“Better,” she said softly. “Class dismissed.”
Gabriel stopped fluttering. He stared at a point just past her left ear. “Yes.” syndrome du savant autisme
She shrugged, a small, bird-like motion. “Because I just defended a thesis on non-verbal spatial reasoning in autistic savants. And because I think you’re about to have a meltdown. Your left thumb is tapping a Morse code for ‘distress.’ You don’t realize you’re doing it.” “Better,” she said softly
The meltdown came two hours later in the solitude of his apartment. It wasn’t a tantrum. It was a seizure of the soul. The hum of his refrigerator—a perfect C-sharp—clashed with the neighbor’s HVAC—a flat D. The dissonance built a pressure behind his eyes until the world fractured into shards of light and sound. He curled into a ball on the linoleum floor, pressing his forehead to the cold, counting the tiles until the storm passed. One hundred and forty-four. A gross. A dozen dozens. Order. “Yes
“Why are you talking to me?” he asked. The bluntness was not aggression. It was efficiency.
“Gabriel? Did you hear the question?” Dr. Elara Vance’s voice was a smooth alto, a rare sound he didn’t hate. She was the only one who didn’t treat him like a broken machine.