Media presentations emphasize the savants: the 6-year-old Beethoven or the human calculator, or there, on Discovery Health, a teenage Rodin. The average autistic children, not excluding the savant, struggle with varying degrees of developmental retardation. They can operate the VCR but cannot button their coat. Have no interest in markers or crayons but will spend hours tearing paper, leaves, twigs into micro particles. Some are high-functioning -- can read and speak, attend college, develop careers. Temple Grandin (autism's John Nash), a world renowned authority on cattle psychology whose visionary stockyard designs have transformed one-third of the bovine and pork operations in this country alone, strolls through corrals of half-ton Herefords. They snort like grizzlies and paw the earth. She knows that one switch of their mighty heads would crush any man's clavicle yet they allow her to walk among them, scratch their necks, communicate. The complexity of human interaction, however -- reciprocity, Romeo and Juliet -- remains as elusive to her as colorless green ideas sleeping furiously.

For better or worse, autism may be in the throes of its own 15 minutes of fame. It's had recent cover stories in both Newsweek and Time and features on virtually all the TV magazine shows. Look, there's NFL star Doug Flutie frolicking with his autistic kid while shilling for a long-distance provider. Beck holds benefit concerts for autism research. Nicholas Sparks' recent supermarket potboiler concerned a missing child with autistic symptoms. A fictional senator on "The West Wing" filibusters Congress on behalf of his autistic grandchild. Our biggest stars share the screen with autistic protagonists: Richard Dreyfuss, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Willis, and Tom Cruise, most famously, supporting Dustin Hoffman's "Rainman," a watershed entry in the MR Film Festival. Other screenings celebrate the asylum romps, "King of Hearts," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Awakenings," "Quills," "K-Pax," films presenting madness as romantic, adorable or courageous -- hence, "A Beautiful Mind." Some are only excuses for actors to chew scenery -- witness Sean Penn in "I Am Sam" or worse, Elizabeth Shue's embarrassingly artificial portrayal of autistic Molly in the 1999 movie of the same name.

The movies prefer to apply the humanistic model to disability so that any attendant bleakness or the utter incomprehensibility of some conditions becomes only aberrant behavior immaterial to the subject's uniqueness as a human being. This same psychological model, however, views its members as basically rational, oriented toward a social world and motivated to getting along with others. But the autistic rarely makes adjustments to the world. Their own world remains self-generated and self-contained. Autism, as one text suggests, is "imagination self-determined." A world of, perhaps, pure imagination. Is this a curse, or are they in fact angels among us? Some autistic youngsters learn to sing before they ever speak. Others spin in place, their eyes closed, for hours, in their own encapsulated rave.

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Celestial metaphors do little to temper the exhaustion you struggle with as your daughter, still going strong at 3:30 a.m., cranks out her version of the diagnostic handbook for developmental disorders' Greatest Hits. This in spite of receiving her meds back, when? 7 that evening? Enough detox, compulsion blocker and synapse stim to sober a junkie. But for some reason -- full moon, diet, puberty? -- her sleep patterns have been cross-circuited. The deeper into brutal night she marathons the more wired, delirious, hypermanic she becomes. You have isolated yourself in her room. The same home-taped "Sesame Street" plays the same two and a half hours over and over. This, an integral part of the same preservative tic impelling her to clutch to her chest all manner of unrelated objects: a door stop, a bean bag, a ball of foil, a coaster, a hairbrush, a subscription card, a winter scarf. When she bends to pick up yet another item -- a shoe -- invariably the lot of it gets away from her and you watch as the bundle spills to her feet. Dutifully, robotically, she gathers everything up again, dropping some, retrieving, dropping again like a bumbling vaudeville comic. You watch this fascinated, then impassioned, then with alarm (what ... the hell ... is she doing? ) then with dull acceptance. It is just the same scene from the same interminable clip on the Late Show from hell.

You doze. You wake, her hand on your face. Time to rewind the video. Surly with fatigue you shove her aside as the school bully would some playground twerp. Clothes all over the floor. She's emptied her dresser, the closet. Inexplicable sculptures composed of sweaters pancaked with a book, then a stocking, a puzzle piece, an old moldy pretzel all constructed in mysterious, calculated intent. They dot the little room like totems, mushrooms, shrines amid a Japanese garden. You sit together as the VCR motor whines. Yoga on the TV -- must be dawn. Beautiful bodies made of rubber on some tropical shore. Hey, they got nothing on your kid whose quadruple-jointed limbs can do Cirque du Soleil moves. An hour later your wife wakes you. (What do you do without a partner? How is this possible alone? Sex ... maybe a quick tumble whenever the kid sleeps. Jumping each other like scamps. Going at it. Then you notice your child standing in your bedroom, waiting. Standing there like Carrie, shiny red as a candied apple, wet footprints, dogs licking her legs. Coitus interruptus anyone?) Sunlight streaming through the window. Is she down? you ask. Is she asleep? She's in the shower, your wife responds. She got me up.

Daylight seems to click her down a few amps. She seems alert and ready for the day. A full circle has transpired and now, a familiar morning ritual. Calming, predictable. Breakfast. More pills. Hair. Teeth. Dressed. (Help your 15-year-old daughter on with her bra every morning and the female breast loses most of its mystery.) Get her on the bus. Now you must leave for work. Can't take any more sick days. So sleepwalk through the motions. Hope your reserves kick in. Take an early lunch. Doze in the car for an hour. Throw down three cups of mud stewing since morning. Limp 'til 5:30. Collapse at home. Sleep through midnight. Again, your wife wakes you. Yeah, she's still up, she informs you -- napped two hours at school, cruising ever since. Your wife has clients tomorrow. She must crash. Time for your shift.

Men may be from Mars and women, indeed, Venus. But Planet Autism is where you reside now.

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