ASD or [A Simple Decision]
TW: Blood, Death
My first order of business is to make a sandwich. After asking Freddy what he wants for lunch, I make my way to the kitchen with a new goal in mind. It is my preferred activity to fixing the radiator, the first of two tasks my parents entrusted me with earlier today. I was made aware of a screw that was bulging out of the radiator, which could cut the skin or catch the clothes of whoever passed it, but that isn’t my priority. Lunch is the second task my parents entrusted me with. After picking up a screwdriver, I call up the stairs to him, still unmotivated to prepare food or fix furniture.
Down the hallway, I just heard a loud crash, as though something just slammed into the floor.
Whilst my parents are out of the house, I am the one who must take responsibility for any breakages: vases, stair bannisters, anything. I think Freddy fell at the bottom of the stairs whilst not paying attention to his footing or moving in a hurry. The sound was probably nothing important. Even now, my brain finds a distraction in a non-essential task: reciting my video essay scripts.
“On the 1st of July, 2018, eleven members of the Burari family were found dead in the living room of their own home. One of whom was strangled, the other ten were hung. Up until the release of the Netflix series, House of Secrets, which most likely hyperbolically fictionalised the events for mainstream consumption, the assumed predominant cause of these deaths was suicide.”
I wonder if Freddy is as distracted as me right now. Like me, he’s also an “antisocial and weird little freak”, as our uncle would say. I hate having ADHD. I hate being autistic. He’s most definitely twelve years younger than me, and supposedly he’s twelve years less mature or productive. He hasn’t asked me for his sandwich yet. It’s been a while. His head is probably spinning too. Minecraft, dinosaurs, trains, Among Us, dogs. He’s probably not dwelling on essays and philosophy, but he might be thinking about equally stressful, messy, and futile thoughts for the given moment. After all, he’s as neurodivergent as me.
“Therefore, the Burari incident was one of the most tangible and poignant delineations of generational trauma. This also makes the incident the most thematically appropriate parallel to the events depicted by Ian Dallas’s What Remains of Edith Finch, published by Annapurna Interactive for its release on the 25th of April, 2017.”
Back to the sandwich; I’ve had enough distractions. Ham or jam? Jam or ham? Or marmite? What about peanut butter? Jam is the most versatile, but I can’t remember what Freddy likes. It’s also the messiest. Marmite is my favourite but it’d be ridiculous to assume a seven-year-old would like it, and ham is so contextual that I crave it sometimes, but sometimes it has an absolutely soul-crushing texture and smell to it. Crunchy peanut butter has no taste, in my opinion, but its texture is wonderful, but its firmness is also the exact same reason that it tears through cheaper bread slices, and I don’t know what bread Mum bought. Ham or jam or marmite or crunchy peanut butter?
To avoid the unfathomably excruciating and unbearable stresses of sandwich-making, my mind does the one thing it’s good at: getting distracted. I return to comfortably thinking about the essays that I started only recently.
“To quote Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms, “In real life sweet moments are short and dulled by time”. Such is one of the central theses of both Tally Hall’s Ruler of Everything and Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day. The relentless fear of time, a concept that often transcends fathomability, tends to coincide with insecurities and the deterioration of individuals’ mental states. Where Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar makes the case that love is a powerful concept, tangibly transcending time and space, providing meaning and comfort to people’s lives that they can cling to for hope, Ruler of Everything argues that love is a triviality used in order to ignore the relentless decline of all people and their relationships as time passes indifferently through them. It’s Such a Beautiful Day similarly portrays a character, Bill, who only acknowledges the time that he’s wasted in his life, alongside all the wrong decisions that he’s made, and the insignificant worth of his life in a short and flimsy moment of clarity between his years of aggressive dementia, just minutes before his death. Joe Hawley, the writer of Ruler of Everything, wrote the song during what was…”
I’ve begun making my way toward the scene of the earlier hallway slam, now bored of mentally reciting my unfinished passion projects. I ignore the screwdriver on the table as a new task consumes my mind: checking what the sound was. Any distraction from the sandwich-making is greatly appreciated as a means to procrastinate, allowing my uselessly stressed autistic mind a moment of relaxation and ease.
As I approach the stairs, my heartbeat begins to slow significantly, or speed up greatly. I can’t tell which it’s doing. I feel my body hair against my clothes. My head feels hot but my body is cold. I can feel all of my skin, and I’m hyper-aware of the end of my fingers groping the air and the balls of my feet pushing against the wooden floorboards through my thin trainer socks.
As I glance from my eye level and track the scene to the floor, I momentarily allow my eyes to pause on the protruding screw on the radiator. The overall unit is close to unchanged, it’s slightly slanted. Perhaps it has always been like that, but it is still mostly white and wholly ridged. It’s only mostly white, as opposed to wholly white, because the protruding screw and its surroundings are now painted with a dark, thick red. Tiny circles and ovals of the same colour also decorate the wallpaper, soaking into the paintwork and lubricating the brickwork behind it.
Freddy’s crooked body lies at the foot of the stairs, turning the blood that decorates the walls into a path where his mutilated, leaking face is the entrance. I think I should call an ambulance. His nose is crushed into caressing his right cheek, whilst painting it with blood from his left nostril. I really should call an ambulance or my parents. Two incisor teeth lie at my feet. One is from the roof of his mouth. The other is from his lower jaw. Both have cleaved a gap into a small mouth that cannot currently scream or breath. It’s obvious that I should really call an ambulance or my parents or check Freddy’s pulse to help him. Some shards of wood, scraped from my shoes on an earlier dog walk, have embedded themselves into Freddy’s right forearm and face, piercing and making a forest of his skin whilst contributing to the river of blood slowly reaching my feet. I should definitely call an ambulance or my parents or check Freddy’s pulse to help him or go get a first aid kit. His arm creates an estuary with his now crooked joints, around each chip planted in his muscle is a terrain of torn skin and sore red flesh, and in the air is the thick and potent smell of sweat. In front of me lies the brutalised body of my neurodivergent younger brother. I need to call an ambulance or my parents or check Freddy’s pulse to help him or go get a first aid kit. Call an ambulance or my parents or check Freddy’s pulse to help him or go get a first aid kit? Call an ambulance or my parents or check Freddy’s pulse to help him or go get a first aid kit? Ham or jam or marmite or crunchy peanut butter? Ham or jam or marmite or crunchy peanut butter?
Freddy died of heart failure on the seventeenth second of the third minute of the twelfth hour of that day. This was thirty-two minutes after I had first noticed Freddy laying at the bottom of the stairs, according to all official forensic accounts. My parents intended to leave us home alone together for half an hour, but instead took forty-five minutes. Freddy died in that time, his body was on the floor for my family to return to. He did not die from the initial fall, but instead a slow release of blood preventing oxygen from successfully circulating around his body. Freddy fell because he was in a rush, he was in a rush because he wanted to show me a picture that he drew of me as a character from Minecraft. He most likely hyper fixated on this picture. He was breathing the whole time while I stared at his pain in indecision and incompetence. The movements of his chest were in sync with the confused shaking of my peripheral vision. His vacant stare fluttered and blinked in time with mine. My indecision and anxiety killed my younger brother. My parents returned to the corpse of their youngest son due to my incompetence. My neurodivergence killed my younger brother. My autism killed him. I killed Freddy.
I can’t even make a sandwich.