Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  Of course this touches off celebration in the matriarchy. Owen effusively introduces “one of the greatest actors of all time and my good friend” to Maureen and all the girls.

  This is exciting for all concerned: the female artists having witnessed many versions of Jafar drawn over the past year, as well as for Jonathan, an actor meeting an appreciative audience. He does not disappoint, turning the praise after a moment on Owen, and queuing him gently. “Owen, isn’t something happening tonight?”

  It takes him just a second. “Yes, I’m having a Halloween party tonight at my clubhouse and everyone’s invited.”

  That’s what the rented house is called—“the Clubhouse”—which is fitting in that the young men rarely sleep there. It’s officially named Newfound Academy, after the New Hampshire lake that’s next to Walt’s summer camp, and—in ways both conscious and subconscious—there’s a desire to bring to Owen’s life some of the self-reliance that has been instilled in his older brother.

  Tyler, the program director, carries the camp’s old-world, energetic optimism (the cultural norm during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency) to great effect. The three young men, after all, are without cynicism, the attitudinal currency of much of the developed world. It simply doesn’t exist in autism, like lying, but with fewer attendant complications. Take away jaded, world-wise appraisals, distancing and disdain, and you’re left with appreciation and participatory vigor. Tyler directs this readiness to tasks, like lessons in cooking and balancing checkbooks, travel training (riding subways and busses), and bike outings or regular hikes on woodland trails. There’s a lot of role-playing in the house, with Tyler acting one day like a distracted job interviewer, and the next like a frustrated customer. If the young men are to succeed in the workplace, they’ll have to deal with the uncooperative and the impatient.

  Ben already had a job working at a local supermarket—a place where Owen is now trying to get a part-time job. So, in the week leading up to Halloween, Tyler worked with Owen in the clubhouse’s kitchen on speed, technique, and customer courtesy while bagging groceries.

  A “practice bag”—filled with dry goods like cans and cleaning supplies—is still on the counter as Owen and Jonathan string cobwebs in the kitchen and then move to the living room to prepare for the party.

  Once the room seems well webbed, the two of them sit on the couch. Owen says he just wants to look at the room, make sure the webs are hung just right. After a moment, Jonathan suggests they keep moving—it’s already late afternoon, and there’s much to do for the event—but Owen says just a couple more minutes.

  When asked a few years later what he was feeling that day, he mentioned that time on the couch. “It was Halloween and Jonathan Freeman was there. It was the greatest day of my life and it all was going so fast. I wanted to slow it down. To just be in this day for as long as I could.”

  We wake up, little by little, throughout our lives. There are signature days that are like thresholds crossed. They reveal a before and after.

  This was a day like that for Owen.

  After several years, when he was told high school kids don’t dress up for Halloween, he wonders why the edict is lifted now that he is of college age. As we unload food from the car, he asks me why. I have no real answer. College Halloween parties, I tell him, are the stuff of legend.

  “I’m glad Halloween’s back,” is all he says, and soon he’s slipping into the costume of Jack Skellington, the treacherous and romantic Pumpkin King from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. We all worked on it with him in the late afternoon, stitching rubbery bones on his dark gloves. Once he’s snug in it, Jonathan—with a hand seasoned by decades in theater—deftly applies the makeup in the bathroom of the clubhouse.

  For so many years, it was Owen and his autistic friends, often dressed as Disney characters, who carried later than most the magical realism found in small children, as they knock on each door with a smile that says, “Look, who I am tonight. I am what I imagine.”

  They ran into the high school prohibition and, as for Owen, he didn’t understand why. The reason kids don’t dress up and knock on doors when they’re in the tenth or eleventh grade is because those are the years their basic architecture—the foundations of their personality—begin to settle. Their inner, private selves start to take shape, as does their sensibility of how everyone—parents and teachers, included—offer a face to the world. They begin to feel deeply the divide between how they feel and how they behave, and are forced to recognize the consequences, for better or worse, that rest on drawing that line just so.

  Once kids get to college, they’ve come to accept that our inner life—a place of restricted access—is where we live and love, and that we all wear masks in public; masks they joyously discard for a grown-up Halloween and replace with some mask of their choosing, also crafted for presentation and effect.

  How much Owen senses these shifts is not clear. Though tonight, much is reversed: the masked people come to Owen. Girls from his art class come—Maureen, too, and her husband—mixing with his clubhouse mates, their families, and friends from school: Connor, of course, but quite a few others from high school, too. Laura, Owen’s same-aged first cousin, and now a Georgetown University freshman, also stops by with her friends.

  The three-bedroom ranch, with its tag sale furniture, is soon filled with people from many parts of Owen’s life, enjoying each other’s company, drinking, eating, and listening to music. In the center of the swirl is Jonathan, greeting an array of kids from Owen’s school, who know quite a bit about him, and not just from Owen.

  Certainly, he’s deeply appreciated by a fellow Movie God like Connor, who treats him with giddy deference. But Owen tells everyone who he is, and even the unaffiliated already knew the movie and the character, if not who did the voice work. He also claims another IMDB credit, favored by a certain subset of aficionados: he was the voice of Tito Swing, the jazz piano player in the band that lives inside a jukebox on PBS’s Shining Time Station. Brian, dressed as Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, is at his side much of the night, having a cathartic moment not unlike Owen’s first sighting of Freeman at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Jonathan welcomes the attention—“now Brian, which episode was that, number 162”—as, hour by hour, he wades into this upside-down world. Here, he leads the marquee. Special needs kids mix easily among their so-called “typical” peers. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas runs in one room, rock and roll—and rap—blares from another, and a gangly autistic young man in skeletal whiteface moves about with an affectionate attentiveness and flexibility that runs counter to his neurological profile.

  He just wants to make sure everyone has a good time.

  The next morning, Jonathan—sleeping in Walt’s bedroom—awakens to a thrumming on the door.

  “Who’s there?” he calls several times. No answer. It’s the wagging tail of our dog, Gus, who’s nose-up to the door of Owen’s bedroom as his heavy tail pounds Walt’s door. The reason Owen can’t hear him is that “A Whole New World,” the inspirational ballad from Aladdin, is blaring in his room.

  A few minutes later at breakfast Jonathan asks, “Did you play that for my benefit, Owen?”

  Owen looks up quizzically from his bowl of cereal. “No, I play that every morning.” Why? If he was able to articulate it to Jonathan, he’d say that it clarifies and nourishes his inner self, and helps him navigate the threshold between how he feels and how he behaves. Basically, it grounds him, like so much of the Disney fare he carries, giving him the strength to face the world—a whole new world it seems each morning—which is particularly difficult when it’s hard to read how people see you.

  But he’s managing it. He’s recognizing—and accepting—who he is, both in his own eyes and the eyes of others

  We didn’t really understand what was going on until he explained it to us a few years later. Not surprisingly, he did it by using a scene from a movie. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a Disney movie. He’d perio
dically use a non-Disney movie as archetype, relying on the architecture of plot and character to tease some truth from himself.

  In this case, it was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was one of the live-action films he seized upon in his senior year in high school. The 1975 movie by the Monty Python troupe spoofs King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It’s a cult classic, quite durable over the decades. It was one of my favorites. I’d watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a BBC import that was a hit on PBS in the mid 1970s.

  When the movie came out, I was a sophomore in high school. I rediscovered it with Owen, who was drawn to it, initially, because John Cleese (who plays Sir Lancelot) and Eric Idle (who plays Sir Robin) had both done lots of voice work for the animated movies he liked.

  We watched it together and swapped dialogue. One scene that he couldn’t get enough of involved a father, a medieval lord, talking to his fey and feckless son from the tower of the family’s castle.

  FATHER: ONE DAY, LAD, ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS!

  HERBERT: WHAT, THE CUTAINS?

  FATHER: NO, NOT THE CURTAINS, LAD. ALL THAT YOU CAN SEE! STRETCHED OUT OVER THE HILLS AND VALLEYS OF THIS LAND! THIS’LL BE YOUR KINGDOM, LAD!

  HERBERT: BUT, MOTHER—

  FATHER: FATHER, I’M FATHER.

  HERBERT: BUT FATHER, I DON’T WANT ANY OF THAT.

  FATHER: LISTEN, LAD. I’VE BUILT THIS KINGDOM UP FROM NOTHING. WHEN I STARTED HERE, ALL THERE WAS WAS SWAMP. ALL THE KINGS SAID I WAS DAFT TO BUILD A CASTLE IN A SWAMP, BUT I BUILT IT ALL THE SAME, JUST TO SHOW ’EM. IT SANK INTO THE SWAMP.

  SO, I BUILT A SECOND ONE.

  THAT SANK INTO THE SWAMP.

  SO I BUILT A THIRD ONE.

  THAT BURNED DOWN, FELL OVER, THEN SANK INTO THE SWAMP.

  BUT THE FOURTH ONE STAYED UP.

  AN’ THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE GONNA GET, LAD—THE STRONGEST CASTLE IN THESE ISLANDS.

  Owen would do the scene, often wanting to do the father. And then laugh uproariously. Could barely make it to the end.

  And, after one such bout, with Cornelia and I present, he said, matter-of-factly, “That’s my life.”

  We leaned in, and he explained:

  The first castle I built at the Lab School and it fell into the swamp when I had to leave. The second castle I built at my next place, at Ivymount, which I liked, but that fell into the swamp when I had to get homeschooled. The third castle I built when I made it to high school. That burned down, fell over into the swamp when I met those bullies. The fourth castle, I started building when I got that call from Jonathan Freeman. And my life as a great Disney animator and expert began. And that castle stood, the strongest in these islands. That’s because it’s built on all the fallen castles.

  It was humbling and hard to hear that—to hear how he placed our efforts, both in victory and defeat, as part of a sunken foundation. The homeschooling, which we saw as such a triumph, didn’t register that way for him. He wanted to be with other kids, not in some room with his mother.

  And, of course, it all ranks behind the moment Jonathan called. Why should we be surprised? It’s hard to remember that Owen—like all kids, and all of us—is…different yet the same. His differences are so striking, that when you hit that sameness—that we are all essentially identical in our urges and needs and joys—it’s still a surprise.

  When he was a tiny kid, fallen silent, I wrote that scene in the Wall Street Journal article where Cedric gets the acceptance letter from M.I.T., a letter directly to him, affirming his worth and capacity, and—pressing to his chest—says, “This is it. My life’s about to begin.” When he gets the letter, his ticket out of the ghetto, his mother reaches out to touch him—it’s her triumph, too—but he turns away, already gone, looking to the horizon.

  Loving and letting go. It happened with Walt, and now it’s happening with his brother. His crafting of the four castles into a life metaphor, with Jonathan at the center, throws both Cornelia and I backward, to see that first phone call for what it truly was.

  When Jonathan asked from the speakerphone what Owen thought Aladdin was about, he said, “It’s about finally accepting who you really are. And being okay with that.”

  That was really Owen talking about himself, though he was using Aladdin as his surrogate.

  That was the moment he saw it. Now, we could see it, too.

  It was his inner hero, beginning to emerge.

  A few days after the Halloween party, Owen is sitting in the kitchen with Cornelia. I’m off working. She makes dinner for the two of them. It’s been the two of them for so long, so many hours and days. She can talk to him more frankly nowadays. And she does, about ideas she has for Newfound Academy, about how well he’s done and will, she’s sure, in the days ahead.

  He meets candor with candor, looking at her intently, waiting until she meets his gaze.

  “I’ve decided I want to go away to college, like Walter.”

  Define emergence. From where, toward what?

  The only thing we were sure of was what we’d learned long ago: it only works for our son if it’s self-directed. He’d have to lead—there was no other way. And we’d have to work off of clues to support him, just as we had been since he was a small boy speaking his invented language. Now, though, the stakes were so much higher. We’re helping him plot a path away from us.

  The night of his grand pronouncement about going away to college like his brother—we begin our usual effort of deciphering: is this a lark, an uninformed notion based on what Walt, his only role model, has done? Is there some other desire tucked within, of being free to go his own way, watch as many videos as he wants, have gatherings like the Halloween party, and be liberated from the pressures of the transition program, or is it just the natural passage of a child needing to leave his parents to find himself—to become himself?

  Is it simply wanting to be like everyone else?

  Maybe all those things.

  What was indisputable: in an eventful six months, from Freeman’s call to graduation to the trip to Disney Animation and the Halloween party, he is edging out into the wider world. Each instance, gives us a chance to see how others reacted to him, in a first encounter, and how he responds. Our long-held concerns, that he would be off-putting and incomprehensible to the uninitiated, the non-expert, the stranger, and then treated poorly—are easing. The bullying and his regression set him back a year; he still carries the scars. But the intervention of his own internal voices—an ongoing conversation with his wise sidekicks that, once revealed, we could gently guide—help him charge back. Though he was just beginning to master the divide between feelings and behavior, he seems to be rising, ever more, to the challenge of presenting himself to people he does not know.

  The complications are still vast, with him not being able to hedge or fudge in these encounters. He can only show who he is, his essence, and hope for a favorable response. But the responses are good—better than good.

  And now he wants more.

  Cornelia and I begin scheduling visits to college programs in something of a frenzy. This is what Owen wants—one of the first things he’s ever really requested. How can we help him achieve it? That is the only question. If he’s going to get accepted into some program, and be able to successfully attend next fall, many things need to improve—and fast. His expressive speech is strong, whether giving the graduation speech or talking to Disney stalwarts. Successful social interactions—something we’d been working on for years—are a whole other game. It’s the difference between monologue and dialogue, between shooting foul shots and actually playing basketball.

  The big opponent: the self-stimming Owen’s been doing since he was three. It’s been reduced dramatically, of course. But it’s still there, especially when he’s not in a one-on-one situation with an ardent interlocutor, or when he’s stressed and his mind wanders. He’s made progress; he can now attend to a task, even one of little interest, for five minutes. But then he’ll break into quickstep, doing a little hand flap or t
hrow out his arms, a bit like Jackie Gleason in that “and away we go” move from “The Honeymooners,” or Jim Carrey in a full, cartoon-character gesticulation in The Mask. Keeping his attention focused and reducing stim are clearly linked—and, beyond one-on-one interaction, there’s been some success in very structured settings, like classrooms. But most workplaces and all college dorms are free-for-alls, as are shopping malls, busy sidewalks—most anywhere.

  Cornelia consults with Dan Griffin, tells him the clock is ticking. Owen will probably have to visit schools for evaluations early next year, just three or four months from now.

  Dan starts visiting Newfound Academy once a week, in addition to his group session with the boys. Together, he, Cornelia, and the program manager, Tyler, begin to institute various behavior modification programs, some already tried, some new, all urgent. The first feature is a “stim meter,” which rates everybody’s stims from 1 to 5 on the degree of disturbance it might cause. This is matched with something of a stim-replacement therapy, identifying an imminent outbreak of a high-disturbance stim—like Owen jumping up and pacing, clearly a code 5—and replacing it with a still satisfying but lower-disturbance stim—a code 2—like clenching fists over and over.

  The satisfaction issue is important. The reason autistic kids do the stimming is it feels good reintegrating senses or settling a jangled nervous system. But it’s also related to attention. To keep it from drifting, Cornelia and Dan create a system of prompts, using the vibrate function on Owen’s cell phone. In an e-mail asking for Dr. Lance Clawson’s assistance—especially in reviewing Owen’s mix of medications—Dan writes that, “in this little Manhattan Project,” we “would love to have someone come up with a Google app that emits vibrations at random intervals that can be tweaked from afar by a computer or smartphone.” Cornelia searches far and wide for one; there’s none to be found.