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How Kai Saw the World

You hear it slam. You see it flash. You can taste the pain.

The baby is sleeping.

Mom opens the door.

Light falls onto the cradle.

She lifts the baby up, strokes his head.

Her skin is slightly rough from bathing him, so he doesn’t catch a single germ.

She says the most loving words.

She disinfects her hands. And changes his diaper.

The baby cries.

You’re asleep.

You hear it slam.

You see it flash.

Thunder echoes in your head. Light stabs your eyes.

The light fires into your tongue. You can taste the pain.

It’s stamping toward you. Your whole world wobbles.

It yanks you upward, your scalp in scraping pain.

Her voice hurts, screeching you feel to your fingertips.

Your nose burns all the way into your head.

Your butt is in scraping pain.

You cry.

That was Kai’s life as a baby.

As an infant, you are programmed by nature to absorb everything. There’s nothing you can do about it. You absorb it all, even if it’s bad for you. You stuff dirt and poisonous plants in your mouth when your parents are distracted; you run into the water or climb onto windowsills. You don’t want to explore—you must. And unlike a toadstool or a burning candle, all the dangers an autistic child faces on its discovery missions cannot be identified by parents. They are not dangerous for other children, after all.

Their parents don’t know better. Occasionally, they may realize that something isn’t doing their child any good. The child cries when you comb its hair, cries when you dress it, and cries when you bathe it. The child covers its ears. The child is loud itself. It’s trying to drown out the sounds: the talking, the pipes, the vacuum cleaner; the clanking of the heater, the clatter of the plates; the animal voices, the revving cars. And that’s not to mention the white noise inside, the rushing blood, the throbbing pulse: the whole, unrelenting organ symphony that drives tinnitus patients mad. How could a parent understand that?

Imagine stepping out of a cave into the desert sun and you’ll get an idea how an autistic child sees “normal” light. Imagine hearing all the above-mentioned sounds—all the time. An autistic child perceives the world with a sensitivity that you may only experience a few times in your life: say, if you arrive in Australia during midsummer after a sleepless thirty-six-hour flight.

Kai grew up with this dissonance, torn between his drive to explore and this permanent jetlag.

And then comes the day when the child starts to withdraw; when he turns away, wanders off, rejects everything. It occurs slowly, almost imperceptibly. He would be lucky to escape Earth altogether, but he’s stuck here.

On the street. Surrounded by a few people, though to him that’s a crowd. Surrounded by city noise, though to his ears it’s the equivalent of an airport runway. The blaring sirens seem faraway to other people, but to Kai they’re in the middle of his head. Engines rattle at the traffic light. Kai rears his head from all the stench and the noise. A delivery guy rushes by, and Kai jumps out of the way, people jostling him. He could escape into a café, away from the street, the noise, the masses, but god forbid the waitress in there is tapping her pen on her order pad, or a light in the hallway is flickering, or a nervous guest is tapping his foot on the floor. Your friendly neighborhood café is an autistic child’s private hell. The people speak loudly, laugh loudly, slurp loudly; the ice crushes and cracks, and the coffee spits while it brews. Everything is spinning, including the threatening fan on the ceiling, until the child throws itself on the floor and covers its head, as Kai did in Switzerland to his parents’ horror. He only had one wish: calm.