Following Ezra (19 page)

 

 

Years later, I’m sitting next to Ezra at a matinee of a film called
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
. The movie is decent, but barely holding my attention. About forty-five minutes in, I shift my focus. Instead of watching the goofy animated animals on the screen, I zero in on my twelve-year-old son gazing at the action, mesmerized, in bliss. In the darkened theater, I watch Ezra’s face, illuminated by the glow of the screen. Lost in the movie, he wears a facial expression of pure joy: his lips turn up in a grin; his eyes dance with delight while he watches the colors and shapes and listens to the sound track.

My grandmother used to do something like this. Though my Grandpa Dave was an avid watcher of sports, Grandma Minnie could barely tell a baseball bat from a hockey stick. But she loved her husband. In the den of their apartment, she positioned her chair in the corner, just to the side of the TV: When Dave sat in his La-Z-Boy to watch the Red Sox, she would watch Dave.

That’s what I have come to relish on these outings: to sit in darkened theaters watching animated animals and aliens and dinosaurs and robots. Sitting in crowded cinemas on opening weekend or in nearly empty theaters watching mediocre films, I watch my son, my child who almost everywhere else is twitching and anxious and uncomfortable, but who for these ninety minutes or so exudes true happiness.

Other children outgrow their interest in animated films, moving on to teen movies and the world of sophisticated entertainment: from
Finding Nemo
to
High School Musical
to
Lord of the Rings
. Ami and Noam were once as focused on animated fare as their brother, but Ami grows to love
Anchorman
and
Superbad
, and Noam becomes enamored with the Harry Potter films after he reads the books. Ezra has never moved on. Instead, as he has gotten older, he has become more and more preoccupied with the world of animated characters and movies—as if the entire universe of live-action movies doesn’t exist, with one exception: the
Star Wars
saga. To him, Paul Newman is the voice of Doc, the town judge, in
Cars
, and Dustin Hoffman is the wizened martial arts master in
Kung Fu Panda.
What began as a source of childhood amusement has transformed over time into a fixation that touches almost everything he does. Just as, at five, he ran after the Elmo face without noticing the boy wearing the hat, he often seems to focus the majority of his conscious energies on Homer Simpson and Buzz Lightyear rather than the human beings around him.

He starts conversations with abrupt declarations about animated movies: “The character Red in the
Cars
movie doesn’t talk very much,” he’ll say, or “Every character is in
The Simpsons Movie
, but Sideshow Bob does not appear.” It’s as if the conversation has been going on in his head for some time, but he’s just thought to share his end of it aloud.

This happens all the time: It’s six in the morning. I’m the only member of the family awake, and I’m alone in the kitchen, enjoying my morning tea, when I hear footsteps descending the staircase. It’s Ezra. He approaches in his pajamas, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“Morning, Ez,” I say.

To which he answers: “Fiona is the princess of Far Far Away but then she falls in love with Shrek.”

“How are you doing this morning?” I ask.

“Eddie Murphy is the voice of Donkey, who falls in love with Dragon, who doesn’t have a name, just Dragon,” he says.

It’s as if he dwells mentally in an alternate reality populated by animated characters and an encyclopedia’s worth of details about them. It’s not daydreaming, in the sense that daydreams divert your attention from the real. I imagine that it’s more like Ezra is watching a movie in his mind. On his mental screen, he sees not an actual movie, but the entire animated universe he has accumulated. Only, to him, it’s vivid and real.

When you watch a movie in a theater, you’re absorbed with the reality of the movie on the screen, but every once in a while, you shift your consciousness and become momentarily aware that you are sitting in a chair in a theater. You notice the glowing green exit sign, the silhouetted heads of the men and women in the rows in front of you, the occasional patron shuffling off to buy popcorn. This is how Ezra goes through his days. As his body is in school or at home or in the car, he is watching, say,
The Incredibles
on his internal screen. Occasionally, he takes note of the world around him: the teachers trying to attract his attention, the brothers operating in his orbit just beyond his focus, or his mother or me. Speaking to him can be like whispering into the ear of that person mesmerized by a movie. He can hear, but he’s focused on the movie’s sound track—and he can find the interruption annoying and even highly aggravating.

As soon as Ezra ascertains the date of an upcoming animated feature, that date becomes a focal point, more prominent in his mind than a birthday or school vacation. At some point our family adopts the practice of attending his movies on the first Sunday afternoon following their release. He comes to rely on and expect that, asking repeatedly for reassurance that his plan will come to pass.

“Will we see
Chicken Little
on November sixth, Abba?”

“I hope so, Ez.”

“
Will
we?” he asks, more agitated. “Say we
will
see
Chicken Little
on November sixth, Abba!”

“Of course we will.”

“Yeah. Right. Of course we will. Of
course
we will see
Chicken Little
on November sixth, Abba.”

He craves that reassurance, just as he thrives on his visits to the zoo and seeing that all of the animals are where they are supposed to be. He finds it comforting and reassuring that his movies are where they are supposed to be. It’s control over chaos. It gives him a powerful sense of security and comfort to know that
Shark Tale
will hit theaters on October 1, 2004, and that on the afternoon of October 3, he will be in a dark theater in the Pacific Culver Stadium theater watching, with a tub of popcorn on his lap.

Of course, that can make life challenging when things don’t go as he expects. Ezra sometimes makes his mental plans around more obscure animated movies without making sure that the adults in his life have fully registered the schedule.

“Abba, will we see
Horton Hears a Who
on March sixteenth?”

“I’m not sure, Ez. We may have something else that day.”

“You’re not
sure
!?” he says, his voice rising an octave and gaining volume quickly. “But you
must
become sure!”

“I just don’t know yet, Ez.”

“Yes, we
will
see it on March sixteenth,” he says dramatically but with utter sincerity. “How could you
do
this?”

“Ezzy, I’m sure we’ll see it,” I say. “I just don’t know when yet.”

“Don’t block the day,” he says.
Block the day.
That’s his original phrase for when someone tries to alter a plan that was set firmly in his mind. “Say that we will see
Horton Hears a Who
on March sixteenth.”

The conversation goes on like this until I can defuse the situation—usually after some fuss, and even some tears. He cries about these things because it’s all real to him—as real as it was in that moment at his third birthday party, when I discovered him alone in his bedroom acting like Tigger from
Winnie the Pooh
.

It’s also the structure he finds appealing. Around age five, he somehow teaches himself which characters belong to which studios.

“Daffy Duck, he’s not
Disney
!” Ezra says, appalled that anyone could make such an obvious error. “He’s
Warner Brothers
!” I never figure out how a five-year-old boy with limited ability to communicate came to understand that Disney and Warner and Hanna-Barbera and Fox each has its own stable of characters, but he does, and he masters them all the way other boys master baseball lineups.

Why is he so focused on sorting out these cartoon faces? Perhaps because his brain has such difficulty processing and interpreting the faces of the human beings around him. What comes intuitively to others—understanding the emotion reflected in a particular smile or smirk or furrowed brow—is baffling to him. When he is five and six, we spend countless bath times (when he’ll sit still in the comfort of the warm water) playing games of Name That Face to teach Ezra expressions like “happy,” “sad,” “curious,” and “excited.” When he grows older, I often catch him pausing from brushing his teeth to practice facial expressions on his own, gazing into the bathroom mirror as he manipulates his cheeks and eyebrows with his fingertips to demonstrate.

Cartoon characters don’t deal in subtle nuance, and Ezra has no trouble reading Elmer Fudd’s scowl, or the frightened eyes of Nemo, or the angry, creased forehead of Homer Simpson. So it’s no surprise that he would rather spend time looking at the faces he understands. (On occasions when I’m frustrated with him, he often reacts by trying to convince me to change my facial expression before anything else: “Abba, your eyebrows are down! Put them back up!”—as if altering my features will instantly change my mood, or his consequences.)

Besides the visual appeal, there’s an auditory factor to Ezra’s attraction to animation. He often flees from ordinary social exchanges because he has such difficulty deciphering the spoken language he hears. The words become garbled as his brain struggles to interpret them, causing such anxiety that he retreats and avoids conversation. At the movies, he can take in dialogue without anyone expecting him to respond—and he can play a DVD over and over until he understands the words and keep listening until he commits dialogue to memory. That explains why for several years of his childhood it’s almost impossible to engage Ezra in dialogue, but he will routinely spout movie lines like the one from
The Emperor’s New Groove
, “Llama? He’s supposed to be dead!” or another from
Toy Stor
y—“Mrs. Potato Head! Mrs. Potato Head!”—that usually put him into hysterics, for reasons I cannot fathom.

One morning when he’s four, Ezra crawls into our bed and starts to tell a story. It’s an elaborate tale about Simba, the patriarch from
The Lion King
. I start asking him questions and for once he reacts not by shutting down and fleeing, but by answering.

“Where does Simba live, Ezra?” I ask.

“He lives in the pride lands. Yeah, he’s going to run in the pride lands.”

“And then what?”

“And he’s going to see his friend Nala.”

“Good! And then what?”

“They’re going to play, yeah, and then they’ll find Zazu.”

The exchange continues, leaving Shawn and me surprised at his newfound ability to tell a story spontaneously, until he concludes:

“That’s the end of our story. If you’d like to hear it again, just turn the tape over.”

As he grows and develops, his mental catalog of movie dialogue snippets provides the basis for an additional form of communication within our family. After Ezra repeats a line of Disney dialogue a few dozen times, the other boys are first amused, then annoyed, and then they join in, reciting the dialogue back to him: “Three days? What about lunches?” they say, mimicking Winnie the Pooh trapped in Rabbit’s hole. Or the would-be superhero’s bit from
The Incredibles
: “Where
is
my supersuit?” The lines take on lives of their own, like a joke told so many times it gets old, and then absurdly funny. What started as Ezra’s involuntary tics morph into a nonsensical secret language that our children share with one another.

Of course, while movie snippets are better than silence, they are hardly real conversations. When we ask his doctor for advice about steering Ezra away from the habit, she suggests simply to label the practice
movie talk
and discourage it.

“Oh, that’s
movie talk
,” I say the tenth time he repeats the same line from
Cars
instead of answering my question. “I don’t want to hear movie talk. I want to hear
Ezra
talk.”

Sometimes that works. Sometimes it frustrates him. Sometimes he catches himself in midsentence: “Oh, that’s movie talk. You don’t want to hear that?” he says, half asking.

 

 

I often think that, given the choice, my son would opt to live in a land of animation, free from the fetters and demands of living, breathing human beings. In some ways, he already does. More than once I have happened into Ezra’s bedroom late at night to put clean laundry in the closet or straighten up, and caught him talking in his sleep—to characters from whatever movie is preoccupying him that week. Around age twelve, when he starts remembering and describing his dreams, he tells me one morning he dreamed the night before about finding himself alone at the home of some family friends late at night, somehow charged with the chore of cleaning up the place before they returned home.

“Then there was a knock on the door,” he says.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“It was Homer and Marge Simpson.”

I imagine that would delight Ezra. No, he says, the Simpsons created a huge mess and left Ezra to clean it up.

“Do you have lots of dreams with animated characters?” I ask.

“I think so,” he says. “Most nights.”

I make efforts to join Ezra in celebrating his beloved animated world, to build a relationship based on what he values. It’s not always easy. Often, my attempts—even those that seemed most benign and simple—fail.

When Ezra is six, I take him to Disneyland. It’s a hot August day; Ami will be visiting another theme park with his day camp, and Noam is still too young for the more dizzying theme park rides, so just the two of us head for Anaheim, about forty-five minutes from home. It’s his first visit, and my first in many years. Since Ezra is so captivated by Disney movies (at the moment, he’s lingering in his
Winnie the Pooh
phase), I am certain that he will revel in encountering a supersize Mickey Mouse wandering the streets of the Magic Kingdom. As we barrel down Interstate 5 through dull, industrial stretches of Orange County in the blue Camry, I envision him posing with Goofy and Pluto and goggling at his beloved Pooh friends in full, gigantic costume. I wonder how I will ever pry him away once he comes across these larger-than-life, colorful creatures.