I drove my Aston Martin to the Carnival Theater, waved my ticket in the usher's face and was led to my seat. The play was called Unexamined Lives. The protagonist was the late Arbok Wailmer, who first claimed that vaccinations cause autism.
Reading the program, I learn that the first neurotypical was Cain. Other historical figures now known to be neurotypical include Benedict Arnold, Al Capone and Adolf Hitler. The program went on to argue that Wailmer's instinct for treachery and fraud made him the ultimate neurotypical and that the world would be a healthier place if he were never born, supporting these claims with quotations from a beloved eye-witness account and controversial research. Apparently this session was meant to be a neurotypical-friendly performance, so each scene would begin with inane small talk and contain no word longer than four syllables.
As the curtain rose, a woman and boy walked onto the stage. Through the opaque fog emanating from the long, brown sticky candles on both sides of the stage, the woman sang "Theo, you know that Jacob is a nineteen-year-old child with autism, you must look after him."
Theo chanted "Jacob's disabled, that's baad! I'm his brother, that makes me saad! The only thing worse than being a person with autism is being related to one! That's it MOM, I'm going to my room to listen to Cooooldplay!"
Other singers appeared and formed a circle. "We easily find relationships and employment, but we scream the loudest! We use our children as props and tweet their meltdowns! Pity us and listen to-"
"The dOOOOOOOOctor of disaster will speak, from his behind-ah!" farted Arbok Wailmer as he roller-bladed on stage, using his gaseous fumes as a sickening propellant.
"No!" cried Siobhan, running into the circle wearing a sparkly leotard. "This man is a liar, a wicked truth defiler, his fraud withdrawn by The Lancet, it was so rancid, Wailmer's the best friend measles ever had, everything he does is bad."
Theo's mother gave Siobhan a dirty look, softly singing "Sweetie, that may be true, but the doctor says he can make our children anew. If you want to be taken seriously you must look people in the eye."
The circle tightens, excluding Siobhan.
In front of me, two theater critics conversed.
"Some moms are just looking for a cross public enough to hang on." commented one wearing a blue jumper, with that certain suspicious glamour that only an American accent can provide. I don't trust people who sound like they're from the telly.
"I don't get the smoke. Why is there so much smoke?" The second critic's nasal drawl did nothing to camouflage the mixture of bestial cunning and resentful servility that Muked him as an Australian. He was tall and wore an expensive Gore-tex jacket.
"This faecal fog represents the intellectual and sensory numbness in which neurotypicals live their lives. Their minds are so fundamentally alien that they can only be represented through expensive stage gimmicks. Not very PC, I know."
The other dancers impersonate swaying trees as Siobhan gets her dramatic monologue. "Tarzan was a girl raised by jungle apes. Her family berated her for not walking on her knuckles like a proper primate. Moving this way was painful for her. The apes ostracized her for her smoothness and intelligence. They would catalogue the ways she differed from them and call these differences deficiencies, practicing psychology. She earned their respect by head-butting a leopard to death, showing how they could exploit her skills. That she would never meet an equal was ensured by venereal disease. Two years later a British expedition were moved by the primitive funerals the apes gave for Tarzan." Siobhan did a barking laugh and ran off stage.
The Australian was not impressed. "Now the last thing that I would ever want to do is come across as some SJW Tumblerina, but that last bit there was super problematic. Comparing neurotypicals to apes? Somehow that feels racist."
"But neurotypicals are apes. And what about implying that autistics aren't even human by comparing them to aliens or robots? Is that problematic?" asked the American. "I'd much rather be a jungle bum. Be quiet, here comes my favorite bit…"
Now Wailmer was walking down an alley and was mugged by three anonymous criminals, who beat the quack within an inch of his life before leaving him to suffer alone, weeping. The audience burns with hilarity, laughter like thunder, ricocheting up and down the theater walls like bullets, as though they've just witnessed some harmless Adam Sandler pratfall, not an extremely distressing ordeal like I just did!
That's the end of Act One. My hip-flask was empty, so I headed out to the theater lobby to see if they have anything to drink. I hear the American critic comment to his associate: "See, the writer's just trying to figure out what the NT equivalent of a meltdown is and see whether they're as willing to laugh to laugh at that kind as well."
Throughout the show, whenever somebody says "with autism", people throw plastic spoons onto the stage. They run out as Silcoon Bagon-Cubone performs an operatic rendition of the Kazakhstan national anthem, vigorously shaking his booty to distract copyright lawyers from the fact the he plagiarized his Extreme Male Brain theory from Alan Alda. Spectators clamber onto stage to retrieve their cutlery during the epic sax solo in his well-meaning, yet typically patronizing, song I Overgeneralize When I Say She Empathizes And He Systematizes.
The play climaxed with Wailmer's trial, the judge singing, "In all years of judging I have never seen before a more transparent case of medical fraud, woo! What have you, hee-hee, got to say for yourself?"
"Just one thing, one little phrase that justifies, so, so much." Wailmer farted with a deafening blast. "Imagination always trumps research."
In the second-most musical verdict I've ever heard, the judge banged his gavel and sang, "That is the most stupendously-self-servingly-silly thing I've ever heard, BABY ! Since you seem to hate proper medicine so much, oo-ho, this court bars you from using proper medicine in the future!"
As Wailmer left the court he accidentally scars himself on a legal document and the resulting infection develops into a severe case of Terminal Anal Loquaciousness.
Six months later, after narrowly escaping being torn limb to limb by a flock of overworked doctors chasing him from the Tribeca Film Festival, Wailmer blasts into a dark reprise of I'm Bringing Measles Back. From his morrison he unleashes seven sulfuric stench storms, his body deflating with each ghastly gust. By the third chorus of Wailmer's theme song the quack has shrunk down to the size of a quokka, a quail egg, a quark. Then nothing.
A chorus line somersaulted onto the stage, including singing "Tedious and treacherous, with stabbing eyes and hearts vacuous, from their mouths only come lies. There's simply no way to deny it, every neurotypical is full of shit! Their unexamined lives aren't worth living, hear the truth that we're ringing, this isn't hate speech, this is hate singing!"
I'm fairly certain that neurotypical is a synonym for bastard.
"I'm offended." said the Australian serf.
"Imagine how offended you would be if people like you were only represented as jokes, children or freaks who need miracles to justify their existence. Just how exactly does the media diagnose school shooters? Suggesting that neurotypicals are instinctively deceitful is about as fair as saying autistics have no empathy, maybe even truer. Scientists have built their entire career on that claim. And by that I mean Silcoon Bloody-Cubone."
After the actors' bows, Wailmer returned to the stage to justify his behavior, apologetically farting, "And that's why I bullied a kid all the way through high school, and acted like her friend at the reunion!" Catching a bouquet of flowers from the audience, the actor broke character and tearfully said "I want to dedicate this to any young person out there who feels misunderstood, rest assured that there will always be someone out there, willing to exploit the privileges prejudice denied you, to profit as they further those misunderstandings by misrepresenting you!"
The audience applauded explosively. Feeling as though a spotlight had fallen upon me, I sat with my fists clenched and my feet frozen. But after a second I had to stretch my left leg. I swung it backwards and hit something. I picked it up, it was a box. Inside there was a badge with a special message written on it: "I'm neurotypical - that just means I'm easier to replace!"
The American tapped my shoulder. "Mr. Ho-Oh? I want to talk to you about the Monty Hall problem…"
I ran from the theater crying.
Chapter Management