To Siri with Love

by Judith Newman

  Researchers have looked at why Thomas the Tank Engine (a series of British children’s books about talking trains that morphed into a television cartoon series, a line of toys, and the poster boys—uh, trains—for the UK National Autistic Society) is so deeply appealing to autistic kids. It starts with the train’s faces—not just the easy-to-read expressions, but the very fact that the trains have faces. It’s the melding of machine and feeling that seems so core to the autistic self. The personalities and characteristics of each character are unchanging; Gordon is always going to be the fastest and most powerful engine, Edward will always be a friend to all, and Thomas will always be an overzealous little twit. (Not that I’ve overthought this.)

  There is also the static background and scenery. While the narration must have cost considerable bucks—the cartoon was narrated by Ringo Starr in the UK and George Carlin in the United States—the Thomas animation is very cheap. This means there isn’t a lot going on besides the trains in the foreground. Even the faces of the trains don’t have much detail—they are happy or they are sad, without a lot in between. This is extremely soothing to people who can be easily distracted by tiny details other people wouldn’t notice, or who find the subtly of human expressions hard to parse. In a world where emotion could be so confusing, nothing could be clearer than the slightly creepy mad or happy faces on a Thomas or a Percy—and they get mad and happy with great regularity. Their emotions are almost binary. Because in the land of Sodor, things go wrong, and then by the end of the episode they’re set right. Always.

  And then, there’s the trains’ suitability for detailing and classification. The original tiny wooden trains each cost fifteen to thirty dollars, which is, I believe, the fault of autistic people. Why? Because they notice knockoffs immediately. Don’t mess with autistic kids and their originals. The auction houses of Sotheby’s and Christie’s may have extremely well-groomed, socially adept people as their front men, but I’m convinced the people who really know what they’re doing are people in Lycra golf pants with their shirts half unbuttoned, railing about how anyone can see that the splatter patterns in this so-called Jackson Pollock are not authentic.

  For many years, Thomas the Tank Engine dominated our lives. There were years of Thomas-themed birthdays, movies, books, videos; entire vacations planned around seeing a life-size steamer Thomas train. Somewhere there exists a piece of Thomas-related pornography I wrote to my husband. Wisely I didn’t show it to him, but it involved Gordon (the largest and strongest of the engines) and Emily and whistles and smokestacks and engines being coupled and a satisfied Emily, smoke feathering out of her stack, murmuring to Gordon, “You’re a really useful engine.”

  Eventually Thomas gave way to replicas of New York City subway cars; Gus has every model of those, too, and eagerly awaits the arrival of new ones. The new Second Avenue subway line in New York City, which will eventually stretch from Hanover Square to 125th Street, is every bit as significant to him as Comic-Con is to a Trekkie. For years Gus attended a clever program in New York City called Subway Sleuths, an after-school program for train obsessives on the spectrum who (so the thinking goes) may be more inclined to learn the rules of social interaction when they are practicing them around a shared interest. “We weren’t trying to get kids to be neurotypical, but to get kids to communicate in whatever way they do,” Susan Brennan, one of the creators of the program, told me. “So our focus isn’t on social skills; it’s on building connections and awareness that there are all these social rules. That’s an important step—just being conscious that there are all these rules. Some kids will be able to put them into practice better and more quickly than others, but everyone is more likely to be receptive to social cues when they’re doing something they love.”

  At first I thought Subway Sleuths was silly, just another way to occupy the kids for a little while so that parents could have a break. Then one day I asked Gus about another kid, Lev, he met in Sleuths. “What do you talk about with Lev?” I asked. “Oh, timetables, or the 1, 2, and 3 line, the weekend changes on the B and D. You know, Mommy,” he added, “things that are important.”

  It is a trope of autism that people with the condition are not as feeling as neurotypical people. That couldn’t be more wrong. It’s just that sometimes they have deep feelings for things the rest of us don’t. The parody site the Onion News Network, for example, has a series of news segments from a man they call “the Autistic Reporter.” Here, Michael Falk (played brilliantly by the actor-playwright John Cariani) sees the news somewhat differently than the average person. In a news report called “Train Thankfully Unharmed in Crash That Killed One Man” Falk notes that a “hundred-thousand-pound CometLiner 2 stainless steel car” ran over a man who had jumped on the tracks to retrieve a woman’s purse. He was instantly killed—but “luckily,” Falk adds, “there was no structural damage to the car’s chassis, so it was only a matter of cleaning the train to remove the human debris to return it to its pristine state.”

  Now, I’m not saying Gus would be immune to the death of a human. But he’d be truly delighted that the train was not harmed.

  These days, after he does his homework, Gus and Michelle (his current caretaker/train buddy) head to one of his favorite places: Port Authority, Penn Station, or Grand Central. At Grand Central he is greeted by many of the conductors; one had an MTA badge printed up for him, and another gave him his conductor’s cap. Many let him get in their booths, flip on the microphone, and announce the routes, which of course he knows: “Harlem–125th Street, Melrose, Tremont, Fordham . . .” By the time he makes it up to White Plains and North White Plains the passengers often end up clapping.

  A few, of course, get irritated. He has had anxious passengers check the booth to make sure he’s not actually driving the train. Last year there was an incident where a conductor on the New Haven line messed up the order of the stops and he corrected her. When she first ignored him and then gave him the stink eye, he sobbed. She smirked. To that cow, I wanted to say: “Sure, he was crying because you wouldn’t speak to him. But mostly he was crying because by not announcing the stops and connections correctly, you were dishonoring the train.”

  * * *

  It is my fear that for all his passion for vehicles, Gus will never be able to go anywhere by himself. Or, alternatively, that he will go everywhere himself, and disaster will ensue. Just as it has for Darius McCollum.

  Thankfully, at fourteen, Gus is delighted to just watch the trains and buses and announce their routes. He shows no interest in actually being a driver. He seems less likely to become a train thief than a trainspotter. Trainspotting is a phenomenon that began in the UK in 1942, when Ian Allan, a kid in the press office of the Southern Railway in the UK, got tired of answering endless questions from train enthusiasts about the locomotives. He suggested to his office that they put out a simple booklet detailing the trains’ vital statistics. His boss thought he was insane, and so Allan produced the book himself. The ABCs of Southern Locomotives sold out its first run immediately. Further guides to every railroad line in the UK followed, and trainspotting clubs (then called loco-spotting clubs) sprang up everywhere. By the late ’40s these clubs had a quarter of a million members. In the ’50s and ’60s a million ABC guides, listing twenty thousand locomotives, were being sold every year. Ian Allan became wealthy.

  But with the death of the locomotive as a main form of British transportation, membership in these clubs waned. Now they have a mere ten thousand or so hard-core members. Still, England has always embraced its eccentrics. Go to any station in the UK, and you’ll see a few of these anorak-clad outliers jotting down the numbers of passing locomotives in their well-worn notebooks. They look solemn yet content. Years ago Chris Donald, the founder of the popular British comic magazine Viz and an enthusiastic trainspotter, told an interviewer, “In some ways you can get as much from a train as you can from a woman.” No word on how his wife, Dolores, mother of their three children, feels about this.

 
; * * *

  Given that Gus doesn’t seem headed for a life of train hijacking, why do I get so worked up about Darius McCollum?

  Because I have seen what happens when Gus has a compulsion. I’ve seen the hours and hours he devotes to watching the trains, memorizing them, knowing the routes, learning the names of the drivers, learning where they live. What if that love turns into something else? If he decides he wants to drive a train instead of watching it, he will be driving a train.

  Darius McCollum keeps me up at night, so I started a page on Facebook: “Darius McCollum Needs a Job.” I needed to know: Why for the love of God couldn’t the MTA find work for this man?

  When I was obsessively discussing Darius on my Facebook page, one woman wrote, “Well, of course the MTA couldn’t hire him; their insurance will never stand for it. He’s just too unpredictable.” And I wanted to shout at her, you couldn’t be more wrong! Darius McCollum is 100 percent predictable. Let me tell you what he’s going to do as soon as he’s free: he’s going to steal a vehicle and safely drive it around.

  One woman, happy that I had started the page, wrote to me privately. Ramona A was thirty-three years old in 1983 when she was hospitalized for a serious eating disorder. McCollum, who had just stolen his first train, had been committed to her unit. “He was this extremely gentle, sweet boy who had great difficulty communicating, couldn’t relate at all to his peers (the other patients viewed him as ‘weird’ and he was shunned), and could only talk about the subway system. He had all these odd and off-putting behaviors which, looking back, I can now identify as putting him on the high end of the autism spectrum. Like he would just talk and talk and talk at you—usually about subways and trains. His speech was very fast, and often garbled. If you managed to get a word in edgewise, he would simply ignore you and keep talking. He would invade people’s personal space. He was completely oblivious to social cues. Also (sorry—this is gross) he would sneak around the unit until he found a place where there were no other people—and he would poop on the floor. I’m not sure why. Maybe that was his way of showing how angry he was at being there.” His mother would visit him, but she seemed at a loss. But he was such a nice person, Ramona recalled. “I just can’t imagine him being in prison.”

  Ramona’s note upset me so much that I made the mistake of visiting Darius’s own Facebook page. There is a photo of him happily posing in front of a D train; and there are several recent posts:

  I need a wife. Looking for someone to care for, love and be able to share myself with and also someone who can understand me for who I am. I just want to be loved.

  By curiosity, I was wondering if there are any people out there who may like trains or are even just train buffs. It’s a passion of mine.

  I have and always will be a one women man. Even though I am looking for someone, I just want that one person.

  Then there was the most recent post, a photo of a woman with long black hair. “Now you know, this is my current young lady who I am choosing to be with and I love her very much.” That was November 7, 2015. He was arrested for taking a bus on November 13.

  I wrote to Darius’s “current young lady,” Mary. She is from the Philippines, and she and Darius met on some sort of dating site. They have never met in person. She seems very far from the “mail-order brides” from the Philippines you’ve heard about. She had become very attached to Darius, and was deeply upset by his arrest (note: English is obviously not her first language): “. . . when I saw him he arrested I am shocked because he have many secret of his life that he hide to me all, now I am much sad and worry to him, hoping someday that he do good for better person. I did not judge him, I understand him.” But when she discovered that Darius was not, as he had told her, an MTA employee, she was less understanding. She felt betrayed, and at a loss. Mary had never heard of autism before.

  I emailed Darius’s attorney, Sally Butler, offering my help without exactly knowing what that help would be. I think it involved winning the lottery; that way, I could buy Darius a “shadow” for a year, someone whose job it would be to make sure he was safe doing his job, thus convincing the MTA to take him on.

  I was happy to hear that there has been an enormous outpouring of sympathy for Darius. There was a documentary being planned about his life, and a fictionalized movie, starring Julia Roberts as his lawyer.

  Still, what good did it do? He was in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. He is an only child, his parents are elderly and live in South Carolina, and at any rate they had given up. “I think my office and our team are pretty much his family at this point,” Butler said.

  I blubbered for a while, and then I called the MTA. I needed to know. What would be SO terrible about finding this guy a job?

  Adam Lisberg, the external director of communications, is trying to be patient, but he talks to me like I’m a slightly dim toddler who needs a time-out. “Ummm . . . he stole a train. He steals buses. He will never be hired here in any capacity. Over and over and over he has failed to follow MTA laws.” The MTA does not take a position on whether he should be helped or criminally prosecuted; they just know there is no place for him in their system. “Do you think we should have someone who has impersonated an MTA authority actually work for the MTA?” Lisberg asks.

  Yes. Yes, I do.

  Lisberg explains that the problem is not that Darius is autistic; in fact, he suggests that were it not for people on the spectrum, there might not be an MTA. “There are a fair number who are on operations side, or are planners with the buses,” he says. “They love it. They can’t get enough. We have people all over the system who are on the spectrum. That’s not it. But this guy can’t control his impulses. If he can’t control his impulses from the outside, what do you think he’ll be like if he actually works here and gets it into his head that he wants to take a particular bus or train that day?” Lisberg can see he isn’t convincing me. “Look, bus drivers can lose their jobs if they can’t keep their uniforms in good shape. I think stealing a bus goes beyond that, don’t you?”

  No, Mr. Lisberg, I do not. What I think is that Darius McCollum—and someday, my Gus—will be the best employee you ever had.

  And their uniforms will be spotless.

  Six

  Blush

  “Don’t . . . do . . . anything,” Henry hisses as I continue to do exactly what I was doing before: nothing.

  In the state Henry’s in, it’s best not to establish eye contact. So I continue to answer email on my phone as I mutter, “What exactly do you think is going to happen here?”

  “I know you,” he says. “You’re going to speak to him. You’re going to ask him for a photo. You’re going to dance.”

  Thanks to my friend Janice, who ran Billboard and Hollywood Reporter, Henry and I are at a photo shoot in LA for one of his cultural heroes, Andy Samberg. Samberg and his crew, Lonely Island, have a movie coming out about an obnoxious Justin Bieber–ish rock star. The premise of this shoot is that he and his boys are emerging from a Hummer (cue fog machine) with their entourage of bodyguards and a driver. Only the bodyguards are seven-year-olds and the driver is Henry. A few days earlier I’d gotten a call from the photo director of Billboard.

  “Can your son act?” she asked me.

  “Not at all,” I said. “But he’s really good at staring straight ahead and not smiling.”

  “Fine, he’s hired,” she replied.

  So I used frequent-flier miles to get to Los Angeles so Henry could meet Samberg. And I am having a proud-mother moment: he looks splendid in his tailored black suit, Dolce & Gabbana loafers, sunglasses, and fake CIA-inspired earpiece. He even enjoyed being fussed over by the stylist, or enjoyed it as much as his general gloominess would allow.

  The problem, for Henry, was that at any moment I might do something that every single person in that room would be sniggering about later. Like tell him he looks nice. Or ask Samberg for his autograph. Or take a photo of the adorable prop girl he told me was so pretty. OK, maybe I did that. May
be he died internally. But: memories!

  It is thrilling that someone in this world thinks I’m a loose cannon. I am about as loose a cannon as Emily Dickinson. But in Henry’s mind, I am only about thirty seconds away from grabbing Andy Samberg and making out with him on the hood of the Hummer. Just because one time, one time only, I sang and spelled out the words to “Y.M.C.A.” while his bus drove off to camp. I mean seriously, if you came of age in the 1970s, wouldn’t you?

  Here’s a dirty little secret of parenthood: making our children cringe is one of our great pleasures. Yes, sometimes the embarrassment is inadvertent. As a physician, my mother believed all medical details were inherently interesting, which may be why she used to love regaling my friends with stories of how difficult my birth was; then she would offer to show them her cesarean scar. But more often, as parents, we know what we’re doing. Embarrassment is muscle flexing with humor. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Michelle Obama noted, “Barack and I take great joy in embarrassing our children. We threaten them. Sometimes when you see me whispering to them in a crowd I’m saying, ‘Sit up or I’m going to embarrass you. I’m going to start dancing.’”