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"If I had Tourette's syndrome I'd know it, right?" I ask Levi-Pearl.

"Would you know it if you had it?" she repeats. "You may go through life having a little involuntary movement and clearing your throat irregularly. 'Oh that's just David's habits.' Then you would see one of our public service announcements and say, 'That's me.'"

We talk about children. "Kids that get diagnosed fairly early are lucky," Levi-Pearl says. "Parents realize what the child has instead of thinking they have brain tumors. Most children with classic Tourette's syndrome do quite well in mainstream education. There are those who have TS as well as learning and attention problems." She pauses. "In a third of cases there are varying degrees of obsessive traits." She looks across the table and smiles at Handler. "And by my even saying it, Lowell wants to do some stuff."

Handler honks.

"I don't even have to look at him," Levi-Pearl says. "He's already thinking about his stuff. Everyone has their own obsessive stuff."

Handler touches my tape recorder.

"What exactly is your stuff?" I ask him.

"I do a lot of touching of inanimate objects and people," he answers matter of factly. "There are other people who have obsessive-compulsive stuff who are just the opposite -- they can't stand to be touched. There are people who have to have specific symmetry in every object. There are people who have to get dressed in a specific order or else they have to get undressed."

I point out that I basically ignored his stuff. "How should I react to you?" I ask, and then imitate him reaching out to touch the tape recorder.

"People have all kind of reactions," he answers. "I was on the subway a few months ago. This guy was in the subway car and I was on the platform. I'm Touretting and shaking and doing all kinds of things. This guy looks up at me and shouts, 'You must be some kind of fucking retard.' And I said, 'You're right. I'm retarded. And you must be a very smart man.' And the doors closed and he was screaming at me as the subway went away." He pauses and halfheartedly touches my tape recorder.

"It's easy to get interested in the strong reaction," a newcomer says. It's Jonathan Lethem, the final participant in this discussion. This prolific, brilliant novelist's latest novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," stars a private detective who has Tourette's.

"I'm fascinated by the things that point exactly in the direction 'Should I ignore it?'" he says. "What Tourette's exposes -- someone behaving strangely -- is the way that we all weave together a social world where we allow a certain amount of strangeness. We filter it out. Have a built-in denial that says, I'm not seeing that. That didn't really happen. There was a reason for it and I don't know the reason. I don't need to think about it. Or, I'm not going to react to that. Tourette's can become an example of something that exposes aspects of human interaction that are at work everywhere."

I check my tape recorder as Lethem adds, "I found that writing is extremely Tourette. It's got rituals. My revision takes an obsessive grooming of the text. My generation of metaphors is to turn ideas upside down. Wordplay. A game like written tics."

Levi-Pearl raves about Lethem's book. "I read it in one sitting and thought, Either this guy has Tourette's or all his friends have it. He had so captured the essence, the feel of Tourette's. There is an intuition there." She pauses. "When I learned that Jonathan had never seen anyone with TS I was truly blown away."

Handler touches the tape recorder and gives a honking laugh. "You'd never seen anyone with it?"

"Seen is the wrong word," Lethem answers. "Because I had of course seen them. But then I read about Tourette's in Oliver Sacks. It was moving and intriguing to me. I also read 'Twitch and Shout.' I was going to have to explore Tourette's in my work because of the enormous level of identification that I felt. Tourette's became my own response to the world even if no physician would ever consider me a candidate for diagnosis. I had voluntary Tourette's."

"You should have called me up," Handler honks, touching the tape recorder again. "We could have gone Touretting through the East Village."

"I was tempted and at the same time I was protective," Lethem says. "Once I had my notion of my narrator Lionel in place I put up some walls, because I only wanted to know what I knew because I was on fire with my character and I needed to just go."

"The aspect of Tourette's syndrome illustrating larger aspects of human nature is what I'm hoping people pick up on from my book," Handler says to Lethem (just two authors talking). "It's something that illuminates universal aspects of human nature."

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