by Aqilah Teo
I remember my mother standing there and fiercely telling the officers that if they even tapped my brother with a stick, she was going to report them. They assured her that all they wanted to do was subdue him.
Which they did, after a fantastic scuffle. One thing about my brother is, once he knows that he has been outclassed in strength, he will throw in the towel. So they snapped the cuffs on him, marched him out the house, into the lift and down to the police cars that were waiting. What awaited us was another great struggle. Jan was in the worst mood and did not want to get in any of the vehicles.
I hardly think any other cuffed culprit would dare to decline a ride in a police car. Jan however staunchly did, and the officers could have threatened him till kingdom come and all they would have gotten was thirsty.
So they cajoled and persuaded and reasoned with him instead, promising all sorts of games and treats, pointing out the many fascinating gadgets on the dashboard of the police car. Someone had a brainwave and pulled out a fancy mobile phone to show my brother some mini-cartoons. Their tactics worked and we managed to get Jan into the car. I climbed in after him.
Jan had acquired cuts and bruises on his arms and legs from the earlier tussles. We were driven to the nearest general hospital to get him treated.
The 3rd Step
For the first time since I was old enough to manage such incidents, I was at a complete loss. Normally I would put on my battle gear – helmet and chain-mail and armour and sword, with a dogged determination that either sparked a steely gleam or made me a little cross-eyed. Either way, I had always found the strength to get through it.
This time things were different. I felt defeated even before I had started. I thought we were going to lose Jan for sure, and I did not see how I or anyone else could bring him home this time.
I remember holding on to Jan and not crying. During the journey Jan would sniffle occasionally, terrified that I would let go of his hand. I did not, and stared at the back of the driver’s seat. To this day, I cannot remember the colour of the back of that driver’s seat.
There were many things to think about during the journey. We were thankful no one had been hurt. Then other thoughts surfaced. Were we going to lose our home? Was my brother going to prison? How would I get him out of this one?
Jan, frightened and ill, did not make a sound. He sat quietly all the way, and seemed to be growing weaker. When we arrived at the hospital, they placed him on a wheelchair with his hands cuffed, and tied down his legs. He stayed quiet through it all. I kept a firm hold on his hand.
We were brought to the Accident & Emergency Room.
My family had arrived at the hospital by car, but had been made to stay outside in the waiting room. My parents were sick with worry and exhausted.
They had done too much of this campaigning and crusading. Even glorious generals retire from the front-lines at some point, and pass on the torch.
The 4th Step
My brother and I were put in a kind of holding cell in the hospital, where we waited with a number of officers. Some of them were nice enough. Noticing that Jan’s lips were chapped and blue, they offered to get him drinks and asked if he was hungry.
Then Jan was brought to see the doctors. Once they were done, we were transported to the police station.
I soon discovered, to my consternation, that they meant to lock Jan up in a cell overnight. So I marched right up to the officers and demanded to see their superior.
I was referred to the inspector who had taken charge of the case. When I met him at his desk, he seemed unwilling to talk and somewhat hapless. So I demanded to see his superior. (They must have thought I was such a charming and sociable person when I made all these demands.)
I would have been prepared to meet nasty stomping furry ogres if it meant I could bring Jan home.
This officer – I had been too peeved to take note of his exact rank, but its title had a “superintendent” someplace – was an aloof, stony-faced man with a subtle sneer about his mouth and a dismissive look in his eye. Perhaps he saw a naïve little girl who meant to tell him sentimental stories to try and convince him that her brother was not a criminal. He was right.
He began to talk about how my brother had committed an offense, how it was all standard procedure, how they could make no exceptions, and so on. I simply looked at him. I was not angry, nor was I sad. I was only determined.
‘Jan does not conform to your policies nor standard procedure,’ said I. ‘Maybe if you stopped a moment to think about what you’re doing, you’ll understand what I am trying to say. Jan’s upset now, and he’s ill. He’s never gone to bed not surrounded by family. If you put him in that cell overnight alone, not only will you be doing something cruel, you will also be doing something counter-productive because that would just make him even more upset, and when you give him back to us very upset, do you think good things will happen? You’ll be dealing him emotional and psychological damage. What’s more, he’s an autistic boy. Who knows what this damage will do to him or how he will react. You’ll be dealing my family further damage – don’t you think that enough damage has already been done?’
He paused, then tried to sound out anything that seemed like a loophole in my argument, searching for weak links. I kept right on talking. I was not letting my brother become a prisoner.
Finally his expression softened and he heaved a sigh. For a moment he looked weary. Under that stiff, jaded, condescending exterior roughened by years of life and work, he was, really, a reasonable man.
He relented and made a couple of phone calls. I was then told that my brother would be released, on the condition that the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) take a look at him if he was unwell.
The police transferred the case to the IMH, and there Jan underwent a thorough examination. The doctors found anomalies in his liver, and that his blood pressure was too high and his pulse abnormal.
I must have had thanked him, that officer whose rank I cannot remember. I cannot recall now. If I had, I do not think I had thanked him as an officer, but as a person and a human being.
Jan came home.
The 5th Step
There is a simple reason why it is not easy to bring my brother to the hospital. Jan is very strong.
I do not mean anything poetic or symbolic by this. He really does have a great deal of physical strength. He has displayed this uncommon strength ever since he was a tot.
Jan was born with an inclination to find syringes and medicine bottles repulsive creatures. As a baby, come medicine-feeding time, the grown-ups would bind him with a swaddling cloth such that his fists could not punch and his legs could not kick.
So what does he do? He twists and turns his neck such that the syringe containing the medicine cannot be brought near his mouth. The grown-ups secure his neck and the syringe is finally brought close to his gums. He retaliates by using his tongue to dispel the alien object. After more struggling, the medicine is – to the triumph of the grown-ups – successfully deposited into his mouth.
Then he spews out all the medicine, and spits some more for good measure.
Where most infants would have conceded defeat and swallowed what they had to, here was a baby determined to fight to the very last. Four to five grown-ups would have a long-drawn out battle with him whenever it was time for his medicine, emerging bruised and sore and with cricks in their joints.
(My mother had wished for a stout and strong baby when she was carrying him. Nowadays we joke about her not being able to say she had not gotten what she had wished for.)
One of little Jan’s pastimes, when he was still plump and round and running about everywhere in his walker, was boxing. I do not know how my mother got the idea, but she stuffed some old cloth into a plastic bag, then tied it to a knob on a chest of drawers such that it was suspended exactly at his eye-level. He would skate up to the bag in his walker and happily give it a pummelling with his tiny fists.
Then he grew bigger. A mere four grown-ups
trying to get Jan to do anything he did not want to often turned into a travesty of a Charlie Chaplin film.
My baby brother was not only strong. He was smart, and he was fast, and it took only a split second’s opening for him to get a good one over his opponent.
When I make the calls for an ambulance and request extra manpower for the job, the officer at the other end of the line usually adopts either a patronising or an amused tone.
Here’s another panicky family member exaggerating things, he thinks, with the air of one who has been on the job for years and seen it all.
The conversations usually run like this:
‘I’m telling you,’ I say, trying to make my voice heard above the ruckus in the background, ‘My brother is very, very strong.’
‘I’m sure he is, miss. We’ll have our men down there, don’t worry.’
‘You’re going to send two men and that’s not going to be enough,’ I say. ‘We’ve done this before many times. You’re going to need at least ten men down here just to be safe.’
‘We’ll send the standard team, miss. We’ll call for backup only if it’s really necessary.’
‘Oh it’s necessary,’ I assure him, losing my patience by this time. ‘But fine. Do as you like.’
So two to four men would pop up at our doorstep ten minutes later.
My mum turns to me. ‘Didn’t you tell them they would need extra help?’
I reply with a nod. ‘These folks are going to learn something new today.’
My mother cannot participate in the scuffles, being a PID patient. Her earnest attempts to talk them into calling for extra help would be brushed aside, gently at best, but brushed aside nonetheless.
Oh, so this is the mother? It’s best to placate her. If anything, she’s going to be worse than the sister at making mountains out of molehills, they think.
They confidently go over to my brother. Then they find they cannot budge him. They try again, and still they cannot budge him.
They look at me.
I look at them.
My brother looks at all of us.
‘We’ll call for backup,’ one of them says, turning to leave the room immediately.
‘We’ll need the police down here, we’ll need permission to use binding straps,’ says another.
Our home would be invaded by medics, policemen and, on even better days, civil defence officers. Not one dares to approach him because he is sitting on his bed, huddled in blankets, looking very ill, very grumpy, and giving them all a look that plainly says, go away. He tries to bargain with me, anything to get himself out of a trip to the doctor’s. He promises to drink more water, to eat properly, to take his medicine and so on.
Too bad, I tell him. You’ve got to go means you’ve got to go.
I shall not detail the massive tussle that usually comes after, and the trip in the ambulance to the emergency room. Really, memories of this sort can only be revisited so much when they have not truly faded. (Also, each and every one of the paramedics and officers who have ever helped Jan deserves a trophy. Once they realised the gravity of the situation and got over their initial disbelief, they tried their utmost to do their job without Jan getting hurt.)
I do not face much resistance when I accompany Jan into the emergency room. Half-drugged and groggy, tied to the bed, Jan still manages to free his hands from the bindings. If the doctors and nurses are lucky and quick enough, their medical equipment survives my brother’s bad mood. The strong anaesthesia does not knock him out; it succeeds only in making him slightly sleepy.
The 6th Step
It has always been a problem for me to get my brother into an isolated ward at general hospitals. Once or twice, the staff would generously move us up to an A-class ward, if they had room.
Other times, when the air-conditioned B-class wards were fully occupied or reserved, Jan was put in the rooms with open windows. When I tried to point out the problems with this and asked that Jan’s case be given priority, I got sniffed at.
‘All the wards are the same, these wards are just as good,’ they said, imperious.
The staff knew that my mother and I had special permission to remain with Jan in the hospital till he was discharged. I suppose they got the impression that we were making a fuss to get ourselves an air-conditioned room. Indeed, it is a luxury. What is even more luxurious for everyone’s well-being, however, is that an air-conditioned ward has no open windows for my brother to toss things out of.
Usually I try to explain, ‘My brother is already not happy being tied up and forcefully brought to the hospital. He is also not happy with the foreign environment. He is furthermore not happy that you just poked him with a needle and taped it there. Now, my mother and I are not automated beings. We are bound to fall asleep sometime during his stay here. Mind you, my brother is a very fast worker. What will happen if he went around pulling out the other patients’ intravenous plugs?’
Then we get our requested ward.
It was not as though we were looking to holiday in the A-class ward. We just needed an isolated ward, a secure space. Whenever no isolation wards were available, I had no qualms bluntly asking that our patient be bumped up to a single ward for the health, safety and reasonable peace of mind of all.
With my brother’s strength, the family would have sent him for triathlon trials for the Olympics, only he would probably have single-handedly re-routed the runners’ paths. We have pondered the fact that should the home’s electricity be generated from his energy, it would save us a lot on utility bills.
It is interesting. I have mentioned that the boy is a great fan of the Disney animated film Hercules.
He is especially fond of the song in the film, “A Star is Born”.
The 7th Step
After being sent to IMH, Jan got his check-ups and his medication and was in and out of hospitals for a bit. My father had all the window-grilles reinforced with steel, and riveted. The house was bolted down even tighter than before, like a submarine in an underwater emergency.
A few more years have passed by without much incident. Jan has turned his attention to other things. There are ups and downs and time flows on.
But the memories, like persistent phantoms, still haunt us. My mother stops in her tracks whenever someone hammers unannounced at our front door. It usually turns out to be for some innocent reason; the post has arrived, or door-to-door salespeople making their rounds, or volunteers doing charity work. She would turn extremely irate and say to me afterwards, ‘They don’t have to bang on the door like they’re trying to knock it down.’
My phobia for such incidents has grown too. Now, whenever I see police officers carrying out official business anywhere near our place of residence, my system instantly shuts down. A second later, it reboots into emergency mode.
Did something happen? Is that a body bag? My first coherent thought would be “Msut. Cnoatct. Hmoe.” I then frantically try to get in touch with whomever is at home.
One morning, I was leaving for work when I saw that a crowd of police officers had cordoned off the area nearby. Men and women in blue were milling about, and there was an zipped-up police tent by the side of the pavement.
Jan had been keeping irregular hours the previous nights, and so alarm bells in my head immediately went off. My first instinct was to dash back home, but I would have been late for work. I froze for some moments, a petrified statue by the side of the road, of two minds as to what to do. Then I craned my neck to get a better view of what was happening without attracting the officers’ attention. I spent the next couple of minutes like that, then decided to leave a phone text message for those at home. I dashed off to work and hoped for the best.
When it turned out to be a false alarm, I did cartwheels and somersaults, danced a jig, built a spaceship and rocketed off to the moon.
The 8th Step
Jan is not a naturally sorrowful character. Instead, he usually is pretty merry. When he does get sad, a kind of desolate fog creeps into th
e house and lingers for a time.
I had not noticed the fog one morning, being busy getting ready for work. Jan was dozing on a mattress on the floor of the study. He had been feeling off-colour for some weeks. I did not want to disturb him and went about my business silently.
I was thankful he did not stir, even as I crept in and out of the study. Finally, after returning to the room to fetch an umbrella, I was about to leave when suddenly I felt his hand grab my ankle. My brother had woken up, and his face was a bluish hue. Jan then did something which was extraordinary for him. He began crying, clinging to my leg with both hands and begging me not to go.
My father had already left for work and my mother was ill in bed. The last thing I wanted to do was leave Jan there alone, sick and crying, but I had no choice. I wrested my leg from his grip and fled from the house extremely distraught.
The management I was then working under had already been growing impatient with the consequences of my living with autism. As I made my way to work that day, I was scarcely in a forgiving mood.
I could not forgive those strangers in the management. I had just been forced to conform to their normal laws in a less-than-normal situation. However, the truth remains that they were merely trying to run a business and lead their normal lives.
There are many things my family has taught me to laugh off, but that day it was just not funny.
Chapter 3
Outsmart Me If You Can
The 1st Step
Together with Jan’s autism comes sleeping problems and episodes of erratic behaviour, especially if he is cranky or physically unwell. It is particularly difficult as he cannot express to us precisely what is wrong.
People are fond of telling my family to send my brother away. The Institute of Mental Health is an oft-suggested destination. The topic, of course, does not sit well with our digestive systems, but after being told off for being impractical and to ‘think about the family’s future’, my parents mustered the courage to explore the option. They called the IMH. We had been told there were vacancies for special needs children.