“Is she okay?”
He nodded.
The weekend before, Zip had called me to the front yard. We’d set to raking the last of winter out of the garden and he’d discovered a dead mouse curled up on the sidewalk. I poked it with my rake and looked at Zip, waiting to see what meaning this mouse had for him.
He picked it up with a shovel and flipped it into the storm drain in the street. When he came back, he leaned against the shovel and looked at me intently. “You know what that is, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a signal. Our enemies are very near now.”
“Come off it,” I said.
He reached over and held my arm. “You’ll see,” he said, in a low voice. And then he let me go and moved off around the corner of the house.
Now Chase twirled on the swing and, when the spin ran out, twisted the chains so he could twirl again. Zip stood behind me and watched and, when I didn’t move, went back to his coffee. I waited for a while, watching Chase turn and turn and turn, and then picked up my things and went inside. I gave Haley a hug and a kiss and changed into jeans and found a heavy sweater and pulled that on, and pulled on an old pair of mittens. I found a wool hat that Zip’s mother had sent me for Christmas one year and I took a blanket from the linen closet. I put the blanket on the steps so I would not be cold and I sat down and I watched Chase, watched him turn and spin and twist and unwind and twist again. He seemed tireless, relentless. He saw me sit down and he shouted, “You stay there! You stay there!”
Our neighbor pulled her car into her driveway and waved to me. “Nice evening,” she called and I nodded. She picked up her mail and went through her back door. A little while later, I could see her watching me through her kitchen window while I walked up and down in the driveway and Chase said the same thing over and over and over again, and twirled in the yard. The sun had gone down and the sky turned cobalt blue; the last of the shimmering pink light glowed behind the trees but soon that would be gone, too. Zip came out and wordlessly walked down the road to catch his ride. Haley was alone inside.
The breeze picked up the leaves and blew them rattling across the lawn and then the last of the brown leaves rattled, too, in the trees. I sat there for a long time, as the sky grew darker in the way of northern skies, which dim before they darken, and the light grows low across buildings and trees, and watched Chase spin and spin and spin and spin and spin. A line of geese came overhead just at dusk and I could hear the terrible wild rustling of their wings as they flew low and otherwise silently into the dark. After a while, I stood up and walked up and down in the driveway. When the first stars were out in a vivid dark blue sky, I went inside. I watched the clock and counted down: two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. I didn’t turn on the outside light and I kept the lights in the kitchen low, so he would have a hard time seeing me. Finally, when six minutes had passed, I turned on the yard light and stepped out on the back porch and yelled, “Chase! Chase! It’s dinnertime!” Chase sat on the swing and hung his head in his lap and scuffed his toes along the dirt. He was saying something under his breath and I crossed the yard and came up quietly and he looked up at me and his eyes sparkled and he rocked back on his heels and pushed the swing a little bit forward and then swung back by pushing gently from his toes and I said, “It’s time to come inside now.”
He stood and looked at me and said, “Peter Parker was known to everyone by that other name Spider-Man and that was how he hunted for the diabolical men of evil who cast a corrupt taint on our fair city.”
I reached down and took his hand. We walked back to the house, where the warm light of the kitchen made the windows look like home.
“Go wash your hands,” I said. “I’m making hamburgers and French fries for dinner.”
That night, when the dishes were done, and Chase watched TV, and Haley sat at the kitchen table and drew pictures of mermaids and girls with wings who knew how to fly, I thought about Chase on the swing. His language seemed different. He generally spoke in complex sentences and expressed sophisticated ideas. He had a detailed understanding of the complex web of political relationships that defined parts of the Star Wars stories, for example. In November, he’d written a report about penguins: The penguins live in Antartica. The penguins line up on the frozen ice shelf. They push one of the smaller ones in and see if it comes out . . . alive! Leopard seals and orcas live in the water and wait, stalking them. Rookeries are built in the breeding season. The adult penguins feed the young penguins, ready for the same lifecycle their parents had.
But that night, when I got close enough to Chase to hear what he was saying, it was only the same thing, again and again: Peter Parker was known to everyone by that other name Spider-Man and that was how he hunted for the diabolical men of evil who cast a corrupt taint on our fair city. Peter Parker was known to everyone by that other name Spider-Man and that was how he hunted for the diabolical men of evil who cast a corrupt taint on our fair city.
I felt hopeless. I saw something in Chase I’d never seen before, a strangeness and a dislocation, as if he had slipped from our world, and I worried that his horror at my approach could be turned outward as assault or inward as injury. For the first time, I was afraid. And so I decided to quit writing, quit teaching, quit the Midwest, quit that house, quit that marriage, and move to a place where there would be help for Chase, where he could have a better life. I didn’t care what happened anymore, as long as it stopped happening to Chase and Haley.
FIFTEEN
Dr. LJ visited Chase in the hospital. He had been Chase’s doctor for a long time and he wanted to figure out what had gone wrong. At first, he talked to Chase by the windows that looked down over the steamy vents of the heating system, but when Chase couldn’t stand still, he walked beside him as he paced and matched him step for step. Sometimes he was able to elicit from Chase something that seemed like a lucid response, or something that approached the borderlands of the coherent, but by far the greatest percentage of time, he could make no sense of anything Chase said. It puzzled him and worried him. In some ways, he thought the psychosis was just like Chase’s psychotic stuff from the past, except more extreme this time, as if he’d tipped over into an area where he could no longer monitor his thoughts and everything that was on his mind came out without regard for meaning or coherence. He linked this to Chase’s bipolar disorder. But he could also see why others saw classic hallucinations and delusions in Chase. Still, he thought that we were chasing our tails with the trials of antipsychotics, heading down the wrong path. And he couldn’t account for the role that seizures might be playing in all of this, but he thought they probably had some hand in it, no matter what the last EEG said. Then he told me that it might well be schizoaffective disorder, a real true full-blown case of it, a stew of psychosis and manic symptoms that was as notoriously difficult to treat as it was rare to find a person who really had it.
But Dr. B disagreed. By February, he’d decided Chase had schizophrenia. He said Chase’s symptoms were not classic and in some ways didn’t meet the exact criteria for the diagnosis, but in his view, this was the best available diagnosis, or at least the most capacious, the one, like autism, that gave the most room to accommodate the whole of Chase’s clinical presentation. He reminded me that there wasn’t one kind of schizophrenia but many and, in fact, the field guide to psychiatric illnesses—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV —provided a taxonomy of schizophrenia that detailed five different forms, each listed as a subtype: the paranoid, the catatonic, the disorganized, the undifferentiated, the residual. I studied the symptom lists. I could see that Chase fit. I could see that Chase did not fit. I could see that it was almost impossible to know what to do about this. The DSM-IV made clear that pervasive developmental disorder or other autistic disorders would need to be ruled out before schizophrenia could be ruled in; those diagnoses could not exist in the same person.
And yet, in Chase, Dr. B was sure they did
.
In March, I gave consent to try the Clozaril and Chase worked up to a therapeutic dose, as if this was something he merely needed to practice, like sinking baskets or tying his shoes. At every visit, I came prepared for a miracle. There was no change. Chase did not know me. He retreated from me and told the staff I was a crack addict and a prostitute. He was filthy when I saw him. Sam told me that he didn’t want to get into the shower, that when this was suggested to him, he’d cower and bellow, “No, no, I know what happens in there—sex parades!” I tried to imagine the terror of being undressed in a small tiled cubicle in a place that you were convinced was a concentration camp. I tried to remember how much history Chase had had in school and if he’d heard about the gas chambers and if he remembered how they worked. It seemed likely that he had not lost any of this. He fled from strangers on the unit, but every so often, he’d approach someone and scream that the person was a murderer.
ONE DAY IN MARCH, Linda called me and said that she’d called the social worker at the PATH unit at Murdoch Center and told her about Chase and the social worker was willing for us to come and visit. We could take a look at the place and if we liked it, we could submit an application. And once PATH had the application, a unit psychologist and a manager would come to see Chase and make a determination about his eligibility for treatment there. Linda was plainly surprised by this turn of events. She told me that she’d known about PATH, which stands for Partners in Autism Treatment and Habilitation—but from what she knew they wouldn’t take a child with a psychiatric diagnosis. Still, when the PATH social worker heard about Chase, she agreed to see us.
Murdoch Center was in Butner, a small town north of us by some forty-five minutes, where North Carolina collected its institutions: its federal prison, its state prison, its youth prison, its school for troubled children, its local branch of the Army National Guard, its state psychiatric hospital, its mental retardation center. The mayor of the town was the state’s secretary of Health and Human Services. To get to Butner, you had to take Interstate 85 past Durham and then north as if you were heading for the Virginia border. You couldn’t see much from the highway: a couple of strip malls barricaded behind the concrete walls of a construction site, orange barrels, signs warning about traffic shifts, and then the land spread out and flattened and the towns and malls dropped away. Next to the short causeway over Falls Lake, an eagle’s nest crowned a telephone pole sunk in water like something suffering a permanent flood, and everywhere you looked, the thin hard light of the lake reflected up to the bright sky. There was a place that gave airplane rides in a couple of old biplanes and sometimes the planes would come in over the highway and bump down in a grassy field. After that, the margins of highway were a blur of dark trees, cedars and pines, whose branches brushed the ground and made an impenetrable shield, and you couldn’t see anything else.
Before it was a town filled with incarcerated people, Butner had been Camp Butner, a military training facility for soldiers preparing to fight World War II. When the war was over and the army no longer needed its buildings or parade fields, the state bought the acreage and turned the prison for German and Italian POWs—where, I imagine, frightened men far from home had stared out into the vast blank landscape and tried to see America in it—into the federal prison. Murdoch Center was begun in an old army barracks, but in those days it was known as the Colony and then as the Butner Training School. It was intended to serve all sixteen counties of central North Carolina. It grew apace, for just after the war anyone with the slightest hint of cognitive impairment was rounded up and sent away, after admonitions to the family that this was for the best. New buildings were opened in 1957 and residents were assigned to them until 120 or more people lived in cottages that today serve 25 or fewer. They lived in open rooms, where cots were lined up across the floor, and a few staff members watched the residents lie on these narrow beds. With the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, many residents were moved out to group homes and other community facilities, and the Butner Training School became the Murdoch School, and then Murdoch Center.
With the exception of two units—PATH and BART—Murdoch became a mental-retardation center charged with providing care for the most severely impaired. After the 1970s, only the most profoundly disabled remained, and among those were included the medically fragile, and then the young men on the BART unit, and the boys on PATH. PATH followed BART, which stands for Behaviorally Advanced Residential Treatment, into existence and was set aside for the care of boys with incapacitating autism who required intense behavioral interventions. BART came into existence almost by accident, after the state office for developmental disabilities discovered that a handful of clients were being housed in facilities outside of the state, sometimes at a cost of half a million dollars per person a year. Murdoch Center was asked to write a proposal for a ten- to twelve-bed unit that would make it possible to care for these individuals in state. They were all young men. They’d all failed at other treatment plans or places. Some of them, after repeated run-ins with the law, had developed criminal records, not because they were hardened delinquents, but because they could not understand that the things they chose to do or loved to do or wanted to do, the exposing of themselves in public, the noncompliance when a police officer told them to move along, the disruptive behaviors in movie houses and restaurants that they clung to even in the face of security guards and law enforcement officers, were things that would invariably land them before a judge. All of them had a deep and abiding innocence about the consequences of their own actions, even in the face of the strongest possible admonitions to cease and desist. BART is the only locked unit at Murdoch today, existing, as it does, to help young men with histories of walking away or running away from other placements, almost by accident, with a thorough lack of intention, because their complex disabilities, a stew of symptoms and gaps in skills, make it impossible for these young men to understand that if they wander off they will be lost and in harm’s way.
Both BART and PATH are housed in the same cottage, one unit at either end. In between are common spaces: a nursing station, conference rooms, classrooms for each unit, dining rooms where the boys learn to cook and empty the dishwasher and set the table. Out front, a stone sculpture stands as a solitary sentry by the front door. At first glance, it looks only like a block of granite, its sharp angles cut as if by accident or indifference, but then it reveals the face of a human being as if a soul were struggling to rise and emerge from the stone, as if the stone held a person who both sought the protection of the stone, like armor, like love, and hungered to be shed of it, this thing that sets him apart.
LINDA AND I STOOD in front of the PATH cottage and talked until the PATH social worker, a cheerful woman named Tania, came out to meet us. Sunlight glinted on Linda’s black sunglasses. On the wide lawn beside the cottage, a blond man wearing a fleecy green pullover and a pair of heavy blue cotton gloves and gray sweatpants slowly kicked a black and white soccer ball between two horseshoe pits. He listened intently to a disc player, the headphones strapped to his head with an extra strap that buckled under his chin. I watched him while Linda talked. He looked happy and calm. A breeze blew up and ruffled his hair and a man in a clean white T-shirt stepped through the front door and called, “Paulie, Paulie,” until the young man with the soccer ball stopped and turned and looked at him. Then he saw us and began to walk toward the sidewalk. “Hey!” he said in big bright voice. “Hey! Do you like Aerosmith?”
Then the man in the bright white shirt called to him again and Paulie stopped and turned back toward the cottage and followed him inside. He walked with his head turned in our direction so he could watch us until the door closed behind him.
“I’ve got the application with me,” Linda was saying and held up her briefcase to show me. “It’s probably the biggest application I’ve ever filled out. They ask for so much. But we’re ready.”
She paused and the wind blew her hair away from her face. “It’s a long shot,” she said.
“Right now, there are 140 children on the waiting list for PATH.”
“How many?” I said.
“I think it’s 140,” she said. “Something close to that. Maybe a little bit over. They make decisions based on who has the greatest need. Someone who’s locked up in a hospital is going to be seen as having greater need than someone who’s at home.”
“How many live here now?” I asked.
“Eight boys in permanent beds, two more in respite beds. And then there’s the PATH group home. That just opened. I think they take girls and I think they’ve got another four beds there.”
“That’s it?”
She nodded. “But it’s a two-year program,” she said, “so the kids have to leave.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’re back to something like this,” she said. “Trying to find a place that will take your child that is also a place where it’s in the best interests of your child to be.”
Tania opened the door and looked out at us and waved her hand to get our attention. “I’m sorry,” she called. “I don’t mean to keep you waiting. I’ll be right there.” She wore bright pink pants and a white sweater dusted with pink polka dots. Her lipstick matched her pants, and her hair was cut short; she’d moussed it so it stuck up in little tufts.
The wind scuffled across the parking lot and rattled the bushes planted along the front of the building. Neither of us said anything and then Linda said, “To be honest, I don’t know why they’ve agreed to let us look at PATH. I don’t think Chase is eligible. The kids there are much younger and they’re nonverbal and I’m not sure it’s the right place for him at all.” She looked at me. “But they do take kids with autism, and they do take difficult kids, and they’ve said that we can visit, so maybe it’s the right thing to do.”
“How long is the wait?” I asked. “If they put him on the list?”
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 18