Life as Jamie Knows It

by Michael Berube

  Sultan drags the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas. He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

  The answer is: No. The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged. One is not supposed to think: Why has he filled the crates with stones? One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

  One is beginning to see how the man’s mind works. . . .

  At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Although his entire history, from the time his mother was shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island camp and the sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason. And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom. The fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs.

  When we got Lucy from the animal shelter for Jamie’s sixth birthday, we also wound up giving Jamie—and Lucy—a great deal of food for thought.

  Toward the end of Lucy’s life, her increasing ill health weighed heavily on nineteen-year-old Jamie, not only because of her impending death but because her illness manifested as an inability to eat. In her final weeks she was skeletal, often shaking with pain. “You may not let this animal starve,” our vet told us, and we agreed: starvation is a terrible way to die, and we would never allow our beloved Lucy to undergo that torment. Desperate, we made one last effort to keep her with us, with the vet’s blessing: baby food. Jamie and I visited the baby food aisle of the supermarket for the first time in almost twenty years—a nostalgia-inducing experience for him, one that I was happy to indulge as we sorted through the pureed plums and peaches and sweet potatoes he dimly but warmly remembered (or claimed to remember) from his early youth. But over the next day, we found that Lucy couldn’t eat that human food either. Tearfully, Janet and I returned to the vet and had her put to sleep that afternoon. I picked Jamie up from his intramural bowling game that evening and broke the news to him. “Lucy didn’t make it, sweetie. She couldn’t eat. She died this afternoon, very peacefully, and we will have to keep her in our memories.”

  Jamie took this in calmly, saying “shoot” and nothing more.

  At first I thought this was testimony to his maturity—and, perhaps, to the careful way Janet and I had tried to prepare him for Lucy’s eventual death. Only a few months later did I realize the depths of his loss. When Janet and I first broached the subject of getting a new dog, Jamie shut us down. He would not hear of it. There could never be another dog! Right there on the refrigerator was the card some of Nick’s friends had made for us—LUCY, ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS. If Lucy is always in our hearts, how could we possibly betray her memory by replacing her? Jamie did hold out one alternative possibility as a conciliatory gesture: perhaps, he suggested, we could get a tarantula.

  By autumn, as the leaves were turning the color of Lucy’s soft brown fur, Janet had made an executive decision. After months of what she called “online dog dating,” she had picked a comely Jack Russell mix named Becca, who was listed as being six years old. We decided to take her for a trial period, figuring that Jamie would overcome his resistance and bond with her once he actually met her. For my part, I switched rhetorical tactics on Jamie. Since “it would be nice to have another dog, and Lucy wouldn’t mind” wasn’t getting anywhere, I pointed out to him that, as he well knew from his volunteer work at PAWS, a local animal shelter, there are many animals out there who need good, loving homes, and ours is definitely a good, loving home. Jamie made no reply to this argument, because there is no reply; it is simply incontrovertible. And so, when we picked up Becca one crisp fall day near Thanksgiving, Janet took the dog home to feed her and acclimate her, and I went to tell Jamie, who was, at the time, working at a bingo fund-raiser. But Jamie had one last form of resistance, involving a very clever deflection of the “good, loving home” argument. When I told him that we had gotten a lovely little dog whose family could no longer afford her and who needed a new home, Jamie, rather than passively acceding to a done deal, went from table to table, asking the assembled bingo players if they needed a dog for their home.

  I confess that I found this perversely delightful, even as I was struck by how profoundly loyal Jamie could be to his beloved Lucy. But as events unfolded, Janet’s hunch turned out to be right: Jamie bonded with Becca almost immediately, and Becca, like her predecessor, sensed something special about Jamie. As their relationship has developed, Becca has become sensitive to every nuance in Jamie’s life. Most recently, in the weeks prior to my writing this chapter, she has scurried into my study from the sofa downstairs every time she hears me call Jamie on his cell-phone to make sure he is on the 3 p.m. bus on the way home from work. (I was calling him only because the bus schedule changed at the end of the school year, necessitating a change in his daily routine.) Somehow Becca knows that I am talking to Jamie, and she surmises as a result that I am talking about picking him up at the bus stop downtown; exuberantly, she is asking me if she can come along to get him. And because she has abandonment issues, understandably enough, the words that make her happiest are “you can come with us,” which Jamie always utters with a glee to match Becca’s excitement.

  Jamie is right: traveling is great for his heart and his brain. So are art and music, Lucy and Becca. And even though Becca is Jamie’s dog now, we all know that Lucy will be forever in his heart, having helped him grow his brain.

  On the Fields of Play

  Something bad happened to Jamie at a summer camp in 1998, when he was six and a half. For many years we didn’t know what it was; only when Jamie and I started talking about this chapter did he tell me that it had something to do with a diving board. Up through the summer of 1997, he loved going to the town pool in Champaign. He started out as a little aquatic mammal who would jump into practically any body of water, from the bathtub to the Arctic. The following year, though, whenever we proposed going to the pool, he wouldn’t hear of it. I have to assume that he had attempted a dive and had gotten a mouthful of water or worse—though the camp staff never mentioned any unfortunate pool incidents. Whatever may have happened in 1998, I decided in 1999 to make this one of my life’s projects: getting Jamie back into the water.

  I started small, holding him on my hip and easing him into the pool. At first we simply walked around bouncing a little, so that Jamie’s “swimming” experiences consisted of hanging onto my shoulder like a rhesus monkey in water three feet deep. After a few weeks of this, I began a game. I held him away from me, my hands under his armpits, facing me. In a singsong voice, bouncing more strenuously, I said, “He’s my guy and my guy and my guy and my guy, and his name is Jamie B.”—which is what his classmates called him. I gave the “B” two syllables, be-eee. On the second repetition of this line, I slowed down the last bit. And. His. Name. Is. Jamie . . . B! One short, staccato syllable for the “B” this time, and I flung him backwards over my head. (Yes, I always made sure there was no one within twenty feet of us.) Splash!

  He squealed with delight. I spun around and gathered him to me, lest he go under for too long. “Again!” he chortled.

  As you might imagine, we did it again. And after a few reps, I had him swim to me, to my back, and wrap his arms around my neck. I
then proceeded to pretend that I did not know where he was. “Jamie? Jamie?” This elicited waves of laughter. “I’m right here,” he would say, just as he said on the day I lost him at Illinois’s IMPE building. I would turn my head this way and that, but of course, since Jamie was attached to me, I was unable to see him. Laughter, and more laughter.

  And gradually, Jamie got used to the pool again.

  It wasn’t that simple, but that’s what started him on the road to recovering from whatever diving-board misstep had put the Fear of Pool into him the previous year. By the time he was nine, I had gotten Jamie to the point at which he was willing to play by himself in shallow water. Toward the end of the summer of 2001, after we had moved to State College, I thought he had enough confidence to join me—as I held him—in the deep end of the Welch Pool, a few blocks from our house. Jamie tentatively came down the steps, leapt into my arms, and quickly realized that he was nowhere near touching bottom. Indeed, we were in twelve feet of water. “Is deep,” he protested, ungrammatically. “I would sink.”

  “It is deep, sweetie,” I replied. “But you will not sink. Just hold onto me.” All we did, that day, was hang out at the pool’s edge for a few minutes. All I wanted was for him to be in the deep end, not to try to swim on his own or, perish the thought, go off the diving board.

  The following year we joined a health club, the one we eventually left in frustration at its irregular hours. But I will always think of it fondly in one respect, because it is the place Jamie learned to swim. And he learned to swim because, unlike the municipal pools across the country that have been challenged by a combination of attorneys, insurance companies, and grieving parents losing their children to water-wings drownings, this club permitted flotation belts. In fact, they provided flotation belts. So, every weekend, Jamie and I would head to the club. We had a ritual (I had forgotten it, but Jamie reminded me as I was writing this): We would burst out of the men’s locker room and Jamie would cry, “We’re out!”—citing the scene in A Hard Day’s Night when the four lads from Liverpool burst out of the television studio in which they have been rehearsing and run away to gambol and frolic on a field as “Can’t Buy Me Love” soars on the soundtrack. Jamie would then grab a flotation belt—at only 4 feet 5 inches, he could not stand up even in the shallow end—and we would proceed to play in the water for about an hour, mostly by tossing a racquetball back and forth and making spectacular diving catches (or not making them). Gradually we stepped up to jumping in the deep end, flotation belt securely on. Sooner than I would have imagined, Jamie ditched the belt, even in the deep end. By that point, in spring 2003, he had developed an idiosyncratic swimming stroke in which his arms never broke the surface of the water. He would undulate, like a sea lion or a manatee, thrusting forward with his arms under his chest and kicking his legs in a breaststroke-esque fashion. It was ungainly, but it worked, and before I knew it, Jamie had decided to dive and touch the bottom of the deep end, eleven feet down. He was down there too long, I thought, but he made it, and he was thrilled with himself. “You had no trouble holding your breath?” I asked, nervously.

  “No way, José!” Jamie replied.

  “Your chest does not hurt? Your lungs do not hurt?”

  “No way!”

  And now we were off to the races. Not literally: I could not have imagined in 2003 that Jamie would begin his career as a Special Olympics swimmer only six years later, at the age of seventeen. But bit by bit, almost too slowly to perceive, his confidence grew—and so did his competence. That summer, he considered going off the diving board at the outdoor pool of the Penn State Natatorium and actually got out on the board and thought about it for about two full minutes while standing at the edge of the diving board. You can picture the scene, I’m sure—and thankfully, there were only one or two people waiting behind him (though it sucked to be them). Finally he decided to inch carefully back to dry land, whereupon he jumped off the side of the deep end and swam half the length of the pool (a good twenty-five meters) before hauling himself out and announcing to the world, “I am a brave and very good kid.” Which he was. He was simply frightened of the board’s bounciness, because he likes to have a nice steady surface under his feet. And now I know he must have been thinking of that fateful attempt on the diving board five years earlier.

  When the Natatorium’s outdoor pool closed on Labor Day, we moved to the Nat’s indoor pools. In 2001, Jamie had found these too intimidating: one is a fourteen-foot-deep diving pool, one is a six-to-ten-foot-deep lap pool, and one is a three-to-five-foot-deep lap pool. In 2001–2002, he could only manage the shallow end of the last of these. But by 2003, he could jump right into the deeper lap pool, which I (sneakily) called the “big kids’ pool,” and within a few years he could manage—with minimal, but crucial, urging—to swim four laps back and forth. We punctuated these with experiments in how to touch the bottom at both ends, and Jamie was thrilled to discover that when you’re five feet tall, six feet of water isn’t very intimidating at all.

  And then one day, in 2006, not long after his fifteenth birthday, we were playing around the sides of the diving pool alongside six or seven students. I asked Jamie, for the hundredth time, if he wanted to go off the diving board, and for the hundredth time, he replied, “I don’t think so.” As I did on the previous ninety-nine occasions, I said, “OK, then, just checking.” But this time I added, pointing to five lithe and rambunctious young men who were taking turns flying off the board, “You know, they’re not much older than you are, those guys. They’re maybe nineteen or twenty, I think.” And that did it! Before I knew what was up, Jamie was striding over to the board, declaring, “I will do it by myself.” I asked the lifeguard whether Jamie would be allowed to wear his goggles (the outdoor pools in State College forbid this), and he said, “Sure. He’ll probably lose ‘em when he hits the water, but that’s OK if you can get ‘em.” And then splash! Without the slightest hesitation, Jamie had walked right to the end of the bouncy board and flung himself off. He swam to the ladder, goggles still snugly on his face, where I met him with “nice jump!” and a big high-five, and he—you knew this was coming, right?—announced that he would do it again. And then again. And then again.

  By 2010 he was brave enough to attempt a jump from the three-meter platform at the outdoor pool. I was on line for the platform diving—I go off the 5-meter platform, but I will leave the 7.5 and the 10 to younger and more supple folk—when suddenly Jamie joined me. “Do you really want to jump off the platforms?” I asked. “Michael! I can do it,” he replied.

  “OK, then, are you going to jump off the one-meter like you did last year?”

  “No way! I can go off the three.”

  I had my doubts. One of the funny things about those platforms is that they look twice as high once you’re actually on them, so that when you’re up on the five (which doesn’t look very high from the ground), you think you’re jumping off a three-story building. And though the platform is not a bouncy diving board, I worried about Jamie’s fear of heights. The three is ten feet up, of course, but Jamie’s eyes would be fifteen feet off the ground. I figured he would climb up to the three, flip out, and either (a) retreat to the one or (b) get stuck up there so that I’d have to retrieve him.

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “No problem!” he insisted, somewhat dismissively. So I told him that he must, must, must hit the water with his feet first. He must not, must not, must not jump forward the way he does on the spring board, landing knees-and-chest in the water. He must, must, must jump straight down. And so forth. “Michael!” he said, “I got it.”

  When he got to the edge of the platform, Jamie didn’t waver for a second. He sized it up, took a few steps, and wooosh! He went flying into fifteen feet of water from the three-meter platform.

  The following day, Jamie not only went off the three again; he also doodled around the far end of the diving well and then decided to take off from the water’s surface (that is, without jumping in) a
nd touch the bottom. For this he got a warning from the lifeguard (no playing around in the diving well!), but he was so pleased with the feat (and even the lifeguard seemed impressed) that he swam over to me bursting with glee. “I did it!”

  “You did what?” I asked.

  “I touched the bottom! By myself!”

  “Wait, you just touched the bottom? In the deep end? Just now?” That would be fifteen feet down, four feet deeper than the club pool, in which he’d tried this stunt seven years earlier.

  “Uh-huh!”

  “With your hand?”

  “Yes! And I pushed myself back up!”

  “Wow.” That really is impressive. “And you had enough air? Do you feel all right? Did you have any trouble holding your breath?”

  “Michael! I’m fine!”

  Let’s put it this way: the movie of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief opens with Percy sitting at the bottom of the deep end of a pool, where, we find, he has been for an incredible seven full minutes. Now, whenever Jamie plays in a pool, he asks me how long he has been under. I am trying to discourage him from breaking Percy’s record; after all, Percy is the son of Poseidon and staying underwater comes naturally to him. But I am totally thrilled at how pool-adept Jamie has become.

  So much for Jamie’s amateur diving career; he is not a Special Olympics diver. But before I get to the thrilling tale of Jamie’s spectacular debut as a Special Olympics swimmer, in 2009, I have to explain how Jamie became competitive in the first place. And that explanation will take us through Challenger League baseball and the annual Geri Ryan Track Meet, held in Penn State’s indoor track facility (the very locale in which Jamie almost got a foot crushed in a track practice). The Geri Ryan meet was established in 1992, after Geri Ryan, co-manager of Centre County Special Olympics and mother of a child with Down syndrome (Rebecca), died of cancer. Jamie started participating in the Geri Ryan meet in 2005, when he was only thirteen. Challenger League baseball is emphatically noncompetitive. And yet Jamie learned from those experiences to push himself physically—and, crucially, to have fun in doing so.