Autism Evaluation
by Tim Raymond
In which the psychologist asks me what 2 and 7 have in common. I don’t know, I say to him, because the question is too big. He said the IQ component of this thing would start easy and get complicated later. But doctor, it’s always too complicated. Depending on how you draw them, the 2 and 7 can both act as hooks, or perhaps baskets if you flipped them over. They are made of two lines each. If you write them, you can do so completely without your pencil ever leaving the paper. Ah yes, and they are divisible only by themselves and the number 1, which is what a prime number is, unless I’m mistaken. I can’t remember. I took Calculus in high school and got an A in it and then like 30% on the math portion of the GRE. Once upon a time I was published in Prime Number Magazine, a story called “Wounds,” in which all the different characters list their ailments. I didn’t at the time know I was autistic. Anyway, autism isn’t an ailment, as you know. It’s a beautiful ripe peach on a limb near my aunt’s house where I almost drowned in the pool one summer. Doctor, it’s 2 because I’m closer to that many genders than 1. And 7 because that’s how many fingernails I paint because 70% of the time I feel closer to female than male, even though male is how I’ve lived my life. And still mostly live it, I guess. I realize the question is not asking me to consider their relevance to my own life. I’m just not sure how else to approach my tasks. 2 is how many graduate degrees I have. 7 is how many breakdowns. 2 is how many cats. Also, brothers. 7, the amount of nieces and nephews. They both have a single vowel in them. Both start with consonants from the latter half of the alphabet. Both are less than 10, which means poem-wise they’d be spelled out as opposed to the numeral. Unless I’m mistaken about that, which is both possible and likely. They’re numbers, he tells me.
Tim Raymond works as a barista in South Korea. His writing has appeared recently or will appear in Conjunctions, Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, and CRAFT, among other publications. Find his comics and stories on Instagram at @iamsitting.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Autism Evaluation”? “Autism Evaluation” is from a collection of poems I’m writing called Kelly Walsh in Paradise, which is a phrase from a novel I’m writing called Alice Fisher, which is autistic and gender-fluid like I am. I’d been wanting to write about the evaluation process for ASD because I think it’s so ripe for play with language and inversions. I’m convinced actually that the content of the questions and statements in the evaluation’s various components matters less than the nature of the respondent’s answers—whether they ask for qualifications, or go silent, or info-dump, or contradict themselves intentionally for the sake of thoroughness, for I think maybe the quintessential autistic experience is imagining what else could or might be. Anyway, I didn’t know how to write the 2 and 7 poem until I was browsing JCCA and realized I could go the prose poem route, and just forget the line breaks altogether and compress everything. Thank you, JCCA.
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