Raising Cubby (40 page)

The next step was Cubby’s arraignment. It was scheduled for April 8, just after lunch. Arraignment is a court proceeding, generally open to the public, in which the prosecutor and the defendant appear before a judge. The prosecutor briefly describes the case, and the charges are spelled out. Then the defendant tells the court how he wants to plead: guilty or not guilty. We felt fortunate to be arguing before superior court judge Judd J. Carhart, one of the most respected jurists in our state’s court system, with a reputation for fairness.

Perhaps because there were reporters in the audience, prosecutor Perry seemed intent on getting as many inflammatory statements as possible on the record, whether they were true or not. She used the same scare tactics Trooper Hart had used before the grand jury—relating every chemical Cubby had to some kind of terrorist attack, even though there was not a shred of evidence that Cubby had any interest in, or connection to, terrorism. For example, she said that my son possessed the same explosive used in a 2005 terrorist attack in England and videotaped himself blowing up a flag bearing a Jewish symbol.

When I heard her words, I was so mad smoke sizzled from my ears.

Cubby had never blown up any flags, and certainly not any Jewish symbols. What he did do was make a matchstick figure, less than two inches tall, that he called a “suicide bomber.” He blew up his construction on camera. Stupid kid behavior? Certainly. Offensive to some? Sure. But blowing up a flag bearing a Jewish symbol? Absolutely not.

Psychologists say boys with Asperger’s tend to lag several years behind their peers in the realm of social judgment. That was a good example. It was nothing like what the prosecutor described.

Perry continued in the same vein as she described and “interpreted” the chemicals found in Cubby’s lab. In addition to listing explosives, many of whose names she could not pronounce, she claimed Cubby’s lab also contained the makings of lysergic acid amide (LSA), a chemical compound she likened to the hallucinogenic drug LSD.

In fact, there was no LSA seized from Cubby’s lab, nor were any makings for illegal drugs seized. LSA is a Schedule III narcotic, so if any had been found, it would surely have led to additional criminal charges. I could not believe a sworn officer of the court would stand before a judge and state something that was patently untrue, but there it was, plain as day.

On four separate occasions, Carhart asked Perry to stop rambling and stick to her requests and recommendations. But she couldn’t seem to switch it off. “Enough!” Carhart shouted in exasperation at one point. “This is a simple arraignment. We’ll try the case later.”

Finally, the charges against Cubby were read and filed. My son was formally charged with willfully placing explosives near property and with three counts of maliciously creating an explosion. Without a moment’s hesitation, he pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

That took us to the next part of the hearing—what the lawyers call “bail or jail.” At arraignment, the judge accepts the defendant’s plea and decides what to do with him until trial. Most defendants are permitted to post bail, to ensure they don’t just take off. Other defendants—the most dangerous ones, and those with no bail money—are held in jail till the trial. Cubby didn’t go to jail. As a local kid with no prior criminal record, the judge let Cubby live at home with me until the case was resolved.

After a brief verbal scuffle between Hoose and Perry, Judge Carhart set some conditions. He decided Cubby had to stay in my house, not his mother’s, which was no surprise. He ordered Cubby to check in with the probation department weekly. Next he said Cubby could not possess chemicals of any kind. That suggestion was nuts, and totally unreasonable and unenforceable. Toothpaste is a chemical. A CO
₂
(carbon dioxide) cartridge to make fizzy water is another. We all use chemicals. Then he said, “No Internet.” In today’s world, there is no such thing as a college student who doesn’t use the Internet, all the time. It took another hearing to get those last two points clarified and made workable. Cubby could be around household chemicals, but he had to keep his lab packed away. He could use the Internet, but only for school. He had to stay clear of chemical and explosive forums.

Even those conditions were aggravating, but they could have been worse. Still, on Hoose’s orders, we didn’t complain. Our lawyer gave a brief interview to the local newspaper, in which he called the release conditions “a complete overreaction” and said Cubby never had any malicious intent.

We were back to the waiting game. Meanwhile, life went on.

I had always taken pride in the idea that Cubby was more socially aware than me, but the events leading up to the trial forced me to confront the idea that perhaps my notion was wrong. Sure, Cubby had more friends than me, but he was totally oblivious to the ways other people might see his actions.

In fact, he was oblivious to others in some very basic ways. That was revealed to me gradually, as others told me stories of Cubby’s behavior. For example, when Cubby was sixteen, my friend Rick gave him a summer job in his civil engineering lab at the university. One day, Rick watched Cubby run over another student’s foot with a chair and not even notice when she howled. Most days, my son was so immersed in his work that he ignored the other students, and they were annoyed when he neglected them. They would talk to each other about their lives and local events, while he behaved as if he didn’t know them and didn’t care. Indeed, he probably didn’t. It was as if they had formed a team and he was on his own. Meanwhile, Cubby had no clue they felt that way, though like me, he always felt he was an outsider.

He was the same way with his lawyer. Hoose had given Cubby
his cell phone number to call in case there was an emergency, and Cubby took to calling at odd hours whenever trial-related thoughts popped into his mind. Hoose would be at dinner or a movie, and the phone would ring. He had to answer, because it might be an emergency. But it wasn’t. It would be my son, with some random question or comment about the case.

Having read my memoir about growing up with Asperger’s and having gotten to know Cubby, Hoose was at first amused by his behavior. However, after a 9:30 call on a Saturday night while he was entertaining a houseful of guests, Hoose mentioned to Cubby that most people called on his business phone during regular office hours. It had never occurred to Cubby that there was anything at all odd about the nature or times of his calls. My son was shocked to realize he was being rude.

Was that Asperger’s? I was afraid it was. One of the key markers of Asperger’s and autism in general is blindness to the nonverbal signals of others. One of the ways that manifests itself is in self-centeredness. Folks on the autism spectrum don’t behave in a self-centered way to be mean or take advantage; they do it because they don’t “get” the signals others are sending. This trait has caused me a lot of trouble in life, and it looked like it was affecting my son the same way.

Shortly after the raid, Cubby and I went back to the psychologist Cubby had been seeing, who concluded that my son did indeed have Asperger’s. In fact, Cubby and his therapist had often talked about “Asperger traits,” but Cubby had never been given a formal diagnosis. Like the Yale psychologists who’d tested Cubby when he was small, this therapist was more focused on solving problems than affixing labels. Together they talked about friendship, organization, and other problems of day-to-day life. But now that Cubby’s obliviousness to what others might think had placed his liberty at risk, it was important that we give a name to the overarching cause.

Going forward, the goal for the therapist remained the same—how
could he help my son navigate independent adult life? Simple as that is to say, it’s a very hard problem to solve in practice. If you are blind to certain signals from other people, it’s not easy to create emotional insight where there is none. It’s a problem I have wrestled with for years.

Then, in the spring of 2008, my son accompanied me to Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Beth Israel Medical Center, where we participated in several studies that use high-powered magnetic fields to both measure and change the brain. The measurement study confirmed that Cubby shares my brain differences and gave him new insights into his perceptual abilities.

Cubby walked out with another bit of good news too. After extensive testing at the hands of skilled and enthusiastic scientists, we learned his IQ is four points higher than mine, and he will never let me forget it.

But that wasn’t all. The stress of preparing for the trial caused all of us to reflect and learn, and we learned that Cubby and I were not the only autistic Robisons. We realized that Little Bear is also on the spectrum. At the time of our divorce I didn’t know, but when I look back with the benefit of the knowledge I have today, her behavior fairly shouts “autistic!” Most scientists believe there is a significant genetic component to autism, and our family history certainly supports that argument. My father died before any of this unfolded, but if he were alive today, he’d almost certainly be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. And when I consider family stories of eccentric ancestors, I suspect this difference has been in my family for a long, long time.

As we got ready for the trial, Cubby and I had several conversations about Asperger’s and the role it played in this chapter of our lives. It was obvious to me that Cubby’s Asperger’s had blinded him to how other people might see his videos. His inability to imagine that anyone might be frightened or worried was a perfect example of what psychologists call
lack of a theory of mind
.

I realized that Asperger’s had blinded me too on more than one occasion. My desire for Cubby to be “better than me” had been so strong that I failed to recognize one of the chief hallmarks of autism: his fixation on one thing after another: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, and finally, chemistry and explosives. I always told myself that he had my gifts but that he’d magically escaped the disabilities. Now, on the eve of a superior court trial, I realized that was wishful thinking. The gifts and disabilities of Asperger’s go hand in hand, and he has them both.

One of the things I thought about a lot was whether Asperger’s had any place in the trial.

From the beginning, Hoose was opposed to mounting an Asperger defense because of the nature of the case. Saying my son did what he did “because he has Asperger’s” would be tantamount to asking the court to excuse criminal behavior because he was disabled. Hoose didn’t think that was necessary or desirable. Cubby was not accused of being oblivious or exercising poor judgment. As he said, the charges the state had filed required them to prove malice, criminal intent, and real, tangible damage to property. None of those elements were present in my son’s actions. Hoose believed Cubby’s peaceful nature and the absence of damage were the only defenses we needed. I prayed he was right.

It took more than a year for Cubby’s case to make it to trial. First there was the two-month gap between the raid and the arraignment. After that, we had thirteen more months of delays and continuances till the actual trial. During that time, our stress level skyrocketed. I tried to soothe myself by studying the odds and contemplating strategy, though it was really out of my hands.

Did we have a chance of getting a fair hearing, and of Cubby being exonerated? It was impossible to predict, and Hoose could provide only so much reassurance. “I’ll do my best,” he told us, “but you never know with a jury. That’s why a trial is always a last resort. Unfortunately, these people aren’t open to any kind of reasonable bargain.”

More than 90 percent of cases in the U.S. court system are resolved by plea bargaining, where the prosecutor and the defense attorney hammer out an agreement and the defendant pleads guilty to some lesser charge, thereby saving him the risk of trial and saving the state the cost. However, in Cubby’s case, there was no lesser charge on offer. The only Massachusetts law he might have pleaded to was possession of fireworks, a misdemeanor that carried a hundred-dollar fine.