Life, Animated (25 page)

So many autistic kids memorize and recite scripts, there’s a widely used term—“scripting”—that is generally seen by therapists and psychologists as repetitive, nonfunctional behavior, something to be reduced and remediated.

Certainly, we’ve done plenty of that, to help him control it in school and in public. But it appears that Owen, with our improvised support, has derived value in the scripting, itself, as a way—a seemingly successful way—to shape and develop this crucial inner speech.

His internal dialogue, in fact, seems to grow richer, year by year, dealing with not just executive functions, but emotional management and even emotional growth.

In sessions with Dan over the next month, Merlin (or Owen as Merlin) takes us on a tour of “inner speech.”

Others step in as well. He selects the voices of certain sidekicks, generally the wise or protective ones, for different needs. Specifically, to help him deal with the challenges “a boy like” him is facing.

The insights are trenchant. Many are drawn, first, from a line of dialogue. But, as with Merlin’s first emergence, they evolve well beyond the script. The voices of the characters—Rafiki, Sebastian, Jiminy Cricket—each have gentle guidance to offer. With each, it’s the way it is with Merlin. Owen is accessing some latent speech faculty, where he can summon and articulate cognition that he doesn’t otherwise seem to possess.

At home, Cornelia and I call it a back-to-the-future moment. In some ways, she points out, we’re going back to the early role-playing days in the basement. Then, we had to stick to the script and find the right lines, on cue, to communicate.
Now, it’s improv!

As usual, Cornelia’s bringing structure to the proceedings, helping all concerned. The improv idea enlivens Dan. In our therapy session, he sets up scenes that relate to Owen’s life—being lost or confused, being tricked, being frustrated, or losing a friend. He then drops Sebastian in the middle of it, and asks Owen—as Sebastian—what he should do.

But the theater analogies go further. Cornelia, in sessions with Dan, also points out that we’ve broken through the theater’s so-called “fourth wall.” That’s the invisible wall dividing the stage and seats, which the actors cross when they step down from the stage to interact—still in character—with the audience.

At home, it starts to become natural, a modern version of the old Disney dialogue. At any given moment, when a challenge arises, we can ask Owen, “What would Rafiki say?”

An internal dialogue, that he’s clearly been having for years, can now be taken and shaped by us.

Dan, meanwhile, digs around for theories and therapies that will support and illuminate what he’s seeing each week. He looks at everything from narrative therapy—a technique of using stories to help shape a patient’s behavior and attitudes—to personal-construct theory, which maps how, from the early ages, we develop constructs to provide a sense of order to the world, our place in it, and anticipate future events.

In springtime 2009, Owen is in the room for most of the session, but then gets breaks so I can fill Dan in on what’s happening in Owen’s life and we can discuss which characters might work best. The hour is intense. The breaks are almost like time-outs on the playing field, when Dan and I—coaching along the process—can huddle. Then we call Owen back in.

Merlin, not surprisingly, remains first among equals. The movie,
The Sword in the Stone
, is an eighty-seven-minute drama of an older man, Merlin, guiding a teenager toward life’s deeper truths. It offers the cleanest structure. Merlin’s sidekick partner, Archimedes, the owl, helps with young Arthur’s intellectual progress (he teaches him to read), while Merlin provides guidance on his emotional growth and the shaping of his character.

But where does Merlin end and Owen begin? In a mid-March session, Dan feels around for the line between them, to see if Merlin can describe how and where he fits inside Owen. This, after all, is about Owen. He’s the patient the psychologist is treating.

Dan thinks it through carefully. He figures he should start by addressing Owen.

Dan: Owen, can I ask Merlin a question?

Owen: Certainly.

Dan: Merlin, you’re often able to unearth great insights. How do you do it? Where, exactly, do those insights come from?

Owen rises from the couch.

The response, in Merlin’s voice, carries a tone of impatience bordering on anger: “You should never ask a wizard the source of his powers! It’s the surest way for him to lose them!”

A
few minutes after Owen as angry Merlin turned on Dan, we’re in the car, driving home.

It’s been about a year since I last probed.

“So, buddy, have you thought any more about that movie of yours?”

Owen looks over at me, his eyebrows furrowed, and I’m thinking I may get my own dose of angry Merlin.

But I don’t. It’s his voice. He looks out the window. “I’m working on it.”

I do this maybe once a year since he talked about his movie idea of twelve sidekicks searching for a hero. And, how, in their journey, and in the obstacles they face, each finds the hero within themselves.

I ask if he’s written anything down.

“I do it inside my head.”

I let this hang for minute.

“Sort of like James inside his head?”

“Not really.”

“What’s the lyric?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.”

It’s the signature song from
James and the Giant Peach
—the only one, of many, that Owen never sang. The omission was odd, in that it seemed to be the most applicable to his real life and real struggles. Cornelia and I took that as a sign that it touched him in some fundamental way, that it entered a secret place, and was sealed down there.

So, as we drive, I sing it:

My name is James.

That’s what mother called me.

My name is James,

So it’s always been.

Sometimes I’ll forget

When I’m lonely or afraid,

So I’ll go inside my head

And look for James.

Owen doesn’t sing with me. He just looks out the window, his head turned away.

“Do you go inside your head and look for Owen?” I ask.

The car’s quiet.

“Sometimes.”

“How’s he doing in there?”

“He’s okay.”

I feel a tumbler click.

“And how are the sidekicks.”

“They’re okay—they’re with him. They’re all in a dark forest.”

“Has he found the hero within himself?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you know how it might happen?”

He goes silent. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from Dan Griffin’s office in Takoma Park, Maryland, to our house in Northwest, Washington, DC.

I figure I have ten minutes, tops. I make a point of missing a few lights. The hum and vibration of the car, passing landscape, closed windows muting sounds; not having to make eye contact, to read expression. The moving car has always been a sweet spot. Minutes pass. Now, closer to five left.

He starts to softly sing. It’s the rest of the James song:

There’s a city that I dreamed of very far from here.

Very, very far away from here,

Very far away.

There are people in the city, and they’re kind to me.

But it’s very, very far away, you know,

Very far.

We’ve come to our neighborhood. There’s no time to delay.

“This city. Where it is?”

“California.”

He pauses.

“Burbank,” he adds.

It’s better he’s not looking at me, because he’d be trying to read my smile and that would break the spell. Lately, when friends or relatives see his sketchbook and ask if he wants to be an animator, his response is swift and routine, exactly the same each time: “I want to be an animator at the Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California, and usher in a new golden age of hand-drawn animation.”

I’ve got two more turns. When we pull up to the house, this window will shut. His sidekicks story, of him searching with his sidekick friends (the wise ones, the confused ones, the resourceful ones)for their inner heroes, is clearly some sort of mirror he holds up to think about himself, his identity. If their destination is also Burbank, maybe the symbolic and the real—the parallel planes of his life—are due to merge. But it has to be more than just arriving. The sidekick has to do something to summon this inner hero.

“And what happens there—in Burbank?”

“He and his friends make a movie about the sidekicks journey using traditional hand-drawn animation. It touches people and saves the world.”

I’m confused. “Is that the movie or real life?”

“Both.”

I pause for a minute, to think it through. I only get one shot at this.

“You mean an animated movie about the fictional boy and the sidekicks, in this dark forest trying to find their inner heroes, gets made by a real boy, which is how the real boy finds his inner hero?”

“Right, with hand-drawn animation.”

“And that’s you?”

“Right.”

The car pulls to the curb. He suddenly turns to me with the plastered-on smile, the mask—chirps out an exclamatory “Okay?!”—and manages to leap out and shut the door in one swift motion.

Walt sees his close buddy Mike Morris, another counselor, standing in the sun by the mail hut and sidles up to him.

“Sounds like that was quite an adventure,” says Mike.

Walt’s tired expression says it all. Mike, who’s been his friend since he arrived here as a twelve-year-old, lets out a little laugh.

Mike’s already heard from the other counselors that the weather took a toll on the group. Walt and another counselor led eight campers, all thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, on a five-day “expedition” through torrential downpours, over thirty-five miles of tough hiking across muddy mountain trails and creeks that turned into rivers on wet nights and long days. Near the end of the trek, the sun broke through, and they marched triumphantly back to camp.

“Well, those campers feel like they scaled K2,” Mike says, as he and Walt look across the returning hikers unloading their wet backpacks in the sun. “Nothing they can’t do now. Look at them, they’re walking on air.”

Almost twenty-one, and a second-year counselor, Walt is starting to clearly see the forces that helped shape him, something that tends to happen around this age. There’s nothing mysterious about it—old wisdom, now supported by plenty of research:
manageable
adversity.
Not so much that you’re crushed, like so many kids in Cedric’s Washington, DC, neighborhood, but enough that it’s a fair fight, a contest that tests more muscles of resolve and ingenuity than simply those employed to score an A on some exam.

The camp has honed that ethic to a fine edge and now, as part of the staff, it’s Walt’s job to impart it. They chat for a minute about some campwide activities slated for the coming week, when something dawns on Mike: one of Walt’s advisees—each counselor has three or four campers he mentors—who happened to be on the expedition Mike just led “has not one, but two autistic brothers.”

Mike just found out. The kid, Craig, a twelve-year-old, is a new camper. Wondered if Walt knew. “No, he never mentioned it to me.”

Mike nods. “Thought you might be interested.” It so happens that Mike’s one of the few guys at camp who knows Walt has an autistic brother.

It just kind of happened that way. And then Walt didn’t make it un-happen. At first, back when he was twelve, he felt it wasn’t anyone’s business. A lot of kids at camp didn’t talk much about their families. And then it felt nice not to have the whole autism thing be an issue for two months of the year. It affected so much at home—seemed to own the house.

But, up here, Walt can take ownership. It’s like he can be a different person here, accepted for who he was, just like everyone else, without any special designation; it seems to make every defeat, the stuff of learning; every victory, sweet. Sometimes people would hear he had a little brother. And because there are so many generations of families at camp, they’d say, “Hey, another Suskind coming up?” And Walt would just say, “He’s just not a camp kind of guy.” That’s all.

All part of a bigger equation—Walt can see that now: how the independence he won, or was granted, with his folks spending so much time and effort on Owen, allowed him to create a bit of a double life. In a way, that’s what his mom and dad seemed to want; that his day-to-day would be as normal—whatever that means—as possible.

But hearing about this kid with the autistic brothers has made him consider something he hadn’t thought much about: that his family doesn’t have any really close friends among other autistic families. Walking to his cabin after the chat with Mike, he thinks it sure would have been nice to know—really know—another sibling of an autistic person. Someone who would understand.

The next week brings more rain. Usually, the camp gathers on Tree Talk Ridge, an outcropping in a grove of pines that overlooks Newfound Lake, for the weekly “Tree Talk.” It’s a stand-and-deliver moment, where counselors, starting their second year at the camp, step up to offer some wisdom, maybe hard-earned, that’ll be valuable for the campers. Today, a hundred campers, counselors, and staff gather in an open-air hall, high atop the camp. Rain pounds the cedar shingles. Walt composes himself, and looks down at the typed pages in his hand. It’s time they knew what’s really been going on in his life.

I want to begin by telling you a little about the best teacher
I have ever had.

He is eighteen years old, sketches cartoon characters like
there is no tomorrow, and every Friday we make our ritual trip
to the video store. He is my brother, Owen
.

When Owen was diagnosed with autism as a three-year-old,
I didn’t really understand what that meant. I just remember
my
mom
telling me that Owen was a little different than
other kids. In the fiftteen years since then, Owen has struggled
with and overcome barrier after barrier that stood in his
path
.

At times, it has been tough, but having a brother like
Owen has taught my parents and me lessons we never would
have learned otherwise, and helped us become the family we
are today. And although maybe at eighteen and twenty we are
a little old to be going back to Disney World year after year,
and yes, maybe our encyclopedic knowledge of the characters in
Fievel Goes West
isn’t quite the norm for most families, as far
as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The joy my brother finds in things that most people would
roll their eyes, at has helped to let my family realize what is
important to us. And that makes every up and down along the
way not a blessing in disguise, as some might call it. Just a
blessing. When I wonder if life would have been easier if Owen
was a “normal” kid, I always remember it is because of him
that I am the person I am. The hard work Owen puts in day
after day in taking on the myriad challenges that stand before
him—and because I know he works harder in a single day
than
I could even imagine possible—helps me to realize that as tough
as things may appear at times, it is in the face of the seemingly
insurmountable challenges that you have your greatest victories
and learn things about yourself you’d never thought possible…

He goes on to talk about the insurmountable challenges they faced on this last expedition, walking days through the downpour, and how the campers rose to the occasion.

After it’s over, and the boys come up, one-by-one to shake Walt’s hand, Craig approaches Walt.

“Wow, Walt, that was quite a Tree Talk.”

“Glad you liked it.”

“I felt like you were talking to me.”

Walt puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Well, it’s something that’s hard to understand for most people.”

It’s Walt’s twenty-first birthday on September 13, 2009, and we Skype to Spain, where he’s starting his junior year of college abroad. It’s 11:00
P.M.
there—he’s six hours ahead—and things are just cranking up in Seville. We all sing. He laughs. Love you guys.

Everything’s good. He tells us he tried out for a Seville football team—American football in a league that plays across Europe. It’s somewhere between club and semipro, mostly local enthusiasts and a few U.S. college players; and he made the team. That’s a real kick. Working the huddle will certainly help his Spanish, that’s for sure. Listen, got to go. Other kids in his program are calling. It’s his birthday. The night beckons.

Cornelia and I watch the screen darken. We’re missing him, of course, on his birthday, but watching him enter the wide world is a thrill. We try not to over-appreciate—to greet everything he does like some huge victory. As he often tells us, “don’t make a big fuss over me—I’m just doing what other kids do.”

And he’s right. Take out the twist of playing football, and he’s living the basic junior-year-abroad experience, a common feature these days of college life.

But it’s hard not feel awe of the commonplace when you’re thinking about how to reengineer it from scratch. Try to map, for instance, the social schema (a cognitive framework for organizing and interpreting inputs) for a night of barhopping in Seville; or finding a cab back to the dorm at dawn. How about something more basic, like getting along with a roommate. Or one level down: calling for assistance when you’re lost or learning to use money. And one more step, still: not getting into a car with a stranger, or crossing a busy thoroughfare against the light.