I knew Jason wasn’t an average kid when I met him. His family bought the house next door in what amounted to an emotional distress sale, so the address was already interesting, and at first I thought that might be coloring my impression of the 15 year old. But my response to his parents was unexceptional, so I suspected he would have been “interesting” no matter where he lived.

Sometimes, “interesting” is my euphemism for obnoxious. The boy walked with a stuttering head-forward posture, spoke too loudly (as if, like some toddler, he was just trying out his voice and unaware of its timbre), called on his mother for help with things beneath his age (like adjusting his shower water and choosing his socks), and attacked strangers with eager conversational nonsequiturs. There was a cast to his round face that reminded me of a person with Down Syndrome. The first time he met me, he threw his body at mine and tried to hug me (I guess that’s what he was trying; that’s what his father murmured as he pulled Jason away).

I didn’t take to the boy. I didn’t want him to feel free to come into my yard. I didn’t even want him to learn my name, because I noted that he overused any name he knew. It wasn’t just his mother he called for so often. He met the weird old woman who lived on the other side of me, and every time he saw her, he yelled “Hi Bertilda. Hi Bertilda. Want to play with me, Bertilda?” too loud and too much.

His parents were lovely. A good-looking couple in their early 50s, John worked as a psychotherapist and Carol was a private school guidance counselor. John’s initials were JJJ; they named their only child Jason for its original “J’s son” meaning.

Another neighbor ventured a diagnosis about Jason. Anne lives in the same small condo arrangement as Bertilda, but she’s normal. She supervises special ed for the entire school district; she said she suspected Jason was on the spectrum. “Fairly functional,” she added, “but not much better than the worst I deal with.”

I don’t understand what autism is. I don’t understand “co-dependent” either. I take what meaning I can from context, but I thought autistic people were so bad at reading social signals that they mostly didn’t try to converse. “Oh no,” Anne corrected me. “Those are the worst cases. The ones you hear about. It’s like everyone thinks migraines are disabling and require dark quiet places, when in fact most headaches, even mild ones, are in the migraine category. Nonverbal autistic kids don’t get enrolled in public schools. I deal with whole families of kids like Jason.”

“Whole families?”

“Oh yeah. Sometimes I think it correlates with wealth. The kids are all white, the parents are all monied. I have two families with three out of three kids testing on the spectrum.”

“Jason doesn’t go to your school?”

“Nope. When I first spoke to Carol I asked, but her answer was unclear and included a comment about home schooling. I think he attends something private but not every day. You know she doesn’t work full-time, right? I assume she’s instructing him in some subjects. She wasn’t open about that or about what ails him. But she sighed a few times, and she murmured something about how she and John were committed to ‘seeing him through this’ and getting him into college.”

“Wow. And I guess he’s got a touch of pyromania?”

“I don’t know what that incident was about,” Anne acknowledged. “But it was scary.”

“Tell me about it. I think I even experienced a little PTSD after the event.”

“Well it was closer to you.”

“I heard the snap/crackle/pop of conflagration. But I thought it was critter noise. You know – raccoons or squirrels or skunks. My back doors were wide open. After a minute or so, it registered that the sound was continuing. I stepped to my doors. There were flames leaping up like twelve feet. Even then, my first thought was a (controlled) bonfire. In this day and age! Then I got it. I ran for my phone to call 9-1-1. By the time I had a dial tone, I could hear neighbors yelling ‘Is everyone out of the house?’ and ‘I already called the fire department.’ Jason was screaming ‘I set the house on fire! Oh god, I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!’ and aiming the garden house at the flames. Heck, I thought the thing was out by the time the trucks arrived.”

“Wasn’t that amazing? The way they chopped into the house and found all those live embers?”

“Totally. They sure knew what they were doing. But what had Jason been up to?”

“I talked to Carol afterwards. On the sidewalk while the firemen tore into the upper shingles. She was really upset. She said Jason said he was bored in his bedroom and started flicking lit matches out his window. He thought they all blew out on the way to the ground. Obviously not.”

“Seriously. In California. In September.”

“It’s not the first fire incident with Jason. Jerry saw him tossing lit bundles of newspaper into a tree a few weeks ago. He confronted him. Jason said he was teasing squirrels.”

Jerry is the third resident in Anne’s condo. He works as a landscaper, and he does all the gardening for the immediate area. It wouldn’t be odd for him to be in a yard where he’d witness Jason’s arson.

“Shit,” I observed, thinking of all those Criminal Minds shows I watch. I’d learned the psychopathic trinity. “Is he a bed-wetter too?”

Anne smiled sideways. “I think he was. Carol and I have chatted a bit about him. She’s got saintlike patience. Eerie calm. She says he’s a challenge. But he doesn’t torture animals,” she added.

Okay, I thought, but I wouldn’t want to be a squirrel in his yard. Aloud I said, “You know much more about weird kids than I do, but I’m not comfortable around Jason. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t show up at their little housewarming.” I didn’t cop to the fact that I always avoid cocktail-like gatherings, and I treasure my relative anonymity in the neighborhood, so it was more than Jason-aversion that kept me at home that Sunday afternoon, laying low like it was Halloween.

“That get-together was better than I expected. Jason was relatively subdued. Bertilda was the nut case; she didn’t attend but she stood on the sidewalk and yelled about noise that wasn’t happening. The house looked good – much better than when Cedar moved out – except the bathroom was odd. I had to use the toilet and I couldn’t help noticing soundproofing around the door and pink stains on the bathtub grout.”

“That’s familiar. I mean, I’ve seen it before. When we moved to northern California my parents bought a house in Marin. The sellers had been a psychologist and his wife and teenage son. We found pink spots in the bathroom grout. It turned out the boy had attempted suicide with a razor blade, while in the tub. He didn’t succeed, but he left tracks.”

“Well I don’t know if the pink was there when they moved in. I mean, Cedar was anything but stable.”

“She was more homicidal than suicidal,” I countered.

“True,” Anne pondered. “Carol had a bandage on her upper arm. Not Jason. The grout must have been something else.”

I like Anne the best of my neighbors. She minds her own business and respects my privacy. I detect no cognitive issues in her. She and Jerry and Bertilda each have a one-bedroom condo in what was originally a single-family home that became a rooming house and then apartments and a TIC on its way to its current incarnation. The guy who converted it started as a roomer in it when he was in college, then bought it from his landlord, fit it with extra bathrooms and kitchenettes, managed it as three apartments, converted it to TIC and finally condos, and sold it off in pieces, first to Bertilda, then Jerry, and finally Anne. He lived off the property for 30 years and then returned to his native Canada with the proceeds from selling to Anne.
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I’m still a little spooked about that fire. I can summon up the sound of the crackling, the horror of the proximity, and I do that more often than I should. It’s made me pay attention to what happens out the south side of my windows, much like I used to regard the prior resident, an eccentric woman named Cedar who regularly hand-watered the trees on the property. I’m not a weird old woman like Bertilda, who lurks at her window (upstairs front), and is quick to challenge anyone who lingers on the sidewalk or approaches the door. But I do take a look when I hear anything, and I try to make my observation subtle.

Lately I’ve been hearing enough to peek regularly. Bad horn-playing in the middle of the night. I guess the soundproofing isn’t tight. In a way, I’m glad about that, because yesterday and today the sounds changed and now I’m hearing magical tones. Someone singing. It isn’t Carol or John. The voice is ethereal. Almost tenor, almost soprano, with a frisson of countertenor. I’m pretty sure it’s Jason.