Bad Animals (16 page)

ON CYNTHIA'S RECOMMENDATION, I've finally finished one of those books from the pile loitering on my night table. Cynthia read Mark Haddon's bestseller,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
months ago and insisted that I read it. I resisted at first because I have been contemplating writing a novel of my own on the subject of autism. The idea was born out of desperation late one afternoon while I was facing my unfinished manuscript in my basement office. I was making no progress telling our family story, so I thought, why not fictionalize it? The character of the father could be a little more open to change, for instance; the character of the son a little more communicative. There'd be a breakthrough at the end, obviously: nothing dramatic or uplifting, but moving and profound. Then again, why not dramatic? I assumed I could do in a novel what was proving so hard to do in this so-called memoir of mine. I could dream up a satisfactory resolution. What if, for instance, Jonah or Jacob, let's call the protagonist, reveals in the final chapters that he's imbued with superpowers only individuals with autism possess? What if he also reveals in a final moving speech that he's part of a group called the S.O.S. League or Superheroes on the Spectrum, who meet regularly and secretly to maintain order in the overly emotional and cripplingly empathetic neurotypical world. You see, the Nits, as neurotypicals are called, have a disabling flaw. They can't think straight. They are incapable of doing advanced math in their heads or reciting long poems or even living in the moment. They're always dwelling on the past and feeling sorry for themselves. They are always worrying about what other people think. Or they're making foolish plans for a future they are clueless about. The Nits also judge others by how they behave rather than what they are capable of. It's a world, in other words, turned happily upside down. Jacob and his S.O.S. friends—because that's what they would be most of all, friends—also keep track of everyone who's ever teased, misdiagnosed, dismissed, or underestimated them and then seek their revenge on teachers, classmates, therapists, parents. It's nothing drastic or violent, just some turn-about-is-fair-play resolution, done mainly by a comic character, perhaps at the low-functioning end of the spectrum, who would, at the most inappropriate moment, repeat a favourite catchphrase—“Gotcha!”—and make the Nits see what nitwits they really were. She'd also get big laughs from her S.O.S. colleagues. She'd be a girl, a love interest for Jacob, perhaps. Her superpower would lie in her ability to embarrass people who deserved to be embarrassed. Jacob's particular power would be that he could see into the future and thereby reassure his beleaguered but otherwise well-intentioned and unusually tall and handsome father that everything was going to be fine. The father would finally learn to trust his son's powers. Then, I don't know, they'd all have pizza and ice cream. The End. It's probably obvious by now why I gave up on the novel. Still, it was fun to contemplate.

There's no such silliness in
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Haddon's novel ends much the way you'd expect a work of literary fiction about autism to end—with its teenaged hero and narrator, Christopher Boone, making significant progress but staying true to his essential high-functioning Asperger self. He is going to be all right, he assures us, perhaps better than all right. We learn that he's passed his exams and done so impressively. In order to communicate his feelings, he draws a happy-face emoticon. He vows to attend university, live on his own, and become a scientist. “I know I can do this,” he says, “because ... I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.” This feel-good conclusion aside, Haddon's hero is, throughout the novel, painstakingly believable. It's this realistic portrait of Christopher Boone that Cynthia found worth recommending. She's right. Christopher is a significant improvement over the stereotypical view of the individual with autism, which, until not very long ago, began and ended with Dustin Hoffman's hammy “idiot savant” in
Rain Man.

In Haddon's story, Christopher is nothing if not focused. He assigns himself the task of investigating and solving the mystery of who killed his neighbour's dog. This whodunit subplot is barely even that. It's obvious, after just a few chapters, that the reader is going to know who killed the dog and why long before Christopher does, if Christopher ever does. What we are privy to is the way in which Christopher interacts with the world. That's the novel's strength—we see everything as Christopher sees it, through his eyes, and as a unique challenge. We also begin to realize that every detail, even something like the colour of a subway ticket, is open to misinterpretation. Every decision, even the simplest one, is filled with peril. It's not that Christopher gets things wrong; it's that
he
gets them the way
he
gets them. He is not, as most reviewers tend to describe him, an unreliable narrator. If anything, he's the opposite. He is absolutely reliable, for someone with autism, that is. Dramatic irony is the novel's governing literary device but it's also more than that—it's a metaphor for the gap between the brain and the brain on autism. Christopher and the reader will always reach different conclusions. It's inevitable.

Still, empathy is literature's trump card; it's what literary fiction does better than any other art form, and
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
as a reviewer in
The New Yorker
wrote, is “a triumph of empathy.” Reviews have invariably focused on the ability of the author to get inside the head of his idiosyncratic hero. Good old negative capability. There are some clues as to how Haddon did this. His bio reveals that he worked with kids with autism at one point, and that serves as a kind of stamp of approval to his own idiosyncratic stylistic choices. Haddon uses diagrams, for instance, and graphs and math problems to illustrate the strange (to the reader) and perfectly sensible (to Haddon's hero) way in which Christopher thinks.

Haddon also hits all the predictable talking points; it's kind of autism-by-numbers. Christopher's facility for math, his obsession with order, his trouble reading other people's emotions, his unwillingness to be touched or held, his confusion at jokes, all of it rings textbook true. Haddon's thoroughness is commendable, as are his good literary intentions. In Christopher, Haddon creates a character, not a caricature. But here's an argument I never expected to make, one a person who reads and writes for a living should never make: where does Haddon get off? Why doesn't he find his own problem to write about? Until then, he has no business pretending or even imagining he can understand someone like Jonah ... I mean Christopher, of course. Here it comes, incidentally, my ineffectual rage, my latest crack-up. Write a letter, Harriet recommended to us recently, and then don't send it. It's the kind of thing she says she does in narrative therapy; it also seems like sensible advice:

Dear Mr. Haddon,
Research is overrated. So you had some part-time job working with kids with autism. Good for you. Seriously, I'm glad someone got a bestseller out of this disorder. But don't you think I wouldn't love to do what you've done? Fictionalize my relationship with my son. Pretend I understand him as easily as I understand the protagonist in your quirky little novel. You think if I could have figured out some way to make Jonah, that's my son, less mystifying I wouldn't have done it by now. P.S. My wife loved the book.

The other problem I had with
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
was the father. Who do you think turns out to be the villain in the end? “Not the father,” Cynthia says when I finally hand the novel back to her. She is surprised I finished it. We're both in bed reading. Actually, she's flipping through
The RDI Book,
which she's already read and is now littering with Post-it notes on my behalf, I'm guessing. Evidently, she has new-found hope that I am finally ready to take her recommendations.

And she's right about the father—labelling him the villain is a stretch. Still, he does, throughout the novel, do everything wrong. That includes forcing, albeit unintentionally, Christopher to run away, keeping Christopher estranged from his mother—he does that deliberately—and, oh yes, killing the damn dog.

“The book is not about the father, sweetheart. It's about Christopher,” Cynthia says. “Did you see my note? The one right near the end?”
Wait, who's the reviewer here?

“It must have fallen out,” I say, but I'm lying. I routinely skip other people's highlighted passages or ignore Post-it notes in the same way I don't read other reviews of a book I'm supposed to be reviewing. I don't want to be influenced. I don't believe in much, but I believe in my own screwy opinions.

“I think I know where the passage is,” Cynthia says as she flips through the novel, finally coming to the part she was looking for. It's a part where Christopher envisions a world devastated by a mysterious super-powerful computer virus. The result of this technological meltdown is that there are only people like Christopher—i.e., people on the spectrum—left in the world. As a consequence, these so-called “special people” are no longer a minority and no longer special. They're the typical ones now, the accepted norm, even though, Christopher says, “they like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they are like okapi in the jungle in the Congo.”

Cynthia reads the passage to me. She isn't crying, but there is an audible tremble in her voice. Then she stops and puts the book down. “Do you ever wonder what kind of teenager he will be?”

“I don't know. I can't.... So what is an okapi anyway?”

If Jonah were awake I could ask him. Instead Cynthia blows her nose and reads aloud from Haddon's novel before she puts it back on her night table: “'The Okapi is a kind of antelope ... very shy and rare.'”

CYNTHIA IS IN CHARGE of arranging play dates for Jonah. She does this in concert with Jessica, who will sometimes let us know about a classmate who has gone out of his way to approach Jonah. Cynthia then tracks the child down, talks to his parents, and offers to take him and Jonah to the park or invites him to our house to play our newly purchased Nintendo Wii game, which we bought at The Consultant's urging. The idea is to get Jonah interested in the kind of game kids his age are playing so he has some common ground with them, something he can talk to them about in the event, mostly unlikely, that an ordinary, unforced conversation occurs. Jonah is uninterested in Wii, but the game has proven to be a significant draw for potential playmates. There's Jonah's cousin, for instance. Cynthia thinks of it as an investment; I think of it as four hundred dollars down the drain.
Potatoes, patatoes.

Each year Cynthia invites a few of Jonah's classmates to his birthday party. She also organizes an end-of-the-school-year lunch. She takes every opportunity to introduce Jonah to whatever kids they happen to meet in the park. She is like an old-world matchmaker, constantly on the lookout for a promising connection. I am a consistent no-show at Jonah's play dates. If I have to I will go so far as to fake a headache or pretend I have to get back to work on my so-called memoir. I will hide, literally hide, in the basement, sometimes listening at the top of the stairs to make sure the coast is clear before I emerge. Cynthia is so used to my habit of disappearing by now she will often give me a heads-up so I can devise a less transparent, less embarrassing excuse. As for the events I can't avoid, like Jonah's birthday parties, I keep my expectations low and go into these organized activities with my eye on my watch.
What's the minimum amount of time I am required to keep up this cheerful demeanour?

Most of my encounters with Jonah and other kids are of the unplanned variety, usually occurring when he and I are running an errand. The experience has taught me that even though it's hard for Jonah to make friends in the conventional sense, he does seem to have a knack for accumulating acquaintances. When he and I are out together we're always running into kids he knows or who know him. Some are from school, others from camp or the theatre group or swimming classes he used to attend. Some he hasn't seen in years. I generally have no idea how he knows them or even if he really does. Jonah finds the idea of seeing someone in a place they aren't supposed to be thrilling. He'll shout out their name—Aja! Adewale!—and beam. Sometimes, he'll ask them their name, even if he knows it. Often, that's the extent of the exchange. The conversation tends to be stilted on both sides, which is to say the other kid can't think of anything to say to Jonah either. Even so, there's something sweet about these meetings, something encouraging. Walking around the neighbourhood with my son is a little like being out with a celebrity. The encounters are brief, a bit awkward, generally good-willed, and acknowledged to be limited. The other kid may not know what to say to Jonah but he seems happy to have run into him like this—without warning or expectations.

There are so many things to worry about, I try not to worry about my son's future prospects for making friends. Like much of what he's learned to do—dress himself, make his own breakfast, use the computer—it's one of those things that will eventually take care of itself, whether we worry about it or not. The list of things he's accomplished so far that I never expected him to accomplish is long, so there is some justification in holding out hope for him having a real friend one day. But that doesn't keep me from speculating about what that friendship will be like. There is no getting around the fact that whatever relationship Jonah may have in the future will require not only enormous effort on my son's part but, quite likely, an equal or greater effort on the part of the other person. This is, I realize, a lot to ask of any kid.
You're underestimating him again, sweetheart. Aren't there enough people doing that?
I know because it's a lot to ask of anyone.