Life, Animated (6 page)

It’s a glorious night, a moment when we feel settled. But it’s also late fall, when the parents are beginning to angle toward the big prize: entry of their young pride-and-joys into one of Washington’s storied private schools, like Sidwell Friends, where the Clintons and Gores sent their kids, or St. Albans, the private academy for future leaders. NCRC is a feeder school for both, and for Washington’s other exclusive schools. There’s much talk at the punch-and-cookie reception about who’s applying where.

How about Owen?

“He’s doing great,” Cornelia says, with a frozen smile. That’s all. They’re planning for the future. We live in the present. Hold onto it for dear life.

The next afternoon, I’m back at the school, wearing a red-and-yellow-striped stovepipe hat. As in
The Cat in the Hat
. It’s something I did from time to time over the past year: come around to lead the kids in some high-energy games, making it a little show.

I’d known some of them for over a year, and many of their parents. As I look across the smiling kids, I think what I think on every one of these visits: who, in this group, might break from the pack to play with Owen—curious about what was behind the distant smile and soft patter of recited dialogue. Maybe it will help that he’s the son of the clown, especially if I can draw the kids, in unison, into shared, raucous activity. Like always, I’m trying to create a circle of
normal
, an irresistible, swirling place—that Owen might inconspicuously slip into. Inside, maybe he’ll find a friend.

After an hour of running, juggling, and flipping kids up on my shoulder, I crawl into the foyer of our house, dripping in sweat.

“How’d it go, Mr. Clown Face?” Cornelia has made a late lunch for us.

“Great joy, had by all; Owen, too.”

“Any of the other kids engage with him?”

“No, not today.”

We’d talked late into the previous night about the reception: Corn’s speech, the nice reception, meeting a doctor with an autistic son. Now, at lunch, we talk about how all the kids are angling toward their next steps. “After this spring, I don’t imagine he’ll see many of them again,” I say. “They’ll be moving on, moving up, that’ll be that.”

This school has been a brief fantasy. Here, on any given day, he moves among typical kids, like one of them. It’s an illusion, now slamming into a brick wall of reality.

What will be his next step? At that moment we felt Ivymount wouldn’t work; it’d be a step backward. In the coming months, we look at a few schools that aren’t right for him. DC has terrible choices in the public system. There are no other options.

Save one.

“Shining city on a hill” was the Ronald Reagan phrase that so swiftly washed away the earnest, problem-solver glumness of Jimmy Carter, ushering in a new era of willed optimism, a time of experimentation in the uses of that magic word:
confidence
.

When there’s cultural change, often institutions arise that embody that shift, suffused with the rhythms of the period. One such institution sat resplendent, atop a crest of hill overlooking the upper Potomac: the Lab School of Washington.

Redemptive narratives are always appealing and the story of the school and its founder was a snapping good one. It starts with the brassy daughter of a New York department store magnate who found herself in the late 1960s trapped in a proper life of official Washington as the wife of a socially ambitious State Department official. All seemed intact until it became clear her child was born with special needs. Sally Smith made him the focus of her life. She was soon divorced and was tutoring her son, Gary, with a few other special needs children in her home. She had skills—having studied dance with Martha Graham as a Bennington College undergrad and received a master’s in psychology from New York University. Now she had a mission, especially after DC recommended her son be placed with kids who were either emotionally disturbed or retarded. She said he wasn’t either—that he seemed alert, even bright in a few areas, but didn’t learn the way most other kids learned.

There was no school for him. So she built one, and they came: lots of kids with no place else to go.

The school was immediately overwhelmed by demand and moved from building to building across the decade. Smith wrote extensively from her post as an American University professor about learning disabilities, especially the most common one, dyslexia, and how the learning-disabled (LD) population—already estimated at 3 percent of children—was growing fast. She attempted, in a best-selling book, to kill off the stigmas around LD, to show that LD kids would often compensate for problems with reading or language by becoming visual learners or developing artistic skills. It was a framework that, twenty years hence, would be applied to a vast and growing population of kids with autistic spectrum disorders.

But LD came first. And Smith’s big break, in 1984, was a major reason why. She’d moved into a new building, a stone castle overlooking the Potomac in desperate need of renovation. She decided to try a fund-raising gala and sat down with a parent of one of her students: the
People
magazine bureau chief for Washington. Through a few stories in the magazine—where actors or artists would talk about “problems in school”—and lots of phone work, the duo lured an astonishing quintet to DC to receive awards as what they called
Learning Disabled Achievers
.

That fall a thousand Washingtonians in gowns and tuxedos gathered on a vacant floor of the newly built Hecht’s Department Store in downtown DC—a vast room outfitted for a formal gala, with House of Representatives Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill stepping to the podium as master of ceremonies. Sally Smith, though, carried the night, introducing each guest with a “This is your life” flourish. Her twist was to turn it into a brutal litany, drawn from her interviews with each guest, that went something like this: “You [fill in celebrated name] were called stupid, someone who’d never amount to anything.…You were held back in third grade because you couldn’t read.…You felt ashamed of what you’d received on a test and hid the paper.…But one teacher took you aside and said, ‘Let me help.’…” Then, none other than Cher, Tom Cruise, Bruce Jenner, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg stepped up to receive engraved crystal bowls and speak, voices cracking, of long hiding their disability. Rock Hudson had just died, after revealing he had AIDS. The ugliness of shame and secrecy was on everyone’s mind—forces to be vanquished. As the awardees spoke, the crowd, including a healthy number of congressmen and cabinet secretaries, stood and cheered themselves hoarse. The Lab School gala, plastered all across the next morning’s
Washington Post
style section, raised $386,000 that night.

Soon, the castle on the hill was receiving more publicity, brick by brick, than almost any school in the country. PBS did specials, and Smith’s model using the arts as a gateway to educate kids with dyslexia or ADHD soon became widely adopted. Rauschenberg came every year to the school to train and celebrate art teachers who used creativity to unleash the talents of “untraditional learners.”

More celebrities came to be honored, a glittering roster every year, and the replacement of “learning disability” with “learning difference”—a swap encouraged by advocacy groups that generally drew raised eyebrows about the hollowness of politically correct speech—soon had an affirming army of forthright LD achievers. Many parents began to see their children with new eyes. Learning difference? Seemed to make sense. A traditional learning pathway is blocked; compensatory skills develop to find another way.

The practical effect of this? More parents and developmental pediatricians were willing to embrace the LD diagnosis, which often seemed to bump up alongside a smaller but growing number of diagnoses for kids on the autism spectrum. They all shared a legal right under 1975’s Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and related legislation for publicly funded placement in the “least restrictive environment,” or, in English, a school tailored to the child’s needs.

What, in fact, were coalescing were two vast communities of special needs: LD and autistic spectrum disorders. A quarter century after that glittering night in DC, geneticists would begin to discover that a wide and growing array of disorders, including OCD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, may be genetic cousins to the LD or autism. All of them emanate from the same self-regulatory functions of the brain. No one is clear why the incidence seems to be rising in this family of disorders. Link them all together, like so many buoys attached to a shared anchor, and, by 2012, they affected almost 20 percent of the population.

But Sally Smith and LD were the first over the wall. After that gala in 1984, lines began forming outside the Lab School and other schools like it. And soon it seemed to stretch to the horizon.

Of the learning disabled students at the Lab School in 1997, about a quarter of the younger students had autistic-like behaviors and profiles. There is nothing we won’t do to get Owen in. Smith understood that many of the kids applying would be difficult to test, especially the spectrum kids. To be considered, she demanded something—anything—to show innate ability or aptitude.

Dr. Bill Stixrud, our testing guru, is a specialist in measuring aptitude, even when it is deeply submerged. One of the country’s leading neuro-psychological testers, his challenge isn’t simply to measure Owen’s underlying intelligence—but to discover it. Owen seems more attentive. He’ll often look at you now. He’ll sometimes smile when you do. What Alan Rosenblatt saw under the chair that day—where Owen was playful—had grown and flourished. But testing whether he has sufficient aptitude to get into Lab: where to begin? He’ll soon turn six and barely speaks. He isn’t much on following directions, either; crucial in test taking of all kinds. Tests Stixrud administered last year placed his capacities at between 1 and 3 percent for kids his age; his estimated IQ at 75, the threshold for retardation.

Those test scores were so dismal it isn’t even worth sending them in.

In late February, a few days before the March 1 application deadline, the phone rings in the kitchen. It’s Stixrud with an idea, a last stab. There was a test they used in the 1950s for deaf children—the Leiter Test of Nonverbal Intelligence—a big clunky thing, with blocks and other manipulatives for kids who couldn’t read or hear directions.

But where to find one? We all put our heads together. He has names of old psychologists in the area, mostly retired. Maybe one has a Leiter Test in a closet. We begin calling. Dozens of calls. The next day, a retired psychologist living in one of the apartment buildings on Connecticut Avenue, not far from our house, says she might have one in a closet.

Cornelia races over and soon she and Owen are in Stixrud’s office in Silver Spring, Maryland, as Bill intently reads the directions. Having never done one like this before, he’ll have to administer the test, analyze the results, and get them to the Lab School by the next day, the application deadline.

He asks Cornelia to sit behind Owen so she won’t distract him. But she can see Bill’s face as he and Owen, crowded around one of those Formica-topped kid-sized tables, start to handle the “manipulatives.”

Cornelia is also conducting an experiment: how long can a person sit in a plastic, third-grader’s chair without breathing? Or blinking? She watches for tiny changes of expression as Bill takes one set of blocks after another from a large burlap bag. They’re like early versions of the Rubik’s Cube. He’s poker-faced—part of the test-giver’s art—as Owen tries to figure out what is being asked of him, and then execute it. With Owen’s jumbled auditory processing, Bill might as well be speaking Japanese.

As for Cornelia’s data on cessation of breathing, she goes eight minutes. That’s how long it is before she sees Owen’s little shoulders shift as he leans forward, suddenly attentive. He sees a pattern—how the blocks, scattered across the table, are supposed to fit—and begins assembling them with swift precision. Stixrud pulls another cluster from the bag—one Owen solves with spins and clicks in an instant. It is only then that Stixrud finally lifts his eyes, offering one of those slow, purposeful nods—the universal gesture for “It’s going to be okay.”

The final experiment, then, for Cornelia, is how to let months of tense, volatile emotions lodged in every nerve, every hidden ganglia, flood through the tear ducts without making a sound.

That coming fall, six-and-a-half-year-old Owen Suskind enters the Lab School of Washington, which can be his home for the next eleven years. They can find his strengths and widen them into a gateway of learning, the school’s mission for students with special needs from kindergarten through high school.

P
attern recognition takes a bit of distance. Patterns are easily hidden in the noise of life, of preference and prejudice. Love tends to get in the way.

Which means parents are lousy at it, something statisticians, doctors, and toy-company marketers know. Every little child, after all, is unique, a snowflake. And, if that’s the case, the eye will wander toward what affirms that distinctiveness, especially when it sheds a warm light on how well the youngsters selected their parents.

For Walt, we’re looking for that golden combo: growing capacities to meet the wide world, look it in the eye, make it bend to his will…and someday use that acquired strength on behalf of his little brother. That’s one reason why we celebrate his unflinching autonomy.

An inconvenient fact, that he sometimes gets emotional on his birthdays, is thrown into a drawer marked either “family trait” (I’m that way, too) or “exception that proves the rule” (it only happens one day out of 365). He’s tough, resilient, and resourceful. Anything outside that is an aberration.

It’s Walt’s ninth birthday, September 1997. Owen is six and a half. And, it so happens, after roughhousing with buddies in the backyard at the end of his party and bidding them farewell, Walt gets a little weepy.

After he calms down, wipes tears, and resumes roughhousing with one straggler—a neighborhood boy who could walk home—Corn and I return to the kitchen to clean up the party. Owen walks in from the backyard, right behind us.

He looks intently at us, one, then the other. He seems to have something to say.

“Walter doesn’t want to grow up,” he says, evenly, “like Mowgli or Peter Pan.”

We both nod, dumbly, looking down at him. He nods back, and then vanishes into some private reverie.

It’s like a thunderbolt just passed through the kitchen.

A full sentence, and not just an “I want this” or “Give me that.” No, a complex sentence, the likes of which he’d not uttered in four years, since the last days in Dedham. Actually, never. This is something else, entirely.

We don’t say anything at first, and then don’t stop talking for the next four hours, peeling apart, layer by layer, what just happened.

Beyond the language, it’s interpretive thinking that he’s not supposed to be able to do: that someone crying on their birthday may not want to grow up. Not only would such an insight be improbable for a typical six year old; it was an elegant connection that Cornelia and I had overlooked.

It’s like Owen had let us in, just for an instant, to glimpse a mysterious grid growing inside him, a matrix on which he affixed items he saw each day that we might not even notice.

And then he carefully aligned to another one, standing parallel: the world of Disney.

After dinner is over and both boys retreat upstairs to their attic lair, Cornelia starts to think about what to do now.

I’m thinking parallel planes. She’s thinking about loneliness. That he’s in there: “How on earth,” she says almost to herself, “do you get back in there?”

I feel she’s asking me. I’ve been lecturing reporters for years on this point: that there’s always a way in. If you can’t get someone to open up, it’s your fault,

Walt saunters by toward the basement. That means Owen’s in the attic room, alone.

I tiptoe up the carpeted stairs. Owen’s sitting on his bed, flipping through a Disney book—he can’t read, of course, but likes to look at the pictures. The mission is to reach around the banister, into his closet, and grab his Iago puppet. The parrot from
Aladdin
is one of his favorites. He’s been doing lots of Iago echolalia, easy to identify because the character is voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, who talks like a busted Cuisinart. Once Iago’s in hand, I gently pull the bedspread from the foot of his bed—just a few feet from the top step—and slide under it. And I do it all without having him look up. It takes four minutes for Iago and me to make it safely under the bedspread.

Now crawl, snail-slow, along the side of the bed to its midpoint.
Fine
.

I freeze here for a minute, trying to figure my opening line; four or five sentences dance about, auditioning.

Then, a thought:
be Iago
. What would Iago say?

I push the puppet up through the crease in the bedspread.

“So, Owen, how ya’ doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you!?”

Through the crease, I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s like he was bumping into an old friend.

“I’m not happy. I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.”

I have not heard this voice, natural and easy, with the traditional rhythm of common speech, since he was two.

I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years. Or Iago is.

Stay in character.

“
So, Owen, when did
yoooou
and I become such good friends?”

“When I started watching
Aladdin
all the time. You made me laugh so much. You’re so funny.”

My mind is racing—find a snatch of dialogue—anything. One scene I’ve seen him watch and rewind is when Iago tells the villainous vizier Jafar how he should become sultan.

Back as Iago: “Funny? Okay, Owen, like when I say…um…So, so, you marry the princess and you become the chump husband.”

Owen makes a gravelly sound, like someone trying to clear his throat or find a lower tone: “I
loooove
the way your fowl little mind works.”

It’s a Jafar line, the next line from the movie, in Jafar’s voice—a bit higher-pitched, of course, but all there: the faintly British accent, the sinister tone.

I’m an evil parrot talking to a Disney villain, and he’s talking back.

Then, I hear a laugh, a joyful little laugh, like I have not heard in many years.

After dinner on a weeknight in late September, Cornelia and I lead the kids down to the basement.

It’s a week after the Iago breakthrough, and we’ve been thinking of little else. Tonight, we decide to try an experiment.

Owen usually picks the animated movie whenever we gather in front of the twenty-six-inch Magnavox. On this night, we pick it for him:
The Jungle Book
. It’s a movie both boys have long loved and one Cornelia and I remember from our childhood: Disney’s 1967 rendition of British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling’s tales of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the jungles of India, schooled by Baloo, the obstreperous bear, and Bagheera, the protective black panther. In the film, largely drawn from the second of Kipling’s stories, “Kaa’s Hunting,” written in 1893, Mowgli ultimately triumphs over his fear, embodied by the great tiger Shere Khan, and then is returned, somewhat reluctantly, by Baloo, to the Man-village, where he can grow to manhood among his own kind. The movie, like Kipling’s saga, is full of moral tales about the survival of individuals and communities, the nature of interdependency.

We watch the movie until, a few minutes along, we get to its signature song. “The Bare Necessities” is a talking song, with the melody broken up by dialogue—not all that common—and it starts with a line of dialogue. We freeze the screen and turn down the sound as everyone gets up and mills about near the couch. In my best attempt at the voice and inflection of Phil Harris, who voices the bear, I hit play and then say: “‘Look, now it’s like this, little britches. All you’ve got to do is…’”

Then we all sing, trying to get the words right, following along with the low volume of the set:

Look for the bare necessities

The simple bare necessities…

When you look under the rocks and plants

And take a glance at the fancy ants, and maybe try a few.

Baloo lifts the edge of a large rock in the movie; in our basement I lift the edge of a couch cushion.

Just as Baloo looks at Mowgli, I look at Owen; he looks squarely back at me—then it happens. Right on cue, he says, “‘You eat ants?’” That’s Mowgli’s line—he speaks it as Mowgli, almost like a tape recording—then sticks his head under the raised cushion, as though he’s scooping up ants.

I’m poised with Baloo’s next line: “‘Ha-ha, you better believe it! And you’re gonna love the way they tickle.’”

Then Cornelia, as Bagheera, the wary panther, cries, “‘Mowgli, look out!’”

Owen jumps back as I drop the cushion, just like Mowgli does with the falling rock.

We’d slipped into roles that actually fit quite well—something we recognized a bit later—with me in the rambunctious, impulsive character, Cornelia, ever watchful and protective.

A few minutes later, when King Louie, the crazy orangutan—voiced by jazz trumpeter/singer Louis Prima—sings to Mowgli about becoming a man, Walt’s ready: “‘Teach me the secret of man’s red fire,’” he says, pulling on his ear, waiting for the whispered secret from the boy. Owen recoils—just like Mowgli does in the movie—and says, “‘I don’t know how to make fire.’” Cornelia catches my eye; I shake my head—both of us feeling the same unmoored sensation. The inflection, ease of speech, is something he can’t otherwise muster. But it’s in context, as are his reactions.

It’s almost like there’s no autism. He’s not playing the roles as well as we are; he’s playing them
better
than we are. Mimicry is one thing. This isn’t that. The movements, the tone, the emotions, seem utterly authentic, like method acting.

So begins the basement sessions. For Walt, with his nimble memory, this is a cinch. Though his tastes have evolved to action movies, these Disney classics were once his métier. Cornelia, with terrific retrieval skills, is right behind him. My contribution is imitations, and my recall seems to improve when I slip into char-acter.

Owen, though, leads. His memory is flawless, but of a different cast. At three, his comprehension of spoken words collapsed. That’s clear from every test and, later, his own recollections. Listening to him now, it seems that as he watched each ninety-minute Disney movie, again and again, he was collecting and logging sounds and rhythms, multi-track—each one like pi, stretching to thousands of digits. Speech, of course, has its own subtle musicality; most of us, focusing on the words and their meanings, don’t hear it. But that’s all he heard for years—words as intonation and cadence, their meanings inscrutable. It was like someone memorizing an Akira Kurosawa movie without knowing Japanese. Then it seems he was slowly learning Japanese—or, rather, spoken English—by using the exaggerated facial expressions of the animated characters, the situations they were in, the way they interacted, to help define all those mysterious sounds. That’s what we start to assume; after all, that’s the way babies learn to speak. But this is slightly different, because of the way he committed these vast swaths of source material, dozens of Disney movies, to memory. These are stored sounds we can now help contextualize, with jumping, twirling, sweating, joyous expression—as we just managed with
The Jungle Book
. We, after all, are three-dimensional, we have heartbeats. We can touch him, and he can touch us back. Strictly speaking, we’re interactive. In the parallel worlds—real and Disney—we’re crossing over.

During daylight, we go about our lives. Walt rides his bike to school each morning, back home each afternoon. Cornelia manages the house, the bills, the overloaded schedules of both kids. With my book about Cedric and his peer almost finished, I begin editing and writing again for the
Wall Street Journal
, putting on my suit and subwaying downtown to the bureau.

No one knows we’re all living double lives. At night, we become animated characters.

It turns into the most extraordinary six months, as in so many
extras
to ordinary that it’s hard to keep track. Cornelia and I begin to watch the movies in an utterly new way. Up to now, we were looking for something—anything—that caught his interest and diving in, trying to manage an interaction. Now it’s reversed—the other end of the telescope. We have fifteen or so Disney videos in the house. Almost any scene we pick, he wants to roleplay. And he can manage it with ease. He’s clearly memorized them all.

We start watching the movies with appraising eyes.
What scenes
should we pick for the next basement session?
And the one after that? Line up our collection—from
Pinocchio
and
Dumbo
in the 40s to
The Lion King
in the 90s—and the menu is vast.

We role-play selections from nearly every one—scenes of joy or challenge or pathos—through the winter and into spring.

That’s when Disney Club starts spilling out of the basement. It’s happening in the kitchen, the backyard, the screened-in porch.

It’s even happening in the car! We start to regularly converse in Disney dialogue. Grab a line—throw it out there. You had to feel it to do it right, because the tonality was almost as important as the words. Really, you needed both, and if you could summon the rhythm of the line, its cadence, the accent, all the better.

Because Owen will match you. He fires back the next line, gleefully. Lights up like a firefly, at the ready.

Baloo and Mowgli and the rock? Sure, that’s rich terrain. But there are plenty of characters to choose from, countless scenes—one for every occasion, feeling, and moment. When Owen is being challenged, something he’s avoiding, running from—like not wanting to swim, or try riding a bike—you might stick with
The Jungle Book
, and go with Shere Khan, the tiger, voiced in that lowest register of George Sanders. There’s a brief and pointed exchange about fear, when he asks Mowgli: “Could it be possible that you don’t know who I am?”