August Jorgensen owned no telephone, no television, no VCR, no microwave oven, no dishwasher, no garbage disposal, no fax machine, and no electronic kitchen gadgets. He’d once had some of these things, but over the past dozen years, he’d been simplifying, or “paring down,” as he liked to call the process. A less-charitable friend of his once suggested to him that what Jorgensen was really doing was getting ready to die. “We’re all getting ready to die,” Jorgensen had observed, “one way or another.”

Books Jorgensen had by the hundreds - probably the thousands, if you wanted to count those that lurked in the bottoms of closets or bided their time huddled together in cardboard cartons. But of all the books he had, at least so far as he could ascertain, not one of them had anything to say about the subject of autism, save a well-worn Random House dictionary, vintage 1966, which provided him with this nugget of wisdom:

au.tism (ô’tiz em), n. Psychol, the tendency to view life in terms of one’s own needs and deires, as by daydreams or fantasies, unmindful of objective reality. [AUT- + -ISM] -au’tist, n. - au.tis.tic (ô tis’ tik), adj.

It didn’t take him long to decide that if the editors were incapable of spelling the word desires, perhaps he shouldn’t put too much stock in the rest of their information, either.

But what to do?

The local library was utterly worthless, he’d long ago found out, unless you were looking for books on Confederate heritage or Bible study, or a complete set of the Hardy Boys’ adventures; the nearest one that might have anything on the subject was a good hour and a half’s drive. Same for the university, over in Charleston. He wondered if there might not be some national association or foundation concerned with the disease, the way there was with diabetes and cancer and heart disease. He could look them up and send them a letter, or call them on one of those 800 numbers they all had now, and ask them to send him pamphlets and stuff like that. The process might take some time, but time was certainly something he had.

So the following morning, when he’d driven over to the general store for his newspaper and a couple of things, he asked Pop Crawford - Pop was a good fifteen years younger than Jorgensen, but since everybody else called him Pop, Jorgensen did, too - if he might use the phone.

“Local call?” Pop wanted to know.

“One of those 800 numbers,” said Jorgensen. “Same thing.”

Pop looked at him suspiciously, but handed over the phone. Jorgensen dialed the toll-free operator and asked if she had a number for the American Autism Association, or anything like that.

He waited a moment while she looked it up.

“Would you like the listing for emergency road service,” she asked, “or travel assistance?”

He tried for another minute or so, but it was obvious they were having two different conversations, and the twain were not about to meet. He thanked her for her trouble and hung up.

“What is it you’re trying to find out?” Pop asked him.

“Autism,” said Jorgensen, “information about autism. It’s a disease where-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pop cut him off. “I know what it is. They say Nellie Strock’s boy has it. Used to bite folks when he was young. Zack!”

“Zack has autism?” That surprised Jorgensen. “I thought he was just a rotten kid.”

“No, no,” said Pop, “not Zack. Nellie’s kid is Donald. Zachary here is my nephew.” And as though on cue, a skinny, bespectacled youngster appeared from the back room. “He’s staying with me till his momma gets back from up north. Right, Zack?”

The boy nodded shyly, but said nothing, serving only to perpetuate Jorgensen’s confusion. He looked to be about seven or eight, standing no more than four feet tall and weighing maybe fifty pounds, all of it knees and elbows. The kind of kid who got picked last whenever sides were being chosen for a ball game.

“Zack,” said Pop, “do me a favor. Take the judge here with you and help him look up some stuff. He used to be a smart man, but he doesn’t get out much anymore.”

Jorgensen was about to take issue with the comment, but the boy had already turned and was headed back to wherever he’d materialized from.

“Go on.” Pop shooed him away with a dismissive wave. “Unless you’re too proud to learn from a ten-year-old.”

“If he’s ten,” said Jorgensen, “how come he’s not at school like he’s supposed to be?”

“And for his first lesson,” Pop called to the boy, “why don’t you teach him the days of the week?”

Jorgensen looked down at his newspaper, saw it was Saturday. “I knew that,” he mumbled, and headed to the back room.

He found Zachary sitting at an old rolltop desk, his feet dangling a foot above the floor, his face lit up by the blue glow of a television screen. In front of the TV was a keyboard, but the boy seemed to pretty much ignore that. Instead, his right hand rested on a gadget that had a wire sprouting from it, connecting it to a big plastic box. Every once in a while, he’d move his hand a tiny bit, and images on the screen would jump around.

“A computer,” said August Jorgensen.

“How old are you?” asked the boy.

It turned out to be easy, amazingly easy. Zachary needed a little help spelling autism to start him off, but that was about it. Once he’d typed the correct letters into a little box and pressed the enter key, the machine seemed to take over and do the rest.

Not that Jorgensen didn’t know about computers, or what they could do. He lived in a lighthouse, after all, not on another planet. He’d seen people using computers in banks and department stores, and looking up listings at the Motor Vehicle Department and the Social Security office. He knew everyone was online these days, exchanging E-mails instead of letters, and that you weren’t anybody unless you had .com after your name. It was just that he’d never actually seen anybody doing research on one before, the kind of stuff you used to have to go the library for, lug all sorts of books around, and spend forever trying to zero in on what you were looking for.

Suddenly, it was all right there at his fingertips - okay, their fingertips, the white-haired octogenarian and the nerdy ten-year-old with the Coke-bottle glasses.

Autism, Jorgensen was surprised to find out, wasn’t a disease at all. It was a pervasive developmental disorder that occurred in as many as one in every 500 individuals, or as rarely as one in every 5,000, depending upon the diagnostic criteria one chose to use. Symptoms usually appeared during the first three years of childhood and continued throughout life. They typically included problems with communication (particularly verbal skills), conceptualization, social interaction and, occasionally, motor skills. Autistic children seemed removed; they often failed to respond to other peoples’ voices, and tended to avoid eye contact. Endless and obsessive repetitive motions were common, such as rocking, spinning, stroking and hair-twirling. In extreme cases, biting or head-banging occurred. People with autism often exhibited unusual responses to light, sounds, smells, or other sensory stimulation. Paradoxically, they could be relatively impervious to pain while exquisitely sensitive to touch.

Autism was an equal-opportunity disorder in that it affected people of all geographic, racial and social groups; but it discriminated between the sexes, choosing five males for each female it selected.

In terms of causation, autism has long defied easy analysis. Once thought of as the manifestation of flight from poor parenting (particularly frigid mothering) or early psychological trauma, the disorder was now recognized as having an array of physiological components. No unique biological marker had been discovered, and no single gene “caused” autism, although several had been identified as contributors. Families with one autistic child had a 5 percent risk of having a second child affected, far greater than the normal expectation. Recent neurological studies had uncovered abnormalities in a number of areas of the autistic brain, most prominently the cerebellum and hippocampus. In at least some cases, these changes could be attributed to diseases - among them rubella, fragile X syndrome, PKU (phenylketonuria), tuberous sclerosis, Rett’s syndrome, encephalitis, and hydrocephalus - contracted either in utero or during the early months of childhood. There was some evidence pointing to chemical imbalances, and heightened or depressed serotonin levels had been found, as well as abnormalities in various other “signaling” molecules. But these anomalies might eventually prove to be more effects than causes.

Whatever the particular causal agent of the damage might be, the effect seemed to manifest itself as a disruption of the normal circuitry of the brain. Specific areas could be left relatively intact, but integration with other areas might be greatly diminished or even totally absent. The result was that complex behavior - such as language skills, social interaction, conceptualization, and the development of a sense of personal identity - became difficult, if not altogether impossible.

Over the years - and although autism wasn’t fully identified and classified until the 1940s, the condition most likely pre-dated recorded history - there had been no shortage of “miracle cures.” Psychotherapy, diet, vitamin and mineral regimens, and various sorts of behavior modification had all been tried, and all had failed. Most recently, advocates of “facilitated communication” had boasted that profoundly autistic children could “type” intelligent and coherent thoughts when assisted by a “facilitator” holding the child’s hand over a keyboard. But controlled studies had cast serious doubt on the claims, suggesting that they reflected no more than suggestiveness (whether deliberate or unconscious) on the part of the facilitator.

In terms of intelligence, it had long been assumed that the majority of autistic children were retarded, with the debate centering on the question of degree. But recent thinking had begun to cast new light on the issue. One complicating factor was that autism was often accompanied by other abnormalities, and clinicians tended to be guilty of attributing deficits to the autism, when in fact some other condition might be responsible. Additionally, it was likely that much of what presents itself as retardation could be explained by the close connection that existed between language facility and intelligence testing. As more sophisticated testing methods were employed, relying less on the subject’s verbal ability, IQ levels tended to rise rather significantly.

Occasionally - and only occasionally - autistic children displayed enormously prodigious aptitudes, and when they did, the phrase “idiot savant” was sometimes used to describe them. Examples of such behavior included the ability to perform complex mathematical calculations with computer-like speed, or to unerringly predict what day of the week a particular date will fall on centuries into the future. Kim Peek, the man upon whom the movie Rain Man was based, had such talents. Other autistics were musically gifted. In Civil War times, a blind negro boy (for those were the terms in favor back then, “sightless” and “African-American” still more than a century away from coming into vogue), described as an “idiot” in all other ways, mastered the piano without any training, to the point where he could perfectly re-create any piece he heard. Blind Tom, as he became known, astounded audiences by playing one song with his left hand and another with his right, all the while singing a third. He was also known to play with his back to the piano and his hands held upside down. Leslie Lemke, at age fourteen, having heard Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 once, sat down and played the piano part flawlessly. Tony DeBlois, a blind, autistic, jazz improvisationist, quickly learned to play fourteen musical instruments, twelve of them proficiently.

But as impressive as these accounts of autistics with mathematical or musical skills were to Jorgensen, of even more interest were the artistic savants. Nadia, a girl of three and a half, began drawing animals and other objects in a manner described by developmental psychologists as “not possible.” Unlike children three and four times her age, she displayed a sense of proportion, perspective, and light that was not only technically accomplished, but appeared to be entirely intuitive. A man named Alonzo Clemons could glimpse a fleeting image of a horse on a television screen and, given twenty minutes, could sculpt a perfect three-dimensional replica of it out of clay or wax. Richard Wawro was an autistic who was also a world-renowned landscape painter. Many autistic artists (many, of course, being a relative term) concentrated on a single subject matter to the point of fixation. An autistic boy known as Jonny specialized in drawings of electric lamps; the autistic Japanese artist Shyoichiro Yamamura focused on insects; while the American Jessy Park was first obsessed with radio dials and heaters, then weather anomalies and constellations in the night sky, before moving on to renditions of houses and churches. And Oliver Sacks (perhaps best known as the psychologist who worked with post-encephalitic patients and became the model for Robin Williams’s portrayal in the movie Awakenings) had described in detail the case of Stephen Wiltshire, a black, autistic English boy whose drawings from memory of London architecture were said to be nothing less than breathtaking.

Jorgensen came away from the session $10 poorer. It was all Pop Crawford would permit him to pay Zachary for three full hours of research assistance.

“Give him any more’n that, and he’s liable to go out and find himself a woman, blow it all on her. Right, Zack?”

Zack yawned. He seemed pretty noncommittal on the subject and was anxious to get back to the more important stuff he’d been doing on the computer, before he’d been sidetracked by the old man who pretended he was a hacker, but barely knew how to click a mouse.

The other thing Jorgensen came away with was a hunger to learn more about the paradox presented by the autistic savants, particularly the artistic ones. How could young children - some of them so profoundly impaired that they couldn’t respond to their own names, or carry on a conversation or be taught to read a single rudimentary sentence - nevertheless create stunning visual depictions of things they’d only glanced at? And that they could do so without the least bit of training, practice or (at least it seemed) concentration, made it all the more stupefying.

“It truly boggles the mind,” Jorgensen said aloud.

Jake, sitting beside him in the pickup truck, his nose stuck out the far window, contributed no more than a wag of the tail. Small boys and dogs, apparently, were not so easily impressed.

That night, Jorgensen sat in front of his stove, reviewing the notes he’d made and the pages young Zachary had printed out for him. Boyd Davies’s lawyers were probably right in acknowledging that their client wasn’t retarded, at least not in the sense that the courts might be interested. And in focusing on Boyd’s failure to comprehend the logical link between his act (murder) and the resulting sentence (death), they’d somehow managed to stumble upon what seemed to Jorgensen to be the very essence of his disorder: the utter inability of the autistic brain to put things together and form a concept out of them.

But where did that leave them? Boyd had murdered an eleven-year-old child, and likely raped her, as well. At the time, he’d been on parole for an earlier sexual assault of a child. Was William Rehnquist really going to concern himself with whether or not Boyd could make the connection between his crime and his punishment? Was Antonin Scalia looking to broaden the reach of the Eighth Amendment, so that every defendant who stood up and said, “Look, I don’t understand why you’re killing me,” would get his sentence commuted? Did Clarence Thomas give a hoot about damaged cerebella and hippocampi, or abnormal serotonin levels?

The answers seemed painfully obvious, just as they had to have seemed obvious to those who’d reached out to Jorgensen and drawn him into their circle so that he could lead them into a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds.

As his thoughts wandered, so did his concentration, and at one point, he had to yank the steering wheel sharply to the right, in order to keep the old truck from drifting off the road and into the marsh.

Why was it he’d wanted to know more about autism? He tried to remember. It had been only this morning, but it seemed so long ago. Ah, yes - it had been because he wanted to understand more about Boyd Davies, to get to know him better, so he could humanize him for the Court.

But Zachary’s computer hadn’t humanized Boyd at all. It had spat out long lists of statistics and Latin words and case histories and unproved theories; but in the end, all of the autistic savants he’d read about seemed less human, if anything. They were freaks, is what they were, sideshow performers. Somewhere along the line, some genetic accident or mutant virus or playful god had reached into their brains, lifted out the essence of whatever it was that made people human, and replaced it with some weird and extravagant talent. They belonged right between the fire-breather and the sword-swallower. “Step right up, folks! See the amazing picture-drawer! Snatched from his parents at birth and raised by rats in the basement of the Smithsonian! Only one dollar!”

It was starting to get dark as Jorgensen crossed over the narrow bridge to the barrier island, and already the fog was beginning to settle into the low spots. He thought of Boyd Davies, sitting alone in his cell in Brushy Mountain. Poor Boyd. Except for a handful of drawings, his whole life was probably nothing but fog.