Bad Animals (11 page)

“Speak properly, Jonah, you know how to speak properly.” He is quiet for a moment, long enough for me to wonder if I did something right. Then he grimaces. The good news is he's no longer mad at himself; the bad news, he's mad at me.

Jonah still has tantrums but they're less frequent and don't last as long as they used to. And while this is something to be grateful for, it also means that when the tantrums come they're harder to predict or prepare for. It means you've allowed yourself to forget. You've allowed yourself to be lulled into a false sense of normalcy.

“I didn't do well on my French test,” Jonah goes on. He is trying hard to modulate his voice, to speak properly; however, I know his statement isn't true and say so.

“Bogus, Jonesy. You made
seven
out of eight. Mommy saw your French teacher the other day at the parent—teacher's meeting and Madame Melanie said you were her best French speller,” I remind him. He hasn't been bad either. How could he be? He isn't even out of bed yet.

This is my first task of the day: to get my complaining, occasionally inconsolable son dressed and still remain unaffected by whatever he may say or do, no matter how odd or unsettling it might be. As I've learned over the years, a great deal will depend on me—on modifying my behaviour. This can sometimes feel like I'm walking on a balance beam. Even if I don't fall, the possibility of falling is always in my mind. This is why it's essential to keep all those negative feelings—self-pity, doubt, disappointment, resentment, just the exasperation that I normally harbour on mornings like this—from showing up on my too-easy-to-read face. Likewise the tone of my voice, so often transparent to my son, has to be controlled. Keep it upbeat if possible, neutral at least. If it's not, things will get worse. If you don't believe me, we have compiled evidence, empirical evidence, as proof.

Cynthia keeps a large binder full of behaviour sheets, which we use in Jonah's ABA program to keep track of what might have set him off on a crying jag or a downward spiral of disparagement, or both, as is the case this morning. Whatever it might be, the binder has the data and the data holds the answer and the answer invariably is: we aren't reinforcing enough. Or I should say I'm not. That's why when I finally pull Jonah's comforter off him with a little too much force I know I've messed up. And when I tell him to hurry up or there won't be time for a proper breakfast, in a tone that's a little too desperate, too needy, I've really messed up.

“I'm not happy we won't have time for a
proper
breakfast. Why won't we have time for a
proper
breakfast?” Jonah says. I will have to regroup. And do another thing I didn't want to do this morning: ask Cynthia for help.

“Remember the ABCs,” she says, her voice sleepy and barely audible. She's in bed and I'm standing in the doorway of our bedroom, wondering how she and I could be so different. How, for instance, she can sleep through all this. In the next room Jonah is whining and slamming his door repeatedly. If I didn't know what was worrying him before, I can make an educated guess now. He is going to be too late to have breakfast, or, more to the point, he thinks he is. This is the worry I planted in his head. This is plainly on me. The only good news is that Cynthia was sound asleep when I managed to make things worse. It's a mistake I won't have to own up to, not right now anyway.

One of the early deals Cynthia and I struck in raising Jonah is that I do most morning duties and she does most everything else. She'll deny this. She's always telling me I take on too much as it is. But behavioural psychology, which is at the core of Jonah's ABA therapy, has a way of infecting a whole family. Having learned to use positive reinforcement on my son, I also have my suspicions about when it's being used on me. “We're in this together, remember that,” Cynthia mumbles as she attempts to fall back to sleep.

In more than a decade of marriage, I've come to a conclusion: All marriages are mixed in the end. It's not just that you're a morning person and she's not or she's a vegetarian and you're not, it's that everything is contested. These days, everyone calls their spouse their partner, but I don't get that. In its constant push and pull, its ongoing tally of ups and downs, marriage is more competition than joint venture. This realization becomes unavoidable when you add a special-needs child to the mix. You're constantly keeping score. Who slept in? Who lost their temper? Who capitulated and asked for help?
There's nothing wrong with asking for help, sweetheart.
Who just can't take it any more? Who needs a break? Well, take a guess.

“WE LIVE BY ONE ANOTHER'S variable weather,” Peter De Vries says in
The Blood of the Lamb,
and he's turned out to be right when it comes to Cynthia and me. I want her to feel what I'm feeling. Hopeless. I am slouched in the doorway, waiting as she sits up in bed and reaches for her glasses. She does it calmly. Calmly, too, she takes note of my poor posture and offers advice. “Listen, get a behaviour sheet from my office and take the data. It is going to help, really. Do the ABCs.”

“Fuck the ABCs and fuck the data,” I say under my breath as I walk away, which is, incidentally, the way I say most things these days: to myself, and in a position of retreat. Someone once said that a woman only falls in love with a man when she has a higher opinion of him than he deserves and I'm starting to wonder if this fact has, of late, occurred to my wife. Or if it's occurring to her now as I have to wake her up again to ask where the damn binder with the damn behaviour sheets is hiding.

ABC, I should explain, stands for “antecedent, behaviour, consequence,” and it is one of the guiding principles in ABA therapy. The theory is if you know what caused your child's behaviour then you can understand what the behaviour is and you can figure out what the most suitable consequence would be. For example, if he's seeking attention, you ignore the behaviour, though not the child. If he's avoiding a task, then you make sure he completes it. We were taught this when we hired The Consultant seven years ago now. Everything Jonah does, she told us, can be analyzed if we rigorously, consistently record the ABCs. The implication has been clear from the beginning—our son is not a mystery, he is a puzzle. I'm not convinced. In his essay “Open Secrets,”
New Yorker
writer Malcolm Gladwell argues for the essential distinction between the two. With a puzzle, if you uncover the crucial missing piece of information then the problem is solved. But with a mystery, there is no missing piece. In fact, the more things you learn about a mystery, according to Gladwell, the more unsolvable it's likely to become.

“The binder is not in the office. Do you want to tell me why we can never find anything around here?”

“Not right now, I don't. Look in the therapy room then.”

Lately, I've watched Jonah get into shouting matches with inanimate objects and it's strangely encouraging. After all, it is a kind of conversation. It is also funny. If he's having trouble hanging up his jacket, for example, he will tell off the recalcitrant garment, give it a final warning. “You better stay on the hanger.” Sometimes he'll shake his fist at it: like John Cleese, at the end of his rope, in
Fatuity Towers.
When I find the binder, I also plan to give it a piece of my mind:
You bastardy how dare you disappear when I need you? How dare you make an idiot of me? I can do that myself

“Where exactly in the therapy room am I supposed to look?”

“I don't know ... wherever.” We are weary people. Fatigue is our default position. It could, if we wanted, explain everything. But to Cynthia's credit, she doesn't take the easy way out. I could hardly blame her now if she pulled the covers over her head, if she threw a pillow at me, if she screamed, but she doesn't. “Sweetheart,” she says with a forced patience and a tone I recognize. I know what's coming:
the pep talk.
“You can do this. You can. And once you write things down you can start to, you know, properly analyze the problem.” The truth is I don't need behaviour sheets or a binder to be B.F. Skinner or Ivan Pavlov, to know that the problem with Jonah this morning—the antecedent—could be anything. It's like proofreading a manuscript—you go over it again and again and somehow you still know there's something you missed. Jonah might have woken up with a stomach ache; he might have had a bad dream. Then again, this morning's tantrum might be attributable to something that happened at school yesterday or last week or last year. Or it might be everything. It might all be accumulating, all the hours at school and hours of therapy, all our badgering and desperation. With the positive reports we have received from The Consultant and from Jonah's teachers, we forget sometimes the toll, the incalculable toll, that behaving appropriately takes on him and us.

WHEN HE WAS LEARNING to speak Jonah routinely confused his pronouns, saying “you” when he meant “I.” At first, we thought this was cute. Later, we learned there was a term for this—“pronominal reversal”—and that it's common among children with autism. It's sort of like neurological crossed wires; it causes children on the spectrum to echo what is being said. But I'm not sure crossed wires are all that's going on. If there's no distinction for Jonah between “you” and “I,” then there's no distinction either between everything being done by him and everything being done to him. In the last few years we've taught him his pronouns the way we've taught him everything else, methodically, step by step, according to the ABA rule book. But he still slips up sometimes, particularly when he's upset or anxious or just inattentive. In his vulnerable, open heart and his curious, exceptional brain, Jonah still can't help thinking the world is against him. And, for this reason, he so often seems at its mercy.

Autism can be defined by the ways in which a child separates himself from everyday interactions. But there are ways in which Jonah can never be separate enough. I'm guessing that's why he will sometimes become angry at me when I get a song lyric wrong or accidentally mispronounce a word. It's as if “he” was “you”—as if both he and you were the ones making the mistake. Lately, he's also become obsessed with the weather. If he looks out the window in the morning and spots so much as a dark cloud he will run to the TV and turn on the weather channel. If it does happen to rain, he will become angry, personally offended. “I'm going to be mad in my room until it stops raining,” I heard him say the other day. He was sitting on the floor, his knees up, his hands balled into fists and covering his ears. He is practising a kind of reverse magical thinking and he won't be talked out of it. Still, I wish I could convince him sometimes to take credit for a sunny day. But my son is, autism notwithstanding, a natural-born pessimist. When he launches into these elaborate complaints there's often no way for Cynthia or me to respond without laughing and without realizing, at the same time, that while this is undeniably funny, it's not funny for him. If you are convinced the world revolves around you, that means any time anything goes wrong in that world it's logical to assume that it is somehow your fault.

In an essay in
Harper's
entitled “On Spectrum,” Sallie Tisdale, the mother of a twenty-six-year-old woman with autism, writes about how hard it can be to distinguish between behaviour that is autistic and behaviour that is simply quirky. Researchers, Tisdale adds, are starting to speculate that the so-called spectrum is, indeed, all-inclusive—a kind of sliding scale of normal. If her point is that we are all a little autistic, I can vouch for that. I'm reminded daily of the ways in which Jonah is like me or, perhaps, I'm like him. We are both victims of subjectivity. Thinking everything is your fault can be described as a spectrum disorder, but you could also call it vanity, self-absorption, creative non-fiction, first-person narrative.

The ABA binder, incidentally, is where Cynthia said it was—in Jonah's therapy room. Which is why, just for the hell of it, I decide that this morning, this difficult though hardly unusual morning, to stick with the program, to give neutrality, consistency, careful analysis, a fair chance.

Jonah is dressed and having his Cheerios but still carrying on a spirited debate with himself when I take out a behaviour sheet, sit down next to him at the kitchen table, and fill in the box provided for the date, time, and my initials. Someone has to be accountable; another way of saying someone has to be blamed, if you ask me. Still, I squeeze my notes into the three other boxes on the sheet. These are for describing what happened immediately before this morning's behaviour (antecedent: he woke up), what he did and how often (behaviour: he complained and stimmed, verbal stims mostly, saying the same things, asking the same questions over and over), and what happened immediately after the behaviour (the consequence or how I reacted? N/A for not applicable. We're not there yet). The problem with these little boxes, of course, is that they are such little boxes.

All the years I've spent as a book reviewer have made me fond of the voice on the page, the intimacy of a conversation between writer and reader. Forget what they say in creative writing classes about showing not telling. I want to be told. I want a lecture. Go ahead, feel free, talk my ear off. Give me a glimpse inside your head, your world, and don't think for a second that I care how unpleasant, how petty it looks. That's what I want. In
Out of Sheer Rage,
Geoff Dyer, a British travel writer and novelist, rants about everything, from the sinister influence of IKEA in his life to his unwillingness to start the biography of D.H. Lawrence he is supposed to be writing and the rest of us are supposed to be reading. Incidentally, if he needs an alternate title, I have one for him:
Let's Talk About Procrastination.
Dyer's inner life is an open book. That includes his internal meltdown when he learns that the luxury doughnut he desires from his local deli is unavailable. He imagines explaining his terrible state and the reason for it to the deli staff: