Bad Animals (5 page)

“I know, it's a great deal to absorb,” Dr. T. said. “The learning curve can be steep.”

Cynthia was taking notes and asking a few questions, even though she had begun her research a year earlier. The Consultant was already hired, and she, in turn, had hired and trained four therapists, three young women and a man, university students, pursuing degrees in psychology or teaching. Cynthia and I were trained, too, and Jonah's program—thirty-six hours of intensive ABA therapy—was under way. Our dining room had already been transformed into a cross between a playroom and a research laboratory. We weren't a family any more. We had become a team, a business, a lab experiment.

Before we left her office, Dr. T. reached into her drawer and handed Cynthia some literature to read as well as a photocopy of an article entitled “Welcome to Holland.” I glanced at the title and the author's name—Emily Perl Kingsley—over Cynthia's shoulder. Meanwhile, Cynthia quickly tucked it into her copy of
Exceptional Family.

On the drive home from the doctor's office, Jonah asked again for “a bad day” and he beamed when his mother, who was sitting in the back of the car with him, agreed. She usually saved this kind of treat for his bedtime. But that day was different, exceptional. That day, he was indulged. That day, if I remember correctly, we stopped for an ice cream before lunch. If we didn't, we should have. Cynthia was getting good at taking requests for these oddball narratives. She had a talent for escalating the badness in a story, transforming herself into a kind of Scheherazade of unhappy endings, regaling Jonah with an account of the worst things that could happen ever: the worst-dessert-ever, the worst-punishment-ever, the worst-animal-ever. And as Cynthia's story unfolded, Jonah braced himself in his booster seat, latching on to the downward spiral of events like he was holding on to the security bars on one of those amusement park rides. Free Fall: the ones that go up very slowly and come down super fast.

That day, Jonah was treated to the tale of Ellie the Elephant, who wakes up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning, puts on the wrong trousers, gets a cantaloupe stuck in her trunk, jumps on a trampoline which breaks, and is generally disappointed every hour on the hour. Jonah listened intently, mainly so he could correct any detail Cynthia got wrong, any word she omitted.

“Give me an ‘instead of,'” Jonah said. By this he meant include the words “instead of” in the story. For instance, Ellie ordered blueberry pancakes with syrup, but “instead of” getting what she ordered she got “pickles with yucky mustard.” So what did Ellie do? She stomped on every table in the restaurant, every table and every waiter, and every bit of food. There's a literary lesson in these stories Jonah demanded, still demands, and it's always the same. Jonah understands what some of us never manage to, what some of us have an unfortunate habit of forgetting: that to not get what you want is bad, truly bad, but it's nowhere near as bad as hoping for more than you get. You want to tell a really sad story, a crushing one, that's the component you're looking for.

In his own way, Jonah has always been a perfectionist, but a perfectionist forced to operate in an unapologetically imperfect world. A world that is, as far as he's concerned, in a constant state of chaos and upheaval. As a consequence, he's unnerved by change. He thrives, instead, on knowing only what he knows and knowing it perfectly. This is, I realize now, how he makes sense of the world. It's why the questions he asks us, ninety-nine percent of the time, are questions he knows the answers to. In this respect, in his need for assurance and certainty, for meaning even, he is like all of us, only more so. He's making it up, the meaning, I mean, as he goes along.

Here's something else I've learned about my son: he deals with disappointment the same way I do—grudgingly. Our job then, as it is now, is to rescue him from isolation, to turn his attention to the outside world. To simply engage him has always required tremendous effort. I sometimes think that's because when it comes to the world and what it has to offer, Jonah has always been singularly unimpressed. It is yet another way in which we are more alike than different.

“SO LET'S SEE IT,” I said to Cynthia once we'd returned home from Dr. T.'s office. There was no way to talk in the car with Jonah there, no way to analyze whether the second opinion we'd waited a year for and finally received was better or worse news than we had expected or exactly what we expected. We were, however, numb again, as we were after Jonah's first diagnosis.

“See what?” Cynthia said. She was busy preparing Jonah's lunch.

“The article—the one the doctor gave us ... gave
you
before we left. It looked like some kind of story.”

“It's nothing, really, just what they give everyone, I'm guessing, when ...”

“When what?”

“I don't know ... when they don't know what else to say” Cynthia finally handed me the sheet of paper.

“Welcome to Holland” is intended as a pep talk for parents going through the same sort of experience its author went through. The premise is: you've planned a trip to Italy, to visit the Sistine Chapel, the Trevi Fountain, even learn some Italian, but when your plane lands you are, surprise, surprise, in Holland. At worst, the story is harmless, so how come I couldn't read it without stopping to sputter out some comment like: “Give me a break.” Or: “You've got to be kidding.” Eventually, I stopped reading. I couldn't finish it, not even a single page of helpful advice. Instead, I contemplated throwing something—a plate or vase seemed about right, but I'm a civilized man, if not an especially mature one, so I picked up an orange and threw it, as hard as I could, at our kitchen wall.

“She's comparing this ... this ... to Holland. We're not in fucking Holland.” Cynthia glared at me. I forgot that Jonah was still in the room, waiting for his lunch. My wife patted him on the head and dragged me into the bathroom. She closed the door behind her and folded her arms across her chest. This was an argument I was going to lose; I just wasn't ready to lose it yet, which is to say not without a futile, hurtful fight.

“Don't you see how much this analogy sucks? Holland! Holland would be fine. Fucking fabulous,” I said, trying, though not hard enough, to keep my voice down. “Holland has tulips ... wooden shoes ... windmills ... hashish ... hookers in the window. They used to anyway. I have news for you and the doctor and for Ms. Emily Perl Kingsley, whoever she is, this is not Holland we're in. Not even close. This is like thinking you're going to Italy and you find out you're in ... in ... hell.”

“She is just saying you have to try to, I don't know, make the best of a bad situation, that's all.”

“That's what she's got, that's what we get—the best of a bad ...”

“Yes, all right. Go ahead. Do what you do.”

“What?”

“This is something to hold on to,” she said, tearing the paper as she grabbed it back from me. “And, you want to know something, I appreciate that. I appreciate having something I can hold in my hand. Or put up on the kitchen bulletin board or I don't know what....”

“I won't have this in my house.”

“You and your bitterness. I want
you
to tell
me
something,” Cynthia said. “This self-pity—is it going to stop some time soon? What is it you
do
want? Do you want out? Then say so.” She was close to tears, which I knew I could prevent if I made a gesture, if I put my arm around her, said a single kind word, simply apologized. Instead, I folded my arms tightly across my chest and rocked back and forth.

“You have to understand that the way you're behaving isn't helping me and it isn't helping our situation,” Cynthia said. She was sitting on the edge of the bathtub now. It was as if she couldn't stand any longer, as if the only choice she had was between this uncomfortable bit of porcelain and falling down. “Because this isn't just about you, you know. Because I don't think you get it sometimes, and that's what scares me, really scares me. You need to know this is about our family, about our child.”

But, at that moment, all I could think was,
She's wrong. She's finally wrong.
This
was
all about me, all about what was being done to
me,
about the catastrophe I felt descending upon me and my family. Incidentally, you may not know this, I certainly didn't at the time, but you can break an orange. You can do this by throwing it against the wall, hard. It will not bounce like an apple or splatter like a tomato, but a small fissure will appear in the peel and the inside will be damaged, almost imperceptibly.

HAS IT MADE YOU a better father, a better human being?

I have yet to answer the CBC producer's question, and now she's expanded it. I'm not usually good at sugar-coating things, but I can do it and have, countless times before, for family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, teachers, doctors, therapists, social workers. Even, though less successfully, for Cynthia. So, yes, on occasion, I've managed to convince everyone, including myself, that, all things considered, I'm coping fine. Any kind of real prognosis is impossible to predict with autism so you have to learn to manufacture your own. And you do it, more often than not, day by day.

I also know that I have to be upbeat on the radio tomorrow morning for the interview to go well. If I can manage that, I'll end up feeling good about what I've written and about the possibility of giving someone listening a bit of hope or reassurance. So why am I not answering this straightforward question? I guess because what I have finally written isn't evidence of the triumph of narrative, but, instead, of its inevitable failure. My about-to-be-broadcast essay isn't so much an essay as the residue of all these years of planning to write a book I can't seem to write—a story I'm only now managing to make this tiny, almost imperceptible, twelve-hundred-word dent in. There is a message here. When life gives you lemons, lemonade isn't always the most probable outcome. Sometimes, you end up with a sourpuss.

So I finally tell the woman on the phone the truth; or something close to it. “Better father? God no,” I finally say, which seems, even as I say it, like an inappropriate boast. “No, all this has made me a worse father.”

I pause. This woman I've never met and I are sharing the same thought. We both know my uninspiring answer will never make it onto the air tomorrow. She'll make sure to tell the interviewer not to go near the question and I won't volunteer my insight, my revelation either. For now, though, I don't care. I'm glad to continue the pre-interview. “That's the thing,” I go on. “It's made me worse, worse father, worse husband, worse primate—Jonah likes primates—worse across the board.”

The producer is quiet for a moment, but then she's curious. She wants to know what happened. “I mean to you?” she says.

“I wish I could tell you,” I say. “I used to be a good father.”
Who am I kidding
, I think,
I used to be great.

THE FUTURE IS what you are given when you have your first child. When you are a new parent you always have a sense of something coming—a sense so perpetual, so ordinary, you can't imagine you never felt it before. Except you never have; how could you? So you feel it and you do what people have always done: you choose names and wallpaper; debate disposable diapers versus cloth diapers; sign up for daycare; buy life insurance; daydream twenty years down the line about colleges and girlfriends. When you are told that your child has autism, it's the future that's taken away.

That evening, as Cynthia reread the handouts Dr. T. gave her, I put Jonah to bed and watched as he followed his usual routine, lining up his shelf of bedtime books so they stretched from one end of his bedroom to the other. He took on this seemingly pointless task with the deliberateness of a chess master. He weighed each move carefully, keeping his hand on the book he was placing in line until it was exactly where he wanted it. All I wanted, I gradually realized, was to stop him, distract him. “Jonah,” I said, as he began the line, as usual, with Graeme Base's picture book
Animalia.
It occurred to me that here was something we could do together, a topic we could share—our own animal alphabet book. So I improvised a beginning. “Angry aardvarks are always after.... After what? Jonah. Go ahead, fill in the blank.” But he didn't hear me or pretended not to and carried on.

What was suddenly clear to me was that, on this night anyway, I wasn't going to let him off the hook. I would intrude on his routine—somehow interrupt it. So I picked up a copy of
Green Eggs and Ham,
the book that always ended up at the end of the line, nearest the far wall, and opened it. Then I sat on his bed and lifted him into my lap as if I were going to read to him. Jonah wasn't pleased. Bedtime stories came later and usually from his mother. He scowled and muttered under his breath, “Put it back.” When that tactic didn't work he tried to close the book on my hand. But the harder he tried the more tightly I held on to him, the more I bugged him. And so I read to Jonah about how, at first, nobody can stand Sam-I-am, how he is disliked everywhere he goes, on all manner of vehicles and animals, whether it's sunny or pouring rain.

Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, wrote
Green Eggs and Ham
on a dare. After he'd written
The Cat in the Hat
using a vocabulary of two hundred and twenty-five words, Geisel's publisher Bennett Cerf bet him fifty dollars he couldn't write a book using only fifty words. Geisel won the bet easily. In fact, when the book came out in 1960 it barely contained fifty syllables. All the words in
Green Eggs and Ham,
except for “anywhere,” are monosyllabic. The book has no exposition either and only the most unobtrusive of narratives. It is a conversation really, a long, frustrating, one-sided conversation—at least, until the end of the story.