It was cold and the rain was pouring, but my balcony was under shelter. I took a chair and my glass outside, then went back inside, put on the greasy wool jumper that my mother had knitted for a much earlier birthday and collected the tequila bottle.

I was forty years old. My father used to play a song written by John Sebastian. I remember that it was by John Sebastian because Noddy Holder announced prior to singing it, ‘We’re going to do a song by John Sebastian. Are there any John Sebastian fans here?’ Apparently there were because there was loud and raucous applause before he started singing.

I decided that tonight I was also a John Sebastian fan and that I wanted to hear the song. This was the first time in my life that I could recall a desire to hear a particular piece of music. I had the technology. Or used to. I went to pull out my mobile phone and realised it had been in the jacket I had discarded. I went inside, booted my laptop, registered for iTunes, and downloaded ‘Darling Be Home Soon’ from Slade Alive!, 1972. I added ‘Satisfaction’, thus doubling the size of my popular music collection. I retrieved my earphones from their box and returned to the balcony, poured another tequila and listened to a voice from my childhood singing that it had taken a quarter of his life before he could begin to see himself.

At eighteen, just before I left home to go to university, statistically approaching a quarter of my life, I had listened to these words and been reminded that I had very little understanding of who I was. It had taken me until tonight, approximately halfway, to see myself reasonably clearly. I had Rosie, and the Rosie Project to thank for that. Now it was over, what had I learned?

I need not be visibly odd. I could engage in the protocols that others followed and move undetected among them. And how could I be sure that other people were not doing the same – playing the game to be accepted but suspecting all the time that they were different?
I had skills that others didn’t. My memory and ability to focus had given me an advantage in baseball statistics, cocktail-making and genetics. People had valued these skills, not mocked them.
I could enjoy friendship and good times. It was my lack of skills, not lack of motivation that had held me back. Now I was competent enough socially to open my life to a wider range of people. I could have more friends. Dave the Baseball Fan could be the first of many.
I had told Gene and Claudia that I was incompatible with women. This was an exaggeration. I could enjoy their company, as proven by my joint activities with Rosie and Daphne. Realistically, it was possible that I could have a partnership with a woman.
The idea behind the Wife Project was still sound. In many cultures a matchmaker would have routinely done what I did, with less technology, reach and rigour, but the same assumption – that compatibility was as viable a foundation for marriage as love.
I was not wired to feel love. And faking it was not acceptable. Not to me. I had feared that Rosie would not love me. Instead, it was I who could not love Rosie.
I had a great deal of valuable knowledge – about genetics, computers, aikido, karate, hardware, chess, wine, cocktails, dancing, sexual positions, social protocols and the probability of a fifty-six-game hitting streak occurring in the history of baseball. I knew so much shit and I still couldn’t fix myself.
As the shuffle setting on my media player selected the same two songs over and over, I realised that my thinking was also beginning to go in circles and that, despite the tidy formulation, there was some flaw in my logic. I decided it was my unhappiness with the night’s outcome breaking through, my wish that it could be different.

I watched the rain falling over the city and poured the last of the tequila.

35

I was still in the chair when I woke the next morning. It was cold and raining and my laptop battery had exhausted itself. I shook my head to test for a hangover but it seemed that my alcohol-processing enzymes had done their job adequately. So had my brain. I had unconsciously set it a problem to solve and, understanding the importance of the situation, it had overcome the handicap of intoxication to reach a solution.

I began the second half of my life by making coffee. Then I reviewed the very simple logic.

I was wired differently. One of the characteristics of my wiring was that I had difficulty empathising. This problem has been well documented in others and is, in fact, one of the defining symptoms of the autism spectrum.
A lack of empathy would account for my inability to respond emotionally to the situations of fictional characters in films. This was similar to my inability to respond as others did to the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. But I did feel sorry for Frank the fire-fighter guide. And for Daphne; my sister; my parents when my sister died; Carl and Eugenie because of the Gene–Claudia marriage crisis; Gene himself, who wanted to be admired but had achieved the opposite; Claudia, who had agreed to an open marriage but changed her mind and suffered as Gene continued to exploit it; Phil, who had struggled to deal with his wife’s infidelity and death and then to win the love of Rosie; Kevin Yu, whose focus on passing the course had blinded him to ethical conduct; the Dean, who had to make difficult decisions under contradictory rules and deal with prejudice about her dress and relationship; Faith Healer, who had to reconcile his strong beliefs with scientific evidence; Margaret Case, whose son had committed suicide and whose mind no longer functioned; and, critically, Rosie, whose childhood and now adulthood had been made unhappy by her mother’s death and her father problem and who now wanted me to love her. This was an impressive list, and, though it did not include Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca, it was clear evidence that my empathy capability was not entirely absent.