Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  Joker: You’ll see, I’ll show you, that when the chips are down, these uh…civilized people, they’ll eat each other.

  And then this, to District Attorney Harvey Dent—a champion of law, society’s rule book to manage itself—who’s lying, mangled, in a hospital bed.

  Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just, do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, and Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic, their attempts to control things really are…Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.

  The next day, Sunday, I hear Owen recite this entire passage in a flawless mimic of Heath Ledger’s Joker.

  I’m stunned. I ask him to do it again, and bring Cornelia over to hear it. She hasn’t seen the movie, but the words are unmistakable in their impute—as is their connection to Owen’s life.

  We go out to the back patio where we can talk.

  “He might as well be talking to the bullies,” Cornelia says, outraged. “It’s horrifying.”

  We talk for an hour. A warm September sun is beginning to set. Late summer bugs are buzzing around the flowers in a beautiful backyard Cornelia landscaped.

  I suggest that reciting long passages of Heath Ledger is the way he’s deboning the trauma, disempowering it. Just like the use of Disney over so many years, it’s Owen’s particular form of self therapy, his compass and sextant. “Now, he’s trying to deal with the darker stuff, in his life, in the way people can be.”

  “Yes…obviously,” Cornelia says. “It’s really about something deeper. A loss of control. Our loss, as much as his. We can’t protect him. And I don’t think he can protect himself. And that means someone I love so much—as much as life itself—is going to get hurt, again and again. And the movies are just movies.”

  At a hotel in Naples, Florida, we lay the cards on the table.

  It’s Christmas break and we figured a trip away with the kids was in order. It’s nice to be together, all four of us. It’s been a rough semester for Owen, though he’s slowly getting back on his feet. Heath Ledger may have helped. Clearly, the therapy is working, slowly and surely.

  And there’s homework. That’s what the cards are. Twenty cards, laid out on a little table under a hanging lamp in the hotel room—four rows of five. We have similar cards in our hand. It’s a matching game, somewhere between Hearts and Go Fish.

  The cards have curse words. Owen lays a card with the word SHIT on it on a pile of SHITS. “I need another SHIT,” he says, sheepishly.

  Walt starts to laugh.

  “Owen, it’s funny.”

  “I hate that word.”

  “I know, honey,” Cornelia says. “But this is the way for the words to not have power over you.”

  I mention Lenny Bruce. Walt’s on it—definitely, same idea. He says, “Take their power away.”

  Cornelia finds a match to BITCH. Owen shakes his head. “I hate that word.”

  Walt’s turn. He’s looking around the table. “I really need a FUCK,” and then he cracks up. We all start laughing. Owen looks face to face, and starts laughing, too.

  I think back to when Walt was five, right before we left Dedham. I came into his bedroom telling him it’s lights-out time, which he wasn’t happy about, and he tried out a new word he’d overhead. “Shit!” he shouted. I looked at him, kissed him good night, and slipped out, leaving him befuddled. It’s since become an old family story, of how Walt was trying the word out for the first time, then figured he’d misused it.

  I mention it when the next round of SHIT cards come up. And he nods, and smiles. “It was awhile before I tried using it again.”

  Though I’m sure Owen will never use these words, one unanticipated use of traumatic adversity—started a year ago, now, on that morning in music class—is that these words can be taken off the list of ugly realities that might exert power over him as he ventures into the world.

  Monday afternoons are still mine, whenever I’m in town. In late February 2009, Owen and I are driving to Dr. Griffin’s office for a 3:00 P.M. appointment.

  The road forward is just proving to be daunting for him; the subtle play of light and darkness he’s seeing in himself—like in all of us—bespeaks unmanageable danger. Just as Cornelia said last fall, when we sat on the patio—“we can’t protect him” and he’s realizing “he can’t protect himself.”

  His conclusion: too many hurts, up ahead, to risk the journey. His compass is way off, whipsawing from Heath Ledger and his curse-word-therapy game…to Mister Rogers.

  After getting back from our Christmas vacation, we start to notice this compass is pointing backward: a full-on regression. Anything that suggests growth, change, the adult world, or the future starts to become untouchable. High school, and the heartfelt vagaries of teenage life, with all its pitfalls and uncertainties, are unsettling. He’s seen the wider world. He wants no part of it.

  Cornelia maps the race backward, day by day. We’ve been trying to get him to use a cell phone. He discards it. Hides it in his backpack, power off. He’s also reviving “Thomas the Tank Engine,” and pulling out old picture books, from when he was a baby, from boxes under the Ping-Pong table.

  If this keeps up, the very hopeful reciprocities with Connor and Brian will be disrupted.

  Regression is ultimately a defensive reaction, like building a fortress, and retreating into it. Us telling him that he can’t escape into little-kids things isn’t working. We’re part of the problem. He thinks we want to push him forward. That’s understandable. We do.

  If we can’t advise him, who can?

  Which is what brings me back to Hercules’ Phil. That’s who I’m thinking of as we drive to Dan’s. Phil, after all, is who he turned to in that strangely dynamic internal conversation when he was afraid we may not love him, as the bullies said, when he felt he’d have to fight his way forward.

  But there are many kinds of sidekicks, as—by now—we well know.

  When we get to Dan’s, I tell Owen I need to talk to Dr. Griffin for a minute, and that he should hang out in the waiting room.

  Dan and I huddle, behind the closed door. We talk about Phil. He knows all about Phil. He knows about the regression. Basically, he knows almost everything we know, at this point.

  “Okay, here’s the idea. Have Owen solve a problem for a boy like Owen—fearful of the future—in the voice of one of the wise sidekicks.”

  Dan gets it immediately. He’s pumped. “Which one?”

  On the wall in a frame, above Dan’s right shoulder, is the picture Owen drew of Rafiki.

  I point to it.

  He nods. “Definitely, go with Rafiki.”

  I call Owen in and everyone takes their places: Owen’s on the couch. I’m on the wing chair next to him, and Dan’s on his rolling desk chair, which he wheels right up close.

  “All right, Owen,” Dr. Griffin says, leaning forward, his hand framing the air before his face. “Let’s say, there’s a boy like you, different from lots of other boys, who’s fearful of the future, of growing up, and wants to start going back to being a little kid.” He pauses. “What would Rafiki tell him?”

  Without missing a beat, Owen says matter-of-factly, “I’d prefer Merlin.”

  Dan stammers. “Umm. Okay, then. Merlin!”

  “Listen, my boy, knowledge and wisdom are the real power!” Owen exclaims as Merlin, in the voice of Karl Swensen. And then he keeps going. “Now, remember, lad, I turned you into a fish. Well, you have to think of that water like the future. It’s unknown until you swim in it. And the more you swim, the more you know. About both the deep waters and about yourself. So swim, boy, swim.”

  Dan looks at me, eyes wide. He’s watched the movie plenty of times—but can’t place that second part. I shake my head. Not in there. Yes, there�
�s a scene where Merlin turns himself and Arthur into fish. That seemed to be Owen’s trigger to update those lines. But where are the words coming from?

  Dan asks Merlin more questions, and “a boy like” Owen receives advice, wise and gentle. And after ten minutes, I begin to realize that Owen has lived in an upside-down world, much more fully realized than we ever could have imagined. Now, we’re in it, too. Merlin is speaking with a depth and nuance that Owen has never—and maybe could never—manage. At least could never manage without Merlin. Could it be that a separate speech faculty has been developing within him that was unaffected by autism? Or, maybe, in response to how the autism blocked and rewired the normal neural pathways for speech development?

  Forty-five minutes later, Dan and I leave the room in a daze. Me, to drive Owen home. He, to reflect on and record the incredible moment in his case notes.

  When I get home late that afternoon, I can’t wait to tell Cornelia. She immediately gets it, sees the breakthrough, and wants to give it structure.

  “Look, I know you can fake any profession, but you’re not a psychologist. E-mail Dan—tell him to look for what’s in the psychology literature about using voices like this.”

  In the coming days, Dan sends links to recent papers mentioning the use of something called “inner speech” in the development of executive function—that catchall term for reasoning, planning, problem solving, connecting past to present, and an array of other cognitive functions. First theorized by an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, it starts as the self-directed, out-loud speech of young children—verbalizing as they make their way—and is internalized in preschool years, as a way kids “think through” actions. Studies in recent years indicate this inner speech may be impaired in autistic children, undermining, from early on, their executive functioning. In fact, when inner speech is artificially impaired in typical kids—something managed by disruptive noise or tapping—they perform on various problem-solving tests about the same as autistic children.

  So many autistic kids memorize and recite scripts, there’s a widely used term—“scripting”—that is generally seen by therapists and psychologists as repetitive, nonfunctional behavior, something to be reduced and remediated.

  Certainly, we’ve done plenty of that, to help him control it in school and in public. But it appears that Owen, with our improvised support, has derived value in the scripting, itself, as a way—a seemingly successful way—to shape and develop this crucial inner speech.

  His internal dialogue, in fact, seems to grow richer, year by year, dealing with not just executive functions, but emotional management and even emotional growth.

  In sessions with Dan over the next month, Merlin (or Owen as Merlin) takes us on a tour of “inner speech.”

  Others step in as well. He selects the voices of certain sidekicks, generally the wise or protective ones, for different needs. Specifically, to help him deal with the challenges “a boy like” him is facing.

  The insights are trenchant. Many are drawn, first, from a line of dialogue. But, as with Merlin’s first emergence, they evolve well beyond the script. The voices of the characters—Rafiki, Sebastian, Jiminy Cricket—each have gentle guidance to offer. With each, it’s the way it is with Merlin. Owen is accessing some latent speech faculty, where he can summon and articulate cognition that he doesn’t otherwise seem to possess.

  At home, Cornelia and I call it a back-to-the-future moment. In some ways, she points out, we’re going back to the early role-playing days in the basement. Then, we had to stick to the script and find the right lines, on cue, to communicate. Now, it’s improv!

  As usual, Cornelia’s bringing structure to the proceedings, helping all concerned. The improv idea enlivens Dan. In our therapy session, he sets up scenes that relate to Owen’s life—being lost or confused, being tricked, being frustrated, or losing a friend. He then drops Sebastian in the middle of it, and asks Owen—as Sebastian—what he should do.

  But the theater analogies go further. Cornelia, in sessions with Dan, also points out that we’ve broken through the theater’s so-called “fourth wall.” That’s the invisible wall dividing the stage and seats, which the actors cross when they step down from the stage to interact—still in character—with the audience.

  At home, it starts to become natural, a modern version of the old Disney dialogue. At any given moment, when a challenge arises, we can ask Owen, “What would Rafiki say?”

  An internal dialogue, that he’s clearly been having for years, can now be taken and shaped by us.

  Dan, meanwhile, digs around for theories and therapies that will support and illuminate what he’s seeing each week. He looks at everything from narrative therapy—a technique of using stories to help shape a patient’s behavior and attitudes—to personal-construct theory, which maps how, from the early ages, we develop constructs to provide a sense of order to the world, our place in it, and anticipate future events.

  In springtime 2009, Owen is in the room for most of the session, but then gets breaks so I can fill Dan in on what’s happening in Owen’s life and we can discuss which characters might work best. The hour is intense. The breaks are almost like time-outs on the playing field, when Dan and I—coaching along the process—can huddle. Then we call Owen back in.

  Merlin, not surprisingly, remains first among equals. The movie, The Sword in the Stone, is an eighty-seven-minute drama of an older man, Merlin, guiding a teenager toward life’s deeper truths. It offers the cleanest structure. Merlin’s sidekick partner, Archimedes, the owl, helps with young Arthur’s intellectual progress (he teaches him to read), while Merlin provides guidance on his emotional growth and the shaping of his character.

  But where does Merlin end and Owen begin? In a mid-March session, Dan feels around for the line between them, to see if Merlin can describe how and where he fits inside Owen. This, after all, is about Owen. He’s the patient the psychologist is treating.

  Dan thinks it through carefully. He figures he should start by addressing Owen.

  Dan: Owen, can I ask Merlin a question?

  Owen: Certainly.

  Dan: Merlin, you’re often able to unearth great insights. How do you do it? Where, exactly, do those insights come from?

  Owen rises from the couch.

  The response, in Merlin’s voice, carries a tone of impatience bordering on anger: “You should never ask a wizard the source of his powers! It’s the surest way for him to lose them!”

  A few minutes after Owen as angry Merlin turned on Dan, we’re in the car, driving home.

  It’s been about a year since I last probed.

  “So, buddy, have you thought any more about that movie of yours?”

  Owen looks over at me, his eyebrows furrowed, and I’m thinking I may get my own dose of angry Merlin.

  But I don’t. It’s his voice. He looks out the window. “I’m working on it.”

  I do this maybe once a year since he talked about his movie idea of twelve sidekicks searching for a hero. And, how, in their journey, and in the obstacles they face, each finds the hero within themselves.

  I ask if he’s written anything down.

  “I do it inside my head.”

  I let this hang for minute.

  “Sort of like James inside his head?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s the lyric?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  It’s the signature song from James and the Giant Peach—the only one, of many, that Owen never sang. The omission was odd, in that it seemed to be the most applicable to his real life and real struggles. Cornelia and I took that as a sign that it touched him in some fundamental way, that it entered a secret place, and was sealed down there.

  So, as we drive, I sing it:

  My name is James.

  That’s what mother called me.

  My name is James,

  So it’s always been.

  Sometimes I’
ll forget

  When I’m lonely or afraid,

  So I’ll go inside my head

  And look for James.

  Owen doesn’t sing with me. He just looks out the window, his head turned away.

  “Do you go inside your head and look for Owen?” I ask.

  The car’s quiet.

  “Sometimes.”

  “How’s he doing in there?”

  “He’s okay.”

  I feel a tumbler click.

  “And how are the sidekicks.”

  “They’re okay—they’re with him. They’re all in a dark forest.”

  “Has he found the hero within himself?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you know how it might happen?”

  He goes silent. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from Dan Griffin’s office in Takoma Park, Maryland, to our house in Northwest, Washington, DC.

  I figure I have ten minutes, tops. I make a point of missing a few lights. The hum and vibration of the car, passing landscape, closed windows muting sounds; not having to make eye contact, to read expression. The moving car has always been a sweet spot. Minutes pass. Now, closer to five left.

  He starts to softly sing. It’s the rest of the James song:

  There’s a city that I dreamed of very far from here.

  Very, very far away from here,

  Very far away.

  There are people in the city, and they’re kind to me.

  But it’s very, very far away, you know,