A Wizard Alone

Kit left Tom’s by use of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He spent a while there Web surfing, printing out what he’d found, and then located a few books and checked them out. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.

“You know much about it?”

“Enough to get by.” She drank some coffee. “There are a lot of different kinds, and we’re still feeling our way around to the causes. Once they thought autism was caused by being raised wrong, by having parents who were cold or abusive. That theory got thrown out a long time ago. But there are still a lot of possible causes, and some of them seem to include each other. Some autism may be too little of one chemical or another in the brain. Or it may be caused by an enzyme that’s missing, so that certain chemicals build up in the nervous system and damage it, or make it behave erratically.

It may be caused by something wrong with the immune system, or rogue antibodies that attack brain and neural tissue, or even a virus, or pollution, or vitamin A deficiency…” She raised one hand in a

“who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “There’re a hundred answers, maybe all of them right sometimes… Is this for school?”

“No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”

His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, honey, that’s terrible!

His parents must be heartbroken. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”

“I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”

“What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d vanished. So how is he missing?”

“It was just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have been giving them a lot more, if only to keep them from worrying. “When the wizardry first comes to you, it doesn’t come all at once. You get a test first: your Ordeal. If you pass, you’re a wizard. If you don’t…”

Immediately, the look on his mother’s face suggested to him that he might have misstepped.

“You die” his mother said.

“Not always,” Kit said. “Sometimes you just lose the power that was given you to take the test with.” His mama was looking at him rather narrowly now, and Kit realized that she would immediately detect any attempt to soften this. “But it’s true that some kids don’t come back,” Kit said. “Some disappearances are failed Ordeals. Maybe a few percent.”

His mother sat, quietly digesting that, and had another drink of her coffee. “So this Ordeal,” she said. “He’s having some kind of problem with it?”

“He’s been in the middle of it for a long time,” Kit said. “He may need help. And I can’t help thinking the autism has something to do with it.” He sighed. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but I don’t know anything about what’s going on in his head yet. And he may not be able to tell me. I think I’m going to have to get in there and take a look myself.”

“In his head” His mother looked alarmed. “Kit, my love, I don’t claim to understand the details of what you’re doing… but wouldn’t that be a violation of his privacy?”

“Maybe,” Kit said. “But couldn’t you make a case that CPR is, too? Still, you do it.”

“To save a life, yes.”

“That’s what this might be,” Kit said. “Ordeals are crucial by definition, Mama. I had some help on mine. Maybe now I get to pay those favors forward.”

“So you get inside his head how, exactly?” his mama said. “Is this what Carmela keeps describing as ‘magic telepathy’?”

Kit shook his head. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “I’m still working out how to describe it.

Ponch sees it as making a new world to go to…or finding that world ready-made. Once you make it, or find it, you go there.”

“Ponch sees it…” His mother shook her head, sloshed the coffee around in her cup, drank some, and made a face: It was going cold.

“We’ll go there and look around,” Kit said. “We’ll see what his world looks like to him.

Assuming we can get in all right. If that doesn’t work… I’ll have to think of something else. But at least this is a place to start.”

His mother put the cup down and pushed it away. “If you do actually get to talk to him,” she said, looking thoughtful, “there’s possibly something you should keep in mind. Autistic people have trouble, sometimes, predicting what other human beings’ minds are going to do. It’s a skill they have to develop with practice, whereas we take it almost completely for granted, that prediction inside: ‘If I do this, then she’ll do that,’ and so on. So you have to be prepared for the things you say to really upset him, more than would seem reasonable. He may even have trouble believing in you.“

Kit looked at her, wondering what she meant. “It’s not that he’d think he was hallucinating you, exactly,” his mama said. “This isn’t that kind of perceptual problem. But some autistic people have trouble conceiving of anything existing outside the workings of their own minds. The concept of ‘the other’ seems to take a long time forming. That’s part of why so many of them can’t make or keep eye contact with other people. Yet for the same reason, a lot of them seem not to know what fear is.”

“Weird,” Kit said.

“Not as such,” said his mother. “Different, yes. You may not scare him, but you may upset him… so be ready for that.”

“Okay,” Kit said.

His mother sat back and looked sad. “The problem is that there are probably as many kinds of autism as there are people who have it,” she said. “And not enough of them come back from that side of things to tell us how what’s happened to them looks or feels.” She shook her head. “Some of the few who have say that the world just got too overwhelming to be borne. They felt like they were surrounded by sounds that were too intense, sights they couldn’t bear to see. So they had to withdraw inside themselves to get away, or even hurt themselves over and over again as a way to blot out the pain outside. It’s the only way they can control it. Others tell about feeling so sealed away from the world and the things and people in it that they hurt themselves just to be able to feel something. You get kids who are autistic from age two, and others who’re perfectly normal until suddenly they turn ten or twelve and something just goes wrong…and they turn inward and don’t come out again for years. If ever.” Kit’s mama looked haunted.

Kit nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this complicated.”

“It is.”

“You know anything that would be good for me to read?”

“There are lots of books,” his mother said. “Some of the ones in the hospital library are going to be too technical for you.” She looked over Kit’s shoulder at the books spread out on the floor. “But some won’t be, and they’re more recent than these. Let me see what I can bring you.”

“Great. One thing, though. I really need to take tomorrow off to work on this. Can you call school and get me off?”

She scowled at him. “You don’t have a test or anything tomorrow?”

“Huh? No.”

“I’m not going to make a habit of this…”

“’m not asking you to, Mama! But it’s going to take more than just lunch hour to make a start on this, and I don’t want to have to run off all of a sudden in the middle of something that’s going to make a difference.”

His mother sat thinking. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. You can have a stomach bug or something.”

“No, Mama! Don’t lie to them. Just tell them I need a personal day.”