckle on her right hand. We have this conversation often. I’ve yet to find an actual New York attraction that she has seen. It’s sad, really, how much regular people’s lives get in the way of their lives. It’s not easy for me to make money, it’s extremely hard, in fact, but I always over-tip Lindy, in hopes that it helps. 

On that point, I’m not really sure. I don’t really know how it works, but it’s not just that people can’t remember me. It’s that all evidence of me disappears. Come, sit down in front of me. Take a picture. Get out your phone and write yourself a note. Something like. “I am sitting in front of a boy named Jared. He has brown hair that’s on the longish side for a boy and blue grey eyes. About 6’3”. Remember him.”  Then walk outside. Take a walk around the block. I’m not even going to tell you to come back and sit down with me again, because you won’t remember. But here’s the strange thing. Later, if you looked at your phone, you wouldn’t find a picture of a boy you don’t recognize. You wouldn’t find a confusing note. Because they wouldn’t be there. And that wouldn’t strike you as odd, because you wouldn’t even be thinking about it. 

I’ve never seen anything physically disappear. So I’m not really sure what happens to Lindy’s tips. It’s possible that since it’s just money, and not anything actually about me, that she gets to keep it. Who knows. 

I don’t actually pay for my meal, and I don’t feel great about it, because stealing is stealing and even if I’ll never get caught, it’s still wrong. It doesn’t keep me up at night or anything, but I have to be my own keeper. No one else is going to make me be good. 

“Can you show me where the restroom is?” I ask Lindy. She hooks a thumb over her shoulder, and I slide off the stool and head in the direction she indicated. Five minutes in the bathroom, and when I come out again, my place has been cleared, a new paper placemat waiting for the next customer. No one even glances up as I walk out the door. 

The museum doesn’t open until 10:00, which gives me a couple hours to kill. I could try dog walking this morning. I fish through my bag to find the list. Sunday, Amsterdam Ave. If I hoof it over there, I can make it for the eight o’clock route. 

I’ve got three lockers at Grand Central Station where I keep my things, including my dog-walking kit; a couple of leashes, a roll of duty-bags and dispenser, and some fake business cards I printed up. Dog walking is another thing that I feel guilty about, but not too much so. I’ve been dealt a pretty crappy hand in life, and I have to get by however I can. I’d be completely willing to do this the honest way, but for me, that’s just not possible. 

Sarah Jones is a dog walker with an extremely choice route. The people who live this close to Central Park pay fifty dollars an hour per dog because a) they can afford it, and b) they are the sort of people that believe there’s a difference between someone who charges fifty dollars an hour for dog walking and someone who charges ten dollars an hour. The only real difference is that the fifty dollar an hour dog walkers have better websites and the balls to ask for more. 

I watched Sarah for two weeks before I scooped a client. The way I see it, I am working for the money, and Sarah walks enough dogs each day that missing one now and then doesn’t really make that much of a difference. I have seven different dog walkers that I can choose from, so I don’t leave too much of a dent in anyone’s take. 

Sarah’s second pick-up is Mrs. Greyson of 322 Amsterdam Ave, apartment 5b. She has two King Charles Spaniels who are reasonably well-behaved on the leash. Sarah charges eighty dollars for the two of them, so I wish I could chose Mrs. Greyson more often, but I worry about spooking her off swallowing my substitute routine. She answers the door with a dog under each arm and a harried look on her face, as usual. I’m not sure what she’s doing in there, but she never leaves and doesn’t have any kids. None of my business really. 

“Oh!” she stops short. “You’re not Sarah.”  Her overly lipsticked mouth makes a comical little “O” of surprise. 

I smile. “Ms. Jones was running a little late today, so she asked me to substitute for her to make sure that Silky and Clementine got out on time.”  Silky and Clementine are wiggling and whining. They don’t care who takes them out, they just need to go. And I need to get out of here before Sarah comes along at her regularly scheduled time. 

Mrs. Greyson chews her lip and puts on a show of looking conflicted, but she’ll give in, apparently she doesn’t have time to stand in the hallway dickering around with this. I pull out my card, and she takes it gratefully. I’ve given her my card half a dozen times, and it seems to be what reassures her. 

“Is eighty enough?” she asks, reaching into her designer purse which hangs on a hook next to the door. I’ve noticed that the purse always matches her outfit, a different one each time I’ve been here. Weird. 

“Since I’m a sub, you get a discount,” I say. “Just sixty today.”  It feels so good to get those crisp bills in my hand. I can usually get by without any money at all, but it’s good insurance. Just in case things don’t go as planned. 

“They don’t like the horses in Central Park,” she reminds me as I clip on their leashes. 

I know. But I nod my head. “Ok, thanks,” I say. 

Silky and Clementine lick my face and nuzzle in under my arms as I carry them down the hall. I think they remember me. I think. I wish I could ask them. Either way, I pretend they do. “Hey girls,” I say, giving them an affectionate squeeze. “I missed you.”  

Maybe they missed me. I wouldn’t know. 

A little over an hour later, I return Silky and Clementine to the apartment. “I found your dogs in Central Park,” I say when Mrs. Greyson opens the door. 

“Oh my goodness,” she exclaims. “You naughty things!  How on earth did you get out?”  She looks harassed and exasperated, her iron-grey hair pushed up a little out of style on the left side of her head, but she covers the dogs little faces with kisses when I hand them over. “Thank you so much for taking the time to bring them all the way up here.”

“They’re very friendly,” I remark and fondle Clementine’s chin. I turn as if to leave. 

“Wait,” she says, reaching for your purse. “Let me thank you.”  She frowns slightly when she opens her wallet, no doubt a small part of her brain is noting that there’s sixty fewer dollars there than she expects, but it’s not enough to really grab her attention. 

“No, no, that’s ok,” I say. “They’re sweet dogs.”  

“I insist,” she says, pressing a twenty into my hand. “The city needs more people like you.”

Huh, I think as I thank her and walk away, I wonder what that would be like. It’s something that’s often on my mind, actually. Because, there might be a lot more people like me than you’d ever know. You wouldn’t know. You’d have no idea. And, when it comes down to it, there’s no reason that I’d necessarily know about it either. Just because I’m like me doesn’t mean that I would recognize someone like myself. There’s no rulebook regarding my condition, as far as I know, so anything’s possible. Maybe we all meet dozens of people like me every day, and don’t even know it. Which brings me back to my original point. Those people wouldn’t seem real to me. So what’s there to say I’m real either?

********

The museum opens at 10:00. I’m waiting on the steps at 9:55. There’s a boy here who is waiting to go in, but he’s acting differently than the people around us. He’s tall and lanky and he stands out from everybody, but he doesn’t seem to care. It’s weird. 

I don’t do well with weird. Well, actually I like weird things, but only when they’re contained. For example. Picasso. Totally weird. But that kind of weirdness can’t get me. It’s contained three ways. One: in the past. Picasso lived from October 25, 1881 until April 8, 1973. That means he died twenty-five years before I was born. There’s no way I can be harmed by Pablo Picasso’s weirdness. Two: geographically. Picasso lived in Europe, so even if he was alive now, the chances that I’d accidentally see him on the street are pretty small. Three: frames. I prefer to stay away from Picasso’s sculptures because they are right out in the air, like they could spill out onto me at any moment. I like the paintings and sketches better, enclosed in their frames. Then, I can look as close as I like. Which isn’t even as close as you are allowed to. I know the rules, I know how close you can get, and I don’t need to get that close to see. To see the weirdness in a safe way. In a way that I can study it. 

You might be wondering if I’m psychotic or something. I’m not. If I really use only my brain, and facts that I know about the world, I know that weirdness cannot “get on me.”  But that’s the way it feels to me. Facts in your brain and feelings in your body are two different things. 

So it makes me nervous when I see someone who’s acting weird. A lot of people think that since I have autism, I don’t understand how normal people behave. If you think that, then you don’t know me. Ever hear of “early intervention?” That’s when your parents realize really early on that their kid is different, get you tested, find out you are “on the spectrum” and then get together a team of people who work like maniacs to teach you how normal people behave. Thanks to my parents, early intervention, and my “team,” I probably know more about how normal people behave than most normal people. It just doesn’t come naturally to me, that’s all. 

I need ways to remind myself to do the things that normal people do on autopilot. The biggest example is making eye contact when you are talking to someone. If I look at someone’s face while we’re talking, it’s too much stimulus, and then I can’t really pay attention to what they’re saying. But I’ve been taught that you need to do it anyway, so I make glance at a person’s face at least one time per minute during conversations. I’ve had to practice things like how far away to stand during a conversation, how to notice if someone is getting bored listening to what you are talking about, when to say things that don’t really mean anything like “hello” and “how are you” and “fine, thank you.” 

So when someone is not behaving the way normal people do, I always notice it. Like this boy. I watch him for a little while, remembering not to stare, even though I really want to. If this were a perfect world, there would be a video of him that I could watch, and rewind, and watch again, as many times as I wanted to. Then I could figure out what was weird about him, and there would be no way it could come off the screen and be on me. 

I’m not sure exactly what it is that he’s doing different. It’s a little bit that he’s not really paying attention to the people around him. But not quite. I watch, and he keeps the right amount of distance between him and everyone else. If someone does something to catch his attention, he looks up, but then looks away like no one here matters. I also think he’s not going to wait in line when the door opens. His body doesn’t turn the right way when it goes back to being itself. 

Sometimes when someone is acting different, it’s because they’re on the spectrum, like me, and they don’t know how to act. Not everyone gets early intervention. Other times, it’s because they are really stressed and that stress pushes them to act in ways most people don’t. I don’t think either of those are right for him. 

I’m going to have to use my strategies here. He’s not noticing me. Nothing he is doing is dangerous, so it’s ok. I think about what it would be like if he did notice me, and then something weird happens. I imagine smiling at him, and I imagine him smiling back. I imagine him noticing me, and not acting like I don’t matter like he’s acting with all these other people. 

Ok, weird meter alarm just went off. He is getting his weird on me. I look through my satchel for my map of the museum. I’m going to think about my own things for now. 

Like my plan for today’s trip. I have my regular route, the paintings I always go see, with a one-hour block in the middle to see a new exhibit. This is my mother’s idea. To make a sort of sandwich with the stuff I’m familiar with and something I’m not.  That way, I feel pretty comfortable before I start the something new, and I know I have something comfortable to look forward to if the new thing turns out to be weird. 

Today, my new thing was supposed to be the About Face, Human Expressions on Paper exhibit, but I already feel a little uncomfortable about that unexpected boy, so I decide to switch it to one of the textiles exhibits instead. I like the patterns, and if I tell my mom that I liked how you could watch the patterns evolve as trade expanded the horizons of the artists, it might make her forget how much she wanted me to be interested in those Expressions. 

The security guards open the doors, and I stand and wait for the people who have been gathering to head up the stairs and go in before I follow. This is one situation where people break the rules left and right and it just doesn’t make sense to me because seriously, do they think they are somehow not going to make it into the museum if they don’t crowd up at the doors and push ahead like cattle in the slaughter chute?  All those strangers’ bodies touching. No thank you. I’ll wait. 

While I’m waiting, I see the boy again, and he doesn’t wait in line, he sort of walks around the line and into the museum. This is technically not against the rules of the museum. Admission is free to the public, but most people pay the “suggested donation” of twenty-five dollars. And people who don’t want to pay twenty-five dollars usually pay a “polite quarter” instead. So, he isn’t breaking a rule of the museum, but he is breaking a rule of politeness. 

The map. It’s 10:02, and if I want to do my regular route and the special collection to appease my mom, I can’t stand around on the steps trying to figure out why this boy is doing what he’s doing. He’s lying, but that doesn’t mean I have to think about it. I can put that aside, follow my plan. I’ve got my map and schedule.

“Good morning, Jensen,” says the attendant at the ticket booth. Claire. She has the biggest smile of anyone in the museum, which I like because even though the museum is a really safe place for me to be, with more rules than just about any other type of place, there’s not a lot of smiling or laughing going on, which is too bad. 

There are literally millions of items in the collection. Every type of amazing and interesting thing you can think of. All with helpful little plaques to let you know what the heck you are looking at in case you didn’t know. You would think people would just walk around with big old smiles full of wonder. But next time you’re at the museum, do this: for a moment, stop looking at the art, and look at the people in the museum. Half of them look exhausted, which I can understand. It’s a big museum, and a lot of people travel far to get here. Their feet hurt, they’re hungry, they’re carrying too many things with them. And then there are the moms and teachers, chasing their kids around trying to get them to follow the rules. They’re not getting to see any of the stuff they came to see, they keep their eyes on the kids. The other half though, they’re the ones I don’t understand. The ones who look like they’re studying for a test or something. All serious and frowny. Like they think if it looks like they’re actually enjoying the art, that will make them look common. 

“Is everything okay?” Claire asks, which is my cue to notice that I’m stimming. Just a little bit, my knuckle rubbing my temple, no big deal, it’s the sort of thing where as soon as I notice I’m doing it, I can stop. 

I think for a moment. “Yes, everything is okay,” I reassure myself. As soon as I get in, I can start my schedule, and everything will be back to normal. The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts ten thousand guests a day, spread out over six hundred and forty two salons. The chances that I will run into that boy again are very, very small. Not as small as the chance of meeting Picasso here, which is zero, but still small. 

“You have a good day, then,” Claire tells me, and turns to the next person in line. I clip my metal button on my collar and head straight for my favorite painting, The Portal (Sunlight) by Claude Monet. 

On my way to the painting, I pass the line for the special Expressions exhibit, and this is really bad luck because that boy is at the front of the line, and he is lying to the docent. I can tell by his body language. This is something that my therapist drilled into me when I started high school, because there was a lot of concern that I’d get bullied or taken advantage of. How to recognize when someone is teasing. How to recognize when someone’s words don’t really mean what they sound like. How to recognize when someone is lying. 

The weird thing is, he doesn’t even care that he’s lying. Not even a little bit. He’s completely relaxed and I wonder what it would look like if he was hooked up to a lie detector. I picture wires running from his body to my brain and my body lighting up and making a “bing!” noise. “He’s lying!” I’d say. 

If I ever lied, I would shake apart. I’d have to be stimming all over the place to try and cover up the big, wrong space between what was true and what I was saying, and then of course you’d know I was lying because I’d be acting weird and stressed. Not this boy. He doesn’t care that what he’s saying isn’t true and doesn’t care if the docent knows it or not. Maybe that’s why the docent believes him, because he motions for him to go in. I make myself move on as well. 

The bench in front of The Portal is empty, so that’s good. I sit down and pull out my sketch book. 

It’s totally legal to sketch the paintings and other works of art in the museum. They don’t like you to take photos with a flash, but lots of people take pictures. I don’t think they are getting their money’s worth, because it’s too easy to take a picture. You just press a button. Then all you have to do is look. But when you sketch, you really have to be an active observer. When you copy the lines yourself, it forces you to wonder why the artist made the choices he did. You see what parts are emphasized, what parts fall into the shadows. 

I do contour drawings. Which means I only draw the outlines, I don’t fuss around with the shading or coloring. In a way, it makes me work harder, because I have to capture the essence of each piece with fewer tools than the artist used. It also shows how much meaning each component has, the lights and the darks and the brushstrokes or textures. 

One day, I’m going to try spending my whole morning with one painting, and see if that changes the way I see it, if I’m not in the back of my mind worrying about running into the time I’ve scheduled for the next. Because if that next one is on my mind, isn’t it possible that it’s influencing how I’m seeing this one?  

Today is not that day though. I’ve got a pretty good sketch of The Portal, good enough that I might show my dad. Time to move on. 

La Carmencita by John Singer Sargent really makes me happy because there are not a lot of distractions from the subject. It’s all about that amazingly fierce pride on her face, pride in her body and what it can do, and I’ve looked at her face and drawn it more times than I can count, and I’ve never found a trace of darkness there. 

I stop two steps into the room. The boy is there. He’s tall, and his body takes up too much space, he’d be impossible to miss. Standing in front of La Carmencita. He’s not breaking any museum rules, but he’s kind of breaking the rule I made up for him earlier, the rule that the museum is big enough so that I wouldn’t see him again. And not only am I seeing him again, but he’s standing in front of the exact painting I want to look at, and I know it’s not my painting or my museum, but it feels like he’s intruding on something that’s mine, because it looks like he likes the painting almost as much as I do. 

He hasn’t seen me yet, so I have a moment or two to look and try to figure him out. His clothes look expensive, well-made, but they’re not fashionable. Comfortable. Lots of pockets. He’s not very good looking, just an average guy, but something about him makes me not able to look away. The way his eyes are looking at all the different parts of the painting and really seeing it. I reassess my initial impression that his eyes were blue-grey. Now they look hazel-ish. 

He ducks his head and hides a smile when he sees I am watching him, which is something girls usually do because I am really good looking. I know that’s a weird thing to think about myself, but I see myself in the mirror every day, and it’s not like I’m blind. It doesn’t really do me any good though, because even though girls get all flirty and giggly when they first see me, that all changes after they talk to me for a few minutes. 

I try not to let it bother me, because I get it. My mother says it’s going to take a special kind of girl to see past some of my differences to the cool stuff underneath. We’ll see. 

I feel like I’m being pulled in two ways. One part of me wants to keep my distance. His differentness makes me uncomfortable. But another part of me is really curious. What did he say to the docent? What was he lying about?  

“Which do you like better?” he asks me suddenly. 

I know what he’s talking about. There’s another full-length portrait of this dancer in another salon, by a different artist, William Merrit Chase. It’s pretty cool that he knows there’s two. All of a sudden, it’s like some radar in my head goes off. This is a person who shares a common interest with me. I have to clench my hand by my side, because there’s a sudden rush of directions in my head, and it feels like stage fright, and I want to knuckle my forehead to give me a chance to put them all in the right order and not mess this up. Ok. First thing. 

I look him in the eye, stick my hand out and say, “Hello. My name is Jensen. It’s nice to meet you.”  

I can tell by the way his smile freezes that I didn’t quite get it right. I tried to soften up everything, my voice, my muscles, my eyes. But I probably didn’t pull it off. To his credit, he recovers quickly. He takes my hand, and his is cool and soft and he sort of touches the back of my palm with the fingertips of his other hand and that’s what loosens me up. I’m looking at his shoulder, but I can tell that he’s looking at me now the way he was looking at the painting. Trying to see all the parts of me. I take a quick glance into his eyes, to confirm. Yup. And he’s smiling. 

“I’m Jared,” he says before letting go of my hand.

“There’s a special exhibit here on Jared French, the artist. He was a pioneer of the magical realism movement in the 1930’s and a muse for several other artists. Both his works and other artists’ portraits of him are on display.”

“I didn’t know that,” he says. “I chose it because I liked how it sounds.”

“You chose your own name?”  That’s weird. My weird meter is really dinging all kinds of alarms, because I’ve never met anyone who chose their own name before, and because I know that he lied to the docent, and was weird in some way that I couldn’t put my finger on earlier, but bigger than either of those things is the fact that he’s still talking to me and standing close like he’s not looking for a reason to get away. Even weirder than that is that I don’t want to get away either. 

“Sure,” he says, shrugging. “I never knew my mother or father, forget what they named me. I’m homeless, so I’m the only one who it matters to. I used to come up with new names for myself all the time, but I’ve been sticking with Jared for quite a while now.”

Ok, this is it. I’ve got it, why he seems different. It’s like he doesn’t care what happens next. Like, he doesn’t care if I don’t understand what he’s talking about, or if it makes me have a million questions. I think about it for a moment. That’s something I can cope with. 

“This one.” I say.

He looks confused. “What?”

“You asked me which one I like better. This one.”

“Oh!” he says, turning back to the painting. His eyes move all over it. “Why?”

“This one is more real. She’s posing. The other one, she’s supposed to be dancing, but you can tell she’s just posed like she’s dancing. This one, where she’s still, you can see the tension in her body, like she wishes she were dancing. The other one, it looks like she wishes she wasn’t having to pose like that.”

He looks from me to the painting. “I never thought about it that way. To think about what she was thinking. That’s cool that the artist could make us think of her as a living person, all these years later. Amazing, right?”

“It’s a little easier with this one,” I say. “We know who she was, a little bit about what she was like. Look, there’s even video.”  I gesture towards the monitor mounted to the left of the painting. Jared nods. 

“You sound like you know a lot about art,” he says. 

“Well, I come here every day in the summer, and I don’t forget things,” I explain, touching the pad of my forefinger to the pad of my thumb to remind myself not to knuckle my forehead. This really interesting person is talking to me and I’m talking back and don’t think I don’t notice how he’s changed from weird to interesting in my mind. I think about the other Jared, Jared French, the artist. The other thing he was known for was that he was a leader in the gay artists community. Thinking about that makes me realize another thing about this Jared. His body language is like how guys stand and move when they like a girl. 

I’ve literally never been in this situation before. I remember how he was acting. Like he didn’t care what happens next. He doesn’t care if I won’t look him in the eye, he doesn’t care if he’s “encouraging” me, even though by now it must be obvious to him that there’s something different about me. 

“What do you mean, you don’t forget things?” he asks. Suddenly, he’s the one who is looking away, not meeting my eye. I don’t think I said anything wrong. My therapist says when in doubt, to just be myself.

“I’m sure I forget some things, I’m not like a super genius or anything, but one of the characteristics many people on the autism spectrum share is an exceptional memory.”

“Mmm,” he says. He’s looking back at the painting. Everything about him is telling me I said the wrong thing, but I can’t figure out what it was. And I realize I want to figure it out. I want to keep talking to him and have him look at me and to know what he thinks about—

“Which do you like better?” I ask. 

His smile comes back, but it’s a bit of a fake smile. Not fake towards me, fake towards himself. 

“I like the other one a little better, I like the colors. But I really just like the idea that two really amazing artists painted the same woman. It’s not like she was a queen or anything. And here we are, decades later, looking at her, imagining what she was like. How cool that is that she’s remembered after all the time.”

Inside, I’m really glad he said he liked the other one better, because if he said this one just to agree with me, that might mean he wasn’t really interested in talking to me. I’m not doing too bad here. 

“She’s not the only one,” I say. “There’s lots of people who were muses or models for more than one artist, like Jared French. Lots of artists thought he was beautiful.”

Jared turns to me and now his smile is smaller than ever and it’s mostly not covering up the sadness behind it. “It was really nice meeting you, Jensen,” he says, and turns to walk away.

Half an hour ago, I was worried about running into him and thinking it would be almost as bad as running into Picasso, but now the thought of him walking away and not seeing him again feels really, really awful. It makes a panicky little feeling in my stomach and it feels worse than the fear I have of doing the wrong thing here so I say, in a voice louder than I would normally use in a museum, “Wait. Can I buy you a cup of coffee in the café?” I cannot believe I have done this. I press my knuckles into my forehead and tap. Twice. 

“I’m sorry, no,” he says, offering me one last sad smile, and walks away. 

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