Katy M.

Autism has always amazed me. I suspect that anyone who has been near an autistic person will say the same thing. There's just not much to go on when communication is one-way. I'm not talking about the autistic savant --- the Rain Man type who has incredible talent in one area but very underdeveloped in most others. I'm speaking about most autistics: like Katy M.

Kate was fifty-five but didn't look a day older than thirty. Because she couldn't do a thing except raise a fork or spoon to her mouth, everything had to be done for her. My notes reveal a thought I suspect has entered more than one mind through the ages: is reincarnation real? Did the autistic of this age once burn up the track in a former time so he must tread water to balance his soul? Was he once a savant in many areas and now must be waited on by other reincarnated souls to balance out their karma? Who knows? But certainly reincarnation explains one reason a human acts as he does just as it serves to explain where Mozart acquired his phenomenal talent. But I'm not here to wax mystical any more than philosophical or clinical. It's enough to say that Katie did nothing herself or gave any indication that she could.

Staff notes suggest that the woman sometimes tried to communicate through subtle gestures. But never very hard. Somehow she knew she would get whatever she wanted or, perhaps, it didn't matter whether her wishes were granted or not. Those who do delve into the mystic and

philosophic might conclude that was the lady's very mission on earth: to get others to usetheirintuition more and rely less on physical communication. Being out of my realm, all I can report is Staff's remarks, that on a most subtle level they were capable of communicating with Katy. Or thought they could.

More than once I propped the woman up in a hard-back chair in the classroom and carried on as if she were an active listener, which may have been the case but she never told me so. After all, sitting in silence was no more nor less than what Paul Canton or Barry Osmond did though they did talk and carry out rudimentary physical functions. Maybe Katy sitting silently and not talking was the sign that she was getting something out of my monologues. I never knew. But in her non-action she made me wonder if teaching is more for the teacher than for the student.

One day I placed in the same room Paul, Barry, and a few others along with Katy M. I sat as motionless and silent as they. I wanted to see if any non-verbal, subtle-gesture communication transpired. Hoping for telepathic fireworks, I imagined such a great discussion going on at the level of the mind that I almost burst out. The memory of the alleged no-card poker game Albert Einstein and others played made me watch the mutes carefully: would they really communicate? I regret to report that not only did I witness nothing, I also sensed nothing. Not even subtle tension, like why are we all here? When is this over? What do you expect of us? There was nothing. It made me wonder if my intuition was simply so underdeveloped that I was incapable of communicating with these people. For all I knewtheywere going at it tooth and nails.

My thought was not empty, for many times I'd witnessed people with Down's Syndrome or extreme speech impediments jabbering away as if they understood every grunt and grown of their fellow conversationalists.

Maybe all through my experiment they were mentally chatting and inwardly laughing at this poor fellow who doesn't even know how to talk without words. It was a most interesting experiment, but because my laboratory technique and measuring instruments were underdeveloped, I can't conclude whether it was a success or a failure.

Whether Katy M. and other speechless autistics communicate or not, like the sightless who often develop other senses well, I don't know. I do know that this fine lady existed well as long as her every need was taken care of by others. So to the uninitiated, it appeared that Katy's reason for being at Sugar Loaf was to give Staff something to do. And give the rest of us something to wonder about.