The sociology teacher was young and, to me, impossibly cool. He made no secret of his libertarian beliefs but encouraged us to form our own opinions and argue with him. As we made our way through the political theorists of previous centuries, I gravitated toward Karl Marx, socialism, and communism. I asked myself if I would’ve been better off under communism, where people were slotted into roles considered the best for the country as a whole and the State took care of everyone’s basic needs. I longed to belong and to contribute to something larger than myself, but my lack of social skills or athletic ability kept me out of cliques, sports teams, and other organized groups. And having been tormented by bullies in my very conservative school in Houston at the height of the Cold War, I believed on some level that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
I graduated from high school somewhat sympathetic to communism and at university devoured the works of twentieth-century Marxists. In the summer of 1984, I thumbed my nose at the Reagan Administration by visiting Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution and serving as a part-time nanny for a family of Chileans exiled by the right-wing Pinochet regime. One of the Chileans who shared their house was a pilot trained in the Soviet Union, a key ally of the new Nicaraguan regime. I saw teenage soldiers carrying AK-47s and Russian tanks next to public buildings.
Eventually I found my place in the world as a librarian and magazine editor, and Marxism lost its attraction. I worked with Cuban exiles who described in harrowing detail the perils of living in a totalitarian dictatorship that controlled every aspect of life. One friend talked about his father requesting to sit facing the door in a restaurant so he could flee when State Security officials arrived. His future wife’s parents sent her as an unaccompanied minor to the United States to keep authorities from shipping her off to the Soviet Union at the age of eight for training to become an Olympic swimmer—all because she showed early talent.
I realized that I would not have been better off under communism if I couldn’t choose what to do with my life, if my life belonged to the State. The rules in a totalitarian country are strict and often incomprehensible, with draconian penalties for crossing invisible lines. I’d crossed lines throughout my life, with no worse consequences than being fired from a job. A dictatorship would not have been so forgiving.
In adulthood I was diagnosed on the autism spectrum and it answered a lot of questions about why I had trouble making friends, fitting in, and following rules. It also made me think about the experiences of people like me throughout the world.
In the past few years, I’ve also become aware of how easily freedoms that we’ve come to take for granted can be snatched away, just as they were for the young people whose hopes for a third way between capitalism and communism—“socialism with a human face”—were crushed by the Soviet tanks that rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968.
From these disparate origins, my character of Tomáš was born. In the course of researching for this novel, I discovered that a Soviet psychiatrist, Grunya Efimova Sukhareva, had identified the characteristics of what would become the autism spectrum a full twenty years before Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger—but Stalinism, World War II, and the Iron Curtain cut her work off from the others. I also learned of the Soviet-bloc abuse of psychiatry to punish dissidents.
In pursuing my obsessions as a high school student, I’d connected with other misfits—the model-train-obsessed sociology teacher, my friends at the radio station, a summer job coworker who’d dropped out of high school pregnant. After four decades, I haven’t forgotten her asking, “Do you know what it’s like to walk into a classroom and know everyone in the room hates you?” These outsiders became the inspiration for Tomáš’s friends Štěpán and Lída.
At a time of growing hatred against the Other and mass support for would-be dictators in the United States and around the world, I hope readers will connect with three brave Czecho-Slovak teenagers seeking freedom, self-determination, acceptance, and belonging. I hope Tomáš, Štěpán, and Lída will help you to find your place in the world.