Life, Animated (8 page)

After a few minutes of struggle, he pulls it all together: Pat Carroll. We hear him say the name softly, almost reverently, repeating it a few times. And then other words, like
assistant
and
associate
,
lighting
,
director
, and
producer
. He seemed happy and focused, scrolling frames, calm and intensely engaged, with so many movies to choose from. Our only job is not to disturb him.

Walt is with Owen on a Saturday in early June 1999. They’re milling about, fingering books at the DC Public Library about a mile from our house. Or they were a minute ago, when I last looked.

I hear a man raise his voice—a constrained attempt at volume—and turn in time to see a scene unfolding. Actually, the first thing I see is how wide Walt’s eyes are.

The
sotto voce
shouter is the librarian, who is speed walking over from the checkout desk: “What are you doing?!”

I have a good span of carpeting to cross from Contemporary History to get to them, about five seconds in a slow trot, and I watch the librarian, a youngish, bespectacled man, looking—in urgent need of explanation—at Walt, then at something low, which is out of my line of sight, then he looks back at Walt, whose eyes grow even wider. As I get there, Walt turns and runs out of the library.

I see what they’re looking at: Owen’s butt and kicking feet, sticking out from a low shelf. He’s parted the books and wedged nearly his whole body in the dark space between the bookcases.

I know immediately it’s
The Pagemaster
, a 20
^th
Century Fox movie Owen’s been fixated on. Along with Disney favorites, he’s folded in a few movies—including this one and
Space Jam
—that mirror the growing oddity of his life and that of the whole family: combinations of animation and live action. First released in 1994,
The
Pagemaster
was all but designed for him and his fast-shifting reality. Its main character, a cautious boy named Richard Tyler—played by Macaulay Culkin—gets trapped in a library on a stormy night, only to meet a mythical character played by Christopher Lloyd. That’d be the Pagemaster, a wizardly type who shepherds the boy into the stacks and a world—hidden between the bookshelves—where the great stories, like
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and
Moby Dick
, come to life. The boy’s guides are three talking books, each representing genres—fantasy, adventure, and horror—who lead him on a journey to face his fears.

The movie is one of the reasons we’re at the library today. Looking for an activity for both boys on a Saturday afternoon, Owen jumped at the suggestion of a visit to the library.

This is the flip side of our role-playing. It has no natural boundaries. The world now is Owen’s stage. I pull him from between the shelves and sheepishly apologize to the stunned librarian. “It’s just this movie he’s really into about a library…I’m sure you’d love it.”

Outside, I track down Walt. He’s sitting on a bench, shaking his head.

“Dad, does he have to be this way?” he says, in a kind of plea.

I’m not sure what to say. I talk a bit about this being the way Owen was born. “He didn’t do anything to be like this, and I’m sure if he could choose, he’d choose not to. But he has no choice, and we don’t either. We just have to be there for him.”

Walt knows all this, but it doesn’t help. He’s really upset. This has clearly been building for a while. “He has no idea how you’re supposed to behave. None!”

I agree with him. We both know he’s right. I just sit with him for a moment, while he begins to calm down. He was angry when Owen and I got outside. Owen begins to dance nearby on a patch of grass; I put my arm around his older brother’s shoulder. “You know him better than anyone, Walt. It’s just the way he is. I know it’s hard, but we have to find a way to embrace him, to celebrate him, just like people embrace you. He’s lucky to have you as a brother.”

As we drive off a few minutes later, I feel dots connecting around the words “supposed to.”

That phrase Walt just used, I’m using a lot lately. Since
A Hope
in the Unseen
came out a year ago, I’ve been giving speeches where people invariably ask how Cedric defied both the low expectations and destructive codes of behavior that so defined his school and neighborhood. There are various reasons, having to do with his upbringing, his mother, his faith, and the way his pariah’s status divorced him from social norms. But he’s a rarity. Recent research on something called the “stereotype threats and boosts” shows the astonishing power of expectations carried in cultural stereotypes—African Americans are athletic and spiritual; Asian Americans are math whizzes—in determining how a hundred babies, all identical in basic human capacities, end up looking so different as adults. From the earliest age, these expectations shape how others see us, how we see ourselves, and the capabilities we develop as we’re encouraged, or discouraged, by the eyes of others.

These “supposed tos” arise, of course, from the fundamental human capacity to swiftly size up the surrounding context and our place within it.

It’s the quality that most distinguishes Walt from Owen.

It’s hard-wired and instinctual in Walt, as it is in most people, and already well along in shaping his behavior and identity.

Owen’s specialists say his inability to do this is his most basic, and defining, disability. In autism circles, it’s called “context blindness.”

He has no sense of the “supposed tos” because he can’t read all those looks, expressions of favor or disfavor, the ripple in the crowd, borne within each passing moment that builds into a life. That means he doesn’t know what you’re supposed to do in a library—as opposed to a playground—or what movies most eight-year-olds are watching. The questions researchers are busy asking are whether this deficit is a matter of will or capability; can it be developed in a person; and if so, how? But day-to-day facts are clear: like a growing number of autistic spectrum kids and adults, Owen is driven, shaped, and guided by what bubbles up, often quite mysteriously, from within. There are plenty of self-directed urges in everyone. It’s just that our impulse instantly slams against our lightning-fast assessment of
context
. The atmospheric zone created by that collision is behavior.

Walt’s upset because he has endured many moments like we just did in the library and suspects we will have many more, and he’s probably right. From an eleven-year-old’s first-person perspective, that means he’ll have to go through his whole life being embarrassed or he’ll have to stay away from his brother, at least in public. A tough set of choices.

Owen, meanwhile, wonders why Walt is so upset.

A month later, in the summer of 1999, we step into an alternative reality—sometimes called the “Happiest Place on Earth.”

On this, our third trip to Walt Disney World, Owen is nine. He can do more, and say more. Much more.

Context blind? Suddenly we see him mastering a context that’s invisible to us.

And to the Mad Hatter.

That’s who we see on our first morning at what’s called a character breakfast, where a conventional hotel breakfast is interrupted by Disney characters. As we eat pancakes, suddenly Alice appears, and behind her, a crazy little man with a tall green hat.

Owen rises from the table matter-of-factly and approaches him, the rest of us scrambling behind.

“Excuse me,” he says, as the Mad Hatter turns. “Do you know Ed Wynn?” That would be the former vaudevillian who voiced the Mad Hatter in the Disney movie.

“Of course, he’s a good friend of mine,” the Mad Hatter responds, in a stock response of the characters, who, after all, must always remain in character. Owen looks at him intently, trying to detect an inference from behind the fake nose and pancake makeup. None visible. He presses on.

Owen: “So you know Verna Felton—the voice of the Queen of Hearts?”

Mad Hatter (befuddled): No response.

Owen (equally befuddled): “She was also Winifred in
The Jungle
Book
, the Fairy Godmother in
Cinderella
, Aunt Sarah in
Lady and the
Tramp
, one of the three fairies in
Sleeping
Beauty
, and one of the four elephants in
Dumbo
—the mean one!”

Mad Hatter: “Verna who?”

Then off he rushes, like someone late for a very important date.

Owen, that is.

We’re delighted—scratch that, ecstatic—to have him lead. So much to do in three days at Walt Disney World, so many attractions, so many characters yet to question. Of course, almost none of them talk. Only the ones who are human, in actor’s makeup, like Alice or the Mad Hatter or Ariel can respond. But in those brief conversations—or through what Owen asks the nonspeaking animated characters walking to and fro—we catch a glimpse of an Atlantis he’s building under the sea. He’s not only learning to phoneticize words by reading the credits. He’s remembering the names, cataloguing them—those are five movies for Verna Felton—and creating a cross-referenced index in his head. When he meets characters, there is so very much to discuss.

During its first fifty years, the Disney studios relied on a roster of actors—some famous, some less so—that it mixed and matched to voice the animated characters that were drawn, laboriously, only after the voice tracks were laid down. These voice actors move behind the scenes in little clusters. Verna Felton, for instance, matches up in three major movies with Sterling Holloway—he’s Kaa the snake in
The Jungle Book
, the Cheshire Cat in
Alice
in Wonderland
, and the stork who delivers the big-eared baby in
Dumbo
. Winnie the Pooh—famously voiced by Holloway—is asked about all of this by Owen later that day in Fantasyland. Pooh nods and shrugs, and Owen embraces him. It’s strange for Cornelia and me to watch: after years of one-way conversations with Owen, now he’s having one with Pooh. Pooh seems to understand and Owen acknowledges it with a hug. How many times did we do that with Owen? And, standing there, our eyes begin to adjust, to see what he sees. These characters are part of a family. His family. He’s grown up with them, relied on them, learned from them. This is his chance to tease out their relationships to one another, discover what binds them to one another.

When he sees Goofy, whom he’s been looking for and was worried he wouldn’t see, Owen runs toward the giant dog, or horse, or whatever Goofy is, and throws his arms around him. They just hug for a moment, until I can get Owen to spin around, still in Goofy’s embrace, for a picture.

It’s enlivening and humbling. He is expressive and affectionate with these characters in ways he rarely is with us, or anyone else.

Cornelia and I talk about this in the café at the Wilderness Lodge that night. Is it okay for him to have such a strong emotional bond with them? Is there a danger here? Are there views and truths he was ingesting that were all but invisible to our adult eyes?

Where do you begin? It’s a whole, self-sustaining artificial world. She mentions what we saw late that afternoon: a crowd gathered around the lagoon near Tom Sawyer Island, looking down at something in the water.
What could it be?
We crowded in and finally caught a glimpse. It was a small alligator, maybe two feet long. Gawkers were debating whether it was animatronic or real; no consensus was reached.

I went with real: “And it’s been the only real thing we’ve seen here in three days.” “Well, there’s this beer,” Cornelia quips, as we lift our mugs and toast whatever Disney executive decided the Whispering Canyon Cafe should serve alcohol.

These emotions Owen has can’t be equivalent to “real emotions with actual people,” I say, staying with it. “He has to know, deep down, that these characters—that they’re not real.”

She shrugs. “Look, kids believe in Santa Claus long after they suspect there may be some logistical issues. Belief and nonbelief can hang together for quite a while. Mysteries of faith and all that.”

The question, she says, is more how it makes him feel and how he behaves. After spending every day with him, for years, what she sees is how calm, self-possessed, and sure of himself he seems here. And he clearly isn’t doing nearly as much “silly,” the self-stimulatory behavior, like self-talking or flapping his hands, that more and more we are recognizing is prompted by situations whose complexities he has trouble understanding. “Context blindness” causes stress. When challenged, he retreats inward.

But here, everything is inverted. He knows the context, can size it up swiftly and move easily within it, just like most folks do each day, with unconscious ease. Sure, he’s still having to talk, walk, interact, and make choices, like in the real world. But now those split-second decisions—what Disney-themed ice cream to order, whether to ride Peter Pan’s Flight again—rests on a firm, brick-and-mortar landscape drawn from movies he can recite; movies that seem to be shaping his identity—just as that wider world was shaping Walt’s. Whatever he’s feeling for the characters, we both agree that, here, he’s more attentive, affectionate, and available
to us
…even if, after seventy-two hours neck deep in Disney artifice, we can’t wait to get back to the real world.

Owen could stay here forever. He’s comfortable at home and he’s comfortable here.

Two places.

He’s angling to add a third place—school—to that list.

We all are. By the start of his third year at the Lab School in the fall of 1999, we see his skills improving—his rudimentary reading, his new ability to do simple math—but it’s uneven and unsteady, as is the building of social connections with potential friends.

It’s a struggle for him to keep up, mostly—the school warns us, darkly—because his mind so often races through the parallel universe of movies.

This hyper focus is part of the struggle with his PDD-NOS. We aren’t using the word
autism
, at least not in public, where we feel it still carries so many
Rain Man
stigmas. His presentation, as Rosenblatt rightly said, was not neatly aligned with more severely or classically autistic kids, who seem more shut off to the world. Owen, from that first day, beckoning Rosenblatt from under the chair, had the capacity—and, importantly, the periodic desire—to engage. But we now began to see that these labels have always been more strategic, socially and legally, than functional. The reality of “autistic-like behaviors”—where the kids are “self-directed toward narrow interests”—is what we live with. We begin to see the slip-sliding qualities of a spectrum, a concept many medical professionals have by now embraced: on one side, we notice kids like Owen, who more readily attend to their school work and manage more flexibility in moving to unfamiliar topics and new experiences. They are often socially obtuse but are building social skills through experience because they are better able to listen to the teachers, pick up cues from peers, stick with the group.