Bad Animals (15 page)

“Can you explain why you haven't read the book?” Harriet asks. Her cell rings again. She glances at it and, this time, ignores it.
My luck.

“I've been busy. I have a lot to read. It's kind of my job.”

Cynthia doesn't roll her eyes, though she'd be well within her rights to. She knows this isn't true. She knows that I have just about given up on so-called serious literature. Instead, I spend most of my time watching mindless sitcoms and old movies on TV after Jonah has gone to bed. I am a couch potato by choice, not accident. By now, Cynthia is no longer sure if I'm joking when I say I'm done with books, that I've read enough of them.

“Is there, maybe, some other reason why you haven't gotten around to this book?” Harriet asks again.

“Nothing occurs to me.” But there is a reason and you'd think this would be the ideal place to reveal it, here in Harriet's functional office, in Harriet's empathetic, reasonably expensive company. But I don't want to hear myself say out loud what I am thinking.
ABA was also supposed to change our lives.

CYNTHIA AND I ARE IN Harriet's office for another reason—because of what we have come to call our crack-ups. It would probably be more accurate to describe these outbursts of ours as just that, outbursts, tantrums for grownups—temporary and banal. But I prefer the more romantic term F. Scott Fitzgerald coined in his famous essay. Published in 1936 in
Esquire
magazine, “The Crack-Up” reads, in retrospect, like a tour de force of self-indulgence, a gut-wrenching, personal account of decline, of how “an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack-up of all values, a crack-up that he scarcely knew of until long after it occurred.” Writing about a failing that personal was the kind of thing people didn't routinely do back then, certainly not in non-fiction and not anyone as famously literary as Fitzgerald. But he didn't just chronicle his emotional deterioration and his subsequent recovery, he updated it, wrote a sequel and then another. In doing so, he acknowledged that he hadn't recovered at all. He wrote unflinchingly about his weaknesses, complained about his friends and lovers, the people he could no longer tolerate, about “the blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.” He was criticized by fans of his novels for revealing too much, for embarrassing himself, even embarrassing literature. He acknowledged this was true, but he didn't care. He couldn't stand himself and he took some pleasure and pride in letting everyone know.

There is a kind of pleasure, usually unspoken, in pitching a fit, blowing off steam, cracking up. It's like a high fever. You're better off succumbing than resisting. When Jonah becomes frustrated, he's been instructed to punch his pillow, but it seldom works for him, and I wonder if it's because he's being asked to punch his pillow for a specific purpose. Perhaps he prefers, as I do, ineffectual, impromptu rage. So, on occasion, I will bang my fist against the wall, slam a door, or overturn a chair. More often, though, I'll just rant, invariably in Cynthia's direction. My crack-up speech always begins with the same phrase: “I can't take this any more.” What follows is a soliloquy, often of such unremitting hopelessness, such disdain for everything we are trying to do or will ever try to do to make Jonah better, to make him fit in, to make sure he has friends, achievements, a future, that I wonder how I will ever take these words back. How I will be permitted to, I mean. But I am, and this is, as far as I'm concerned, a testament to marriage, to mine anyway. At some point, I will want Harriet to know this.

Cynthia's crack-ups are quieter and, as a consequence, scarier. She expresses anger and discouragement in the same way, by sleeping more and speaking less, hardly speaking at all when I'm around. She is a person who tends to choose her words carefully anyway, so it can take me a while to realize that something is wrong. But eventually I notice her silence is somehow different, more deliberate and ominous. So while she knows exactly what I'm thinking once I start in on my “I-can't-take-it-any-more” speech, I haven't a clue what might be going on in her head on those occasions when she may also be fresh out of hope and patience. I only know what it will lead to: a determination on her part to make things better.

This is what I resent about Cynthia's crack-ups; she uses them productively. She convinces herself that people are capable of change. I can provide her with quotes to prove the opposite point. I've collected them. “People do not change, especially seen from up close; they just grow more elaborate” (Russell Banks). Or: “People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine” (Alice Munro). “People don't change. They only stand more revealed” (Charles Olson). Clearly, though, I'm not about to change Cynthia's mind. She has a quote of her own: “Most women will tell you you're a fool to think you can change a man, but those women are quitters” (Marge Simpson). Cynthia's no quitter either. Because if she doesn't believe she can change me, how can she believe she can change our son? All of which may explain why it can be hard at times for us to work together the way we know we should. Maybe that's what we're looking for here in Harriet's office, some kind of consensus. Maybe it's time for all of us to agree that something is going to have to be different. My concern is that something, according to the consensus, will be me.

“We alternate,” Cynthia explains to Harriet. “Between crack-ups, I mean. Like shift workers. I have one. He stays calm. Then he has one and all of a sudden I'm calm again. It never fails.”

“That is a kind of teamwork, isn't it?” Harriet says.

“Exactly.” I smile at Harriet, appreciative of her efforts to put a positive spin on this.

“He has more ... more of them.” See what I said about marriage? Someone is always keeping score.

“Why do you think that is?” Harriet asks me.

I shrug, again, and can see, out of the corner of my eye, Cynthia glancing at Harriet and Harriet glancing back. A sight like that will make even a self-assured man shudder. Two women, who clearly know too much about you, sharing a secret—about you.

“Tell her about
other
kids,” Cynthia says.

There is a silence then that Harriet permits. As a journalist, I've done enough interviews to know the trick. Silence is a trap. You set it and wait for your interviewee to take the bait, to fill the uncomfortable, eventually unbearable void. He will, if he is like most people, say something, anything. Often, it will be precisely the thing he was determined not to say and, at least for the purpose of the profile you are writing, he will give more of himself away than he ever intended. When I can't bear the silence any longer I end up caught in my own trap. Once again, I say what I don't want to.

“I hate other kids.”

Jonah is three months younger than his first cousin, Cynthia's brother's son. Even before Jonah was born there was the assumption that the two boys would grow up together and be close if not best friends. But that was unlikely from the start. The more everyone pushed the two together the more they seemed to be a bad match. As toddlers, they tolerated each other but hardly more than that. Jonah was the happier and more outgoing of the two, and, as a result, more of a fuss was made about him and not just by us. He was a smiley, good-natured kid. He didn't talk much, but he sang all the time, a kind of human jukebox with the lyrics serving as a substitute for ordinary, basic communication. On weekends, he'd sing “Jolly Holiday”; at meal time, “Apples and Bananas.” It was undeniably odd, but also undeniably winning. His tastes, for a toddler, were eclectic—running from Raffi to Frank Sinatra. Most of all, he was happy, especially compared to his cousin, who brooded more. I suspected some instinctive baby-style jealousy was at the core of their relationship. After all, Jonah had come along like a little brother might, only sooner. This was an arrogant thought on my part and I did my best to keep it to myself. Still, I couldn't help noticing how routinely the two resisted each other whenever they were forced together. “They don't have anything in common,” I finally told Cynthia. “Don't be ridiculous,” she said, “they're two years old. They have everything in common.” It was around the time Jonah's cousin turned three that I began to notice he and I were engaging in small talk. He seemed curious to hear what I had to say on subjects like stuffed animals and apple sauce. He listened and looked for clues in my body language, tone of voice, expression. Jonah talked, but at you more than to you. He usually used words or phrases he'd heard somewhere else and then inserted them, like song lyrics, into a conversation. He developed catch-all phrases he could use whenever he was asked a question. “Too mad, too sad,” was his response to a simple request about how he was feeling. In retrospect, we may have judged this remark to be more profound than it was. I remember once, out of the blue, Jonah saying, “The hippopotamus is an incredibly territorial animal.” This was, for a two-year-old, an impressive feat. I knew he'd heard the line on TV and knew, too, he had no idea what it meant. Still, it was a mouthful. “Territorial is, what, five syllables?” I said to Cynthia. So I beamed and encouraged Jonah to say it again and again. No encouragement was necessary.

His cousin's vocabulary was more rudimentary. But he could play Candyland without lining up all the pieces. He could throw and catch a ball without wandering off. He would answer you when you asked him a simple question and then ask you a simple question in return. There was back and forth, give and take—the elements necessary to an ordinary conversation. He wanted things from you, too, wanted them fiercely: toys, attention, approval, success. Jonah wanted nothing. He was, we told ourselves, self-reliant, easygoing, a free spirit.

I MISS EASY THINGS. I miss taking things for granted. Like a trip to the supermarket or the park. Like me, pushing my newborn son in his stroller, all the while quoting from
Henry
For explaining some odd ruling in last night's baseball game. I miss elderly women stopping me in the street to say Jonah should be wearing a hat or that his stroller strap isn't tight enough. I would nod and accept this unsolicited advice or at least pretend to. I acted as if I was grateful to strangers for keeping me informed about my parental incompetence. Secretly, though, I was like the latest John Grisham novel, impervious to criticism. Thinking:
Do you know who you're talking to? I'm the kid's father. I'll teach him what he needs to know. I'll teach him stuff you never dreamed of—about Shakespeare and Sinatra. I'll teach him spit takes and fist bumps.
I was like a goalie standing on his head, a three-point shooter who can't miss. I was in the Daddy Zone. Like an athlete who knows he can do no wrong, I was all intuition. I didn't have to think twice or even once; I was unconscious.

Ever since Jonah was diagnosed, there's been nothing but advice—all of which I feel compelled to listen to. I have learned to watch my step. Everything is a test—something you grit your teeth and accept or go out of your way to avoid. I find myself constantly wishing for quiet destinations. I plan even the most mundane outing so as to avoid long lines at the store or crowds at the playground. And I am done in daily by unavoidable miscalculations and overwhelming envy; by the briefest glimpse of a father and son chatting matter-of-factly about the day's events. I'll also find myself eavesdropping on parents and children only to be reminded of how much you can take these little things—a simple conversation, a game of catch—for granted. There comes a time, I've been told, when you adjust, when you don't even think about such comparisons. But that time hasn't come for me yet. I still worry constantly about how others will judge Jonah's behaviour and judge me for it. Wherever I go I find myself wishing I could hand everyone within shouting distance a five-page, single-spaced, footnoted explanation, a cheat sheet, of why my child behaves the way he does.
let's Talk About Autism,
I'd call it. And then, just to be on the safe side, I'd have them sign an affidavit acknowledging that none of this is my fault. When, I want to know, did this become so important to me—not being embarrassed?

EVERY PASSOVER WE attend the first Seder at my in-laws. Passover is the Jewish equivalent of Thanksgiving. People you haven't seen for a year reappear and you catch up on one another's lives before losing touch with them again for the next eleven months. When Jonah was younger it was the ideal time to show him off to Cynthia's extended family. Dressed in the preppy clothes my sisters bought him—those argyle vests—and with more product in his hair than was seemly for a toddler, we arrived at holiday dinners with what can only be described as a swagger.
Here we are,
we might as well have announced,
let the fawning begin.
And it did. Jonah was something to behold. I taught him “Dayenu,” a Hebrew song which traditionally comes after the telling of the story of Exodus in the Seder service. Jonah belted it out, ending every chorus with an inappropriate but amusing Cossack-style “hey.” This was a crowd-pleaser and so was Jonah.

Dayenu
is Hebrew for suffice as in “It would have sufficed.” The song itself couldn't be more obsequious: a previously oppressed people sucking up to the capricious, spiteful God who had deigned to free them after he'd orchestrated their enslavement in the first place. But, hold on, you're not quite ready for freedom. First, there would have to be a forty-year layover in the desert. Imagine it, the dusty, incredulous crowd gathered around Moses when he broke the news.
And now,
they must have thought,
were supposed to be grateful?
“If he had brought us out of Egypt.
Dayenu,”
the first verse of the Passover song goes. “If he had executed justice upon the Egyptians,
Dayenu.
If he had executed justice upon their gods.
Dayenu.
If he had slain their first born. If he had ...” Well, you get the idea.

Now, when I show up for my in-laws' Passover Seder I'm holding my breath and I have my fingers crossed. I come with a prepared list of excuses. Jonah is tired. He had a rough day at school. He's been chatty or grumpy or hyper for hours. You should have seen him at my sister's on the weekend, he was an angel.

Jonah isn't good at drawn-out events. He isn't likely to sit still, eat the unusual holiday food, engage with the adults, or play with his cousin. As for me, I always seem to be perfectly positioned to watch some distant relative or friend of Cynthia's family we see only once a year staring at Jonah. When he shouts or answers their simple questions with a strange non sequitur about zebras or yaks or an out-of-the-blue knock-knock joke, I will watch them react either with frustration or confusion. I can practically read their minds. I can see them thinking:
What's this about?

In other words, if Jonah can get through the evening without saying something inappropriate, something wildly inappropriate; if he can avoid a tantrum; if he can avoid a prolonged tantrum; if we can get home in a couple of hours, tops, well, that,
Dayenu,
will have to suffice.

WHEN I WAS JONAH'S age there was a boy on our street with whom I shared a birth date. He'd remind me of this fact every time we bumped into each other. This was our only connection, but it was one too many for me. Our common birthday gave him an excuse to go on at length about the weather. He was the street's self-appointed meteorologist, a job he took seriously. He behaved as if the rest of us could not have made it through the day without his forecasts. I tried my best to avoid him on the street as well as at the elementary school we both attended. When I couldn't bear his company any more, I joined the other kids in making fun of him. I tried not to do it to his face, but I can't say I always tried hard enough or worried enough about succeeding. Still, the teasing didn't seem to bother him, at least that's what I told myself. I can see now that he was quite likely on the spectrum, quite likely Asperger's, before anyone ever heard of either label. On our street, we had our own names; likely, strange and slow were the least offensive.

In his memoir
Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism,
Paul Collins, a contributor to
McSweeney's
and a historian, alternates the story of discovering that his two-year-old son Morgan has autism with stories of famous undiagnosed “autists.” He begins with Peter the Wild Boy, who first came to public attention late in the seventeenth century. He was twelve when he emerged from Germany's Black Forest, naked and foraging for food on all fours. He didn't talk or look anyone in the eye. He was, in the parlance of his day, a freak. But he was a mystery, too, and lucky enough to be befriended by another special boy—the prince and heir to the British throne, the future king of England, George I. Brought to the royal court with George, Peter became a fixture, a kind of mascot to the monarchy. “The simple boy from the Black Forest had landed squarely in what was, for all purposes, the centre of his era's intellectual universe,” Collins writes. Jonathan Swift likely based the feral Yahoos in
Gulliver's Travels
on Peter. The Wild Boy also became the prototype for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic vision of man in “the state of nature” in his most famous book,
Confessions.
Peter the Wild Boy was also plainly on the spectrum.

The narrative in
Not Even Wrong
is constructed around Collins's dogged, often desperate effort to understand his two-year-old son Morgan's world through researching and retelling the story of Peter as well as other overlooked or misjudged historical figures. It makes for a fascinating investigation into how elusive autism has always been and, to a great extent, remains.
Not Even Wrong
is also about how easy it is to misjudge and misunderstand people once a label has been affixed to them. It is, finally, a book full of sympathy for a group of people who are consistently misunderstood in a multitude of small and big ways. “Autists are ultimate square pegs,” Collins writes, “and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you are destroying the peg.” In the end, he decides he'd rather his boy be happy than forced to become something he isn't, something he can never be. It's a tricky argument, made trickier by the severity of Morgan's condition. What's wrong, for instance, with trying to smooth out the square peg just a bit before you start hammering it into the round hole? Collins's argument is also one made under pressure, the pressure of the author's own unresolved, open-ended narrative. Resolution is always going to be the problem, the nut to crack, in any honest story about autism. Your choices are limited and arbitrary. You can opt for acceptance or hold out for a miracle. But the trouble is that the one often seems as unlikely as the other.

Morgan makes progress in
Not Even Wrong,
but Collins doesn't put as much emphasis on that as he does on learning to celebrate his son's uniqueness. By the end of the book, Collins has admirably researched and written a community into existence for and around his son. He's succeeded at putting Morgan into historical context as if he were one more unrecognized, unsung hero in a long, ongoing narrative. Collins chooses acceptance, in other words, or as close as he can come to it. In the book's final scene, Morgan is having a meltdown in the neighbourhood supermarket and Collins's achievement lies in his ability to endure it, to ignore the stares of the strangers around him. “It's not what they think,” he tells himself. “It's not a tragedy, it's not a sad story, it's not the movie of the week. It's my family.”

It's a lovely scene, just not one that resonates with me. Perhaps because I'm not there yet, not able to ignore the stares of strangers, not by a long shot. Instead, there's another scene near the end of
Not Even Wrong
I can't get out of my head. Here, Collins is in a crowded cafe observing a man making a nuisance of himself, asking inappropriate questions in an odd voice to a table full of college students, who are, in turn, making fun of him. The man seems oblivious to their teasing, much of it casually cruel. Then the man turns to Collins, sensing a sympathetic presence perhaps, and goes right on babbling. Collins is polite and tries to engage him in conversation, but it's pointless—the man is incoherent. Collins quickly leaves the cafe and, moments later, is sitting on the steps of a nearby church, crying. He's not religious, he writes, it's just that people are less likely to bother you if you cry on the steps of a church than on someone's front lawn. Eventually, he explains why he's crying: “I can't bear the thought that someday, somehow, someone will be cruel to my child. Or pretend that he is not even there.”