Autism

I.

The electricity in my sister's brain doesn't work right; left

with deviations in gamma and alpha and theta beta

delta,

she spends her days beading jewelry, intricate like

archi

London tec

ture

woodworked

remnants of an empire

that, through water, commanded a world.

Looping plastic cords through tiny holes in plastic orbs,

she commands an empire

at her desk, crafting pulsating

matrix after matrixaftermatrix after matrix,

navigating her

monologue in the sea.

When she was younger, she banged her head against walls.

Neuroscience tells me that maybe there's an explanation in the gamma band—

the crumpled pieces of white paint from the kitchen wall falling,

the rain dance of her coagulation cascade precipitating

tonic

clonic,

contingencyplanning my mother and I in

convergence beneath the telephone, wired, wall-mounted,

silent—all of this

an avalanche excommunicated to a valley by 90 Hz neurillations

onal osc

in the wrong places.

II.

“I made this for you,” she says to me, my

older sister.

III.

The electricity in my brain doesn't work right.

At some coordinate, I am simply a boy suffused in heartbreak, licking

wounds left by a girl, “just like in the movies”; elsewhere,

I serve the Castilian Crown! I am partly Amerigo Vespucci,

by way of the Latin Americus,

charting cortico-cortical seas of

normal

saline!

Petaflops away though,

I am always underneath

a fixed plastic telephone on a white wall, years

ago, with

the slightest impression of my mother on the

other side of me, amidst a

synaptic monsoon.

• © 2015 American Academy of Neurology