Life, Animated (26 page)

That’s what’s on our mind as Walt signs off: engineering a life. Owen’s starting his senior year. After that,
who knows?

Early the next morning, Cornelia and I slip into a deli in Cabin John, Maryland, a riverside enclave atop the Potomac’s cliffs north of Washington, DC. We’re here for the monthly visit, a few doors away, to Owen’s psychiatrist—this time just us. We do this once in a while; go to a session without Owen. That way we can talk openly, strategize, and probe a bit beyond our shared knowledge, our team of two. And there’s a lot to discuss, as Owen enters his senior year.

We brought Dr. Lance Clawson in when the bullying was revealed—a year and three months ago now—and liked him. He’s caring and attentive, but matter-of-fact. What do we need? What do we do? Is there a right answer? Cornelia and I have built up so much knowledge over the years, that we often get treated like colleagues. We like that, up to a point. But we’re not doctors, after all. That’s why we’re visiting one.

We settle around the deli’s wrought-iron table, with the heart-shaped chairs, and quietly spread cream cheese on our bagels.

She asks, “What do other couples do with all their spare time?”

“I don’t know, golf, maybe. Bridge. Progressive dinner parties, with the fondue forks.”

“I guess we’ll be doing some of that next year when we’re empty nesters. What fun.”

Her tone is light, facetious, with a base note of resignation. We eat our bagels in silence. Her Herculean effort of Patch of Heaven was to boost him to a high school that might usher him off, well prepared, to some college program. We’ve looked at a few over the years: programs where kids live in collegiate environs, with added structural support and, generally, a lighter academic load. Many are small campuses that are like a college, or are situated within an existing one. The goal, most often, is not to graduate. One big school, in fact, is called CLE, which stands for College Living Experience. Some kids get degrees. But for $80,000, that’s mostly what you get—the experience.

That’s not going to happen. “He’s not ready for anything like that,” Cornelia says after a bit. “And I don’t see him being ready in a year.”

A few weeks before, we called parents we knew from his school to discuss the possibility of starting a transition program, a group house where a few kids—including The Movie Gods—might live next year, at least a few days a week. Cornelia sketched outlines of how we could hire someone, maybe a young man, who could mentor, coach, teach, and help them build life skills. The other parents were interested, if tentative. Of course, it’d be a huge undertaking—bigger than Patch of Heaven—where a house would need to be rented and a supervisory person hired. Plus, activities, a curriculum, would need to be developed and implemented. It’d have to be created, whole cloth, and Cornelia knows it’d mostly fall to her.

I know not to offer any easy answers—any “here’s how we fix this” suggestions that, as a guy, are always within reach. After all, it’s mostly been her burden to carry. Might be for quite a while.

“He’s not going to graduate and settle into the basement—that’s not good for him or for us.” Cornelia’s adamant about that, and she’s right. But where does he go? Or, if he’s home, what do we do with him each day?

“Look, honey, it’s still a year away.”

“Nine months.”

A few minutes later, in Lance’s office, we run through updates. His medications, mostly a very low dose of Prozac, are fine. No bad reactions. On the last visit in August, Cornelia reported there were some scattered verbalizations over the summer, where, unprompted, he’d yell out “no!” or “I hate that word!”—a residual, still, from the bullying. But she hasn’t heard any in the past month.

Lance says these outbursts will happen from time to time, but the progression over the past year has been good and he thinks we should take him off a drug he’s taking for OCD.

He asks if we detect any anxiety about what’s ahead for him, with Owen starting his senior year. None we detect is our response.

“How about for you guys?” he says, lightly. We laugh.

Cornelia runs through some of the preliminary options, and describes the parent meeting, and the possibility of building a transition program.

Lance immediately sees what a large undertaking that’d be. “He may be at home for a while,” he says. “If they have a structure, a job, responsibilities—and maybe a separate entrance. Lots of young adults thrive that way.”

“It’s not that we don’t want him home, Lance,” Cornelia says. “Over the years, we’ve seen him thrive when he’s out of the house, when he’s challenged. He rises to it.”

“What’s Owen think about any of this? You talk to him?”

That gives me an opening, something I’ve wanted to get Lance’s view about since last spring when Owen told me more about his movie.

“Owen’s untroubled. He thinks he’s going to be an animator at Disney in California. And there he’ll create a movie—about how we’re all sidekicks, searching for our inner hero—that’ll save the world.”

“Well, he sure doesn’t aim low,” Lance says, with a laugh.

I talk about my uncertainty about how to proceed, how, when he first vanished into autism, we discarded parental notions of future greatness for him and never much thought about him having dreams. If we didn’t, how could he? Across the years, he’s developed little sense of the prevailing consensus about what society deems as worthy of aspiring to, about the big prizes, or reckoned with the traditional adolescent awakening about how distant those hopes might be, about how very large and competitive the world is.

Lance nods. Yes, of course. Owen’s gaps are common features of autism. A grasp of scale, and one’s measure, are all calculations of context.

I feel context is one thing I understand, and how this is a mighty tall mountain he’s cast his gaze upon. When Owen was just four, I recount, and I was working on
A Hope in the Unseen
from Providence, Rhode Island, the kids at Brown University—fully realized young artists and math whizzes who could draw—were already flocking to animation. It grew after
Toy Story
came out in 1995 and spread to video games. It hasn’t abated.

Cornelia steps in, broadens it. “Every parent worries about their kid being disappointed. With him, just multiply those feelings. He’s still so hopeful, even as he’s becoming aware of the world’s judgments, how harsh they can be. It seems he’s rested his whole identity on this dream. We just don’t want him to be hurt.”

Lance lightens it up. “So what’s the book title—
A Hope in the
Unseen
? This is our nature.” He talks about how guys wrestle with this in their teenage years—how they realize they won’t be a quarterback for the Redskins. “A boy reconciles with that. Then some girl says she loves him anyway, and they live happily ever after. It’s part of life to work this out on our own.”

Okay, that’s the general point, but the challenge, every day, is to draw the line between what’s the same and what’s different, where the conventional thinking does or does not apply to those with autism. Over fifteen years as a developmental psychiatrist, he’s seen thousands of teens and young adults on the autism spectrum.

“Look, I’m sure you’ve dealt with this before.”

He has. “Some people disagree, but my policy has always been let them dream and learn what they can, or not—in their own way—about how the big, bad world works.

“We were allowed to dream,” he says. “Why shouldn’t they.”

We all sit there for a minute.

“I’m sure many just keep dreaming,” I say. “Context blind and quite content.”

He nods. “They do. But there’s really nothing wrong with that. So their dreams don’t die. Maybe that’s a path to happiness.”

On a snowy Sunday in mid-December, Maureen O’Brien is standing in the doorway of an unusual two-story studio beside her Northwest, Washington, DC, house. This tall hut is itself eccentric—blissfully inhabited each Sunday by the giddy Maureen and five artsy teenage girls. We’ve been coming to this locale for most of the fall. And today, like always, there’s great fanfare when Owen arrives that’s led by Maureen, a wide-eyed, red-haired, late-forties, child-mom painter, photographer, calligrapher, drafter, and sculptor who runs the art program at a nearby private school.

We had been introduced to her by a friend with an autistic son, who may join our prospective transition program. And she’s been the find
of the year.

Maureen, as eccentric as her studio, views Owen as a creative colleague. She calls him an artist. She’s one, too. So are the girls, who look up from paint-splattered tables, downstairs and down from the second-floor loft, and call out his name. It’s an artists’ den, with an ancient chandelier, a fireplace, artwork hanging from any surface that’ll support a nail, sliced fruit and cookies, and a prized, comfy chair in the corner tucked beneath strung beads and small papier-mâché figures hanging from the underside of the stairs. That’s his chair. Beside it is a small low table where Maureen sets out art supplies that seem to have shaped themselves to Owen’s hands in the past three months.

On Owen’s first Sunday visit, back in September, Maureen looked at his sketchbooks of Disney characters—declared them fine art—and literally walked into his head. She had him bring his thick Disney animation books the next week.

Disney animation techniques emerge from a variety of artistic traditions, different styles in different eras, that she could instantly deconstruct. She saw patterns between which characters he was drawing, and how they made him feel

After a few Sundays of this, she didn’t need to draw him out. He came to her, ready to go. They’d flip through books he brought, select figures he’d redraw. She’d have him take artistic ownership, pressing him to render the figures on wild backdrops with an array of materials—charcoal, watercolors, oils—in colors he would select to accentuate mood and emotion. In other words, art. After years of working alone in the basement—compulsively perfecting his technique—Owen found a coach.

Owen shakes off the snow, hangs his coat, and settles into his desk, and starts drawing. It’s like he’s hungry for it. My phone rings; it’s a story source I’ve been chasing pulling me outside for a few minutes. When I duck back in to say I’ll be back in ninety minutes, Maureen has some of Owen’s latest works in her arms to show me. I start to look, and then something surprises me. It’s not one of the canvases, startling as they are. Owen, engrossed a few feet away in his sketch of King Triton, is talking calmly, assuredly, to a girl at a nearby desk. She’s a pretty, blond girl.

This doesn’t happen. When an attractive girl addresses him, or just walks by, he literally has to turn his head. This has been going on for a few years. We’ve talked to Lance and Dan Griffin about it. Their explanations are fuzzy, a grab bag. Sex is a complex transaction along the autism spectrum. For typical teenage boys, when an attractive girl walks by, they get flushed, their heartbeat ticks up. For autistic teens, this is often too jarring, too eruptive and jangling to their nervous systems. They turn away or tamp down the reaction.

Others move along the steps of sexual awakening very slowly, with measured steps, and may not have a first sexual experience until they’re thirty. It’s hard to know where Owen fits, a mystery. But, in this warm and safe place, it seems the art is acting as a thermostat, directing certain senses in one direction—toward the emotive expressions on the page—and freeing them in another. His head down, he tells her he’s drawing Triton, the father of Ariel—the beautiful heroine, whom the girl says she was raised on, just like he was. And then he asks her what she’s drawing.

Now, across the room, another girl joins in—another attractive, artsy girl, in a flowing, peasant blouse—and he tells her his feelings about Ariel, about her motivations and fears, never lifting his head, his eyes finding the line for his pencil.

Maureen, beside me holding up one of his canvases, sees my attention has been drawn away, listening to the exchanges; to the way, in her lair, Owen is learning to manage his unruly senses, to harness them. She watches me watching it all, which I notice as I turn back.

“They like him,” she says.

“I think he likes being liked.”

She nods. “I think he likes being an artist. It’s who he is. That’s what the girls see.”

Owen will have to do it on his own.

When neuroscientists talk of their fascination with autism, they’re referring to how alterations in the way the autistic brain works—what’s different about it—gives them insights into what it varies from: namely, the typical brain. There’s a subtext to that interest. In the past ten years, understanding about the brain’s famous functional map—frontal lobe for this, left hemisphere for that—has given way to a view that the brain is much more dynamic, adaptable, and inscrutable than we’d ever imagined, with various regions and billions of cells instantaneously connecting and carving “neural” pathways.

The humility this is inducing among some very smart people notwithstanding, there’s palpable excitement about one area of powerful and growing consensus: when challenged, the brain finds a way.

In the early days, when Cornelia talked of re-birthing Owen every day, she—like countless other parents, trying anything that they could to reach their child—was experimenting with the brain’s ability to improvise, what would later be called its “neuroplasticity.”

Science caught up with the moms, which is actually not all that uncommon, and now has its hottest lights on autism. Because autism is pervasive, it covers almost all of the brain, putting everything on display. There is clearly a connection between the way deficits in processing language may be caused by, or create, heightened capacities for pattern recognition and certain types of memory. Those three core functions—language processing, pattern recognition, and memory—can be difficult to probe and assess in the typical brain.

But you can see the neuronal gears turn in the way those functions are heightened or diminished by autism, and the way the brain—challenged in this way—is busy discovering itself. Watching that teaches scientists what the brain is inherently capable of. Call it the discovery principle.