Authors: Ron Suskind
I’ve banished Owen to his room for the last few days—“Dad’s taking over the basement”—and ordered him this sunny afternoon to ride his bike to a neighborhood market to pick up heavy cream for his mother. It’s a make-work job. But it’ll keep him busy for an hour.
I settle onto the holy sofa: Corn’s first purchase as a single girl when we were dating in New York in the early 1980s. It’s a high-quality product, holding up quite nicely after twenty-five years. We are, too. There’ve been stresses galore that have come to rest on this marriage, from the long, seesawing struggle with Owen to the moments of public battle when the latest books have been released into this toxic political environment. But the battles, if anything, have strengthened our bond.
And we’re both feeling fortunate these days. No single reason, and many circumstances to the contrary—especially, in regard to Owen’s strange and troubling behavior. But a kind of faith in possibility, in the way things tend to work out, is the cup we both seem to be drinking from. You do your best, and wait for a break. They come, luck from unluck.
Take Cornelia’s father’s decline last fall. It was precipitous, and as I was readying before a trip alongside Benazir Bhutto—for her long-awaited return to Pakistan—Cornelia intervened. Knowing her father wouldn’t have long, she asked if there was any way I could postpone it. I did, albeit somewhat reluctantly, meaning I wasn’t beside Bhutto that October as a suicide bomber attacked her parade motorcade in Karachi, killing 140 and injuring five hundred. She’d slipped behind a plexiglass screen at the last instant to work on a speech she was about to give; that’s why she survived this attack. I wouldn’t have followed her there.
Two months later, at the end of December, I sat with her in Quetta, the western Pakistan town controlled by the Taliban. We’d been chased that day by suicide bombers. It was her last major interview. She died nine days later.
By then I’d just gotten home for the holidays, after a difficult exit from Afghanistan, and was all but overcome with gratitude that the four of us were together, safe within the warmth of this house, this family.
In our long afternoon in Quetta, inside the fortress-home of a friendly warlord, Bhutto talked about her alleged corruptions, how she became prime minister, twice, of a patriarchal country, and about life’s transactions: how it often boils down to credits and debts, who saved whom, who owes whom what. Whether for a family, or a nation, she said, that’s where the trouble rests, a false calculus. “When things really work, though, it’s because people realize that this is a lie, that, really, we all save one another. It’s the way of the world.”
So I decided, when I returned to America, to call this next book
The Way of the World
. There are probably better titles. But I get to choose and I felt that quote was so very true. True for the world? Hopefully. But true for my own life and that of my family, the thing I know best? For sure.
The dinner is much more than the food—these are our good friends; there’s drinking and laughter and jokes about how many days it’s been since I’ve slept. By two
A.M.
, Cornelia turns in and I slip back to the basement.
The book is running through my head—a puzzle of nearly five hundred pages, of characters and plot turns, Afghani kids and intelligence chiefs, documents and disclosures about how power often undermines principle. It’s all laid down, nice and neat, but I need to manage a final summation of how they all connect, and connect us to something larger than ourselves in the next ten hours. A short passage of last thoughts, for literally the last three pages of the book, is due at noon. When all the pieces are fitted together, what does the puzzle reveal?
In the fitful early morning hours, the rich food and wine and insomnia catch up with me. I find myself grasping the toilet in the downstairs bathroom. I think this may be it—that Owen will find me here in the morning when he slips downstairs to watch a movie. When the misery passes—and certain death is averted—this harrowing image of Owen’s discovery lingers and my de-puzzling turns to him.
What the hell is wrong with him?
What holds together and what’s missing? It’s just basic reporting. What are the incongruities, the pieces that don’t fit? Hold them up, turn them this way and that. They all belong somewhere.
I’ve overheard him talking to himself quite a bit lately; always, it seems, in Phil’s voice. He’s doing it quietly, under his breath, but you can tell its Danny DeVito’s rasp.
Why Phil?
Well, he trains Hercules for battle, and is an aggressive little guy, himself. Is Owen—a kid without an aggressive bone in him—in some kind of confrontation, or headed for one? Why would he try to jab a kid with a pencil? It’s not in his nature—that I know—so it must be driven by some circumstances, something that’s making him incredibly tense.
As I run through the many moments I’ve seen him anxious, I think of that concert. He played that piece ten times at the piano in the living room with his eyes closed. And he never freezes in front of audiences. Look at the bar mitzvah. What are the differences between our living room—and even, more clearly, a crowded synagogue—and that gymnasium? Well, as Cornelia said, the bar mitzvah was a safe place. What was going on in that gymnasium? Mostly, I remember the performers—I really wasn’t paying attention to anyone beyond Owen, Cornelia, and whoever was on the stage. Which brings me back to that one amazing kid who commandeered the room. And then, an attached memory of how Owen was sitting, looking at the floor when everyone else was up clapping.
A few days later, the book is at the printer’s. I’ve gotten a few long nights of sleep. Owen has taken back his basement. We’re on the sofa now, together.
“Who was that boy who did the last song? You know him?”
Owen wouldn’t meet my eye. “No.”
“Weren’t a lot of the performers in your music class? Is he in there?”
He pauses. “Yes.”
“So, he’s in your music class for the whole year, but you don’t know him?”
“Can I go now?”
“Not until you talk to me.”
This went on for an hour, until Owen arrived at, “If I tell you once, I won’t ever have to talk about it again.”
I earnestly agree to this—a promise to him I’ve made, and broken, many times. “Yes, just this one time.”
He sits for about five minutes in silence. And then it starts coming, fast, in a torrent. The whole story. It’s cataloged in his head by the day. He doesn’t want to say the words, what was said. I tell him I need to hear it all, every word. And then I’m repeating them back to him, feeling each blow, as though I’m being struck. “Burn the house down!” “Kill us!” And, “Kill you if you told us!”
He’s not crying—he so rarely cries—but he’s shaking, heaving it up.
And then, and then, and then
, spewing up each threat and curse.
Everything now makes sense, how the two bullies trapped him, toyed with him. He says he almost told Walt and he says it almost impatiently—like,
hey, I’m not a complete idiot, here
—but that he was afraid Walt would kill the kid. And I can see that whole scene in the carpool line, like it’s happening. Thank God he didn’t tell Walt. “But that must have been so hard. And you having no one to talk to.”
And then, catching his breath, he tells me about Phil. He couldn’t turn to us, so he turned to Phil. Of course…training him for battle. “I could talk to Phil—that helped me.” And Lucky Jack, another training sidekick. And also Jiminy Cricket. “He said, let your conscience be your guide. And also, ‘Go tell your parents. They’ll understand.’”
I ask him why didn’t he listen to Jiminy and tell us. “All these months you’ve been alone and terrified, every minute.”
He puts his arms around my neck. I hug him, tight, and after a moment I feel his tears moisten my cotton shirt. “I was afraid they’d burn our house down.”
Upstairs I hear the front door open. It’s Cornelia. In a moment, all three of us are in the basement.
Her response is volcanic, then swiftly capped. She’s moving fast and furious, like those women who lift cars to save their kids. The circle widens fast. That afternoon, Rhona Schwartz comes to the house. We don’t have to tell her that Owen can’t return to the school if the two boys who tormented him are there. He tells her himself. Cornelia adds one homicidal look and Rhona gets to work. They’ll be gone by the fall.
C. T. Gordon, Owen’s psychiatrist, is on a rare vacation, so we bring in the doctor on call, Dr. Lance Clawson, who is recommended by the school and plenty of others. He takes the lead. On top of everything else, Owen is now battling obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as he replays the threats and swear words over and over, in his head, leaving him paralyzed with fear.
He gets medication for that and Lance sends us to a specialist, a therapist who starts Owen on a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy called ERP, for exposure response prevention. The idea is to expose him, bit by bit, to the horrific thoughts or words, but keep him calm and not let him break out into panic and paralysis. Over time, he’ll become desensitized. This, in a manner of speaking, is what happens to neuro-typical people over the years, starting from the earliest ages—the on-rushing world numbs us and thickens the skin.
The axis of bombardment and desensitizing—and the need for ever-heightening shocks to draw a response—is what plenty of social theorists see as a dilemma of the modern, technological age: we live inside a Circus Maximus of violence, sex, and fear generally called the media culture. Owen, of course, has suffered a specific trauma. But its features—the lying, the threats, the curse words—are the types of mortal shocks we’ve tried to insulate him from.
Cornelia and I discuss this endlessly, night after night. On the one hand, we say he’s just turned seventeen and he’s in high school. He can’t avoid the wider world, and neither can we. If things work out, it’s the place he’ll have to live. On the other hand, we’re in a state of shock and remorse. Our fears, of how readily he’ll be taken advantage of, a threat rising with each step toward independence, have been disastrously confirmed.
“I worked so hard to get him to this place, and now for this to happen,” Cornelia says, late one night in July during a moment of reflection.
What do I think, over and over? What he wrote on the pad, that he’d be “the protekter of sidekicks.” I always figured that was my job—to protect him. At that I’d failed.
We begin driving him up to an office in the Maryland suburbs where a middle-aged psychologist named Sherry has him recite each thing that the two boys said to him. As his body tenses, she eases him down. And then she starts the process once again.
Carl Jung’s term is “the shadow.” Or so Dr. Griffin told me the previous fall after a session where Owen was describing in effusive detail what drives many of the Disney villains: greed, lust, power, jealousy.
I said I’d never heard of Jung’s shadow. Dan, as my all-purpose search engine on psychology, that night sends me a note:
Sex and the life instincts in general are,
of course, represented somewhere in Jung’s
system. They are a part of an archetype called
the shadow. It derives from our pre-human [sic],
animal past, when our concerns were limited to
survival and reproduction, and when we weren’t
self-conscious. It is the “dark side” of the ego,
and the evil that we are capable of is often stored
there. Actually, the shadow is amoral—neither
good nor bad, just like animals. An animal is
capable of tender care for its young and
v
icious
killing for food, but it doesn’t choose to do either.
It just does what it does. It is “innocent.” But
from our human perspective, the animal world
looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for the parts
of ourselves that we can’t quite admit to.Symbols of the shadow include the snake (as
in the garden of Eden), the dragon, monsters,
and demons. It often guards the entrance to a
cave or a pool of water, which is the collective
unconscious. Next time you dream about
wrestling with the devil, it may only be
yourself you are wrestling with!
Dan counts Jung as one of his important early influences. Of course, it’s long been clear that Owen’s been tiptoeing through the shadowlands, trying to get at it meditating on his favorite villains and darker human impulses. He knows people lie, cheat, bully, bruise, and even kill each other. These are elements in virtually every movie he’s memorized. But he can only seem to wrestle with these human dualities in the controlled landscape of Disney, a place he can own, manipulate, and master.
The last six months are all about a loss of that control. He learns from movies—it’s his way—but life isn’t a movie that you can rewind, pause, and decipher from the end of a remote. It comes at you fast, faster than so many of the spectrum folks can manage. The dark side rose to meet him, face-to-face, each morning in music class. For no reason he could fathom, a carefully controlled life—by us and by him—was thrown into chaos.
Owen returns to school for his junior year, but he’s quite tentative. He’s bouncing around, still discernibly unglued.
The bullies are no longer there, but he’s walking the same halls, sitting in the same classrooms. The residues are everywhere.
But so are a few precious counterpoints, namely Connor and Brian, who are waiting for him in homeroom, that very first day. It’s a reunion of The Movie Gods.
They are each different, just like we all are, though they share some of the telltale traits: difficulty picking up social cues, rigidity in habit and intellect, difficulty taking the specific to the general, disorientation in unfamiliar situations, trouble with attention and receptive language.
Expressive language is a different story—and what bubbles up from within all three is a world made accessible through the moving image. Like the Venn diagrams Rhona drew the interlocking circles of The Movie Gods show plenty of overlap.