Following Ezra (15 page)

“I know, sweetie,” I tell him, trying to calm him down. “I know it’s hard.”

He cries all through the fifteen-minute drive home, and then runs from the backseat of the car across the lawn and into the house, slipping silently into the bedroom he shares with his brothers.

After a few minutes, I go in and find him in his top bunk, the covers stretched over his head. When I pull them off, his eyes are red from the sobbing.

“I wanted the Homer so
bad
,” Ezra says.

“I know,” I say. “Sometimes you don’t get what you want.”

That evening, I offer Ezra a way for him to earn the Homer doll he wants so dearly. I draw up a chart with twenty-eight boxes and tell him that if he can control his behavior and avoid those kinds of tantrums for four weeks—and curtail the begging—then maybe we can venture back to Aahs!!

“I can get the Homer?” he asks, brightening for the first time all evening.

“If you’re good.” I point to the chart in my hand. “Can you be good for four weeks?”

“I can be good.”

“No talking about the Homer?”

“I will be good,” he says, and, in seconds, he stops crying. His entire countenance changes, as if a demon that has been possessing him has fled, leaving the same gentle, sweet boy who accompanied me to the store a few hours earlier. Then, in a calm, singsong voice, less ecstatic than relieved: “I can get the Homer.”

Every evening that month, when I get home from work, Ezra excitedly reports to me that he has had a good day. Whenever he starts asking for the doll, I raise a finger or an eyebrow in warning—and he stops.

Four weeks after the disaster, the two of us pile into the car and drive back to the Aahs!! store. Together, we walk into the store. Together, we stroll to the
Simpsons
display. I reach up and grab the doll for him, and hand my charge card to the surly woman behind the register, who, I am thankful, doesn’t seem to recognize us. We walk out into a warm Los Angeles evening, I clutch Ezra’s hand, and he hugs his new two-and-a-half-foot-tall yellow doll.

“I got the Homer,” he says, matter-of-factly.

“Yep,” I say. “You got the Homer.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

When Ezra is six years old, my editor at the magazine calls with an intriguing assignment. He wants me to interview a boy who cannot speak. Tito Mukhopadhyay has made international headlines for an extraordinary ability: Though his severe autism renders him unable to utter a meaningful sentence, he is composing sublime poetry that reveals a complex and unusual intellect. Tito and his mother are visiting Los Angeles from their home in Bangalore, India, so that scientists can benefit from his unparalleled ability to explain the workings of his mind.

I have covered scores of heartrending human-interest stories for the magazine. This one is different. This time I bring my own questions.

I feel excited and curious as I arrive on a warm December afternoon at the white stucco apartment building just off Hollywood Boulevard. Only a few blocks from the tourist bustle of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, it seems an odd home—even temporarily—for a boy from a small flat halfway across the world. Tito’s mother greets me. Soma is in her early forties, tiny and self-assured. She introduces me to Tito, fourteen and in the midst of an adolescent growth spurt. He is a bundle of tremors and paroxysms, in constant motion and with eyes that seem permanently locked in a far-off gaze. Immediately I recognize shades of Ezra. Tito does not speak, except for some occasional phrases, almost whispered.

While Tito paces the small living room, gazing at his hands fluttering in front of his face, I interview Soma. She tells me how she ignored doctors’ early warnings that Tito would never be able to communicate in a meaningful way. She watched Tito stare intently at a calendar, clearly focused on understanding it. Then she taught him how to count and to read the letters of the alphabet on a paper chart. She read him one of Aesop’s fables when he was three, then asked him what it was about. He pointed to the letters on the chart: C-R-O-W.

“Once it started,” she says, “there was no limit.”

Instead of giving up on him, she began reading to her son from classics—Dickens, Hardy, and Shakespeare—confident that, although his body showed almost no outward sign, his mind was taking it all in.

I think about all of the times I have watched Ezra’s eyes and wondered what he is thinking, what he was feeling, what he understands. I envy Soma’s maternal instinct and consider the pure faith that must have driven her. I try to imagine what must have gone through her mind as she sat in her Bangalore home and turned pages, day after day, reading
A Tale of Two Cities
to her mute little boy as his body rocked and convulsed and his eyes stared off into the distance.

Soma tells me how she taught her young son to write, first fastening a pencil to his right hand with elastic bands and slowly guiding him as he traced the alphabet on paper. Over months and years, the boy scratched out one letter at a time in broad, uneven strokes as his mother sat by his side offering encouragement. In time, he was writing poetry—about trees, trains, and how he experiences life.

“May I ask Tito some questions?” I ask Soma.

She prompts her son to sit. He settles beside me on a couch. I hand him a legal pad and a pencil. Soma sits on his other side, issuing verbal prompts—“Go ahead! . . . Next, please!” The combination of his flailing body and distant look give a sense of a kind of wild, untamed energy; the apartment can barely contain him. When he begins writing, he reveals himself as refined, clever, and sophisticated. Though I am a quarter century his senior, I feel like I am drinking in wisdom from an older, wiser soul.

I ask why he moves around so much. He explains that he cannot feel his body unless it is in motion. Best of all for him, he says, is being submerged in water. I think of Ezra, who thrives in the bathtub, who opens up and communicates in swimming pools in ways we have not seen anywhere else.

I ask about eye contact, and Tito tells me that his brain is incapable of using more than one sense at once. “I can either see or hear,” he writes. “I cannot do both at the same time.”

In the midst of the interview, Tito stands up without warning and walks across the room. Soma tries to guide him back, saying, “Sit, sit!” and firmly nudging him, but he moves toward an open window, apparently drawn by a gentle wind sweeping into the apartment. He looks upward and smiles, the way golden retrievers delight in catching a breeze in a moving car.

When he returns to the sofa, I tell him about Ezra. I ask him to explain why my son is constantly asking lately whether faces he sees are happy or sad.

“He’s stimming on the question,” Tito writes.
Stimming.
In autism circles, it’s shorthand for self-stimulating behavior—repetitive movements that somehow prove arousing. I have never thought of Ezra’s incessant questions this way.

“You mean he knows the answer,” I say, “but it makes him feel good to ask?”

“Yes,” he writes.

I have more questions, but Tito, then thirty minutes into the interview, can no longer sit still for long enough to keep writing. He’s asking Soma for dinner, and he doesn’t have the focus to continue. His mother beckons him back, but then apologizes. I assure her it’s fine.

Leaving the building, I walk up Hollywood Boulevard, clutching the pad with Tito’s writing. The pages are much more than the notes I will need to write my article. I feel like I’m carrying something sacred.

Part of what makes the papers so precious is the promise they hold for Shawn and for me. I have long believed that Ezra has more thoughts than he is able to communicate. I understand that his habit of verbal dumping conceals what Ezra carries deep inside: a lucid mind, an eager soul, a yearning to connect. As he repeats his
Winnie the Pooh
line for the hundredth time, I have looked into his eyes, certain that something else is going on in his mind. Part of me feels disappointed that I couldn’t ask Tito more questions about Ezra, but I also realize that another boy, no matter how brilliant, cannot explain my son to me any more than doctors or therapists or books can. I will need to find my way in, just as Soma did.

When I get home, Shawn and the boys are waiting for me for dinner. Four of us sit down, and Ezra leaves his chair empty, as usual, moving about the house, flapping his arms, and entertaining himself.
Stimming
. As I look at him, I don’t see the six-year-old boy, but try to imagine him at Tito’s age, a young man entering adolescence. I wonder: When Ezra turns thirteen or fourteen, what parts of himself might he be able to share?

I ponder the irony that Tito cannot speak, but can be so articulate, while Ezra can talk easily, but so much of what he says is . . . stimming. I wonder, if I could get him to sit for long enough to write or type, what profound worlds might my son reveal? While Ezra has been watching Disney videos and
Bear in the Big Blue House,
should we have been reading him Shakespeare? Have I already failed him by not undertaking the kinds of heroic, selfless measures Soma has?

On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine eliciting a written conversation with Ezra. For one thing, he has trouble with the physical mechanics of writing, experiencing such difficulty with fine motor coordination that an occupational therapist intervened to help him learn to write his letters. For neurological reasons I don’t fully grasp, he has particular trouble with letters like S and Z, with diagonal strokes, so when he writes his name, he tilts the second letter, making the middle stroke vertical. Writing seems almost painful to him.

And he is so peripatetic that I hardly have the opportunity to sit down and try. Ezra at six is a constant blur. Like a shark, he is unable to live without constant motion.

From the dinner table, I watch my son slip into a fit of laughter at something only he understands. I think about Tito rushing to the window, savoring the breeze and writing in rhyme, and I wonder if Ezra will ever share in words the things that make him smile and giggle.

 

 

It’s two years later, a Sunday. Ezra, now eight, is stuck, as he so often seems to be. He has trapped himself in a verbal loop, fixating on his latest Disney obsession,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
He is riveted by these seven little men—each with a distinctive face, a fixed set of expressions, each with a name that sums up his personality and disposition. They have everything Ezra is drawn to: categories, predictable personalities, bright colors. He has frequently returned from school recently with a backpack full of drawings he has etched with crayons on lined notebook paper, his own renditions of Sneezy and Happy, Dopey and Doc. The pictures are rough but remarkably detailed, showing Doc’s spectacles, Sleepy’s droopy eyelids and robe.

Now he wants more. Somehow he has convinced himself that he desperately needs to get to the Disney Store in search of some kind of figurine versions of the dwarfs. And he won’t let go.

“We
will
go to the Disney Store at Westside Pavilion,” he tells me.

“No, Ez.”

“We will. Say yes, Abba. We
will
go.”

I shake my head, but Ezra is undeterred, repeating his request with increasing urgency. The more firmly I refuse his demand, the more energetic his entreaties become.
Yes, we will, yes-we-will, yeswewill.
He is stimming on the words. He is also determined, pushing his face into mine, struggling to find any way to convince his father to give in.

“Yes, Abba. We
will
go to the Disney Store today. You
will
take me.”

I shake my head, trying to ignore him.

“But we
must
go.”

I feel both exasperated and fascinated by his persistence.

I hold steady, trying to look stern. We are locked in a standoff. Neither of us is budging. And then I get an idea: Maybe this is the moment I can induce Ezra to express himself in writing. In recent months, he has begun showing interest in the desktop computer we keep in an armoire in the living room. Since he has discovered that he can use Google to search for images, I have watched him sit at the keyboard, using a single index finger to type in the names of one animal after another: pigs, cows, bears, sheep. Mesmerized, he clicks on the mouse and stares at the monitor, surveying screen after screen of photos. But will he type more than the few letters of an animal’s name?

I motion for Ezra to come with me to the computer. I sit on the black desk chair, pulling up a folding chair for Ezra. He sits, but bounces and squirms, a bundle of anxious, uncontainable energy. Without speaking, I type one sentence:

“Ezra will write here what he wants to tell Abba.”

“But you
need
to take me,” he says aloud, still begging for the Disney Store.

Silently, I point at the words on the monitor. I wait for him to read them, and wonder whether he will slow down and focus for long enough to internalize them, and whether, if he does, there is any chance that Ezra will respond in kind.

Should I read the words to him? I wonder. Will that grab his attention? I tap my right index finger on the monitor, where the first word appears:
Ezra.

He leans forward in his chair, reading.

“But I want to . . .”

I hold a finger to my lips:
Shhhh.
I point to the screen again, thinking:
Should I tell him what to do?
When he looks like he is about to plead again, I hold the finger to his lips and shake my head again—
no
—letting the silence do its work. I extend my left hand, tapping lightly on the keyboard, then touch the monitor again with my index finger.

This will never work,
I think.
He’s just not ready.
I am about to concede and let Ezra escape. And then Ezra sits up, reaches out for the keyboard, and, using only his right index finger, begins pressing on the keys.