this weekend, i went to a new/used bookstore in sunnyvale with anderson and jason. where i bought the book about the curious garden tine forked dog in the nighttime. which i then read over the weekend. it’s very good. the author is all about the inner-workings of asperger’s syndrome and i’m willing to believe he’s portraying it correctly because he’s worked with autistic kids. the bits about maths are good, and the bits about toby the rat, also the colors and the cars and Siobhan. which i find to be a simply wonderful name. and the voice and the descriptions and the pictures. also the idea of the book being about writing a book about doing detecting about the dead dog on the neighbor’s lawn.
at one point though, christopher, the main character, approaches a woman with a kid in a stroller with his swiss army knife open to the saw blade position prepared to slice and dice if she touches him. and so begins the odyssey of the boy-with-knife-can-travel-can-stab story wherein he goes to london and ALMOST stabs, or horribly mutilates, 8 people. this is not ok. i was with him up to the point when he almost killed a baby. sure he doesn’t do it, but he gives you the impression that if someone touched him, his stabbing them would merely be self-defense. scary.
‘where can i buy a map?’
‘sorry?’
‘where can i buy a map?’
‘where are you trying to go?’
‘the train station.’
‘you can see the train station from here.’
‘where is the train station?’
‘you can see it.’
‘no.’
‘here,’ you reach out to point and turn him around and he goes for the knife. stab! stab! mortal wound! gushing blood! he falls down doing the groaning. the baby starts screaming. you keep leaking. he likes the color red though, which is excellent. if your blood was brown (or yellow) you would be so screwed. not that you’re not already screwed. what with the geyser of blood spurting out of the hole in your body.
