Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  We talk briefly about this year’s learning-disabled achievers: David Boies, the super lawyer whose dyslexia forced him to build the extraordinary verbal memory he used to overwhelm opponents in court; and John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems.

  Two of society’s titanic winners. “And learning that they had some struggles early,” I say, trying to not sound bitter, “will change views far and wide about the potential of people with learning differences.”

  “Something like that,” she says. “Killing off those negative expectations isn’t nothing. It matters.”

  It’s time to go. She says she hopes we can remain friends and that I’ll continue to help with the gala. I rise from my chair. “You started this school so your son, who’d been discarded, would have a place to go,” I say, putting on my coat. Gary, now well into adulthood, has significant challenges, much like Owen. “Do you think he’d be accepted here today?”

  Those are fighting words. I can’t help it—I am thinking how difficult this is going to be for Owen. To her credit, Sally doesn’t rise to battle.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she says, quietly. “Times change. We’re serving a need and serving it well. Just not anymore for someone like Owen.”

  They plan a small graduation ceremony for early June 2002. Owen’s fifth-grade class will be moving up to the middle school.

  Save one.

  There are few options. We call Ivymount and tell them he’s been “counseled out.” They’re sympathetic. It’s like a game of musical chairs, with the autistic-spectrum kids not able to hear when the music stops. The assistant director says his old school will gladly take him back.

  We tell Owen in early May, a month ahead. We go out to dinner and say he’ll be going back to Ivymount. He’s made a few friends at Lab. They do things together, are starting to form little rituals. Quite a lot about friendship, after all, is ritual. He feels like he belongs there. “It’ll be great, Owie,” Walt says, putting his arm around Owen’s shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll see some of your old friends at Ivymount will still be there.”

  Owen gets this look where he raises his eyebrows and presses his face into the widest of smiles. He calls it his “happy face.” He does it when he’s worried he might cry.

  On the day of the ceremony, the kids give Owen cards they’ve made for him, wishing him well. He’s been with them for five years. They drew pictures of Mickey Mouse, of the Simpsons, which Owen got into at Walt’s behest. Elizabeth, one of several girls adopted from Russia with developmental delays, wrote, “I am your friend Owen. I will miss you so much. I like helping you to be quiet when we are told to be quiet. I think it is nice you like James and the Giant Peach. I also love Disney movies and characters too!” Another friend, Sebastian, drew a picture of Mickey next to Homer Simpson and wrote, “I will miss you and so will Homer.” Most said they hope he’ll make new friends and the card they signed, all together, wishes him “100 years of Walt Magic in Disney World.”

  They all hug him good-bye. Neela Seldin, director of the lower school, hands him a certificate that “acknowledges that Owen Suskind has successfully completed the Elementary Program.” They put a gold seal on it, to make it look like a diploma.

  Owen isn’t fooled. He doesn’t say anything or make a sound in the car on the way home. He just looks out the window. All through the “ceremony” sitting on the grass behind the school, Cornelia tried to hold it together. She wasn’t going to let them see her cry. She feels a combination of anger and devastation—not only for Owen, who is being thrown out of a place he loves—a place she has worked so hard to keep him in—but for all the other spectrum kids she feels have been treated unfairly by a school that had committed to educate them.

  At home, Cornelia tells him she has an afternoon of activities planned—a trip to the video store, the bookstore, some ice cream, and then pizza for dinner. All of his favorite stops.

  Owen thinks for a minute and then shakes his head. He’d rather not. “I think I’d like to just go to the basement and watch my movies. That will make me feel better.”

  Something’s going on in the basement.

  We can’t be sure what.

  It’s a new basement in a new house, just two doors down the street. The house is a little bigger—it has a backyard with a writer’s studio—but everything else is the same. Owen finds comfort in ritual, in sameness, and we’re careful to find just the right places in his new cave for all the key items—the sofa, the TV, and the two small bookcases for his library of videos, all in their original clamshell cases, tightly tucked, spines out, arranged in a system understood by Owen alone.

  On a mid-June day he’s settled in, sitting on the basement’s soft wall-to-wall carpeting—freshly laid just before the move—taking one video off the shelf to study it, front and back, return it, and then take out another.

  I watch from the bottom of the stairs. Since the ouster from Lab School a few weeks ago, I’m doing a lot of this. So is Cornelia. We know it was a blow, but there’s no way to really discuss it with him. His speech is still mostly needs-based, except when something bubbles up from within, something deeper. But that’s rare, and you never know when it might come.

  So I study his moves and float assumptions. A VHS cover for a Disney movie is usually a drawing of all the main characters in a montage, which, for him, must feel like looking at a family picture, an array of loved ones. That’s clearly the way he’s looking at each cover—handling it deftly and so gently, cherishing it, looking from one animated face to the next. Does he love them? What, then, would be the nature of this love?

  He’s logging more time with them than with us these days and more time in the basement, here, than in the old house—which is saying a lot—sorting and watching his videos, trolling online with a new computer we bought for the kids, going about his business, quiet and purposeful, like he’s working on some kind of project.

  He developed a new habit of announcing his descent: “I’ll be in the basement if you need me.” He says this with a more traditional cadence and ease than almost anything else he’s ever said. It’s like someone else’s voice, an octave lower than the atonal alto that usually propels his speech. Cornelia and I are convinced that he heard either Walt or me say this, and he locked on it, like some line of Disney dialogue he’d speak in the voice of Merlin or Jafar. However he got there, though, it’s a leap: a sentence that stretches beyond the first-person singular of what he wants to a directive, helping us know what to think: “Mom, Dad. Please don’t bother me unless it’s important.”

  And down he goes. It’s clear his chronological age may mean less than we once figured, or sometimes hope, but in a pinch we rely on it—saying to each other that he’s eleven, an age when kids start to need their space.

  That lasts a few weeks, until Cornelia is struck with a spasm of separation anxiety—What’s he doing down there?—along with a more generalized anxiety about online chat rooms and the like. I go down that night to check the computer’s history. All his URLs are Disney sites, the Internet Movie Database, or eBay, which he likes to troll in search of discontinued videos, original posters issued at a movie’s debut, or figurines from Disney movies, which were the prize, for decades, inside McDonald’s “Happy Meal” bags. The only predators I detect are Shere Khan and Scar.

  We try to keep the surveillance light—just us, being attentive, all smiles. The yield is modest—there’s no easy way in—and he doesn’t seem to want us prying. In the last days at Lab, when he sensed pending disaster, he mustered every ounce of energy to try to rein in the self-talking, self-stimulatory reverie. He would snap to attention, arms at his side, eyes wide, chin out, like a Marine Corps grunt, whenever a teacher approached, and say, “No silly!” It was like holding back a raging river. After a minute or two, it would crest its banks. But at this point, it had become a matter of back and forth: a minute thinking about, say, how all the Disney villains have some red in their costumes; a minute listening to what the teacher was saying ab
out the Gettysburg Address. At least he could turn it off.

  Which is what he is often doing now as we approach.

  It means, for the first time, he’s developing the ability to hide in plain sight. To pick his moment, dive into his secret world, resurface to do what’s asked of him, then dive deep again.

  This growing capacity to control the thoughts and pictures popping into his head is something we want to help with and expand. At the same time, it makes us crazier; proof, it seems, of some pain he’s hiding, rather than simply his natural reaction against a parental stop and frisk.

  And getting at what he’s feeling—sharing with him, comforting him—trumps all else. So we resolve, hereby, to be better about gathering clues, to be better organized, write down observations, tips, anything suspicious, and exchange reports each night.

  Spies in our own home.

  A Disney movie called Lilo & Stitch is released on June 21. Owen, now Internet enhanced, had been anxiously waiting for the release date and also knew that there’d be trouble. Usually, on a Disney debut day, we end up in one of his favorite Washington-area theaters, first in line.

  Not this time. By mid-June, we’re already in New Hampshire for a summertime ritual that seems open ended, like it might be repeated in coming years, with Walt away all summer at a nearby camp and us in a house on a lake. Hope in the Unseen was selected as required freshman reading two years before at Dartmouth College and they asked me to sign on as a visiting scholar in the summers. I’d left the Wall Street Journal to write books full time and, with Dartmouth providing us a lake house for the summer, we’d officially begun the self-scheduled life.

  All the better to match Owen’s increasingly self-directed life. Which means, on a late June evening, we drive an hour and a half to a drive-in in Fairlee, Vermont. That morning, Owen saw Lilo & Stitch pictured in the movie section of the local newspaper—the only area showing.

  At dusk, we turn onto the main street of the one-street town, which seems happily locked in a time warp: a wood-framed ice cream stand, a white clapboard town hall, a general store, a diner, all capped by one of only two drive-in motels left in America. This was a 1950s invention, driven by the primal need—deep in the species—to watch first-run movies from a bed. The beds were in a stretch of hotel rooms with picture windows facing the big screen, with those hanging car window speakers now sitting on the night table. Such bold innovations have been long ago overtaken by the VCR, HBO, DVDs, and pay-per-view, but this drive-in holds on—the motel rooms now mostly empty—in Fairlee, which, like other tiny towns, had grown accustomed to watching movies from a grassy parking lot of pickups.

  It’s jammed on a muggy night for this Disney offering about an alien—an intelligent, destructive, dog-like critter—who crash-lands in Hawaii and is adopted by Lilo, a friendless, orphaned little girl (Disney, like Dickens, is very big on orphans). She loses her adopted extraterrestrial, Stitch, chaos ensues, villains are revealed then defeated, and in the end she gains him back.

  A key line in the movie relies on the word, ‘ohana. In Hawaiian, it means family, but it has broader cultural connotations, referring to any relatives bound by blood or by choice. In the movie, Lilo—trying to make Stitch understand their growing bond—says to the alien, “‘Ohana means family. Family means no one is left behind.”

  This line leaves no discernible impression on either Cornelia or me, eating popcorn in the front seat. The movie’s fine, if predictable, and we’re already over-loaded with dialogue from a dozen Disney classics—a mountain of memorization.

  Eight months later, when the video is released the first weekend in February 2003, Owen makes sure we are the first ones in line to make the purchase. Soon, it’s a favorite in the basement, running nonstop.

  He’s now more than halfway through his first year back at Ivymount and not being challenged, either academically or socially, where so many of the kids have trouble forming connections. Cornelia’s response is to crank up his programming. She starts piano lessons with an Ivymount teacher who specializes in teaching special needs kids. There are still the rounds of therapist visits and any after-school activity we can find. Not many playdates, though.

  Owen doesn’t seem to mind. All he wants are pads and pencils. Markers, too.

  He’d started drawing three years before at Lab—one of his few strong suits there was art class.

  But this is different. He goes through a pad in a few days and wants another. “Where’s the other pad, Owie?” Cornelia asks. He looks blankly at her. Okay, back to the CVS. A few more days, he needs another one. I look around for what are now two missing pads. They’re nowhere. Could he have hidden them?

  Cornelia’s acting director of our intelligence service. She’s with him most of every day, and at night she reports her findings. He’s distracted. He’s watching lots of videos. The school reports that he’s doing lots of “silly.” I listen, more analyst than agent.

  “Boy, he’s really gotten into drawing,” I say to her on a sunny Saturday, as midday approaches.

  “Wonder what’s up with that,” she says with a shrug, before slipping out with Walt for an afternoon of errands.

  After Owen and I have lunch, he’s seized by an urge and leaves the kitchen table for his room. A moment later, he’s back, padding across the ceramic Mexican tile on his way to the basement—pad, pencils, and one of his large animation books in hand.

  I wait a minute before I tiptoe behind him, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. He’s over on the rug, kneeling but hunched forward, flipping furiously through the book; as I edge closer, I see it’s a book with artwork from How To Draw Disney’s The Little Mermaid. My fear he’ll spot me begins to fade; he’s so engaged I probably could knock over a vase and he wouldn’t turn.

  Standing silently over him, I can see he’s stopping at pictures of Sebastian, the wise crab, who watches over the heroine, Ariel. There are lots of Sebastians—twenty or so, one with Ariel, one alone, pencil sketches when the animators were developing the character, full-color renderings of key scenes from the movie. Which is where he stops, late in the book: at a slide of Sebastian with a fearful look—mouth open, eyes wide—on his little crab face.

  The sketchbook flies open, the black pencil in hand. He looks from the picture to his pad: picture, pad, picture, pad. And then the tightly gripped pencil begins to move, a lead-lined crawl. Most kids, most anyone, would begin with the face—the first spot we all tend to look—but he starts on the edge, with the crab tentacle, then claw, which take shape in a single line. I think of those old-style drafting machines, with two pencils poised above two pads, the pencils connected to a mechanical apparatus, a crosshatch, so that moving one would create the same motion, the same precise line, with the other. At the end, you’d have two identical drawings, side by side.

  It’s happening below me: his eyes following one line, the Disney artist’s line, as a foot away his hand repeats it.

  But here’s the crazy part: every part of him starts moving except that rock-steady hand. His whole body begins twisting and flinching—moving as much as you can move while kneeling, with his free arm bending in the angle of Sebastian’s left claw. Five minutes later, when he gets to the face, I look up and see a reflection of Owen’s face, me behind him, in the darkened screen of the TV, just in front of us. The look on the crab’s face in the book is replicated in my son’s reflection on the TV where, of course, we’ve watched this scene—of Sebastian watching Ariel lose her voice—so many times.

  And then it’s over, like a passing storm. He drops the pencil, rears back, turns his head, and out of the corner of his eye starts squinting down at an almost precise replica of what is in the book.

  It freaks me out.

  He can’t write his name legibly. But here is a fairly sound rendering of a Disney character that might have easily appeared in any one of twenty animation books in his room.

  I’m about to say something—I have to speak, looking down at his creation—but his motion
preempts me, leaping up and bounding off. Doesn’t even look my way, and then vanishes up the stairs, most likely to play out some Mermaid scene.

  I’m left standing over the sketchbook. I squat down and begin flipping. It’s one character after another—the Mad Hatter next to Rafiki, and then Lumiere, the candelabrum from Beauty and the Beast, and, on the next page, Jiminy Cricket. The expressions are all so vivid, mostly fearful. Dozens of them, page after page.

  I hear a noise and snap around. Annie, our black lab. “Just me, girl, spying on your brother.”

  I settle in cross-legged on the carpet to examine the pages. What do the drawings mean? Are the faces of these characters a reflection of hidden, repressed feelings? Does he race through the books looking for an expression that matches the way he feels and then literally draws that emotion to the surface?

  Could be a half hour I’m sitting, maybe longer. I’m inside him, or so I imagine, running my fingers along the slight indentations of carbon—a smiling mouth of Baloo, a weeping Dwarf, a soaring crow from Dumbo—to try to touch him, his tears and smiles and moments of sudden flight. This is the crushing pain of autism. Of not being able to know your own child, to share love and laughter with him, to comfort him, to answer his questions. Cornelia spends time in here, in his head—this child she carried—whispering to him. Now I’m in here, too.

  Time passes, pages turn. And then I see writing. Next to the last page of the sketchbook, there’s something. It’s his usual scrawl, the letters barely legible: “I Am The Protekter Of Sidekicks.”

  I flip to the last page. In the chicken scratch of a kindergartner is a single sentence.