always so obliging. «Some days are almost all bad», Fran wrote a month later. «Full Moon. Low, heavy clouds. What a horrendous day». Jessy came home crying; someone had taken her special seat on the school bus. (There was a system there too, but we never understood it.) She refused to sing with Fran («I will cry again») or answer her questions. She mumbled because the radiator hissed. She cried when she made a mistake in sewing, stopped, cried some more. When Fran tried to comfort her she went in her room and told Fran to go away.
I walked out the door and cried all the way home. It was just too much of a struggle all afternoon… I cried and cried, as bad as Jessy, I suppose. No work Tuesday. Hooray! A holiday for a full week- must rest and be renewed to begin again.
There were good days too, with swimming lessons, walks, bicycle rides in benign weather. With Fran’s encouragement and supervision, Jessy designed and sewed a gorgeous quilt, the sun on one side, the full moon on the other, not a cloud in either sky. And the system kept on growing, spreading invisibly, underground. As it predated its discovery by others («Found these at ears and years», she told her father), it evolved without their attention. What Fran had glimpsed would prove to be its next and most florid stage.
Moon, sun, and clouds were now correlated with, of all things, flavors. And gum wrappers — twenty-nine of them. Fran didn’t know it, and I didn’t notice it, but of course that was the number of day things, real and imaginary. There were also (only now do I discover it) twenty-nine of the numbers in the pictured cloud. So it was not good when three wrappers were missing. «No remedy. Mumble mumble and threats of tears». But this time Jessy found a way to cope. She drew the number-filled cloud again and cut it into tiny bits to sift between her fingers. «She played with them all afternoon. A Decent Day».
Jessy told Fran there was a new kind of cloud, «rice rice pudding with lime rice pudding».
Jessy had made tubes of many flavors with numbers on them, which were the same as the [numbers on the] cloud. She started to make a chart of suns with the same flavors (lime lime lime, little bit lime, rice pudding, etc.). She wanted me to go away, but I had her tell me about school first, and then she continued to make the flavored suns, neatly in rows.
Then she cut them out. Those suns are in the suitcase, twenty- nine of them, their rays recalling the emotional valences of days past. Jessy drew them short and stubby, so as to allow room to do full justice to the colors of the coordinated flavors. Rice pudding, for example (not good — correlated with 3), had to be drawn in grain by grain, a painstaking operation, since Jessy classified the grains as «fairly big», «big», and «extra large». The flavor tubes are in the suitcase too, in a twenty-nine-, then a forty-one-tube version. Jessy taped six sheets of paper together so she could draw them all. From each tube emerges a length of icing. «This is a happy frosting come out the tube», she explained. «And sometimes sad».
The lengths are carefully measured to correlate with the appropriate number. Each digit, Jessy told me later, equals one inch, each exponent (squares, cubes, et cetera) a half-inch. Three, the smallest number, occurs twice; the inch-long lengths of icing are labeled «rice pudding with lime». The largest number is one even a mathematician would find bizarre:
(Seven squared to the infinity power to the infinity power plus i, times 37 squared to the infinity power to the infinity power plus i.) It is represented by a 9 1/2-inch length; its icing equivalent, carefully written on the tube, is «lemon lemon lemon lime little tiny bit orange orange orange lemon». The composition of the 8 1/2-inch length is even more complicated: «double dutch little bit lemon- lemon lemon lemon lemon lime lime lime lime lime lime lime lime- lime lime lime». And Jessy colored the icing as carefully as she calculated the numbers, in permutations and combinations that boggle the mind. The next tube is identical except that «little bit» becomes «little tiny bit»; predictably, the little lemon lime-green areas that stripe the brown chocolate have been reduced by half to correspond. I could describe the others, but somehow I don’t think I will.
The correlations came first. The explanations emerged only gradually, as her language grew more adequate to what she had in her head. We learned that flavors correlated with the times she «looked at the clock by mistake». They correlated with the number of times she soaped herself in the bath, o light blueberry, i lime, 2 lemon, 3 orange, 4 strawberry, 5 vanilla, 6 licorice, 7 chocolate, 8 grape, 9 or more, blueberry again. «Dark lemon», «dark lime», and «lime with a little bit rice» correlated with three kinds of «striped» cloud. Even her pencil line proclaimed the system. «Why is the window all wiggly?» I asked of a drawing showing Jessy in bed and the moon behind her favorite tree. It was because of the flavors, she said, wiggly for lime, three-eighths wiggle for lemon lime, whole wiggle for rice pudding. How many other correlations were there that we missed?
The system expanded to include new experience. A year later, when the Christmas catalogs came, the various delicacies received numbers, 137 for solid chocolate, 173 for chocolate with nuts, 337 for chocolate with coconut. Dobosh torte was 3; with cherries it was 7 ?+1. That same number, she told her father, was correlated with airplane vapor trails: if two vapor trails crossed, the cloud at the crossing point yielded 7 2?+2. The exponential 7 was «rice pudding with lime lime»; a 3 was rainbow-colored «when cloud has color outside looks like rainbow and white inside». In the system’s last stage Jessy correlated colors, flavors, and numbers with her typing errors, and correlated them with «flavor cookies». A surreal connection? It proved to be wholly logical when Jessy drew herself with ten cookies, two on the floor. «And drop the cookies. That is a mistake». So both kinds of error were duly recorded in a Book About the Mistakes, in which the very word was given its permutations: «mistakable, mistake, mistaken, mistaker, mistakers, mistaking, mistook».
Then, gradually, numbers lost their magic. Three years later she could say, «They used to be important to me, about all the things, such as bath soaps, and wild berries, and too good music and crying silently and laughing silently». We heard no more about flavor tubes. Jessy’s emotions seemed independent of the weather. She stopped making books. She was doing more conventional art at school, and told us, echoing, I’m sure, what she’d been told, that she was now «too mature». For all we knew, the system was finished.
And yet, twenty years later, when we got out the tubes and suns and «all different kind of days» to show Dr. Oliver Sacks, it turned out it was still there. Under his gentle questioning it burgeoned anew. There had, she said, been more than twenty-nine days; Phil just hadn’t had room for them all. She named and described them. She added fifty-five new flavors, including dark rum, three kinds of «expresso», and tangerine. «There are lots of correlated!» she crowed, reaching the end of the list.
If the reader by now is experiencing some wandering of attention, that’s as it should be. For us normals, boredom is part of the experience of autism. We are, most of us, impatient with formal structures we cannot relate to the concerns of human life, and even mathematicians, who are sympathetic to such pure pleasures, expect them to lead to something more interesting than tireless and self-absorbed variations on the same theme. We taught Jessy to solve simple equations. Excited by her facility with numbers, Phil tried to teach her calculus. But she resisted, not because she couldn’t understand it, but because it had nothing to offer her and demanded much. Rather than repeating familiar processes, it insisted she move forward, beyond the security of the predictable into a realm in which she must accept, even invite, unexpected results. And that was exactly what Jessy did not want. Her systems were designed to eliminate the unexpected, to capture uncertainties in a net of connections, to reduce them to rule.
Marvelous yet sterile, they bespoke a mind which for all its vigor was severely limited. Kanner’s «preservation of sameness», Courchesne’s «difficulty in shifting attention», worked in tandem to restrict both the ability and the desire to initiate new activities. Chaining, lining up objects, sifting silly business — these had been the preferred pastimes of Jessy’s childhood. In adolescence she could still be content with repetitive activity, rocking in her rocking chair, bouncing her superball up and down (though she might use her new skills to graph the number of bounces). At least her systems were richer experientially than that. They could admit new elements — weather, typing lessons, words and their spellings. Some were pleasurable; many were not. Systems couldn’t banish the world’s distressing variability, but they could set it in order, as clouds, cookies, mistakes, and shining
