Katie Asher, buzzing with exhaustion, collapsed on her couch. She was 40, smart, a bootstrapper with a southern drawl and long auburn curls. She also had an abusive ex-husband, three jobs, and five children, including a then-17-year-old named Houston, who had autism and couldn’t speak. Caring for Houston was torture. He smeared feces. He bit his hands so hard that she could hear him grinding the bone. He grunted and tantrumed all night long — no one in the family could sleep. He ran everywhere, fast: around the house, away from Katie. At age 3, he ran into the street and was hit by a pickup truck. Katie installed locks on the inside of all the doors; he was hers to protect. But after puberty, Houston was suddenly, terrifyingly huge: six feet and 200 pounds. Was he even in there? Katie asked herself this all the time. She had no idea.
Prostrate, delirious, Katie drifted in her living room. Then Houston sat still at her feet, which he had never done before, tugged on the blanket covering her body, and said the first sentence he’d ever spoken: “Mama, I love you.”
Those four words recharged Katie. She still had the three jobs and the five kids, but the words landed on her like a meteorite, a miracle. Their impact energized Katie to take Houston for a whole new round of treatments to try to get him to speak: integration therapy, music therapy, biofeedback therapy, the Tomatis Method, Forbrain. She talked one of the best speech-and-occupational-therapy clinics in Atlanta into taking Houston as a client. It fired him after six months. The clinic wanted to save resources for patients its practitioners believed could make progress.
Then a friend suggested Katie and Houston try a form of communication known in the autism world as spelling. Spelling involved not just Houston but Houston and Katie as a team. Katie’s role was communication partner; as such, she held in the air an 8.5-by-11-inch board or stencil covered with the letters of the alphabet and numerals 0 to 9. Houston’s role was a speller; he’d use a pencil to point to letters on the board to make words he wanted to say.
All summer long, in 2018, Katie and Houston spent four, five, six hours every day at their dining table trying to master the technique. Each spelling lesson consisted of a reading on a topic, like constellations, followed by questions that had just been answered by the reading. After each lesson, Katie lifted a black plastic stencil letter board in front of Houston’s chest. Houston lifted a pencil. Together they practiced as Houston learned to point the tip of his pencil in the proper place. A constellation is made up of a group of what? S-T-A-R-S. What is the name of the brightest constellation? O-R-I-O-N. They became “one instrument,” Katie said. “Like the cello and the bow.”
By then, Houston was 21, a little calmer than at 17, but his younger brother Joshua, a high-school wrestler, still regularly had to coax Houston into a cold shower when he melted down. Houston’s next birthday was significant: At age 22, he would stop receiving free public school, albeit in a special-needs classroom in which he’d been doing the same life-skills exercises — counting coins, picking out groceries — for years.
Six months before Houston’s birthday, as Katie held a letter board, Houston spelled I-M S-P-E-C-I-A-L.
Katie said, “Oh, of course you are.”
Houston spelled I C-A-N H-E-A-R T-H-O-U-G-H-T-S.
Katie was petrified. If Houston could hear her thoughts, he knew she lay in bed thinking, I can’t keep doing this. He knew she resented people with less severely autistic children: They wanted to celebrate neurodiversity. There was nothing to celebrate here. Katie thought her life was destroyed. And not just her life — she thought her four other children’s lives were destroyed. Houston’s autism made them all social pariahs. He often smelled like shit and couldn’t clean himself. She’d be caring for him until she died.
Soon after, Houston spelled I A-M T-H-E H-E-R-A-L-D O-F C-H-R-I-S-T.
In late January, I wrote to Katie. She and Houston had been main characters on a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. The show, about the telepathic abilities of nonspeaking autistic people, had rocketed up the podcasting charts and blasted open nationwide debate. What was happening in these families? What could they teach us about the nature of consciousness, interpersonal connection, and the spirit? Within 20 minutes of my reaching out to Katie, we had a plan for me to visit. Within an hour, she had sent a long email with the subject line “First Misconception — Language Acquisition.” In it, she explained, in a strobing storm of scientific terms, that “comprehension is in the Wernicke’s area of the brain, responsive thought is in the Broca’s area.” She attached Noam Chomsky’s rebuttal to B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book, Verbal Behavior.
A few weeks later, Katie and Houston opened the door of their home on a wooded hill outside Atlanta. Houston is now 28. That morning, he wore a T-shirt that read NONSPEAKING, VERY VERBAL; purple earplugs in both ears (his hearing is extremely sensitive); glasses to keep from seeing triple; and a rosary-bead bracelet on his wrist that matched the one on Katie’s. Over toast and berries, Katie and I discussed the world as she sees it: the number of electrons in the shell of an aluminum atom and how that’s related to vaccines causing autism; how the brains of people with autism don’t go through the typical pruning and myelination processes and how this results in a lack of sensory-motor integration and thus little or no speech.
Houston has apraxia, meaning he has difficulty with “motor planning.” The body he inhabits lacks the fine motor skills to get his lips, tongue, and soft palate to form the words he wants to say. Given this, Katie says, Houston’s ability to communicate mind-to-mind makes perfect sense. “If you’re not connected to your physical body, which one are you gonna use — your spiritual body or physical body?” she asked.
After concluding that Houston was telepathic, Katie asked friends in the nonspeaker community if their children were telepathic, too. Some said “yes.” Many said they didn’t know, checked, and said “yes.”
For Katie, Houston’s telepathy was a huge asset. He’d hand her her purse if she forgot it while she was running out the door. Or he’d spell something insightful, like THOSE ARE THE ROTTEN THOUGHTS. And he’d be right — she had been consumed by doubt in her faith. Yet the big news of Houston’s telepathy, to Katie, is not Houston’s mind reading. The big news is that thoughts are real; thoughts abide by natural laws. “The first law of energy is the law of conservation: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred,” Katie explained. “So that means our thoughts are transferring. What are they transferring to?”
I asked Houston, aloud, how it felt to go through the world in his body. Katie picked up the letter board. As Houston pointed with his pencil to letters, Katie called them out, then tried to shape the letters into words.
“H-A-V-I-N-G, having to hear what is — B. Having to hear is being P-R-E-S-E-N-T, present, W-I-T-H, with, F-E-E-L, with being present, with feelings, P-A, pain, C-R-U-E-L, cruelty.”
Katie paused and said to Houston, “Find your letter. You’re wandering all over the board there.”
They resumed. “L-O-V-E, love, L-O-S, loss, F-A-I, lost faith, W-E-A-R … Oh, okay. Weariness. L-O-N-E-L-I-N-E, loneliness.”
I asked Houston how he felt about the word telepathy.
“B-O-B-O-N, so. B-O-N … Oh, bold, bold.”
I asked, “What do you mean?”
“F-O-R-C, forces, P-E-O-P, forces people, to A-S, ask, I-F, if we A-R-E-R-M-O-R, are more than B-O-D-I-S, bodies.”
Before I left, Katie wanted to show me Houston’s telepathy skills. She handed me a slip of paper, and I wrote SURFBOARD.
“Grab the word,” she said as she held the letter board aloft in front of him. “What was the word she just wrote down?”
Houston spelled S-U-R-F-B-O-A-R-D.
