Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  With a typical kid, the extra time wouldn’t really matter. They process quickly, naturally. Either they figure out the answer or they can’t, and then they move to the next question. With the learning-disbled student, the unevenness of how they process information, fit it together, means the extra time matters—it helps them work through their learning difference to get at their underlying intelligence…and show it on the test. For many autistic kids, you need to multiply—with the deeper complexities in the way they process information, either written or spoken, their underlying intelligence is often more deeply submerged or unevenly expressed.

  That means there’s some cat herding that’ll go on, with kids moving at many speeds and in many directions in every classroom at KTS. But with enough time, they get there, often summoning some very improbable pathway to the right answer.

  So, there’s that, in terms of the academics. But similar dynamics apply to everything else going on in the building, to the small society that forms in every high school. What’s different here, or needs to be? Everything here needs to be softened and slowed down a notch, including social matters.

  Many of the kids carry a look-before-they-leap cautiousness, socially, a delay switch for time to demystify. And that translates into a gentleness; aggressiveness, after all, is often born of an overflow of confidence or frustration, based on comparative issues. On that last score, these kids don’t form hierarchies in the usual way; there aren’t ongoing battles for supremacy or rank, so typical of high school. Not that the underlying desires are any different. Their hearts beat strong and true, and maybe a bit more exposed than the rest of us.

  And what we begin to see, day to day, is what Rhona tells Cornelia: that in this delicately controlled ecosystem, he’s thriving.

  Owen wakes up one morning in early December 2007 at 7:10. He’s out of bed by 7:15, done with breakfast by 7:25 (a quick eater), out of the shower and dressed by 7:45, in the car by 7:50 (today, Dad drives), and at school by 8:20 A.M.

  It was a day like any other, or so Owen would tell me a year later in quotidian detail. That memory, again. So much he can remember. Some things, he’d rather not.

  And on this wintry day he weaves through the bustle on the way to his locker. Puts gloves inside hat, pushes the knitted ball into the jacket’s arm and hangs it in the locker. Then he makes his way to homeroom, where he first sees Brian and Connor (they’re both in his homeroom). All three talk about DreamWorks’s new animated film, Bee Movie, which is just out for the 2007 holiday season. In their opinion, it isn’t any good. Owen says he watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs last night, that it’s been awhile since he’s seen it. Still great. Brian loves it, too. Owen does Grumpy’s voice. Connor and Brian laugh; they know it’s Grumpy at the first word. They both chime in with other dwarf dialogue.

  First period is music. Owen arrives and slides into his desk in the music room. His mind is moving this way and that. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Grumpy. Why Connor likes the first Superman movie. Owen takes in the room. There are drums, a piano, and a few other instruments. Other kids soon arrive. There are five boys and two girls.

  Owen doesn’t mix with the kids. He’s polite—always polite. But he keeps to himself. He has his two friends.

  The boy sitting next to him—William—is a big, athletic guy, almost Walt’s size. He’s very popular. And he’s bending over his desk toward Owen’s.

  “Hey Owen, something I’ve got to tell you,” he whispers. “I know where you live.”

  Owen turns. He can’t read the expression on William’s face. He has a nice face, and he may be making a joke, but Owen’s not sure. His dad always says, “If you think someone’s making a joke, assume they are. Act like it is a joke, and you’ll find out if it’s not.”

  “You’re trying to be funny?” Owen says.

  William shakes his head. No joke.

  “And, listen Owen, I know your parents. That’s right. And I know something else. They don’t love you. And they’re going to leave you. One day, you’ll come home, the house will be locked.”

  Owen is feeling panic rise in his chest. He can’t lie, but he can’t easily discern when others are lying to him. This is maybe the greatest peril many autistic people face, both kids and adults. They’re believers. He knows what a lie is, of course. But he doesn’t know it when he sees it.

  “My parents do to love me. I’m a good person, with a big heart, and I love animated movies, mostly from Disney.” He says with all the resolve he can muster, like he’s lifting a shield.

  It just exposes his flank. “Right, you’re always talking about Disney. I know you love it. In fact, I know everything about you, Owen,” William continues. “I told you, I know where you live. And if you tell your parents what I said, I’m going to come and burn your house down.”

  Owen goes through his day—world history, math, art, lunch, science, gym, and English—in a daze. His eyes dart left and right, while his mind races around a continuous play loop. Could William really know Mom and Dad? If I tell them what he said, will he burn down our house?

  In April 2008, Cornelia and I do the morning carpool together. Owen sits in the back, looking at the landscape passing by.

  Owen’s a mess. We don’t know why. We just know that he is. We ask him how school is and he gets one of his plastered-on super-smiles, eyebrows up, lips tight against his teeth, and says, “School’s great! Everything’s a–okay!” He says it every time, just like that.

  But he’s not eating. He’s not sleeping. We run in circles. Have been for months. Maybe it’s his medication—possibly he’s outgrown his low dose of Prozac. Maybe he needs a higher dose, or something else.

  And he’s not talking about Disney, not even when I do a voice. He won’t respond with the counter. I’ll do his favorite dads—Mufasa, King Triton—and my mimicked line hangs in the air.

  Same thing for Monday afternoons with Dan Griffin. Disney’s been tabled. Owen’s responses are perfunctory.

  We’re in the car all together today because the school has called us to come in for a morning meeting. They didn’t tell us why, just that Owen is behaving strangely, and they’d explain when we got there. We suggested that Dan come, too.

  At 9:00 A.M., as the kids file into their respective first-period classes, we three—Dan has just arrived—file into a conference room. Rhona comes in looking grim. She’s accompanied by Owen’s social worker. (Each student at KTS is in a small social skills group—usually three or four kids—that’s run by a social worker.)

  Rhona gets right to it: Owen tried to poke a kid with a pencil. No damage, didn’t break the skin. “But this is so not like him,” she says. “I know you guys have gone through a lot, with the passing of so many members of Cornelia’s family. Is everything okay at home?”

  Cornelia is stunned. “He tried to poke someone with a pencil? That can’t be Owen.”

  Rhona nods in partial agreement. “That’s been our reaction,” she responds before laying out a few small details. It was in science and there were two kids who may have been “joking around” with him. “But nothing that would draw this kind of response.”

  I tell her that there are no big changes at home, at least none we’ve detected. How things might affect Owen are often unclear. Maybe there’s some latent response to Walt having left this year for college. Maybe it’s his medication.

  Dan says that Owen seems grim in therapy. And not particularly forthcoming. He tells them that Owen seems to have replaced Disney films with relentless viewings of the first two Batman movies (which were from Tim Burton). Both are pretty dark. “Owen reveals things through his movies,” Dan adds. “Maybe this is just a strong move into adolescent angst. Maybe something else.”

  We all talk more generally of the difficulties in reading teenagers during these years of rapid change, but how, with a typical kid, everyone has a fairly sound estimation of what the growing pains look like: separation from parents, testing boundaries, sexual awakening, disdain for t
he adult world. The basic Holden Caulfield menu one finds in The Catcher in the Rye. It’s difficult to match much of that with a spectrum kid like Owen, at least with any real surety.

  “What goes on inside of him is still, often, a mystery,” I say, with frustration. “There are worlds in there—places we can’t get to.”

  “You know, we love Owen here,” Rhona says after a bit, to fill the silence.

  “We know,” Cornelia says, still trying to get a fix on an image of Owen—the world’s gentlest child—going after another student. “Just tell us anything you see. And we will, too. We’ll see what we can find out about the pencil.”

  Around the corner and down a long hallway, Owen is sitting in music, trying to breathe.

  William has brought in a friend, Tony, as his partner. The two of them wait for Owen each morning. The trap of torment, where revealing the threats against him will bring disaster, has held. Within it, there’s so much room for them to improvise. Every day, there’s a new twist.

  “Hey, Owen, drove by your house last night,” William whispers. “Didn’t you see me? I almost burned it down last night. I was thinking you’ve been lying to me, that you already told your parents. Have you?”

  Owen shakes his head, side to side. “I don’t lie.”

  “Okay, then fuck you, too,” one of the kids responds.

  “I hate that word.”

  “Okay, fuckin’ shit then.”

  He won’t look at William’s face. When his tensing body reaches its fullest, piano wire tautness, the other boy—Tony, who’s sitting behind Owen—pokes him hard in the ribs. The wind flies from his lungs with an “oomph.”

  “Please stop,” he says.

  “Owen, is there a problem?” the teacher asks. The regular music teacher went on leave in the late fall. This teacher, a substitute, is a first-time teacher of music—he’s overmatched in a subject that requires quite a bit of skill.

  “No, everything’s fine,” Owen croaks.

  He hears snickers next to him and behind.

  Since William brought in Tony, Owen is seeing danger everywhere—not sure who William will recruit next. The kid he poked at with his pencil in science yesterday wasn’t even one of these two. It was just a kid who knows them and was starting to act a little like them. Owen felt like the mayhem was spreading, that the kid in science had caught wind of what was happening in music and was ready to join in.

  The music teacher tells everyone to pick up their instruments. There’s a year-end concert scheduled in a week and everyone works a bit on his or her presentation. As the period bell rings, Owen runs from the class and, when he’s clear of them, starts pacing the halls, murmuring. “Come on, kid, come on. Fight back. Come on, you can take this bum. This guy’s a pushover, look at him.”

  It’s not Owen’s voice. It’s Phil—Danny DeVito’s tough guy tone—from Hercules. He hasn’t abandoned Disney. He’s just taken it underground, not wanting to give the bullies any other weapons to use against him. He’s relying on Phil, mostly. Phil talks to him, like an adviser. They have conversations, always in DeVito’s voice reciting certain lines from the movie. This line—about this guy being a bum, a pushover—is one of the lines of dialogue Owen repeats a lot. Today, he adds the next line in the movie, a response from Hercules: “You were right all along, Phil. Dreams are for rookies.”

  And then he follows with Phil’s finish: “No, no, no, no, kid, givin’ up is for rookies. I came back ’cause I’m not quittin’ on ya. I’m willing to go the distance; how ’bout you?”

  And through the day, he mutters that stanza of dialogue under his breath, barely audible, a hundred times. It’s the only thing that seems to drown out the dread.

  There’s a surprise in the pickup lane on an afternoon in mid-May.

  “Walter!” Owen shouts and runs toward the car. Walt, five cars back in the pickup line, jumps out to meet him, and they embrace in the parking lot.

  Owen hugs him with all his might. “Easy, buddy. You okay?”

  Owen nods. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  There are a few honks from behind them and they jump back into the idling car.

  “So, how goes. Everything good?”

  Owen nods. “Are you done with college?”

  Walt explains that they get out early in college—graduation’s this weekend, and he’ll be home for a few weeks, before leaving for camp, where he’s now a counselor. The car inches forward. There are no U-turns. They’ll have go through the line. Up ahead, there’s a crowd. After-school pickup is carefully choreographed. To avoid injuries, and help along a few kids with physical disabilities, teachers or aides escort all students into the cars.

  Owen sees William in the mix and his mind begins to race. This is his chance. Literal to a fault, he thinks that William said if he told his parents, he’d burn down the house. But he didn’t say anything about telling his brother. For Owen, this is the cracking of a code, and he’s already sketching in his head what Walt will do. William is big, but Walt is bigger, nearly two hundred pounds with muscles on muscles; in Owen’s estimation, almost like Hercules. But thinking that creates a subtle turn, that none of the Disney heroes ever kill the villain, at least not in the classics. The villains are killed by their greed, or hatred, or, as in The Lion King, by their evil sidekicks. A hero never stoops to murder, even of someone who is pure evil. Walt eases his truck toward the front slot, as Owen watches him fuss with the radio. Walt could kill him. If he did, he’d no longer be the hero. And, slipping out of Disney calculus, he’d also be in very big trouble.

  He looks out the passenger window and right at William, who catches his gaze and registers surprise. What’s this? His prey staring back at him? Owen never meets William’s eye. The adversary looks inside the car, sees a big guy who looks a lot like Owen behind the wheel, and backs away into the crowd of waiting students.

  As the car pulls away, with Walt at the wheel, Owen feels his whole body let down.

  As Cornelia and I load dinner plates into the dishwasher, we hear Owen, from the living room piano, practicing his song for tomorrow afternoon’s school concert. We can’t help but feel excitement. This is an earned reward. He’s been taking a weekly lesson from Ruthlee Adler, his piano teacher, for five years. He can manage a few classical pieces, like the one he’s now playing.

  The next day, as we slip into our seats in the KTS gymnasium for the concert, I mention to Cornelia, how we knew he’d crush “Hatikva,” especially after I told him that if he played it flawlessly he’d never have to play it again.

  “I think that’s revisionist history,” she quips. “If I recall, we couldn’t be sure he’d ‘show up’ for his bar mitzvah. But he did. It was such a warm place that day, a safe place.”

  The students enter and most sit down in chairs next to their parents. Some student-performers are up front; others will be summoned forward when it’s their turn to perform. Owen’s among the latter, due up near the end of the program.

  But he seems tight and distant. He doesn’t applaud when the others finish—he usually loves to applaud. Then, when his name is called, he just sits. Like he didn’t hear it. We’re sitting midway in a pretty good-sized crowd of about 120, so the concert director can’t see him.

  “Owen, you’re up,” I whisper. “They’re calling your name.”

  He just sits, looking forward. One of the teachers up front spots him and begins to walk back. “Come on, Owie,” Cornelia says. “This is it.”

  After a long pause he rises, and walks tentatively toward the piano, his songbook in his hand. He sits, opens it onto the music rack, and then nothing. Closer to the stage, right near the piano, a group of students, who will be singing next, look over quizzically at Owen.

  Twenty seconds pass and he begins to play in a fitful manner. Owen struggles with it to the end. He jumps up and races back toward his seat, amid sparse applause. He’s barely in his chair beside us when the next act is announced: an original song,
written by “one of our most talented students.” A large, handsome young man, who’d been standing by the piano, takes center stage. He seems self-aware and ebullient, a cockiness that’s striking in a school like this because very few kids with special needs exude that kind of swagger.

  But he brings it—a raucous song that really works, which he sings and claps masterfully, until the whole room is on its feet clapping to his beat and cheering. That closes the show.

  I barely notice that Owen is frozen in his seat. I’m too busy looking at the kid. “Wonder what his ‘issues’ are,” I murmur. “Looks like he’s ready for MTV.”

  “Do you want to cancel the party?” Cornelia asks me, tamping down exasperation.

  “No let’s do it. Look, a person’s got to eat. So, I’ll eat and get back to work.”

  She looks at me with pity, though she’d probably be just as happy if I stayed in the basement—where I’ve retreated to write the finish to the latest book because it’s easier to nap on the couch than in my studio office. Like all books, this one is a battle to the end. On the first one, Cornelia joked, “It’s as close as man will get to childbirth—you might as well enjoy it.” Now, on book four, she’s way past levity.

  I look like death, and feel worse. She just gets to watch, make sure I’m fed, and wonder when her husband will return.

  It’s Saturday, June 7, and the kitchen might as well be zoned for a TV commercial—pots of every variety are simmering with ingredients gathered from across the globe (but all available at Whole Foods Market). There’s a large rented table filling a wide expanse of the living room which was made possible after the couches and chairs were pushed against the walls. Cornelia’s in a movie club, all women, except once a year, when the spouses are invited for a dinner party. That’s tonight.

  “Please be showered and shaved by seven o’clock,” Cornelia instructs me. I nod sheepishly and slip downstairs.