The week collapses into a cycle of appointments. It’s cold out, Carolina late fall, everything gray and brown.
Could still be nothing,
that first doctor says.
Could still be nothing.
But even in the way he says it, there’s an undertow. Still. Could still. The second doctor, Dr. Kriedle, draws blood, does some reflex tests. She picks him up and holds him upside down, and he curls up, a shrimp.
Look at that,
Beth says.
No,
Dr. Kriedle says.
That’s not right. He should be hanging down. Like a pendulum.
She sends them on to another doctor, the one who tells them it could be anything, everything, asks them to sit down, says,
I want you to hear me out and ask questions whenever you like,
says
late onset
and
spectrum disorder
and
it’s too early to tell
and
regular intensive therapies.
They sit there and look at her and Jack says,
I have to finish classes. I have to give finals in a month. We’re going to Beth’s mother’s for Thanksgiving.
They go back to Dr. Kriedle, and she says,
I don’t think we’re talking about institutionalization here. But this is the long haul.
Jack remembers that so clearly, remembers the way her mouth looked when she said
long haul.
After that appointment, Jack drops Beth and Hen off at home, goes to the bookstore, gets the clear feeling that he’s falling through himself. He buys every book they have on the subject—
The Autistic Child. Boy in a Box. My Life with Samuel.
The man working the register looks at him like he’s buying books about autistic children. They get pamphlets from the doctors, get support group flyers in the mail. Jack reads everything he can find.
Autistic children are usually boys. Autism can strike anywhere between birth and six years. These children often have little sense of themselves. Our Christopher was a gift from God. Sensitivity to light. To loud noises. To sudden movement. The autistic child has little understanding of his body in space.
The autistic child has little to no object permanence.
Jack had to look that up. He bought a medical dictionary, made space for it on the shelf in the den. Object permanence: Remembering something exists after it’s removed from one’s field of vision. Jack wonders if he himself has any object permanence. What now, what next? Doctors. Endlessly. Diets and physical therapy—Hendrick’s stopped moving himself around, stopped doing much of anything. Forget about benchmarks: He’s just quit. They get a huge canvas beach ball from Dr. Kriedle, roll him around on it, trying to teach him balance. When he does sit up again, he’s six months behind. And when language comes back—he’s two and a half, so it’s another full year, a bizarrely silent year—it’s the complete text of a
News-week
article on the decline of Amtrak. Beth and Jack are standing in the kitchen, grazing in the fridge for leftovers, for anything they can cobble together for a late dinner, and Hendrick, clear as anything, says
George Santos, regional line manager for Amtrak, notes that rider-ship is down, and that he’s not sure how to get it back. Safety violations pose a problem, too.
Beth and Jack sneak into the room behind him, just out of his line of sight, and listen to him. He’s been playing with books, with newspapers, but they had no idea he could read. At two and a half, he can read. But it’s not even that: These are the first words of any kind he’s strung together in almost a year, the first time he’s done anything, really, besides point at what he wants—Pop-Tarts, pretzels—and grunt. It is like someone has plugged him back in, but to the wrong socket.
The therapist—at least their seventh or eighth—tells them the only way they’ll be able to potty-train him is to sit there with him, to literally move him into the bathroom except for sleeping. They’ll try anything: Hen has taken to smearing his shit across the walls of his room. It takes the better part of two weeks. It’s March. Jack sets the little TV up in there and sits on the edge of the tub, Hen on the toilet, and they watch spring training games on cable. On St. Patrick’s Day, all the teams wear green versions of their uniforms, and Hendrick loves that. He repeats, word-for-word, the commercials, what the announcers say. He’s a faucet turned on, an open valve.
Jim, I’ll tell you, if this kid can get that circle change figured out, he’ll make this club. And not just make it. He’ll be a contributor.
The way he’s able to get hold of words. Holy hell. They watch the games and every fifteen minutes or so they go through the flashcards the therapist gave them, these insane squatting stick figures pissing and shitting. This is Jack’s life now—to somehow supply for Hendrick the notion that his ass is part of his body, too.
Once they do get him potty-trained, he spends forever in the bathroom. He’ll go in, forget why he’s there, and read or spin the toilet paper roll and just disappear. The first few times, Jack jimmied the lock with a coat hanger, found him sitting there. He wasn’t drowning, wasn’t having seizures. He was just sitting there, happy as he ever got. Now they’ll stand at the door, call in to him.
Hen, buddy, are you alright? What are you doing in there?
Silence at first, and then, if they’re lucky, one time out of five, or ten, he’ll say,
I am making a poop.
What makes him respond sometimes and not others, they don’t know. They never know. None of the books know. Most often he just picks up mid-sentence in whatever he’s reading. Like they’ve switched on the audio feed.
We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.
That spring, the spring Hen is almost three, Jack’s teaching two sections of GenHum II. His third class, a gift from his chair, is a 300-level seminar on westward expansion. The Donner Party. Custer. Bloody Kansas. The Golden Spike. It is not a generally pretty history, and this freaks the kids out. Any criticism of anything is unpatriotic, is un-American.
No
, he tells them.
It isn’t. We did do these things
. He works them through how anyone who fails to understand history etcetera, and their eyes roll back in their heads, their ball caps come further down. But he’s got a few smart ones in there, kids he likes, a little group of eight or ten juniors and seniors who do the readings, ask good questions, hold the class together. Kids who don’t need PowerPoint slides of everything, kids who seem to believe in actual books with actual pages. It’s those kids who stay after class, who email him, who ask him about Beth, about his life.
So you and the other Professor Lang are married
. The girls want to see pictures of Hendrick, of Yul Brynner. It’s those kids who invite him out for beers that May, after they hand in their final papers, and he goes, asking each of them if they’re old enough. They are, or they lie to him, and it doesn’t matter, really. Why shouldn’t he go? They end up at a place far enough off campus to where he’s reasonably sure he won’t be seen by that many people anyway, a little pizza and beer place in Burlington. Gubbio’s. They drink a few pitchers around, eat pizza, ask Jack questions about his weekends, his house, where he went to school. He’s a zoo animal to them. Teacher in the wild. They’re trying to get hold of him as an actual person with an actual life, as someone who does not simply materialize in front of them every Tuesday and Thursday at 2:10. He is a person who has a vegetable garden. They have never even thought about growing such a thing as a zucchini. This is what their parents do. But he’s still young enough to seem like one of them, or for them to think he is, or could be. They probe. He does not tell them much about Hendrick, doesn’t tell them he’s autistic. That belongs to him. That is what he doesn’t share.
The students straggle out of Gubbio’s in little clumps until finally and somehow it’s just the one girl left, his favorite, Sarah Cody. He realizes what’s happening while it’s happening, but can’t do much about it, or doesn’t want to. He didn’t do this. They did. The kids invited him out, he said yes. It’s only nine o’clock. Sarah orders them one more pitcher.
Oh, come on, Jack. Just one more.
He likes that she says his name. She smokes. The waitress comes by and clears the table, looks at them a little longer than she needs to. He wonders how much older than Sarah he looks. The booths are red plastic. The floor is a wood floor. An oversized TV on the wall is playing the Braves at the Mets. It’s drizzling in New York, cold. Here it’s beautiful, May, the end of the school year, warm afternoons. Sarah tells him about her family in Philadelphia, about her sister’s wedding, about how she’s going to be the maid of honor, how she has to find a stripper for the bachelorette party. Her final paper was not great, was adequate, a surface exploration of what it means for the western states to have used longitudinal borders instead of geographical ones. She’s bright enough, tries hard, just isn’t exactly committed to the idea of being a student all the time. But she’s his favorite anyway, has been all term. He likes the way she’ll get excited about certain ideas, likes that she’ll talk without raising her hand. He looks forward to seeing her. She wears T-shirts and jeans, T-shirts and little plain brown shorts. No makeup. Brown hair. Brown eyes.
Halfway through the last pitcher Jack’s a little drunk, and she is, too, telling him about her other sister, who’s older than she is by ten years.
She’s retarded,
she says.
She goes to work at a place that makes lightbulbs
.
It’s sad. She lives in a home. She comes over on holidays. Last year she gave us 60-watt bulbs for Christmas.
As much as anything that’s going on here, Jack’s relieved to be out of his own house, to be away from the flashcards and the beach ball and how completely tired they are by the time Hendrick’s in bed. He registers this in little washes of guilt, but still: It’s like he’s been living a different life altogether since Hendrick was born, and a second and parallel one on top of that since he was diagnosed. He and Beth move through the house in occasionally intersecting orbits, but he’s got the TV, got his baseball and weather and shows on PBS about the history of Tupperware, and she’s got her little studio, the back bedroom, where she revises her dissertation when she can, still hoping for her book. Jack doesn’t write at all any more, hasn’t answered a string of emails from Dr. Dunst about when he might resume his dissertation hours. They grade papers over red wine at the dining room table, share bad lines, go to sleep.
Sarah Cody sits across the table from him in Gubbio’s and tugs at the neck of her shirt, looks at him. She’s someone who is maybe aware of her effect on the world, someone who is almost certainly
aware of her body in space
. Also, she’s clearly in love with another kid in their little gang. Greg Alessa. When she came in to conference about her paper a few weeks ago, Jack had been amazed to find out they weren’t dating. He’d even called him her boyfriend.
Oh, no way
, she said, laughing.
That would never work
. Since then he’s seen Greg with the girlfriend, the typical Kinnett girl: Shiny hair, idiotic boots, thousand-dollar pants. He wonders when the last day was that Sarah didn’t smoke pot, didn’t get drunk. She is rough-edged. She’s a little like a version of himself he wishes had existed in another universe, or in this one: He doesn’t so much want her as want to
be
her. To take on her life for a while. He drinks his beer. Beth’s at home, Hendrick’s down for the night. She’s probably asleep on the sofa. He’s at Gubbio’s with Sarah Cody, listening to her stories about how once she passed out on a city bus in Philly
,
how some girl she knows got arrested in February for selling a mashup of Vicodin and Ritalin mixed into Gatorade, how
my mom wanted to give me a boob job for my birthday.
And what in the hell is he supposed to say back to that? “I think you’re doing fine in that department,” he says.
She smiles, gives him a raspy giggle, looks away, lights another cigarette. “I probably have to go pretty soon,” she says. “You know?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”
He signals the waitress, pays their bill, walks her out to her car, a brand new BMW. The money these kids have. She says, “Thanks for coming out with us.”
“Thanks for inviting me.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It was cool.” And then she puts her hand on his arm, leans into him a little bit, and he does, in fact, see it coming, sees the whole thing, sees how this is easily the dumbest thing he could possibly do, but sees at the same time how it might also be free, how maybe nothing would come of it, how maybe no one would ever have to know anything about it. Because there’s no way he’s getting ready to get in his car and follow her home. There’s no way she’s getting ready to ask him to do that. This is nothing other than a little blip on the radar, something that will happen right here and only right here, a tiny footnoted moment of time. And she knows what she’s doing, for sure: She’s had her share of the beer, but this is a girl who does not do something like this accidentally. You can read that much on her. For Sarah Cody, this will be like kissing a friend at a party. He should not do this, should not, and he does it anyway. In the fluorescent light from the Gubbio’s sign, in the parking lot, in Burlington, North Carolina, the cars whipping by out on the highway, she wraps her hand around to the small of his back and then there he is, kissing Sarah Cody, twenty-one years old, his student. She tastes like cigarette smoke and something sweet. He can smell her deodorant, can smell her sweat a little bit through that. He puts a hand in her hair, something he’s wanted to do since he called her name on the roll. Sarah Cody. Her tongue hits his lip and she presses her hips against him for as long as it takes the light up at the intersection to change, then pulls away. She smiles, looks at the ground, looks through her car keys. “Yeah,” she says. “OK.” He can see she’s already working on it, scripting it for her friends.
We were pretty drunk. It was hilarious.
He doesn’t know what to do next. He can hear his own blood moving through his head. She gets her car door open, and he steps back. She says, “Well, you drive safely there, Jack.”