Bad Animals (6 page)

By the time I reached the end, I was gritting my teeth and squeezing Jonah so tightly, so desperately, I might have been hurting him and I would have never known it.
Green Eggs and Ham
is a battle of wills, too. It's about stubbornness, but also persistence. So I persisted. I made a pest of myself. By the time I finished the story, Jonah was crying softly. But when I gave him back the book to put in its proper place, he hesitated before taking it from me. For a moment, I could see how hard this was for him, how brave he was to make this simple gesture, this tiny concession to change. I could also see how hard things were going to be for him, how extraordinarily brave he would always have to be. There would be no miracles. There would just be the usual daily round of ups and downs, of despair followed by hope, and back again. I still forget that sometimes he's on the same rollercoaster we're on and that however hard it is for us, it's much harder for him. Because he hasn't learned yet that it is a rollercoaster he's on. No one can explain that to him yet, not even us. Finally, he handed the book back to me and got into bed. “Again, Daddy,” he said. It was hard to tell if he was capitulating or if this was something else. Maybe he was just being a good sport. He'd had a bath before bed and his cheeks were still rosy from the hot water. His hair was wet, too, and sticking up in a variety of places. I smoothed the spots down. Then brushed his hair across his forehead with my hand, getting a glimpse of the big boy he was becoming. The expression on his face was uncharacteristically transparent. He was still a small boy, really, trying to decide whether or not he was ready for sleep. His decision was no—he'd stay awake a little longer if I had something interesting to offer. He sat up, clutched his pillow to his chest, and waited for me to read to him.

“Again, indeed, again!” I said, exclaiming like I imagined a triumphant Sam-I-Am might.

Cynthia was listening at Jonah's bedroom door and met me there after I'd tucked him in. ‘”I will hug you here and there and everywhere,'” she whispered in my ear, putting her arms around my neck. “In our bed. Wearing red.”

“Give me a bad day,” I said.

“Too late for that now,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Last year, on the final day of school, Jonah came home with a book he'd spent all of his second term writing and illustrating in class. It was his grade four project. “It's called
Bad Animals.
He did it on his own,” Jessica, his shadow at school, told us.

“He came up with the title, too?” I asked and couldn't help adding, “By himself?” I always seem to be asking this question or some variation on it. Yes, on his own, Jessica assured me again.

Jonah has always gone to a regular school, but he's always gone with an ABA shadow. Jessica is his latest. She's also been part of his team of therapists for several years. Like everyone who has worked with Jonah, Jessica was in her early twenties when she began. She's a keener, good-natured and hard-working, currently doing a graduate degree in education.

This is her second year as Jonah's shadow, a job for which she has been painstakingly trained. What she's not trained to do, however, is make things easier for the school, a fact routinely misinterpreted by overworked teachers trying to manage overcrowded classrooms. There can be as many as four or five kids in a class in need of special attention, so it's not surprising that the teachers have often expected Jonah's shadows to do everything for him when, in reality, it's their job to do the opposite. Jessica's job is to make herself unnecessary as soon as possible. Her job is to prompt Jonah and then fade her prompts, thus encouraging his independence. If he is dependent, it's the teacher he should depend on.
Just like the other kids, sweetheart, that's what we want.

We had hoped that, by now, Jonah would be on his own. That while he needed a shadow in kindergarten, he would perhaps only need one part-time in grade one, and maybe only for a couple of hours in grade two. Grade three: that was going to be the limit, the year his shadow was gone for good. But he's in grade five now and none of our predictions have turned out to be reliable. There are still times he's lost at school. We know this from Jessica's notes, and we don't know what we would do without her or the other therapists who have worked with Jonah over the years. All have been reliable; all have come to care about our son. A few have become friends. A few we have missed desperately once they've moved on after a year or two as they invariably do. One confessed to me, “Even when it was a particularly tough session, I knew I was leaving after three hours and I always reminded myself that you and Cynthia weren't. You guys weren't going anywhere.”

There are three main characters in
Bad Animals-.
Deedee the Cow, Rooney the Camel, and Moe the Yak. Incidentally, the names are taken directly from the irritatingly upbeat CBC kids' show
The Doodlebops.
Fortunately, Jonah's story is not upbeat. There is, instead, a dark slapstick element to his narrative. Imagine
Animal Farm
meets
The Three Stooges.
There's also an autobiographical element. All three characters end up having to deal with the kind of problems Jonah may have recently encountered. Or, more likely, the kind of problems Jonah is anticipating and worrying obsessively about. A detailed account of Jonah's worries can be found in all his shadows' notes so far, along with a detailed description of how the worry is manifesting itself in his behaviour. How a surprise test, for instance, set him off on a downward spiral of anxiety. How something as minor as a disparaging comment from a teacher resulted in a week of Jonah biting his nails or giggling inappropriately. In
Bad Animals,
his characters are just as easily unnerved. The story begins with the three protagonists about to perform at Montreal's annual summer jazz festival. Jonah has drawn saxophones and drums on the margins of the page as well as the occasional musical note. His colouring is neatly inside the lines and shows considerable effort, an encouraging indication that he takes more care with such things at school than he does at home. The animals appear, at first, to be enjoying each other's company. Then a hurricane hits the city. As a result, the jazz festival is postponed. Next, the mall, where the animals decide to go to get dry, is closed. So is the Pizza Hut where they end up stranded in an empty parking lot. Disappointment accrues, as the ability of Jonah's alter egos to cope with it deteriorates. Eventually, they behave badly and, really, who can blame them?

They felt mad. Rooney hit Moe's head. Moe punched
Rooney's nose. Deedee kicked everybody. They all fought.
Everybody was very angry. A policeman saw them. The
policeman arrested them. He took them to jail. Poor
Deedee, Rooney, and Moe! Poor them!

It was reading
Bad Animals
that made me think Jonah and I could collaborate on our own book. I don't know why I expected this kind of project would be different from all the others I'd begun with him and given up on or simply let slide. Like the time I taught him to swing a baseball bat but could make no headway teaching him the rules of the game. He kept running from home to third. Ditto hockey and basketball and poker. Or the times I've tried to teach him to talk on the telephone or to use a normal voice in public.
Bad Animals,
though, indicated that he could become involved in a story if it was one he cared enough about, if it was one that spoke directly to the day-to-day things bothering or besting him. That was his kind of story and, as it happened, mine too. The problem would be sticking with it. That would be the most important thing for him as well as me.

In retrospect, my mistake was telling Cynthia about the idea before I had properly thought it through. “We'll call it
More Bad Animals.
You know, a sequel. Everyone likes sequels,” I explained one night as she and I were getting ready for bed.

I improvised a story about the further adventures of Deedee, Rooney, and Moe as well as two new characters, their father, who's a gorilla, and another son who's a monkey—“It's a blended family, okay?”—and I dreamed up a plot about how none of them get along. Still, they decide one day to, I don't know, bake a cake together and, guess what, it turns out terrible, they make an enormous mess, and that's it, that's all I've got so far, I told Cynthia. Except for the new characters, the father and son, who are inveterate troublemakers. I'm calling them The-Worst-Daddy-Ever and The Worst-Monkey-Ever. “Jonah will like that, don't you think?” I went on to explain how in each new chapter they mess up something else together—break a window playing ball or slip on a banana peel—and they always end up fighting with each other. They make up, eventually, but only once they've picked a fight with some other animal, a giraffe or hippo making a cameo appearance. And while there are no happy endings for this oddball bunch, the reader eventually realizes they're not bad exactly—Deedee, Rooney, Moe, and the new characters—only flawed, deeply, humanly flawed, for animals anyway. I was rambling now, barely coherent. I've had this experience before, teaching. Your mind suddenly goes blank but you keep on talking like you're stuck on a runaway treadmill. You can't get off and you can't stop either—because if you do, you're sure to go flying.

This needs work, I quickly realized; still, Cynthia was encouraging, though she did wonder out loud whether it's true that everyone likes sequels and whether a series of such resolutely unhappy endings are ideal for children. (“Non-happy,” I corrected her, “not unhappy”) In the end, she said what she always says when it comes to my latest scheme to connect with Jonah. She said, “That sounds great, dear, really.” Then she got into bed, turned out the light, and requested a story of her own, preferably happy and boring.

SHORTLY AFTER JONAH'S current school year began, Cynthia installed an exercise bar in the doorway connecting our vestibule to our dining room, or what used to be our dining room. It's the kind of item you see advertised on TV, targeted at viewers who believe they can lose weight easily and conveniently in their home doing ten minutes of chin-ups once a week. There's always a market for the self-improvement types: people willing to lay out a few dollars for the promise of the item as much as the item itself. In this case, the item itself is an eyesore, not to mention hazardous. While our family, Cynthia and Jonah and I, sail under it as if it weren't there, more than one guest above the height of 5′6′ has had to be warned to duck on entering our home.

The bar is there because Jessica informed us that Jonah doesn't seem able or willing to swing on the monkey bars in the school playground like the rest of the kids in his class. She has tried to encourage him to make the effort, but he is apprehensive, afraid of the height or of falling or, if I know my son, failing. The problem is, at school, swinging has become a favoured recess activity, the current craze, you could say. Like tether-ball or hopscotch in previous years. This year, for some reason, all the grade-fives are lining up at the jungle gym like army recruits at basic training. Meanwhile, Jessica, whose job is to make sure Jonah is integrated not just into his classroom but also into social situations, has come to the conclusion that his reluctance to swing is isolating him—isolating him even more, she means to say, though is careful not to. This is valuable information, the kind we wouldn't have without Jessica, the kind that makes having our own shadow in the school so important.

The first day our exercise bar went up Jonah eyed it suspiciously. He reasonably assumed that this change in the household decor had something to do with him—he always assumes that; he's usually right—and, as a result, avoided it. I had doubts, too. I wondered what purpose having a single exercise bar would serve. Didn't he need more than one to practise actual swinging, you know, from bar to bar? Wasn't that the point of monkey bars—the point of monkeys, for that matter?
And what, exactly, was the point of all this anyway? Did we expect Jonah to grow up to be a trapeze artist?
I wisely kept these complaints to myself; still, as if to prove my point, the first time we coaxed Jonah into hanging from the bar, that's all he would do. Hang from it limply and then only for a few seconds. Cynthia pushed his bum to get him going, but as soon as she did he released his hands and dropped to the floor.

“What?” Cynthia said to me the first time Jonah refused to swing his legs and then wandered away

“Nothing. It just doesn't seem like this is the kind of thing we should have to teach him.”

“We have to teach him everything,” Cynthia said, not for the first time.

Now, we can't get Jonah off the thing. I'll call him to do his homework or to come to the kitchen for dinner, and when he doesn't show I always know where to find him. Now, I worry about him letting go of the bar in full swing and crashing through the nearest window, sticking a perfect landing somewhere in our next-door neighbour's backyard vegetable garden. Sometimes he beseeches us to push him. Other times, he drags over his small trampoline and positions it under the bar so he can vault onto it. This helps him gather speed. He's learned, with some coaching from Cynthia, who would be the first to admit she's no acrobat, to bend his knees and then fully extend his legs. He particularly enjoys the pendulum motion, the idea that you can only go so far forward before you inevitably end up going backward and, of course, vice versa. The gentle surprise of this as well as the constancy of it pleases him. Backward or forward, he is, on the bar, pure momentum. Sometimes, he'll belt out songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or “Swinging on a Star”—he particularly likes the part about the monkeys not all being in the zoo. He's not so much being clever or cute but adding a soundtrack to his favourite new activity. Mostly, though, I hear him reciting the alphabet, attaching an animal to each letter. At first, he could only make it to “C is for Camel” on one swing. Now, he's up to “Q for Quetzal.” Yes, quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, in case you're wondering. Jonah's capacity for happiness is unlimited, and this is not always an unequivocally good thing. It can turn, sometimes, into a kind of intoxication. Living with Jonah can be a bit like living with a little drunk—fun for a while but ultimately draining. But these days, on the swing, there's also a sober sense of pride and purpose. Cynthia suggests this has to do with the fact that Jonah is aware, more than I'm often prepared to acknowledge, that he has accomplished something he didn't believe he could. Jessica hasn't reported much progress in the schoolyard yet, but I'm willing to believe Cynthia is right. Even so, I suspect there's something else going through my son's head when he swings with this kind of abandon—something to do with gravity, with the sudden, conspicuous absence of it.

SOMETIMES I TRY TO imagine Jonah as a character in a novel. I know that if I can think of him that way, I'll have a better chance to understand him, figure out how he thinks. Isn't that what writers are supposed to do after all—get inside the heads of their characters? Negative capability: Keats coined the term. He used it to describe the uncanny aptitude a few extraordinary writers, like Shakespeare, had for empathy. Some writers, Keats said, were “capable of being in uncertainty, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In other words, they became their creations. My problem is I'm always reaching for facts and reasons. I have a lousy imagination. Besides, you can't chase after empathy any more than you can after happiness or love. Either you have it or you don't.

In
Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism,
author Kamran Nazeer, who is on the extremely high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, begins by telling the story of an unusually progressive school he attended in New York City when he was four and how, some twenty years later, he set out to find his classmates, also on the spectrum, to see how they fared. Nazeer, a successful policy adviser to the British government and an accomplished young writer, fared well. In fact, if he didn't remind us of his autism every now and then most readers would likely forget about it. He mentions some stims he still has, but they seem more like nervous tics. Even so,
Send in the Idiots
contains valuable insights about Nazeer's disorder, the kind only an insider could have. At one point, he explains that one of the reasons he was able to track down his long-lost classmates is because their parents had kept in touch with each other. The parents shared the same anxieties. “They knew ... there was unlikely to be a shining day when everything became fine,” Nazeer writes and then takes a stab at putting himself in the parents' shoes. “What did that feel like, to have created a life that was so fundamentally different from their own? Not different interests, a different view about the importance of religion, a partner that you don't necessarily approve of, but a different sort of life.”