Following Ezra (18 page)

Mastering new realms of data brings him a feeling of calm that helps Ezra to feel at ease in the world. Yet the process is so invisible that I often don’t know what new information he is committing to memory until he has already mastered it.

That’s what happens with the “Disney Days” calendar. The calendar is a gift from my parents, who have a tradition of treating their grandchildren to tenth-birthday trips. They took our niece to a weekend in San Francisco, and accompanied Ami and a cousin—both passionate baseball fans at the time—to the All-Star game.

Not long before Ezra’s turn, my parents visit us. Eager to inform Ezra about his upcoming trip, they sit down with him one afternoon at our computer.

“I want to show you something really special,” my mother tells her grandson. It is difficult to grab his attention, until she gets him to focus on the Web site on the screen: Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the theme park in Orlando.

“How would you like to go there?” my mother asks him.

“
Ooooh
, I would like that!” Ezra says.

“Well,” she tells him, “Grandpa and I are going to take you there for your tenth birthday in January.”

“Ooooh!” he says. “Can we go soon?” He is thrilled, but the trip is nearly three months away. My mother has planned for this with a small gift: a desktop calendar with a page for every day, each bearing a picture from a Disney movie. She has marked the page when they will fly to Orlando, to help him count down the days in anticipation.

Ezra keeps it on a shelf in a corner of his room, each morning remembering to tear off a new page, revealing the new day.

He maintains that practice for the weeks leading up to his trip, and then continues after his return. I don’t pay much attention to the calendar until December of that year—more than a year after he first receives the calendar, and many months after the trip (a heavenly week for him). In his room one night, I notice the expired pages he has kept in a neat, orderly stack next to the calendar. I pick up a few to take a look.

“Put that back!” he demands.

I do. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Leave it there. Don’t touch those.”

I’m not sure why.

“I like them there.”

“Can I look at them?” I ask.

I can tell he doesn’t want me to. Ezra’s bedroom has an order that only he understands. I have always sensed that it makes him feel good—secure and comforted—to know where his most important possessions are.

“I just want to look for a second,” I tell him. I pick up the stack and begin flipping through the pages, spotting a movie I like.

“
Finding Nemo
,” I say.

“
Finding Nemo,
released May thirtieth, 2003,” he replies.

I didn’t even know I was quizzing him. He is across the room, nowhere near the calendar.

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“I just know,” he says.

I thumb to another picture.

“
The Lion King
,” I say.

He doesn’t hesitate. “
Lion King
. June twenty-fourth, 1994.”

I try a movie I’m not sure he has seen.

“
Lady and the Tramp
.”

“Lady and the Tramp
,” he says, “release date June twenty-second, 1955.”

I look at the stack—hundreds of pages—and wonder how many he could know. I grab another page at random and, instead of the movie title, read the date.

“What’s on December fifteenth?” I ask.

“December fifteenth?” He thinks for a second, not more. “December fifteenth is
The Emperor’s New Groove
, released December fifteenth, 2000.”

I am about to flip to the next page when he speaks up again.

“There’s a picture of Kuzco, the main character.”

“How about November twenty-fifth?”

“November twenty-fifth? That’s
Aladdin
, release date November twenty-fifth, 1992. There’s a picture of Aladdin and the genie.”

I call Shawn in from the other room. The two of us sit on Ezra’s bed while he paces the room. We take turns thumbing through the pile of pages, amazed that he knows each one. I am even more astounded that he has accumulated all of this information without ever mentioning it.

The moment leaves me amused—and mystified. When has Ezra ingested all of this information? Late at night, after we put him to bed, has he hidden under his bedcovers, scrutinizing the hundreds of pages of the Disney calendar, drilling for hours, determined to master it all, reciting and reviewing until he has transferred it all into his brain? Or is it a more effortless process? Is my son able to snap a mental photograph of a page and store it in his brain, then access it on demand with his own internal version of Google?

I occasionally ask Ezra to explain how his memory works. The most he has been able to tell me, once, is this: “I can see it.” When I try to probe deeper, he yields nothing.

“I just know. Now leave me alone.”

Is it only the Disney calendar, I wonder, or is Ezra committing to memory all kinds of data without my even realizing it? As the years pass, will he surprise us by spontaneously reciting the menu from California Pizza Kitchen? The owner’s manual for the computer? The contents of his history textbook?

And then there is this question: If he can remember the detailed contents of more than three hundred calendar pages, then why can’t Ezra recall the names of the seven children in his fourth-grade class? When asked, he says one or two names as if he’s guessing—“Rachel? Charlie?”—and then begs to be released from that arduous mental task. “It’s hard to
remember
! Just let me
beeee
!” And why can he easily master lists of polysyllabic spelling words, but then not be able to recount a paragraph he perused just seconds earlier?

I contemplate the impossibly thin line between ability and disability. The very condition that makes it so difficult for Ezra to forge friendships, the same wiring that forces him into endless verbal loops and makes him uncomfortable in his own skin—that very condition makes possible these remarkable feats of memory. He finds it painfully difficult to do ordinary things like make eye contact in conversation, yet he can effortlessly do things that seem impossible to almost everyone else. Does that make Ezra’s mind better or worse than anybody else’s? That isn’t the question in my mind. Instead, I wonder this: Does his memory need to make him more solitary and isolated? Or can it ever be the key to connecting Ezra to other people?

It is Ezra who answers that question, in his own unpredictable way. At a large family party when he is ten, he begins circulating through the hall and greeting other guests. His usual habit at such big events, which can overwhelm him with noise and activity, is to flee. Either he takes refuge in a quiet corner of the lobby with a picture book or he anxiously paces through the crowd, with no particular destination, arms tightly folded across his chest, occasionally jostling other guests or inadvertently bumping into a passing tray of hors d’oeouvres. This time, though, he surprises us by taking an interest in the other guests, asking a cousin or great-aunt, “What’s your name, again?”

His second question is always the same: “What’s your birthday?” Not exactly Emily Post’s etiquette advice for social occasions, but it is such a welcome departure from his usual isolated behavior that I feel gratified by his efforts.

When he gets an answer, instead of just filing it in his mind, he responds with a movie title.

“June nineteenth?” he says. “A movie that came out on your birthday was
Mulan
, June nineteenth, 1998.”

He says it so fast that most people don’t hear or appreciate that in a split second, the boy has connected their birth date with a Disney movie.

“Say it again, Ezra,
slowly
,” says Shawn, standing at his side.

“. . . movie that came out your birthday’s
Mulan
,” he says, still rushing and skipping words.

Once they figure out what he is doing, the men and women who meet him are charmed and impressed—and often speechless.

“Oh, I haven’t seen that,” they say. “Is it good?” Usually, he is already gone, en route to jostle the next waiter. That is as much social contact as he wants.

I watch him do that again and again—always with the same enthusiasm, rushed pace, and lack of awareness of how abrupt it seems.

“Novemberthirteenth?” he says, slurring all of his words together. “Moviecameoutonyourbirthdaywas
Beauty and the Beast
, November thirteenth, 1991.” Sometimes he throws in another fact: the DVD release date, say, or an actor’s birthday. He has mastered not just Disney movies and not just animated pictures, but also the six movies of the
Star Wars
saga and, soon after, dozens of
Simpsons
episodes whose broadcast dates he has gleaned from his stack of
Simpsons
books or somewhere on the Internet.

At summer sleepaway camp—where Ezra participates in a remarkable program that integrates special-needs children with the general camp population—he gains a reputation for this skill, and children crowd around, calling out their birthdays. “Elianna!” he would say. “June twenty-third! Wide release of
Pocahontas
!” Or “Michael!
Robots
, released March eleventh, 2005!”

What at first seems like mere movie trivia comes to be something much more significant and powerful: a way to reach out to other people, a means for Ezra to use the remarkable workings of his mind to connect—in his idiosyncratic way. Months or years after making the link between person and movie, he remembers both, and reminds the person on each meeting.

The encounters are considerably less compelling when he discovers that an acquaintance was born in, say, mid-September or early January—annual lulls in animated movie releases. After excitedly asking, “When’s your birthday?” Ezra reacts to the disappointing answer with a blank stare, a downward glance, and a few mumbled words that trail off—“Oh, I don’t know any . . .”—as he quietly skulks away.

That often leaves the other person puzzling over what they’ve said wrong. I offer a shrug and a smile, and watch my son sauntering on, looking for the next person, the next birth date, the next new memory.

CHAPTER TEN

Ezra is five. We bring the three boys to La Cienega Park, a green expanse of baseball fields and picnic tables tucked into a traffic-choked pocket of our neighborhood. Emerging from the minivan, the children quickly fan out into the bustling play area: Noam occupies himself in the sand pit, choosing a blue toy trowel we’ve brought to scoop fine granules into a red plastic bucket; Ami joins a ragtag group of boys scrambling up the sides of the jungle gym; Ezra is approaching the tire swing when, for a moment, I lose sight of him.

I have grown accustomed to the way he slips from our grasp, disappearing without warning in crowded places like supermarkets and the zoo. Still, it incites momentary panic. The busy boulevard abutting the park hums with traffic, and Ezra has little wariness of danger. I survey the crowd, looking from one child to another—the infant playfully cooing at her mother atop a picnic blanket; the two girls in pigtails clutching the bars of the spinning merry-go-round; the pudgy, red-faced boy descending the slide again and again.

Where is Ezra?

I finally spot him halfway across the playground. He’s running, racing with some intention. And then I realize something: Ezra isn’t alone. He is chasing after another child, a little boy about his age.

I’m stunned. In the dozens of times I have taken Ezra to the park, I have watched him do many things. He has fearlessly begged me to push him harder and higher on the swings; he has balanced his tiny body at precarious heights; he has bolted without warning, suddenly planting his palms over his ears and fleeing to take refuge behind the bronze sculpture at the distant reaches of another park. But I have never seen him do this: spontaneously play with a stranger.

“Shawn!” I call. She is sitting nearby, next to where Noam is digging in the sand. “Look at him!” I point toward Ezra, who is still dashing in pursuit of the boy in the white T-shirt and baggy navy shorts. As the child weaves around the play equipment—past the slide, the seesaw, the swing set—Ezra keeps tagging close behind. Shawn comes over and stands near me, and the two of us are speechless as we watch the scene unfold. I feel delight and excitement—as well as a sense of mystery: What has suddenly provoked Ezra to play with another little boy?

As the two kids swerve around the play structures and veer closer to us, I notice something: Ezra isn’t exactly playing with the boy; his eyes are fixed on something on the boy’s head. Looking around, I begin to figure out what is happening. The little boy has wandered from a birthday party under way at a nearby picnic table. Ezra’s entire focus is on a conical paper party hat the boy is wearing. It’s decorated with the face of Elmo, the friendly red monster from
Sesame Street
.

Ezra isn’t chasing the boy. He’s chasing Elmo.

What looked at first like a friendly game of tag is something much different. Watching closely, I’m not certain whether Ezra even
sees
the boy under the hat—or, for that matter, the other children bustling around him. Or his brothers. Or Shawn. Or me. He has focused his energies on the disembodied face of the red cartoon character he sees hovering over the playground.

I call out Ezra’s name, trying to get his attention, and fearing he might topple the little boy in his attempt to snatch the hat. Ezra looks in my direction.

“Elmo!” he calls out. “I see Elmo!”

I’m rushing over to try to intervene when the boy outpaces Ezra, making his way back toward the birthday party. When I get to my son’s side, he’s standing in the playground sand, a delighted grin on his face, still looking in the little boy’s direction.

“Look, Abba!” he says, pointing. “Elmo!”