Bad Animals (10 page)

Anyway, my advice: if you're going to read
The Book of Job,
read it on a warm summer evening. Take it out into your garden, if you're lucky enough to have one, just as the light is fading. That's what I should have done. I shouldn't have waited. I should have been rereading it a decade ago. On one of those evenings when my infant son was asleep on my chest, our breath rising and falling together, in sync; and when Cynthia was at the kitchen table, scribbling on a notepad, planning our collective future. “Plans you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about,” Cynthia liked to say back then and still says sometimes. Vacations, real estate, Jonah's bar mitzvah, his first car, his college fund, his wedding. The sky was the limit. Grand, long-term plans that would have scared me silly, it's true, if I'd ever been asked to listen to them. What, I wonder, was I doing instead? It only occurs to me now that
The Book of Job
is not merely about disappointment or suffering or injustice; it's also about counting your blessings. That is its true literary achievement. To make sure we're grateful for every little thing we have, every camel, every goat, each and every patch of unblemished skin. Gratitude is the takeaway. Only don't leave it too late. Don't wait for trouble to come.

Last summer, Jonah learned to ride his bicycle in the cul-de-sac, a small circle really, behind his grandmother's house. There's hardly any traffic there, so that when cars do appear they do so with what we hoped, fingers crossed, would be sufficient warning. We were depending on the fact that the driver would have plenty of time to see Jonah or, worst-case scenario, time for him to be guided to safety. Jonah's grandmother volunteered to teach him once his training wheels were off, and we took her up on the offer and removed them. Actually, Cynthia did, after I complained about rusty bolts and improper tools. “This isn't as easy as it looks,” I muttered under my breath, loud enough for Cynthia to hear, adding, “Nothing ever is.” For her part, Cynthia looked at me with her standard mix of amusement and quiet restraint.
You always say that, sweetheart.
In the end, she borrowed some WD-40 and an adjustable wrench from a neighbour and, with some persistence and surprising, embarrassing ease, removed the damn things.

More difficult than removing the training wheels was making the decision to remove them. Jonah wasn't lobbying one way or another. Most kids his age would be clamouring for this first taste of independence, but when we asked Jonah to choose—training wheels: yes or no?—he was indifferent. In the end, Cynthia and I disagreed about how to proceed. On my part, it wasn't just about being a klutz with a wrench. I wondered if we might be rushing things. I thought we might want to wait until Jonah was more confident steering, braking, wearing a helmet, and understanding the rules of the road. A distracted and tentative pedestrian, he is never left alone crossing the street, but I constantly worry about the day he will be. Given that, I couldn't imagine him being ready to ride a two-wheeler. That was my side of the debate. Cynthia, however, had had an urgent look in her eyes. She didn't have to say anything. She just had to think it:
Most kids Jonah's age are already riding a bicycle.
Meanwhile, I was thinking:
Didn't you get the memo? Jonah is not most kids his age.

The first few times I dropped Jonah and his two-wheeler off at his grandmother's I didn't stick around. I left as soon as I could. I didn't want to distract either of them—that was my excuse—and I promised to be back in an hour. Even so, as I was getting back into the car, I kept the door open to eavesdrop. I heard Jonah giggling at his grandmother's warnings, at her insistence that he keep his helmet on. One time, I also heard a tiny crash. Jonah, who will cry for reasons it can sometimes take us days, considerable paperwork, and a costly meeting of a team of ABA therapists and our consultant to unravel, doesn't cry when you expect him to—scraping his knee, say, or bumping his head. So he'd be silent after what I assumed was a fall and I listened as his grandmother praised him, telling him he was doing fabulous, telling him not to worry, and that he wasn't going to fall again. She wouldn't let him. Then I'd hear her shouting, “Pedal, Jonah. You have to pedal to go.” I sat in the car for a moment, marvelling at her patience, but not just hers. I marvel at everyone who manages to be patient with my son, even for a little while: therapists, teachers, classmates, neighbours, store clerks. I should have watched her, maybe learned something. Instead, I drove away.

The real reason I wouldn't stay to watch was because I couldn't. I have a lousy imagination, remember, and I couldn't imagine how this was going to end well.

WHENEVER JONAH AND I are out walking, I try my best to leave him to his own devices at intersections and crosswalks. I view it as a kind of training run for the future. Still, I make sure he's wearing a hooded sweater, even in warm weather, so I can keep a firm but largely undetected grip on him. Too often, I've had to yank him back to the curb, an action which is usually followed by an angry lecture about the importance of paying attention to the traffic. You can't be drifting off into La La Land, I told him once and immediately realized my mistake. He found the phrase La La Land irresistibly funny. This is not a joke, I told him. This is serious. By then, I was shouting and he was scared, just not as scared as he should have been, as I wanted him to be. Instead, his shock was tiny and temporary like the kind you'd receive after scuffing your shoes across a carpeted floor. The spark was quickly gone and I uneasily watched his expression shift—from fear to a small, gradual, unconcealed smirk. He repeated what I said—“This is not a joke”—then repeated it again. I knew I needed to be more patient, react properly, according to the rules of ABA, information I should have had at my fingertips by then. I was, I also knew, giving undue attention to his inappropriate behaviour. But the pulse in my neck was throbbing. I was scared and the fear was not dissipating. Human variables, that's the problem with intersections. There was no foolproof way to test or trust my son's knowledge or lack of it when it came to something as simple and crucial as crossing a busy street.

The other day, after another one of these incidents, I dragged Jonah back to a nearby bench and sat him down so I could go over the rules of the road with him yet again. I lectured him about traffic lights and stop signs, about the importance of looking both ways. “You're almost eleven,” I said, waiting again until he stopped giggling. “You have to know these things. Don't you ever want to go out on your own or with friends? Don't you want to drive a car one day?” But, once again, the lecture wasn't sticking. So I thought, out of the blue, what would a yak do? Or a cow? Or a camel? I thought
of More Bad Animals,
that book we hadn't started yet, and the chapter we could devote to traffic safety and autism. We could write it down later, but for now we could talk it out and take some notes when we were back home—before bed, maybe. The kind of thing you always do when you're procrastinating and looking for a way around a bad case of writer's block.

“So, listen Jonah, this is a story about how Deedee, remember Deedee the cow, from your book, from
Bad Animals,
well this is a new story about how she ...”

“What's La La Land?”

“Never mind that, Jonah, listen ... you have to listen.... So Deedee is crossing the street one day in La La Land and along comes ... who? Help me out.”

“Rooney, the camel.”

“And Rooney is?”

“Driving really fast, in a convert-a-bull.”

“I get it. Convertible ... Converti-bull, right?”

“Right.”

“So his humps stick out, right?”

“Right,” Jonah says.

“Great.” Now, we're clicking. “Where was I? Right, Rooney is about to run Deedee over because she's not, not what, Jonah?”

“Not looking.”

“Right. And Moe, the yak, grabs Deedee's cow tail and pulls her back so she's off the road just as Rooney whizzes by. And Moe is ... what is he, Jonah?”

“Mad.”

“How mad?”

“Really mad.”

“Yes and you know why Moe is mad? It's because he's scared, so so scared. Do you know why? It's because Moe can't hold on to his friend's tail forever.”

MY JOB AT THE cul-de-sac last summer was exactly as easy as it looked. I was to drive towards Jonah, make sure he noticed me, and then under no circumstances run the kid over. That was it. After just a few lessons with his grandmother, Jonah was not only riding his bicycle unassisted and without training wheels, he was riding it exuberantly, recklessly, the way any kid would. True, he had only the most rudimentary grasp of what his brakes were for, but we weren't focusing on that. Anyway, it was clear he had no intention of stopping, so who needed brakes? It turned out this was wonderful to watch, and I regretted that I hadn't stuck around all the other times so I could see how he had progressed to this point. How he had gone from being indifferent to pedalling, simply pedalling, to this—this combination, rare in Jonah, of purpose and delight.

“Look at him,” his grandmother said. “He loves it.” Then she added: “We have one problem, though. You see.”

I did. I saw that Jonah insisted on riding in the middle of the road and he couldn't be convinced to do otherwise. Put another way, I couldn't run out to the middle of the cul-de-sac and take hold of Jonah's hood. There was simply no way of knowing what he would do if and when a car approached. My initial thought was to stand guard at the entrance to the tiny circle. Stop each car as it appeared and run a background check on each driver before making it clear to them that they were to watch out for the kid with autism.

Do you even know what autism is? No. Well, here's some reading material you might want to take a look at. There'll be a quiz later. No, I don't care how many times you've seen
Rain Man.
Yes, Hoffman deserved the Oscar. All right, let's start with the spectrum.

A real plan, however, eluded me until I realized I could simply drive my own car around the cul-de-sac and head slowly, very slowly, towards my son. I felt like Pavlov. I'd devised my own experiment.

On the first try, Jonah didn't notice me until I was right in front of him, the car securely in park, my foot firmly on the brake nevertheless. Initially, I worried that I would scare him, that he would be startled and fall off his bike; then I worried he wouldn't. That he wouldn't notice me or he would and find the whole thing hilarious. Mostly, he was surprised to see it was me in the car. I waited as he zipped by. But when he returned I stepped out of the car and put my hands on the bicycle's handlebars. I told him to stop for a second and then, as calmly as I could, I explained that from now on whenever he saw a car, any car, not just mine, he needed to steer his bicycle out of the middle of the road and towards the sidewalk. The next time I drove into the cul-de-sac he rode past me again, but we kept at it. Each time I stepped out of the car and stopped him. Finally, I suspect he was so irritated at having his progress interrupted he got the message. The next time I drove towards him he pulled his bicycle over to the sidewalk, watching me all the while. I drove out of the cul-de-sac, then parked the car on a nearby street, and ran back to congratulate him for listening, for following
my
rules of the road. That's when I noticed he was exactly where I'd left him, by the sidewalk, standing beside his bicycle. His grandmother was telling him he could get on again and go. But he seemed to be waiting for an okay from me. I hugged him and told him to take off.

“One problem solved,” his grandmother said.

“And another one created,” I said. I repeated the experiment a few more times that afternoon and a few more afternoons after that. Each time, he pulled over as I'd taught him; each time, he got off his bike and waited for me to leave the cul-de-sac. It wasn't ideal but it was a start. Besides, I knew it was a safe bet that at some point, down the road, so to speak, the next car he would have to avoid would not be mine.

JONAH WILL BE ELEVEN in a couple of weeks. It's always around this time, around his birthday on Christmas Eve, that I find myself clinging to him being ten the way I clung to him being nine last year and on and on back to the year he was about to turn four and we first received a diagnosis of autism. It's curious how the feeling hasn't changed, how even then it seemed like we were running short on time. Age matters for Jonah in a way it doesn't for neuro typical kids. We are way beyond
What-to-Expect
milestones now; we are into a serious countdown. The clock is ticking on Jonah's potential as well as his limitations.

At our December ABA meeting The Consultant and Jessica, now his only remaining full-time therapist, brought him presents. He quickly unwrapped and mostly ignored the puzzle and the book he received and was keen, instead, to return to swinging on his exercise bar. Meanwhile, Cynthia and I held hands and waited as The Consultant prepared to read us the highlights from her end-of-first-term visit to Jonah's school. Her report was generally positive, she said by way of introduction. Jonah was doing his schoolwork with a minimum of assistance from Jessica. He listened to his teachers, often better than other kids in his class. It's all that behaviour modification kicking in, she boasted, and Jessica nervously cheered. Swinging, Jonah disappeared behind the door jamb and then reappeared. I was close enough to hear him mangling some lyrics, ‘“You could be better than a car. You could be living in a jar.'” Cynthia nudged me as The Consultant continued to say that while Jonah wasn't interacting much with his peers in the classroom or during recess or lunch, his behaviours, by which she meant inappropriate behaviours, had diminished, and that's what counted. That was encouraging. He was not shouting out as he'd done in the past or raising his hand when he didn't know the answer to a question or laughing for no apparent reason. All very good, she concluded. I took Cynthia's pen out of her hand and wrote her a note: “What about you know what?”

UNFORTUNATELY, NOTHING IN The Consultant's report explained why, if everything was going so well in her opinion, Jonah was waking up most weekday mornings bitterly complaining about his own behaviour. That includes this morning. Jonah is in the middle of what feels like a pre-emptive strike, anticipating a day of warding off inappropriate behaviours. When I turn on the light in his room, he piles his
Madagascar
comforter on top of his small body like his very own ash heap and burrows under it. He's not hiding from me so much, I'm guessing, as from the prospect of another trying day at school.

“I'm not great, Daddy. Not great.” He says this so sincerely I can't help smiling. Jonah often sounds and looks younger than he is. (His pediatrician, who missed Jonah's autism completely, once referred to him as immature. Jonah was barely three at the time.)

“You're great, kiddo,” I hear myself say and realize I could be more convincing. I need coffee. I need sleep.

“I'm bad, Daddy, what should I do?” His voice is high-pitched and babyish now, and I'm guessing it would break my heart every time if I didn't know it so well, if I wasn't so accustomed to its nuances by now. It is part heart-wrenching anxiety, part performance art.