Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  “No Sidekick Gets Left Behind.”

  That night, Cornelia sits up in bed, pillows propped, waiting.

  “How was your day with Owie?”

  I tell her it was good and fascinating, all quite nonchalant, and hand her the sketchbook.

  “You found one—where was he hiding them?” she asks, opening the first page to a drawing of Timothy Q. Mouse from Dumbo, and gasps. “My God, look at this?!” She flips two more pages, eyes widening. “An animator—he can be an animator!” I’d been thinking that all day, of course, even after seeing that his technique—drawing the figures freehand while looking at the book—isn’t exactly the animator’s freehand invention. Close enough. We didn’t need much to leap back into fantasies of conquest; that a remade and triumphant Owen would emerge—Hey, guys, how’ve you been, sorry I’ve been away—making everything right.

  Then she did what I did: gaze intently, page by page, at the characters’ faces, each so expressive. “Lots of fear and surprise,” she says after a few minutes, still flushed with excitement. Until she comes to the last two pages.

  She reads them, looks up, and lets out a long, even breath: “The Earthworm.”

  I exhale, too, like I’ve been punched in the gut. “Right. Sounds like all this has been brewing, from somewhere deep down, for some time.”

  Not that we didn’t think of the Earthworm now and again, and how Owen spoke, two Thanksgivings ago, about being jealous of the Caterpillar and the Centipede and “other characters who can do things I can’t.” That, of course, would include James, the hero. We wanted him to be James—the star—and he said, no, he was the Earthworm, the very least of the supporting characters—the sidekicks, we see now, in his choice of parlance—and also the one who is “scared and sometimes confused.” And it wasn’t just us wanting him to be the hero—even the kids lifted him on their shoulders for the final curtain.

  We lay there for a few minutes, side by side, racing back, silently, across the years as they suddenly come into a new, sharpened focus. It’s as though a one-way conversation—a monologue has just become dialogue. He’s responding to us, and the wider world he is now beginning to see.

  Other kids are racing forward, with their dreams of heroism. He’s caught in the starting blocks, a sidekick. And he becomes a protector of the sidekicks, the supporting cast, demanding that none of them be left behind. That’s all. Not asking for the world, here—just don’t leave us behind.

  “And you and I lifted him to the famous Lab School,” I say. “Only to have him lose a brutal game of musical chairs—musical chairs where he couldn’t even hear the music, much less hear it stop.”

  “He can hear it now,” she says.

  We need the right moment to respond. Every second we’re with Owen in the coming days, Cornelia and I look for our opening—a moment when he’s alone, or settled, or upbeat, or a bit more talkative than usual.

  Meanwhile, I search the Internet for sourcing. If he’s cribbed the line from something he’d seen, a movie, or some online video, we could use that as a conversation starter. Nothing comes up. Just the last half of that line about ‘ohana from Lilo & Stitch. A typical kid might be able to explain the origin of those lines, how he thought of something or what was going on in his head. Impossible with Owen, as it was impossible to know which came first—the “sidekick” part or the “left behind” part. The former is an identity; the latter, a circumstance. Together, both form something larger.

  Then, the stars align. He’s watching Beauty and the Beast and wants us all to join him. Soon, we’re together in the basement, watching the familiar opening, where the handsome prince spurns an old, ugly woman on a forbidding night, only to have her transform into a beautiful enchantress, who turns him into a hideous beast; a spell that can be broken only if he can “learn to love another and earn her love in return.” We’ve heard these words dozens of times, but now they sound different—everything seems to—since reading those last two lines in his sketchbook. Is the Beast a sidekick? The movie, after all, is really about Belle; she’s the heroine. Owen jumps up at key moments, moving in sync with the movie—like it’s his mirror—then sits back down in the sofa; then, up again. Walt takes off to do his homework. The movie crests forward to its final battle and happy ending. As the credits roll, we do a few voices—I say, “Sacre bleu, invaders!” as Lumiere (Jerry Orbach, doing a stagey French accent). Cornelia throws in a Mrs. Potts (Angela Lansbury, upper-crust British) line, “He’s finally learning how to love.” Owen rises to each with a burst of follow-up lines. We respond, in character. Nothing special. Just your average American family speaking in Disney dialogue.

  Both characters, though, are vividly drawn in his sketchbook.

  “They’re a great pair of…sidekicks,” Cornelia says.

  We’ve never used the word with him in conversation.

  Owen snaps to. “I love Mrs. Potts and Lumiere.”

  Tell us about them, I ask.

  “They’re sidekicks,” he says.

  “What does that mean?” Cornelia follows. Owen looks at her blankly.

  “What is a sidekick?” she says, trimming it down.

  “A sidekick helps the hero fulfill his destiny,” he chirps. Rolls right off his tongue.

  Neither of us says anything for a minute. My mind begins to race, wondering if he heard that line before, maybe in one of those “making of” videos, with the writers and directors talking about the goings-on behind the scenes, or if he heard someone say it. I shake it off—what difference does it make. It’s a classical, elegant definition.

  Cornelia isn’t similarly distracted.

  “Do you feel like a sidekick, Owie?” she asks him softly. Their eyes are aligned, just the two of them now, looking into each other, until he suddenly breaks into “happy face”—that big plastered-on smile, lips tight across his little teeth.

  “I am one!” he says. His voice is high and cheery, no sign of a quaver. “I am a sidekick.” The words come out flat, without affectation. But he compensates, giving them expression by nodding after each third word.

  “And no…sidekick…gets left…behind.”

  The radio is on nonstop in the kitchen. The Iraq War started last week on March 20. Reporters are embedded with the troops. There’s blanket coverage.

  I listen as I slip by the counter, foraging for pretzels, nuts—anything—as dusk arrives. A week before, we listened to George W. Bush address the nation telling Iraq to accede to U.S. demands in forty-eight hours or be invaded. Now, troops are fighting their way to Baghdad.

  I’m working on a book these days about the conduct and character of the Bush administration, and especially how, after 9/11, they brilliantly and brazenly sized up the prevailing context of fear—and used it—to achieve their ideological goals. My main source is the recently fired Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who just gave me 19,000 internal documents. They show, among other things, that the stated predicate for war—the fear of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction—may not, in fact, have been the cause for last week’s invasion.

  Neck deep in documents all day in my backyard office, I’m starving. Cornelia shoos me away. “Don’t eat junk. We have a big dinner tonight.” She doesn’t need to tell me. Earthy smells of corned beef and cabbage fill the kitchen.

  It’s the latest St. Patrick’s Day dinner in America. Walt was away on a trip to Puerto Rico with his classmates from Sidwell Friends, where he’s now in eighth grade. They built houses in poor neighborhoods, and then got to spend a day on the beach. In our house, that meant the annual tradition of a big St. Patty’s day feast was bumped from March 17 to tonight, March 24. Insofar as the leader of a Jewish household remains an un-reconstituted Irish Catholic, all traditions that Cornelia’s loved from her childhood are celebrated, with gusto. She isn’t about to pass on this one.

  It’s nearly seven o’clock when the kids grab their usual chairs and I fiddle with the radio. At school, Walt’s beginning to wade into more sophi
sticated, open-ended discussions about war and peace across modern American history. He also knows what I’m up to, with all those documents. Owen has just watched The Lion King, for the umpteenth time. The movie’s scene, with hyenas goose-stepping like Nazi storm troopers, pops into my head.

  I brush it away and look up to realize we’ve assumed an oddly formal, almost reverential posture, sitting at an elegantly set table, listening to NPR’s reports about allied planes attacking Saddam’s Republican Guard positions near Baghdad while the U.S. Army has driven to within fifty miles of the Iraqi capital.

  Cornelia asks me to please turn off the radio. I jump up—yes, of course.

  I turn off the radio as Cornelia and I bring out the big serving dishes of corned beef in its cabbage stew and homemade Irish soda bread.

  She suggests we say grace. Walt has been saying grace each summer night at his camp, which has Episcopal roots, and Cornelia has been thinking it’d be a nice tradition to start, another one she was raised with.

  We go around the table, each of us offering a bit of something—all now having joined hands—until we come round to Owen.

  “Would you like to say something, honey?”

  He looks at Cornelia quizzically, confused it seems about the concept. “It’s just talking to God,” she says. “That’s all.”

  Owen nods once. He understands.

  “Dear God,” he says after a moment. “Let people around the world tonight find peace and honor, freedom, and choice.” He stops, looks at each of us. “And may we at this table always be a part of one another.”

  Walt looks at me, startled. “Are you giving him this stuff?” He can see otherwise from my hanging jaw. Cornelia’s cheeks are already wet.

  I know Walt so well—we can exchange looks that house volumes of shared understanding, common reference; his little brother, still, barely talking at all. And then a window opens.

  We begin to eat and I think…of Billy Felch?

  I haven’t thought once of this man for ten years. Suddenly, I feel like he’s sitting at the table with us. Our only model for an autistic man had been the dreaded Raymond Babbitt. Until this moment, that is, when Dustin Hoffman gets bumped by someone I actually know. I wrote about him for the front page of the Wall Street Journal the year Owen was born, and I had no idea he was autistic. Clearly, he was.

  What originally drew me to Felch was a tip from a student in a journalism night class I was teaching at Harvard: she knew a “perpetual mourner” in Seabrook, New Hampshire, not far from Boston. I’d always been fascinated by someone who mourned perpetually, probably because, around the time my father died, I saw Harold and Maude in which Ruth Gordon goes to strangers’ funerals as a way to stay in touch with the ephemera of life. What I found in Seabrook couldn’t have been further from all that: a portly, middle-aged man who fixed lawnmower engines from a garage behind his house on the edge of town. Billy first became known to the local clergy when, as an eleven-year-old boy, he arrived at the funeral service of an elderly friend and pounded out “Old Iron Cross” on the organ by ear. He played it every Sunday at church after that and, as a teenager, started to show up at funerals on his motorcycle to direct traffic and assist in any way possible, which is what he’d been doing for the three decades since. I just thought he was a good-natured oddball, who seemed to remember everyone’s birthday and relentlessly delivered candy to kids at the local hospital. As I was standing with him at his garage, trying futilely to make both eye contact and conversation, he looked over my shoulder at the tail end of a passing car. “Not from here,” he said, under his breath. I asked how he knew. “Not a license plate from our town.” I wrote all that up through my lens, my life context, as an eccentric man who kept tabs on the comings and goings, life and death, of a small town.

  But none of that spurred the recollection, as Owen finished his prayer. It was something that never appeared in the article: an incident where Billy received a call in the dead of winter from the wife of a Seabrook pastor who’d retired and moved to western Massachusetts. She told Billy that her husband was dying and needed to see him, immediately, and Billy drove that motorcycle three hours in a blizzard to rush to his bedside. The old pastor said he couldn’t die unless Billy told God that he was a good man, who’d lived a good life, a life of kindness. Which Billy did, praying, as he held the hand of his old friend, ushering him out of this hard world.

  I originally wrote about the dying pastor in three or four paragraphs to end the story. The Journal’s page one editor said it was too schmaltzy.

  Schmaltz. For the unaware, it generally means overly sentimental, with the best working definition, for a writer at least, coming from J. D. Salinger, who says, sentimentality—“the great enemy of writing”—means giving your characters “more love than God gives them.” It’s not just that, though, at least for nonfiction. It’s giving them more love than society gives them, because maybe to do so upends the order of things; namely, our surety in the ways we measure human value and some of us see ourselves, quite comfortably, as better than others. I agreed with my editor. That thing about Billy and the pastor was schmaltzy. So I cut it.

  Now, looking back, I wish I hadn’t. But that still leaves the matter of what exactly happened that night at dinner. The last thing I’d ever want to do is sentimentalize my own son. I tossed in bed that night trying to settle what I saw that was indisputable and fact based. On a night when the nation, and much of the world, is gripped with tension—an anxiety we’re sure Owen could feel, even if he didn’t understand all its particulars—we asked him to say a little something. Maybe what’s missing in him, the reasonable doubts and common hesitations, allows him to look upward, unfettered, in a way that focuses some invisible capacities. After all, it’s a big deal to talk to God, if you believe he can actually hear you. All of this I think about, walking the floors as dawn approaches, wondering how it’s possible, after all of our efforts, that just about the most cogent and heartfelt thing my son has ever uttered was to a deity I didn’t much believe in.

  Cornelia and I have not slept well for years. And we’re still not, but the quality of the insomnia has changed. It’s more like the way we didn’t sleep after the kids were born, when the newness of it all, of a new life, screaming its presence, revealing itself, made us press ourselves and each other to stay awake.

  Owen is making some kind of move, here, with the sidekicks. The lines keep running through my head. I think about them when I wake in the morning. Cornelia and I talk about them that night.

  There’s no doubt, now, that he sees what we see: that kids of all stripes—typical kids, his old classmates at Lab School, are moving on, while he’s left behind. He chooses the Earthworm as his character and then the sidekicks emerge, sketch by sketch, in the difficult months after he’s ejected from Lab. His response is to embrace it, the pain of it, and be a protector of the discarded. Of course, that was my job, mine and Cornelia’s, to protect him against judgment and loss, to ease him forward into a warm bath of a life, as independent as possible, on terms we would do our best to set. That was bound to fail at some point. I suppose we knew that. What choice, though, did we have, walking around as he does, without the protective skin of social instinct or acuity, his heart so utterly and perilously exposed.

  Exposed, yes, but beating in ways we suddenly can see. He starts giving sidekick identities to his classmates at Ivymount, so many of whom are so heavily burdened—some with physical infirmities and plenty of autistic kids with little speech. But they have qualities that he’s identifying—this one was loyal, that one gentle, another one silly in some lighthearted way that makes Owen laugh. Instantaneously, he races across the pantheon of sidekicks and, for each of them, finds a match.

  The heroes in many fables tend to be flat, constructed with a sort of solid, accessible simplicity that allows readers or viewers to hop aboard to travel the hero’s journey. As well, it’s often the supporting players in these fables who are more varied and vivid. Even in the earli
est Disney movies, the first sidekicks—Goofy, Pluto, and then Donald—often carried confusions, frailties, foolishness, pride, vanity, and hard-won, often reluctantly learned, insights. The spectrum of complex human emotions is housed with the sidekicks.

  There are hundreds of them in Disney. Every hero has sidekicks, usually several of them. Some are goofy, or dim-witted; some comical, some resourceful. There are protective ones, loving ones, wise ones.

  Owen has become an aficionado. We can barely keep up. In the carpeted cavern downstairs, he seems to be developing a vocabulary, using the sidekicks, through which he can organize his emotions.

  Including, what he feels for us. On Cornelia’s birthday in late February, he draws her a picture of Big Mama—the owl from The Fox and the Hound, who takes in the orphaned red fox, Tod—because, Owen tells her, handing her his card, “She is the gentlest and most caring of all the lady sidekicks.”

  For Father’s Day in June, he gives me a drawing of Merlin, next to which he wrote, “You are the best Dad I could ever have. Thank you for being so guideful.” I tell him I love it, of course, and that I’m honored to be among the wisest sidekicks, Merlin. But “guideful” is not really a word. What does it mean?

  “A sidekick who is a loving and a careful guide.” He doesn’t care if it’s not a word. In his language, it now is.

  In September, on the day of Walt’s fifteenth birthday, he draws Aladdin and writes, “To the greatest brother I ever had.” By now, sketchbooks are piled high—hundreds of drawings—but this is the only hero he’s drawn, this one picture. He so often watches his brother, intently, from the corner of his eye: Walt with his gang of friends, moving in and out of the house; in his football uniform, muddy, after a game on Sidwell’s junior high team; talking on the phone to what might be a girl.

  A few days after his birthday, Walt takes a break from homework to catch a little Dumbo in the basement, wanting Owen to fast-forward until the end when the little elephant, learning to spread those giant ears like wings, soars across the big top, firing peanuts at the cruel elephants, proud and vain, who’d ostracized him. Walt always liked this part. “Certainly gives it back to those nasty elephants in the end, huh, Owie?” And Owen laughs—“Yeah, Walter, Dumbo flies.”