Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  I’m beginning to realize how you can lose yourself in this basement. It’s cavelike, with thin, street-level windows that are shaded, and walls—stone, brick, and cement behind the wood paneling—that don’t let sound in.

  I’ve banished Owen to his room for the last few days—“Dad’s taking over the basement”—and ordered him this sunny afternoon to ride his bike to a neighborhood market to pick up heavy cream for his mother. It’s a make-work job. But it’ll keep him busy for an hour.

  I settle onto the holy sofa: Corn’s first purchase as a single girl when we were dating in New York in the early 1980s. It’s a high-quality product, holding up quite nicely after twenty-five years. We are, too. There’ve been stresses galore that have come to rest on this marriage, from the long, seesawing struggle with Owen to the moments of public battle when the latest books have been released into this toxic political environment. But the battles, if anything, have strengthened our bond.

  And we’re both feeling fortunate these days. No single reason, and many circumstances to the contrary—especially, in regard to Owen’s strange and troubling behavior. But a kind of faith in possibility, in the way things tend to work out, is the cup we both seem to be drinking from. You do your best, and wait for a break. They come, luck from unluck.

  Take Cornelia’s father’s decline last fall. It was precipitous, and as I was readying before a trip alongside Benazir Bhutto—for her long-awaited return to Pakistan—Cornelia intervened. Knowing her father wouldn’t have long, she asked if there was any way I could postpone it. I did, albeit somewhat reluctantly, meaning I wasn’t beside Bhutto that October as a suicide bomber attacked her parade motorcade in Karachi, killing 140 and injuring five hundred. She’d slipped behind a plexiglass screen at the last instant to work on a speech she was about to give; that’s why she survived this attack. I wouldn’t have followed her there.

  Two months later, at the end of December, I sat with her in Quetta, the western Pakistan town controlled by the Taliban. We’d been chased that day by suicide bombers. It was her last major interview. She died nine days later.

  By then I’d just gotten home for the holidays, after a difficult exit from Afghanistan, and was all but overcome with gratitude that the four of us were together, safe within the warmth of this house, this family.

  In our long afternoon in Quetta, inside the fortress-home of a friendly warlord, Bhutto talked about her alleged corruptions, how she became prime minister, twice, of a patriarchal country, and about life’s transactions: how it often boils down to credits and debts, who saved whom, who owes whom what. Whether for a family, or a nation, she said, that’s where the trouble rests, a false calculus. “When things really work, though, it’s because people realize that this is a lie, that, really, we all save one another. It’s the way of the world.”

  So I decided, when I returned to America, to call this next book The Way of the World. There are probably better titles. But I get to choose and I felt that quote was so very true. True for the world? Hopefully. But true for my own life and that of my family, the thing I know best? For sure.

  The dinner is much more than the food—these are our good friends; there’s drinking and laughter and jokes about how many days it’s been since I’ve slept. By two A.M., Cornelia turns in and I slip back to the basement.

  The book is running through my head—a puzzle of nearly five hundred pages, of characters and plot turns, Afghani kids and intelligence chiefs, documents and disclosures about how power often undermines principle. It’s all laid down, nice and neat, but I need to manage a final summation of how they all connect, and connect us to something larger than ourselves in the next ten hours. A short passage of last thoughts, for literally the last three pages of the book, is due at noon. When all the pieces are fitted together, what does the puzzle reveal?

  In the fitful early morning hours, the rich food and wine and insomnia catch up with me. I find myself grasping the toilet in the downstairs bathroom. I think this may be it—that Owen will find me here in the morning when he slips downstairs to watch a movie. When the misery passes—and certain death is averted—this harrowing image of Owen’s discovery lingers and my de-puzzling turns to him.

  What the hell is wrong with him? What holds together and what’s missing? It’s just basic reporting. What are the incongruities, the pieces that don’t fit? Hold them up, turn them this way and that. They all belong somewhere.

  I’ve overheard him talking to himself quite a bit lately; always, it seems, in Phil’s voice. He’s doing it quietly, under his breath, but you can tell its Danny DeVito’s rasp. Why Phil? Well, he trains Hercules for battle, and is an aggressive little guy, himself. Is Owen—a kid without an aggressive bone in him—in some kind of confrontation, or headed for one? Why would he try to jab a kid with a pencil? It’s not in his nature—that I know—so it must be driven by some circumstances, something that’s making him incredibly tense.

  As I run through the many moments I’ve seen him anxious, I think of that concert. He played that piece ten times at the piano in the living room with his eyes closed. And he never freezes in front of audiences. Look at the bar mitzvah. What are the differences between our living room—and even, more clearly, a crowded synagogue—and that gymnasium? Well, as Cornelia said, the bar mitzvah was a safe place. What was going on in that gymnasium? Mostly, I remember the performers—I really wasn’t paying attention to anyone beyond Owen, Cornelia, and whoever was on the stage. Which brings me back to that one amazing kid who commandeered the room. And then, an attached memory of how Owen was sitting, looking at the floor when everyone else was up clapping.

  A few days later, the book is at the printer’s. I’ve gotten a few long nights of sleep. Owen has taken back his basement. We’re on the sofa now, together.

  “Who was that boy who did the last song? You know him?”

  Owen wouldn’t meet my eye. “No.”

  “Weren’t a lot of the performers in your music class? Is he in there?”

  He pauses. “Yes.”

  “So, he’s in your music class for the whole year, but you don’t know him?”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Not until you talk to me.”

  This went on for an hour, until Owen arrived at, “If I tell you once, I won’t ever have to talk about it again.”

  I earnestly agree to this—a promise to him I’ve made, and broken, many times. “Yes, just this one time.”

  He sits for about five minutes in silence. And then it starts coming, fast, in a torrent. The whole story. It’s cataloged in his head by the day. He doesn’t want to say the words, what was said. I tell him I need to hear it all, every word. And then I’m repeating them back to him, feeling each blow, as though I’m being struck. “Burn the house down!” “Kill us!” And, “Kill you if you told us!”

  He’s not crying—he so rarely cries—but he’s shaking, heaving it up. And then, and then, and then, spewing up each threat and curse.

  Everything now makes sense, how the two bullies trapped him, toyed with him. He says he almost told Walt and he says it almost impatiently—like, hey, I’m not a complete idiot, here—but that he was afraid Walt would kill the kid. And I can see that whole scene in the carpool line, like it’s happening. Thank God he didn’t tell Walt. “But that must have been so hard. And you having no one to talk to.”

  And then, catching his breath, he tells me about Phil. He couldn’t turn to us, so he turned to Phil. Of course…training him for battle. “I could talk to Phil—that helped me.” And Lucky Jack, another training sidekick. And also Jiminy Cricket. “He said, let your conscience be your guide. And also, ‘Go tell your parents. They’ll understand.’”

  I ask him why didn’t he listen to Jiminy and tell us. “All these months you’ve been alone and terrified, every minute.”

  He puts his arms around my neck. I hug him, tight, and after a moment I feel his tears moisten my cotton shirt. “I was afraid they’d burn our house down.”

/>   Upstairs I hear the front door open. It’s Cornelia. In a moment, all three of us are in the basement.

  Her response is volcanic, then swiftly capped. She’s moving fast and furious, like those women who lift cars to save their kids. The circle widens fast. That afternoon, Rhona Schwartz comes to the house. We don’t have to tell her that Owen can’t return to the school if the two boys who tormented him are there. He tells her himself. Cornelia adds one homicidal look and Rhona gets to work. They’ll be gone by the fall.

  C. T. Gordon, Owen’s psychiatrist, is on a rare vacation, so we bring in the doctor on call, Dr. Lance Clawson, who is recommended by the school and plenty of others. He takes the lead. On top of everything else, Owen is now battling obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as he replays the threats and swear words over and over, in his head, leaving him paralyzed with fear.

  He gets medication for that and Lance sends us to a specialist, a therapist who starts Owen on a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy called ERP, for exposure response prevention. The idea is to expose him, bit by bit, to the horrific thoughts or words, but keep him calm and not let him break out into panic and paralysis. Over time, he’ll become desensitized. This, in a manner of speaking, is what happens to neuro-typical people over the years, starting from the earliest ages—the on-rushing world numbs us and thickens the skin.

  The axis of bombardment and desensitizing—and the need for ever-heightening shocks to draw a response—is what plenty of social theorists see as a dilemma of the modern, technological age: we live inside a Circus Maximus of violence, sex, and fear generally called the media culture. Owen, of course, has suffered a specific trauma. But its features—the lying, the threats, the curse words—are the types of mortal shocks we’ve tried to insulate him from.

  Cornelia and I discuss this endlessly, night after night. On the one hand, we say he’s just turned seventeen and he’s in high school. He can’t avoid the wider world, and neither can we. If things work out, it’s the place he’ll have to live. On the other hand, we’re in a state of shock and remorse. Our fears, of how readily he’ll be taken advantage of, a threat rising with each step toward independence, have been disastrously confirmed.

  “I worked so hard to get him to this place, and now for this to happen,” Cornelia says, late one night in July during a moment of reflection.

  What do I think, over and over? What he wrote on the pad, that he’d be “the protekter of sidekicks.” I always figured that was my job—to protect him. At that I’d failed.

  We begin driving him up to an office in the Maryland suburbs where a middle-aged psychologist named Sherry has him recite each thing that the two boys said to him. As his body tenses, she eases him down. And then she starts the process once again.

  Carl Jung’s term is “the shadow.” Or so Dr. Griffin told me the previous fall after a session where Owen was describing in effusive detail what drives many of the Disney villains: greed, lust, power, jealousy.

  I said I’d never heard of Jung’s shadow. Dan, as my all-purpose search engine on psychology, that night sends me a note:

  Sex and the life instincts in general are, of course, represented somewhere in Jung’s system. They are a part of an archetype called the shadow. It derives from our pre-human [sic], animal past, when our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren’t self-conscious. It is the “dark side” of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of is often stored there. Actually, the shadow is amoral—neither good nor bad, just like animals. An animal is capable of tender care for its young and vicious killing for food, but it doesn’t choose to do either. It just does what it does. It is “innocent.” But from our human perspective, the animal world looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for the parts of ourselves that we can’t quite admit to.

  Symbols of the shadow include the snake (as in the garden of Eden), the dragon, monsters, and demons. It often guards the entrance to a cave or a pool of water, which is the collective unconscious. Next time you dream about wrestling with the devil, it may only be yourself you are wrestling with!

  Dan counts Jung as one of his important early influences. Of course, it’s long been clear that Owen’s been tiptoeing through the shadowlands, trying to get at it meditating on his favorite villains and darker human impulses. He knows people lie, cheat, bully, bruise, and even kill each other. These are elements in virtually every movie he’s memorized. But he can only seem to wrestle with these human dualities in the controlled landscape of Disney, a place he can own, manipulate, and master.

  The last six months are all about a loss of that control. He learns from movies—it’s his way—but life isn’t a movie that you can rewind, pause, and decipher from the end of a remote. It comes at you fast, faster than so many of the spectrum folks can manage. The dark side rose to meet him, face-to-face, each morning in music class. For no reason he could fathom, a carefully controlled life—by us and by him—was thrown into chaos.

  Owen returns to school for his junior year, but he’s quite tentative. He’s bouncing around, still discernibly unglued.

  The bullies are no longer there, but he’s walking the same halls, sitting in the same classrooms. The residues are everywhere.

  But so are a few precious counterpoints, namely Connor and Brian, who are waiting for him in homeroom, that very first day. It’s a reunion of The Movie Gods.

  They are each different, just like we all are, though they share some of the telltale traits: difficulty picking up social cues, rigidity in habit and intellect, difficulty taking the specific to the general, disorientation in unfamiliar situations, trouble with attention and receptive language.

  Expressive language is a different story—and what bubbles up from within all three is a world made accessible through the moving image. Like the Venn diagrams Rhona drew the interlocking circles of The Movie Gods show plenty of overlap.

  Brian’s a “Thomas the Tank Engine” kid. The British-made children’s series has only one human: the main character, Mr. Conductor, who was alternatively played by Ringo Starr and George Carlin. The rest are trains—Thomas, Percy, William, and so forth—that move along tracks as they play out modest human dramas, their emotions presented with frozen faces (smile, frown, surprise) right above the cowcatcher. It’s precisely this structure and simplicity, the repetition of tracks and easily discernible emotions, that make it a favorite among kids with autism.

  Connor likes Thomas, too, but he’s graduated—if that’s the right word—into the superhero-movies arena. There are plenty of those. He knows everything about everyone in those movies, just like Brian knows everything about Thomas.

  Brian’s interests extend beyond just the Thomas series. He’s an aficionado of Mel Brooks’s movies and, under an organizing principle of Judaism, he knows just about every Jewish actor in the history of movies. Connor, who’s not Jewish, likes Brooks’s movies as well—especially Blazing Saddles—but doesn’t live for them like Brian.

  And they both love Disney, which is where the Venn’s borders of both boys overlap with Owen’s. Owen is the aficionado in that area, yet they can all speak Disney, and are appreciative of his expertise, just as Owen is of Brian’s mastery of Thomas and Connor’s sweep-ing knowledge of dozens of superhero movies. But now, at the start of the third year of their friendship, the three circles are bleeding into one another. It’s almost as though they’ll venture into contiguous territory—movie territory, mostly—at the behest of a fellow Movie God, just like typical teenage boys do on a wider and decidedly more three-dimensional landscape.

  As they meet that first day at 8:30 A.M., the restoration Owen feels is palpable. He hugs them both. The building feels different to him, he tells us later—“like it was last year with the bullies, but not.” However, Connor and Brian are right where they should be, smiling and ready. Connor, a wide-set guy with curly hair, pushing six feet, cheers, “The Movie Gods are back!” And Brian, a dark-haired broad shouldered
kid, about Owen’s height, who smiles all the time—happy, nervous, confused, enraptured, doesn’t matter—says, “All for one!”

  They both want to know the same thing: has Owen seen The Dark Knight with Heath Ledger? Chris Nolan’s second movie with Christian Bale as Batman has owned the summer, mostly because of the performance of Ledger, whose rendition of The Joker was so violent and troubling that some believe it may have contributed to the actor’s death a few months before the movie’s release in mid-July. His last performance was also mesmerizing. No one could take their eyes off the movie, with a villain who wreaks havoc for no apparent reason beyond the fact that “some men,” as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred (Michael Caine) says, “just want to watch the world burn.”

  Owen has heard it’s dark and vicious, well beyond the two darkest movies he’s embraced—the Batman movies by Tim Burton. The first with Jack Nicholson as The Joker, and the other with Danny DeVito as The Penguin, are shadowy and brooding, but carry their violence with a cushion of being comedic and unreal.

  But, on his first day back, Owen is floundering, unsure of his footing. He nods, reaching across the Venn: “Yes, I’ll see it.” They’re both overjoyed.

  “Then, we can talk about it!” Connor exclaims.

  That weekend Owen and I go to the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue near our home, just a few blocks from Patch of Heaven’s church basement.

  I’ve never seen a movie like this with Owen and he’s watching the screen with surprising intensity. The Joker kills a man by pushing a pencil into his brain through an eye socket. I can only think of Owen jabbing at his tormentor with his pencil. I ask if he wants to leave.

  “No,” he says, almost to himself. “I’m okay.” Maybe this is what the ERP is about, learning to stay calm and detached while a thousand shocks are thrown your way.

  I can’t tell what he’s thinking—this sort of thing he’d always turned away from—but now he’s not. And, in my chair, the cinematic and the real are colliding. I’ve spent the summer doing interviews from the “Today” show to Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show promoting my book, The Way of the World. Its main character is a U.S. intelligence chief who furiously treks around the globe in an attempt to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Their oath of using fear to undermine civilization’s norms and create anarchy—to show our prized principles are matters of convenience, easily toppled—is identical to what Ledger’s character pronounces in the movie.