Authors: Ron Suskind
Brian’s a “Thomas the Tank Engine” kid. The British-made children’s series has only one human: the main character, Mr. Conductor, who was alternatively played by Ringo Starr and George Carlin. The rest are trains—Thomas, Percy, William, and so forth—that move along tracks as they play out modest human dramas, their emotions presented with frozen faces (smile, frown, surprise) right above the cowcatcher. It’s precisely this structure and simplicity, the repetition of tracks and easily discernible emotions, that make it a favorite among kids with autism.
Connor likes Thomas, too, but he’s
graduated
—if that’s the right word—into the superhero-movies arena. There are plenty of those. He knows everything about everyone in those movies, just like Brian knows everything about Thomas.
Brian’s interests extend beyond just the Thomas series. He’s an aficionado of Mel Brooks’s movies and, under an organizing principle of Judaism, he knows just about every Jewish actor in the history of movies. Connor, who’s not Jewish, likes Brooks’s movies as well—especially
Blazing Saddles
—but doesn’t live for them like Brian.
And they both love Disney, which is where the Venn’s borders of both boys overlap with Owen’s. Owen is the aficionado in that area, yet they can all speak Disney, and are appreciative of his expertise, just as Owen is of Brian’s mastery of Thomas and Connor’s sweep-ing knowledge of dozens of superhero movies. But now, at the start of the third year of their friendship, the three circles are bleeding into one another. It’s almost as though they’ll venture into contiguous territory—movie territory, mostly—at the behest of a fellow Movie God, just like typical teenage boys do on a wider and decidedly more three-dimensional landscape.
As they meet that first day at 8:30
A.M.
, the restoration Owen feels is palpable. He hugs them both. The building feels different to him, he tells us later—“like it was last year with the bullies, but not.” However, Connor and Brian are right where they should be, smiling and ready. Connor, a wide-set guy with curly hair, pushing six feet, cheers, “The Movie Gods are back!” And Brian, a dark-haired broad shouldered kid, about Owen’s height, who smiles all the time—happy, nervous, confused, enraptured, doesn’t matter—says, “All for one!”
They both want to know the same thing: has Owen seen
The Dark
Knight
with Heath Ledger? Chris Nolan’s second movie with Christian Bale as Batman has owned the summer, mostly because of the performance of Ledger, whose rendition of The Joker was so violent and troubling that some believe it may have contributed to the actor’s death a few months before the movie’s release in mid-July. His last performance was also mesmerizing. No one could take their eyes off the movie, with a villain who wreaks havoc for no apparent reason beyond the fact that “some men,” as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred (Michael Caine) says, “just want to watch the world burn.”
Owen has heard it’s dark and vicious, well beyond the two darkest movies he’s embraced—the Batman movies by Tim Burton. The first with Jack Nicholson as The Joker, and the other with Danny DeVito as The Penguin, are shadowy and brooding, but carry their violence with a cushion of being comedic and unreal.
But, on his first day back, Owen is floundering, unsure of his footing. He nods, reaching across the Venn: “Yes, I’ll see it.” They’re both overjoyed.
“Then, we can talk about it!” Connor exclaims.
That weekend Owen and I go to the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue near our home, just a few blocks from Patch of Heaven’s church basement.
I’ve never seen a movie like this with Owen and he’s watching the screen with surprising intensity. The Joker kills a man by pushing a pencil into his brain through an eye socket. I can only think of Owen jabbing at his tormentor with his pencil. I ask if he wants to leave.
“No,” he says, almost to himself. “I’m okay.” Maybe this is what the ERP is about, learning to stay calm and detached while a thousand shocks are thrown your way.
I can’t tell what he’s thinking—this sort of thing he’d always turned away from—but now he’s not. And, in my chair, the cinematic and the real are colliding. I’ve spent the summer doing interviews from the “Today” show to Jon Stewart’s
“
The Daily Show
”
to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show promoting my book,
The
Way of the World
. Its main character is a U.S. intelligence chief who furiously treks around the globe in an attempt to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Their oath of using fear to undermine civilization’s norms and create anarchy—to show our prized principles are matters of convenience, easily toppled—is identical to what Ledger’s character pronounces in the movie.
Joker: You’ll see, I’ll show you, that when the chips are down, these uh…civilized people, they’ll eat each other.
And then this, to District Attorney Harvey Dent—a champion of law, society’s rule book to manage itself—who’s lying, mangled, in a hospital bed.
Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just, do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, and Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic, their attempts to control things really are…Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.
The next day, Sunday, I hear Owen recite this entire passage in a flawless mimic of Heath Ledger’s Joker.
I’m stunned. I ask him to do it again, and bring Cornelia over to hear it. She hasn’t seen the movie, but the words are unmistakable in their impute—as is their connection to Owen’s life.
We go out to the back patio where we can talk.
“He might as well be talking to the bullies,” Cornelia says, outraged. “It’s horrifying.”
We talk for an hour. A warm September sun is beginning to set. Late summer bugs are buzzing around the flowers in a beautiful backyard Cornelia landscaped.
I suggest that reciting long passages of Heath Ledger is the way he’s deboning the trauma, disempowering it. Just like the use of Disney over so many years, it’s Owen’s particular form of self therapy, his compass and sextant. “Now, he’s trying to deal with the darker stuff, in his life, in the way people can be.”
“Yes…obviously,” Cornelia says. “It’s really about something deeper. A loss of control. Our loss, as much as his. We can’t protect him. And I don’t think he can protect himself. And that means someone I love so much—as much as life itself—is going to get hurt, again and again. And the movies are just movies.”
At a hotel in Naples, Florida, we lay the cards on the table.
It’s Christmas break and we figured a trip away with the kids was in order. It’s nice to be together, all four of us. It’s been a rough semester for Owen, though he’s slowly getting back on his feet. Heath Ledger may have helped. Clearly, the therapy is working, slowly and surely.
And there’s homework. That’s what the cards are. Twenty cards, laid out on a little table under a hanging lamp in the hotel room—four rows of five. We have similar cards in our hand. It’s a matching game, somewhere between Hearts and Go Fish.
The cards have curse words. Owen lays a card with the word
SHIT
on it on a pile of
SHITS
. “I need another
SHIT
,” he says, sheepishly.
Walt starts to laugh.
“Owen, it’s funny.”
“I hate that word.”
“I know, honey,” Cornelia says. “But this is the way for the words to not have power over you.”
I mention Lenny Bruce. Walt’s on it—definitely, same idea. He says, “Take their power away.”
Cornelia finds a match to
BITCH
. Owen shakes his head. “I hate that word.”
Walt’s turn. He’s looking around the table. “I really need a
FUCK
,” and then he cracks up. We all start laughing. Owen looks face to face, and starts laughing, too.
I think back to when Walt was five, right before we left Dedham. I came into his bedroom telling him it’s lights-out time, which he wasn’t happy about, and he tried out a new word he’d overhead. “Shit!” he shouted. I looked at him, kissed him good night, and slipped out, leaving him befuddled. It’s since become an old family story, of how Walt was trying the word out for the first time, then figured he’d misused it.
I mention it when the next round of
SHIT
cards come up. And he nods, and smiles. “It was awhile before I tried using it again.”
Though I’m sure Owen will never use these words, one unanticipated use of traumatic adversity—started a year ago, now, on that morning in music class—is that these words can be taken off the list of ugly realities that might exert power over him as he ventures into the world.
Monday afternoons are still mine, whenever I’m in town. In late February 2009, Owen and I are driving to Dr. Griffin’s office for a 3:00
P.M.
appointment.
The road forward is just proving to be daunting for him; the subtle play of light and darkness he’s seeing in himself—like in all of us—bespeaks unmanageable danger. Just as Cornelia said last fall, when we sat on the patio—“we can’t protect him” and he’s realizing “he can’t protect himself.”
His conclusion: too many hurts, up ahead, to risk the journey. His compass is way off, whipsawing from Heath Ledger and his curse-word-therapy game…to Mister Rogers.
After getting back from our Christmas vacation, we start to notice this compass is pointing backward: a full-on regression. Anything that suggests growth, change, the adult world, or the future starts to become untouchable. High school, and the heartfelt vagaries of teenage life, with all its pitfalls and uncertainties, are unsettling. He’s seen the wider world. He wants no part of it.
Cornelia maps the race backward, day by day. We’ve been trying to get him to use a cell phone. He discards it. Hides it in his backpack, power off. He’s also reviving “Thomas the Tank Engine,” and pulling out old picture books, from when he was a baby, from boxes under the Ping-Pong table.
If this keeps up, the very hopeful reciprocities with Connor and Brian will be disrupted.
Regression is ultimately a defensive reaction, like building a fortress, and retreating into it. Us telling him that he can’t escape into little-kids things isn’t working. We’re part of the problem. He thinks we want to push him forward. That’s understandable. We do.
If we can’t advise him, who can?
Which is what brings me back to
Hercules
’ Phil. That’s who I’m thinking of as we drive to Dan’s. Phil, after all, is who he turned to in that strangely dynamic internal conversation when he was afraid we may not love him, as the bullies said, when he felt he’d have to fight his way forward.
But there are many kinds of sidekicks, as—by now—we well know.
When we get to Dan’s, I tell Owen I need to talk to Dr. Griffin for a minute, and that he should hang out in the waiting room.
Dan and I huddle, behind the closed door. We talk about Phil. He knows all about Phil. He knows about the regression. Basically, he knows almost everything we know, at this point.
“Okay, here’s the idea. Have Owen solve a problem for a boy like Owen—fearful of the future—in the voice of one of the wise sidekicks.”
Dan gets it immediately. He’s pumped. “Which one?”
On the wall in a frame, above Dan’s right shoulder, is the picture Owen drew of Rafiki.
I point to it.
He nods. “Definitely, go with Rafiki.”
I call Owen in and everyone takes their places: Owen’s on the couch. I’m on the wing chair next to him, and Dan’s on his rolling desk chair, which he wheels right up close.
“All right, Owen,” Dr. Griffin says, leaning forward, his hand framing the air before his face. “Let’s say, there’s a boy like you, different from lots of other boys, who’s fearful of the future, of growing up, and wants to start going back to being a little kid.” He pauses. “What would Rafiki tell him?”
Without missing a beat, Owen says matter-of-factly, “I’d prefer Merlin.”
Dan stammers. “Umm. Okay, then. Merlin!”
“Listen, my boy, knowledge and wisdom are the real power!” Owen exclaims as Merlin, in the voice of Karl Swensen. And then he keeps going. “Now, remember, lad, I turned you into a fish. Well, you have to think of that water like the future. It’s unknown until you swim in it. And the more you swim, the more you know. About both the deep waters and about yourself. So swim, boy, swim.”
Dan looks at me, eyes wide. He’s watched the movie plenty of times—but can’t place that second part. I shake my head. Not in there. Yes, there’s a scene where Merlin turns himself and Arthur into fish. That seemed to be Owen’s trigger to update those lines. But where are the words coming from?
Dan asks Merlin more questions, and “a boy like” Owen receives advice, wise and gentle. And after ten minutes, I begin to realize that Owen has lived in an upside-down world, much more fully realized than we ever could have imagined. Now, we’re in it, too. Merlin is speaking with a depth and nuance that Owen has never—and maybe could never—manage. At least could never manage without Merlin. Could it be that a separate speech faculty has been developing within him that was unaffected by autism? Or, maybe, in response to how the autism blocked and rewired the normal neural pathways for speech development?
Forty-five minutes later, Dan and I leave the room in a daze. Me, to drive Owen home. He, to reflect on and record the incredible moment in his case notes.
When I get home late that afternoon, I can’t wait to tell Cornelia. She immediately gets it, sees the breakthrough, and wants to give it structure.
“Look, I know you can fake any profession, but you’re not a psychologist. E-mail Dan—tell him to look for what’s in the psychology literature about using voices like this.”
In the coming days, Dan sends links to recent papers mentioning the use of something called “inner speech” in the development of executive function—that catchall term for reasoning, planning, problem solving, connecting past to present, and an array of other cognitive functions. First theorized by an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, it starts as the self-directed, out-loud speech of young children—verbalizing as they make their way—and is internalized in preschool years, as a way kids “think through” actions. Studies in recent years indicate this inner speech may be impaired in autistic children, undermining, from early on, their executive functioning. In fact, when inner speech is artificially impaired in typical kids—something managed by disruptive noise or tapping—they perform on various problem-solving tests about the same as autistic children.