“But you visit him?” Jim said. “Even though he doesn’t know you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Three or four times a week.”
Jim nodded. He’d clipped a pad of paper inside a notebook and held the notebook open on his lap and he made a note. We watched him write. He looked up at us.
“And what’s his diagnosis?” he said.
“He has autism and schizophrenia,” said Dr. B. He said this as simply and dispassionately as if he were saying, I’ll have the cheeseburger and fries.
I bit the inside of my mouth hard and bit it again but Jim nodded again and kept writing and then read another page of Chase’s application. Then he looked at me with a perfectly level expression. “He has a history of violence? Property destruction? Self-injurious behavior?”
I paused. “He begged me to kill him,” I said. “That was just before he came into the hospital. And then he threatened suicide with a knife.”
“Was he holding the knife or talking about getting a knife?”
“Holding the knife,” I said. “He was going to cut the pain out of his chest. And he tried to strangle himself with a microphone cord. And he made a plan to step out in front of a truck.” I stopped. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure this represents a significant history.” I shook my head.
When I look back on it now, I see the absolute absurdity of my statements. I can’t imagine what I thought a significant history would have been. Perhaps if Chase had successfully committed suicide, I would have thought that counted.
Jim nodded and wrote something on his pad.
Chase moved past the window but I didn’t see him pass by the door and appear on the other side. Sam cleared his throat. “I’m wondering,” he said. “We all know Chase pretty well and we think he’s pretty different from the kids we usually see. Do you have other boys like Chase on your unit?”
Chase peered around the door and his face alone appeared in the window. Then he pushed the door hard and stepped into the room. The door banged against the rubber doorstop in the wall and made a louder sound than I thought it should.
“Hi Chase,” said Jim. “Would you like to join us?”
Chase walked into the center of the room and stood in front of Jim and Sandy and stared at them and then began to talk to the space beside him in a voice so low I couldn’t be sure he was using words. He stood before us unsteady on his feet, like a particularly purposeful drunk, and waved his arms as if he moved without intention. Then he pointed at me.
“You’re a drug dealer,” he said.
“Chase,” I said. “Come on.”
“Chase,” Jim said. “Do you want to sit down?”
Chase immediately fell into a blue vinyl chair and stared at Jim with dark suspicion.
Jim explained that he and Sandy had come to visit him and to learn more about him because they thought he might prefer living at Murdoch Center.
Sandy sat up a bit straighter in her chair and grinned at Chase. “Hi Chase,” she said.
Jim looked at Chase. “What do you think?” he asked. “Do you think you’d like to get to know more about Murdoch Center?”
Chase jumped to his feet and nearly tipped over. He stood swaying over Jim and glared at him. “No,” he yelled. “No Murdoch! No Murdoch! No! No! No!”
“Chase,” said Sam. He stood up and moved closer to him. “Chase. Sit down.”
“That’s all right,” said Jim. He looked at Chase. “Would you like to sit down?”
Chase didn’t move.
“What do you like?” said Jim.
Chase raised his hand to his face and cupped his palm until his fingers curled next to his eyes and fired lasers, taking aim at the wall just above Jim’s head. He muttered something and smiled to himself.
“He likes music,” I said.
“Music,” said Jim. “What music do you like, Chase?” His voice, which had been bland, became animated and excited, as if having an interest in music was an unusual and extremely interesting thing.
“Hey,” said Chase. “Hey. I’m Zack de la Rocha.” He patted his chest lightly once, twice, five times before dropping his hand to his side and tapping it on his thigh. He squinted at the ceiling vent and fired a laser at it with his eyes.
“Do you sing with a band?” asked Jim.
“Rage,” said Chase. “That’s my band, man.” He bent a little from the waist and leaned in toward Jim and continued to smile his terrible smile.
“I know a lot of people who like music,” said Jim. “What else do you like?”
Chase stared at Jim and licked his teeth.
“He likes comic books,” I said. “Or he did.”
“Comic books!” said Jim. “Who’s your favorite comic book hero?”
Chase rolled his lips together and then opened his mouth wider but he didn’t speak.
“He used to like Spider-Man,” I said. “That was his favorite.”
“Spider-Man,” said Jim. “Wow. He’s pretty cool.”
Chase looked away from Jim. He started tapping faster and faster on his leg and we watched him.
“Do you get to play much music here?” Jim asked. “You know, at Murdoch Center people can have stereos in their rooms.”
Chase closed his eyes and then opened them. He started tapping his other leg, and then drummed both hands against his stained black pants.
“Is there anything you’d like to know about Murdoch?” said Jim. “Do you have questions I can answer?”
Chase narrowed his eyes and looked at the ceiling and then abruptly stood up and in three long strides reached the door. He banged it open, stepped through it, and walked away. The door drifted to a stop and no one got up to close it. No one said anything.
Then Jim told us we could send the application if we wanted, but he could just about guarantee that PATH would turn it down. How did he know that? He and Sandy were on the review team and they would have to report what they’d seen here, and what they’d seen here made a PATH placement impossible. He could appreciate our need to find a place for Chase, clearly Chase was not going to be able to come home, obviously Chase had needs that were both dire and complex, but he was sorry, PATH was not the place to serve him.
“You understand,” he said. “I have to think about the match with the unit. The boys on PATH have simple, classic, straightforward autism, if autism is ever straightforward. They are much younger than Chase. They don’t have Chase’s history and we wouldn’t take them if they did. I’m sorry,” he said.
I looked at him. “All right,” I said tightly. “I understand. PATH won’t take him. Okay. That’s fine. Do you have any ideas? Any ideas at all? I hope you do, because we’ve looked all over the state of North Carolina and nobody wants him.”
“Oh,” said Jim pleasantly, “when I said Chase wasn’t right for PATH I didn’t mean Chase wasn’t right for us. Chase is a BART guy.”
“A BART guy?”
“Wouldn’t you say?” Jim said and turned to Sandy. “Doesn’t Chase look like a BART guy to you?”
“Much more so than PATH,” she said. “He’s a little bit younger than our BART guys but I think he’d fit right in.” She smiled at me. “It’s a good group,” she said. “The boys all have a developmental disability and some other diagnosis, usually psychiatric, and BART takes them in when no one else will. They live together, and go to school, and have jobs, and have chores around the unit. They go on outings—didn’t they just come back from a basketball game?”
Jim nodded. “I think so,” he said. “It was that or the circus, I forget.”
“They shop for food and make meals and some of them are part of our Special Olympics teams,” she said. “The goal is to help them build the skills they need to live more independently.”
“You can use the same application you wrote for PATH for the BART unit,” Jim said. “We’ve got a review team meeting coming up in the next month or so and we can look at it then.”
“Is there a bed?” I asked. “Do you have r
oom? Could you be ready when Chase comes out of the hospital?”
Jim and Sandy looked at each other and then looked away. In that glance alone, I should have seen that trouble lay ahead. But all I could think was that maybe, at last, we’d found a place for Chase.
“What happens next?” I said.
“It’s a process,” Jim said. “We don’t have any openings right now but we anticipate having one in the future. The review board is going to meet the first of May.”
AFTER THEY STARTED the Clozaril I waited for change to come, as if it were possible that a change in him was certain. Clozaril was supposed to work magic on those who hadn’t been cured by other drugs. Sam told me that an old friend of his was transformed by Clozaril and went from being someone who was practically living on the streets and completely incoherent to someone who could hold a job. The nurses told me they thought they could see some small improvements, day by day, but I didn’t see that anything was different. Chase paced and tapped and fired lasers and fled when strangers came onto Five South. If he sat for longer periods of time in a classroom with other teenagers and stared silently at the wall instead of pacing and shouting, perhaps this was improvement. If he could write in a mysterious language, just sharp jagged shapes that sometimes looked like letters or backward letters or abstract symbols or Cyrillic or Greek but were something wholly Chase’s own, perhaps this was improvement. Every Friday, a nurse came to him after lunch and had him sit in a chair in the dayroom so she could take his blood pressure, his temperature, and then his blood. He stared past her. I sat next to him and he talked to me about his mansion. One day, when the nurse was finished, he told me to go look out the window and see for myself. I followed him and he pointed to the red brick buildings of the business school and explained that one of these was the mansion where he would live one day.
“You know that’s not true,” I said softly.
“No,” he said. “That one! The one over there! You see it? It’s right there!” He repeatedly stabbed his index finger against the glass and then looked at me. “Right there,” he said again. “It’s right there.”
I looked out at the buildings. In the afternoon sunlight, they were a dusty brick color, with neat white trim, shaped like the hotels on a Monopoly board. The construction workers had diverted some of the traffic from a site on Manning Drive, and I watched cars snake past a big blinking yellow arrow. Chase stared impassively at the buildings. Then his mouth twisted a little. He glanced at me and very quickly raised his fingers, squinted at me as if taking aim down the shaft of a rifle, and fired a laser at me.
SOMETIMES HE WAS ASLEEP when I came to see him and lay on his side on his bed. He was thin and lay on top of his blankets and sunlight came in through the big windows. I stood in the room and listened to a helicopter racketing overhead, getting ready to land on the roof, and then the thundering thwacking sound that meant it was just above us, the beating of the rotors like something with its own life, and then the roar that meant it had landed on the roof and then the sound of the engine dying away in a dissolving whir. Chase slept on and I didn’t try to wake him. In the beginning, I would have. In the beginning, I would have wanted us to have a visit. I would have wanted him to know I was there. I didn’t try to wake him anymore. I sat on the desk and watched him sleep for a while, watched him breathe, watched him, in that time, be without motion at last, and then I went over to him and lay my palm on his forehead and felt his warm skin and could see his thin chest rising and falling with each breath, could feel the damp sweat of his skin. I stood like that and then I lifted my hand away and I went out to the hallway where Sam usually sat at the table in front of Chase’s door. He explained about the Thorazine, that they didn’t use it the way it used to be used but just to sedate someone who was having trouble getting himself under control. And then the Clozaril had that as a side effect, too, especially as the dose increased in the first weeks. Really, it was hard to know what was making Chase sleep in the middle of the day but it was something he needed, right? He looked at me when he said this and nodded for emphasis. Then he told me that he thought Chase was really tolerating the Clozaril well. He thought he could see that things were getting a little better.
“It’s hard for us to know,” he said, “since we didn’t know him before.” He stood up and looked in at Chase. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and stood across from me.
“Do you think he’s more like he was before?”
“No,” I said.
He asked me to describe him and I shrugged. “He was verbal and he made sense and he went to school and he had difficulties with things but not like this,” I said. “Nothing like this.”
Sam nodded.
“He knew me,” I said. “He knew his sister. He knew who he was.”
Sam nodded again.
“He always had trouble with things like getting dressed and washing. He always had trouble being really clear about things. But it was different then,” I said. “It wasn’t like it is now.”
“So the psychosis just came suddenly, out of the blue?”
I studied the tops of my shoes. A few months ago, I would have said yes. But now I realized that Chase had been working up to this for his whole life.
“Chase’s first psychotic symptoms came when he was five,” I said quietly. “It’s not like I really remember Chase without some sort of psychosis being there. But it was much more low level. Much milder than this.” I wrapped my arms around my waist. “I’m being no help to you at all,” I said. “I can’t remember anything clearly enough for this to make sense.”
Sam didn’t reply but we stood like that for a time, both of us looking through the open door at Chase. He slept soundlessly and without motion and he’d folded his dirty hands into a position of prayer under his chin. He didn’t shave yet and looked younger than fifteen. Sunlight fell in a pale block across his bed. After a while, I left.
EIGHTEEN
One day, when we were still in awe of the mild North Carolina winters and Chase had just turned thirteen, I came home from work and Robertson met me at the door. He appeared suddenly, as if he’d been hovering in the hallway waiting to hear my key in the lock. Chase was upstairs, folding laundry, he told me. Then he asked me what would happen if Chase missed his seizure meds.
It was Robertson’s first day on the job. He was going to be trained in seizure protocols the next week but this was during the time before state law changed and you could start your job without having fully completed training. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal except for the fact that Chase would have a seizure if he missed his meds.
Robertson looked like Kurt Cobain in the months before he died, young and frail and downtrodden. He’d wrapped an old greenish cardigan around his thin shoulders and stood next to the sink, picking at the raggedy end of one sleeve. He was trying to look cool but he couldn’t look cool.
“I didn’t know what to do when I realized I forgot so I wanted to talk to you as soon as you got home,” he said.
I glanced at the clock. It was five thirty. “Chase,” I yelled. “Chase!”
We both waited. When Chase didn’t appear, I turned to Robertson. “Go get him,” I said.
I got a glass and filled it with apple juice, then went to the medication box, which had a counter, rows assigned to each day of the week, and below that, little doors that opened on tiny boxes for morning, afternoon, evening, and bedtime dosages. Chase and his worker filled these boxes on the first day of the week. This task was meant to increase Chase’s independence, to help him understand the importance of the meds that he took, but it also had the additional purpose of teaching the worker the importance of the medication regime. I had shown the box to Robertson that very morning.
I opened the box for Monday and tapped the morning meds into the palm of my hand. As I did this, I made excuses for Robertson. It was his first day. He hadn’t completed the training yet. He didn’t think to call me at work. Behind these excuses I felt my own inadequacy: I h
ad waited for the Autism Society to train him and hadn’t trained him myself, I should have called home to see how things were going, I should have stayed home from work and observed.
Still, I told myself, it might be all right. All we had to do was get Chase’s meds into him and hope that he still had enough in his bloodstream from his last dose yesterday to tide him over until these took effect. It had been twenty-two hours since his last antiseizure medication, ten since he missed his morning dose, but maybe it would be okay. Maybe he’d just go to bed and all would be well. When Chase followed Robertson into the kitchen, I gave him his juice and handed him the pills, one after the other.
“Next time, if you have a question, call me at work,” I told Robertson. “No matter what kind of question. Large or small. It doesn’t matter.”
He nodded. He had a miserable, defeated look on his face. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I heard the crash while I was doing the dishes after dinner and right after that Robertson’s panicky voice, shouting my name. I ran up the stairs and Robertson met me in the hallway, yelling, “He’s in the bathroom. He fell, he fell, he fell.”
Chase lay still on the cold bathroom floor. The shower curtain, half out of the tub, dripped water on the floor next to his head. The blue towel that had been wrapped around his waist had come undone. His eyes were closed. There was blood on his head, on the vinyl floor. The toilet seat had cracked and come off.
He was bleeding and still wet from the shower. I strangely found myself wishing that the CAP workers would do a better job of teaching him to towel off.
“Robertson,” I yelled.
He was in the doorway already.
“Call 9-1-1,” I said. “And then come back. Do you know the address here?”
He said he did. He said he could give basic directions. I turned back to Chase. I closed his towel. He wasn’t seizing anymore but he’d clearly lost consciousness and fallen. He’d been brushing his teeth. His red toothbrush lay against the floor’s shoe molding. I pulled another towel down from the towel bar to cover him. I hated seeing him on the cold floor. Robertson was back. He said the ambulance was on the way.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 22