He is a skinny boy, taller than his peers. He has the blond hair of his father but not the curls. His hair is lank as that of his mother and dense and firm. He has his mother's dark brown eyes. They are beautiful and gentle when he is absent, but frighteningly penetrating when he looks at you. But he won't look at you so often.

If you saw him for the first time, here on the beach for example, you would judge his movements as strange. He meanders, stops, meanders again and seems constantly listening to something. You feel that he would not respond to your hello and you are right. This is not the moment to disturb him. This is his beach.

He walks with his hands pressed against his ears. His feet seem older than he, for they know everything beforehand and they send up stories that make him think.

The soles grope the ridges of the tide line, and steer to the wet, muddy sand that encloses the ankles like a cool wet mouth. He shuts his eyes and lets his feet seek further and now he feels dry and loose sand welling up between his toes. Warmer sand, silky and smooth, a velvety resistance, you can barely move forward. It's a soft, warm and elusive flow over his feet. He just smiles. There is no threat, no temptation, only the dry warmth under his feet and between his toes.

His feet want to tell why they love the land. They say that the land is closer to him, real, hard and tangible. Clay, peat, soil, grass, moss, herbs, pebbles, rocks, smooth warm rocks. Presence, defying your weight, carrying. Certainty.

It is quiet and he wants it to stay that way. He removes his hands from his ears for a moment and covers them immediately when a seductive rhythm tries to penetrate. Not yet, he thinks, let it wait. He wants to listen to the silence and he asks his feet for silence. They obey and interrupt their story of billions of small ancient grains, the descendants of

proud large boulders, crushed by time. That what his father says. And the sea...

No, silent.

Silence.

Stand still.

No movement. For a moment nothing at all, not to exist at all.

The certainty of non-existence.

Pause.

But if you stand still, you capsize

In his silent world there is often movement. In that world everything revolves around its axis. Everything is in a vulnerable balance and should not be disturbed. Therefore you must rotate, everything must rotate. Someone had told him - and from that moment it stayed with him - that everything and everyone would be thrown into space when the earth stopped rotating. Rotating was good.

This special silence in which he could retreat. As long as everything rotated there were no intruders, no voices, no ghosts, no confusion. Only the high, thin, continuous tone which belonged to the rotating objects. Like a choir boy singing endlessly the highest F of the piano. That tone belonged to silence.

His feet tell him that a gust of wind picks up that blows the sand over his instep and slowly covers his feet. He opens his eyes and looks ahead. His left eye sees the sea, his right eye sees the land, his nose separates the land from the sea. His left nostril senses the salty air, his right nostril smells grass-dry, spicy aromas. He withdraws his hands from the ears.

He walks along the shore, on the edge of land and water and listens to the call of the sea. The land is quiet. One ear hears, the other is deaf. The sea entices him with her rhythm. Rhythm can lull. In the distance he hears the soft roar of the surf. He looks to the left.

A pale yellow, bright and yet veiled sky with gunmetal scratches and thin wisps of white smoke. An island of light in the distance where the sun hides behind the veil. The high swell with foam edges, far from land, draws a troubled horizon. Gulls with motionless wings glide above the dunes on the dying wind, occasionally discharging excrements with graceful tail-shaking, a careless movement. Oystercatchers on red stilts sprint with their heads down and fly momentarily. A small group of swans passes with singing wings, in a perfect V-formation.

The island of light expands. With a final effort the sun inhales the pale veil, revealing a bleak-blue sky. The sandpipers, oystercatchers and gulls form small groups. It becomes crowded along the tide line, now the people have gone.

He closes his eyes and lets his feet lead. "Rhythm is tranquility," they say, and he feels that they come closer to the water and soon he feels the lukewarm liquid washing his feet. As soft as the sand which the wind had blown over his feet. Now they whisper only during the brief moments when the soles touch the ground. But they do not send messages anymore.

The sea sings to him with the voices of breaking waves at the beach, a seductive, murmuring, rhythmical song. It lures, it lures him back. The land is silent right now, or is its sound drowned by the sea? You should not stroll so close to the water, boy. But he follows his stunned feet and walks into the sea. For now, he has made his choice, now this is his element and it embraces his knees. He feels accepted.

His feet carry him deeper into the water until the waves let him falter. He feels his feet come loose, increasingly, until he no longer feels them, he becomes weightless and bobs on the swell. He is a good swimmer. Floating on his back he looks up at evening sky, high above him a few gulls suspended in pink air. I weigh nothing, sings his head, I'm not bothering anyone, I belong to the sea. I'm not cold, I'm not hot, I turn round and round, that's all I need. And turning around with outstretched arms, he looks during each rotation to the rock on whose smooth sun-warmed surface he is going to lie down to dry.

Tomorrow his parents are going to Rome with him. He knows nothing of that city, his father says she's special. It will be the first long distance trip with his parents. The doctor had said that it was okay now. The boy knows that they call him an autistic.

He narrows his eyes towards the sun and turns back.

"Rome Rome Rome" he sings softly during each slow stroke and he swims back to the quiet beach. He sees his mother's silhouette on the high dune.

He doesn't care.

He is looking forward to the warmth of the rock.

© 2011 Peter Fruhmann