Читать книгу An Archaeology of Yearning - Bruce Mills - Страница 13

MYSTERIES

“Oh, l-ook. A nice dinna!”

Jacob looks past my eyes and points toward the top of the refrigerator. The end of his right index finger curls slightly downward, as if he knew himself that nothing is to be found amid the dusty tops of things.

“Oh, l-ook.” His tongue holds the “l” as if a whole note; the “ook” forms a Dr. Seussian accompaniment. When I pick him up, he twists in my arms like a wild thing and grips the door jamb. We are a raft adrift. His arms are oars catching the sides of the river bank; we have no word for shore. The torque of this leaning pulls at my back, yet I still guide him forward until his hands find the refrigerator. He leaves the dots of his fingertips in the dust.

“What do you want, Jacob? Tell me what you want.”

“Oh, l-ook. Oh, l-ook. A nice dinna!”

For Mary and me, the early years of autism were full of these inexplicable mysteries. I think of them as the wandering times, the wilderness days of storytelling in the face of the unpredictable and unknown. Family and friends lent their own memories because the new ones of Jacob did not fit our remembrances of Sarah’s early development. Relatives recalled the uncle who sat mute among his siblings—and then chose to begin talking at four. Neighbors related the odd fixations of now gifted adults, musicians and artists who, like our son, seemed disinterested in chatter and the social life of jungle gyms. Sometimes, this remembering seemed to urge an unspoken moral: the good parent should not hover or fret with the child who does not chat. Eventually, confusion and doubt filled the spaces that opened up in the uncertainty. What if we did not attend properly to diet, to hints of developmental delays, to the need to intervene earlier in the face of his silence and sleepless nights? Was there something else we could have done or should have known? And then there were the irrational moments, the wondering whether some lack of faith or humility set these new mysteries in motion. What ignorance or arrogance led to this unexpected play and our helpless looking? In these unraveling seasons, a fine line existed between reason and superstition, between the stubborn belief in the miracles of self-denial and the self-evident facts of Jacob’s withdrawal. Though we learned that autism affected communication and social interactions as well as manifested itself in unusual or intense fixations and rituals, we saw no clear path through the confusion of his peculiar phrasings and behaviors. As a result, I felt like a wanderer, the father in some fable who discovers a lost child, brings him into the home, and provides steaming soup and hand-me-down clothes—only to find that the orphan cannot speak or can only utter unfamiliar words. Our waking hours were filled with endless detective work to find the meaning behind private codes and gestures.

Sometimes we knew how to solve the mysteries. One Saturday afternoon, we were on the back deck, talking with our friends, Marion and Con. Jacob came out with a pair of scissors, a long, hot dog-shaped balloon that we had blown up earlier in the day, and a red scrap of construction paper.

“Red udder,” he said, urgently handing me the items.

He was around six, had been diagnosed with autism at three, and so we had learned a disciplined patience in the face of his sudden requests.

“Red udder. Red udder.”

The balloon skidded atop the table, its rubbery smell sticking to my fingers as I thumped it rhythmically against my forearm. We all looked at each other, perplexed. Jacob took the red construction paper and held it against an end of the balloon. For a moment, I remembered not to think with words; I emptied my mind of the clutter of questions and did not panic at his enigmatic phrase.

Ruminating on the long tube of the balloon and the red slip of paper hanging at its bottom, I glimpsed the answer. It came to me in color, like a quick glance at an impressionist painting of an autumn tree, leaves just splotches or dots of red, auburn, and rust. I saw the tube as a metal cylinder rising toward the stars atop a fiery burst. A rocket. He wanted me to make a rocket ship.

“Rocket ship,” I said, pleased to have the words to give to my son and relieved to have avoided an afternoon of his fretful, roving efforts to be understood. Jacob took in a deep breath and let his arms rest upon Mary’s lap. His leaning was relaxed, though his eyes still intently watched my cutting.

“‘Rocket,’ say ‘rocket,’ Jacob.” He was not paying attention, of course. “Red udder” had communicated his want.

As I cut and taped, I wondered what chance combination of memories enabled me to translate his words, this image voiced in sparse vowels and consonants. And then my thoughts wandered back to the associations that had flashed in my mind. I realized that what he wanted came to me when I caught an image of a nursery rhyme. During the past week, we had been reading from a book of Mother Goose rhymes, including the one about the cow jumping over the moon. I went down to the basement to get the book. Against the backdrop of a night sky, I saw that white cow, udder hanging over the curve of the moon as the blocky body seemed to lift off toward outer space. I needed the story-rhyme to call out the proper scene, the one that Jacob imagined and translated into hieroglyphic speech.

There is another tale, one that I pondered again and again in those wilderness years: the Exodus story in the Old Testament. It held the kind of images and associations that contributed to my own sense of what was happening, my own internal meaning-making. The story was linked to the name that Mary and I first considered for a boy child but then later discarded like a scrap of paper: Aaron, the brother of Moses. In the splintered remembrances of the Exodus story, I recalled the various desires that come with trying to escape or striving to conjure up faith to confront the unknown.

I had always been drawn to Aaron in the Bible story. It may be that the attraction arose from watching The Ten Commandments, the Hollywood film that recreates the Israelites’ flight from Egypt through the Red Sea. The biblical story contains its own cinematic and dramatic texture, including the ultimate fear of having been chosen by God without the confidence or ability to carry out His commands. When it is revealed that he has been selected to lead the Israelites out of slavery to the Promised Land, Moses timidly tries to convince his God that he should not be sent; he worries about his own ineloquence:

“If you please, Lord,” he beckons, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past, nor recently, nor now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow in speech and tongue.”

But the Lord said to him, “Who gives one man speech and makes another deaf and dumb? . . . Is it not I, the Lord? Go, then! It is I who will assist you in speaking and will teach you what you are to say.”

Yet Moses still insists that someone else be chosen, that he has not the power to carry the word to his people. In anger, Yahweh replies:

“Have you not your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know that he is an eloquent speaker…. You are to speak to him, then, and put the words in his mouth. I will assist both you and him in speaking and will teach the two of you what you are to do.”

Perhaps, in those early years, my desire to reflect upon this story is not surprising. After all, I had begun to grieve for a lost son, a child I had seen in my mind’s eye but had not embraced in life. In my private storytelling, the imaginings that prefaced Jacob’s birth repeatedly called forth the image of the eloquent one, the progeny who could take a lost people across their own Jordan River to some better place. With both my daughter and son, in fact, I had done as many parents do: I had pictured the embodiment of the best of who I was or the best of what I could nurture in my future children’s lives. In these prophetic hopes and reveries, it was my love that shaped their eloquent leadership. Then came these irrational questions: Was this the arrogance that left me unprepared? Was it this turning to earthly desires that initiated the hard years? How easy it was to slip into these superstitious doubts to give order to what I did not understand.

But I can say now what I was just coming to know then in a house resounding with the Jabberwock of Jacob-speak: that to be chosen is to be sacrificed and that to be sacrificed is to come to a new way of knowing. Something unsustainable had to be given up; something new had to be discovered. And it was the story of Moses and Aaron that crystallized this understanding. What a bitter lesson to find oneself delivered into a wilderness, to set up camp there, to tend the fire and suffer the endless covering of coal and ash, to feel the grind of sand in the unleavened bread, to embrace the initial certainty of false gods, to see the distant shadow that starts as Jordan and ends in a bitter stream of cursing. The most holy of mysteries is this very human place, this shoreline defining the tenuous threshold between sacrifice and deliverance, confusion and faith.

Near the time of looking back to this story, this reflection upon forsaken names, I unexpectedly wandered into a lesser, unsolved mystery: Jacob’s puzzling, “Oh, l-ook. Oh, l-ook. A nice dinna.” The unearthing of the phrase’s origin came from entering another story plotted near the shores of the Nile, another tale that ended in the struggle to escape: Tomie de Paola’s children’s story, Bill and Pete.

After a day of cleaning, I sat down with Mary, Sarah, and Jacob (then eight and six) to watch a videotape of our family taken a number of years before. The television lit up with the image of my daughter and son, each four years younger, sitting on the living room floor. Their eyes were fixed upon an animated version of Bill and Pete. Bill is William Everett Crocodile, who lives on the banks of the River Nile. Pete is his toothbrush, that is, a bird that picks at Bill’s molars beneath the canopy of the reptile’s yawning jaws. When William is young, he gets confused by all the letters required to spell his name. Pete unburdens him with the simple appellation, “Bill.”

That night, I decided to read de Paola’s story, and, after a period of searching, I caught a glimpse of the pink paperback with the moon and stars calm and steady on the back cover. As Jacob lined up dominoes on the floor next to his bed, I narrated the tale in the face of his seeming inattention until I came to the part I liked best. For my own amusement, I renamed Bill and Pete, Jacob and Dad. It was always fun to enter the stories destined to end in sleep or discovery. And I read:

One Saturday, when there was no school, Jacob and Dad went down to the River Nile and sat on the bank in the sun. A man on a bicycle went riding by.

Behind the bicycle were cages filled with crocodiles.

“I wonder what that’s all about?” said Jacob.

“That’s the Bad Guy, and those crocodiles are on their way to Cairo—to become suitcases,” said an old crocodile swimming by. “Watch out he doesn’t catch you!”

But he did. The very next Saturday.

Jacob and Dad were fishing and they didn’t hear the Bad Guy creep up behind them.

For a moment, I saw my son pause and so I eased myself into the space of his play. On the rug, he had arranged dominoes in parallel lines. Squinting or with a quick or sidewise glance, I began to see the lines as credits scrolling upwards on a television or movie screen. I laid the book at the right edge of the dominoes and looked at the lines. In their configuration, I could almost see the words imprinted in his mind: the list of characters and voice credits, of executive producers, art directors, production assistants, gophers, hair stylists. From the black dots and black lines between the dots emerged the symbols of his world, a world of repetition, of rituals fulfilling needs that I had yet to understand. I quietly nudged the book against his elbow and, to draw his eyes to it, ran my finger along the golden shore that formed the border between palm trees and the blue water of the Nile. I began to read with more feeling.

The Bad Guy lassoed Jacob and put him in a cage. He didn’t pay any attention to Dad.

Dad tried to peck the Bad Guy, but Dad was just too small.

Poor Jacob!

He was on his way to Cairo.

All he could think about was suitcases.

Brave Dad!

He stayed close to his son.

The Bad Guy put Jacob in his garden and went into the house.

“Run me a nice hot tub, Jeeves,” the Bad Guy said to his butler. “I will take a bath before dinner. I got me another crocodile today and I need a nap. Call me when the bath is ready.”

“Tomorrow that crocodile becomes a suitcase,” he added.

I narrated Dad’s courage, how he picked the lock with his beak and urged Jacob to escape quickly from the dangers of this cruel man. But Jacob would not leave. He wanted to prevent the Bad Guy from catching more crocodiles and creating more suitcases. So, the crocodile slipped into the bathtub, his head barely visible near the rubber ducky, and chased the villain out into the night.

I squeaked like the rubber ducky on Sesame Street and, following this train of thought, squeezed the airy laugh of Ernie through my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Jacob swung his hand at my face, trying to stop my imitation by hitting me. I rolled away from the arch of his swinging hand, letting the pages crest in the air before flattening on the floor. For a moment, I rubbed Jacob’s back; I said, “Dad stop” to reassure him. And then, after my son attended again to the dominoes, I opened the book, turning from the backside of the Bad Guy to the next page, to the image of Jacob and Dad (that is, Bill and Pete) standing beside a dinner table. In the silence, I heard these words escape from my tongue:

“Oh, look, a nice dinner,” said Dad.

“And am I hungry,” said Jacob.

It took a moment to awaken to the resonance of these lines, to overlay Jacob’s past utterances upon the original text. “Oh, l-ook, oh, l-ook,” I heard, “Oh, l-ook, a nice dinna.”

Later, after I tucked Jacob in and promised to come back to sleep with him, I sat at the top of the stairs and wept. For years, I had not done so, had not let myself slip into this kind of grief. I wept because I had glimpsed what might have been Jacob’s distant loneliness, his wanting to know that another person in the intimate world of our home knew where his imagination had gone. I cried for the urgency of my son’s articulate yearning and for my own unknowing.

I still continue to read the moment like a sacred text. Were his words about hunger, not the kind that marks the emptiness in the stomach but that gives voice to the chaos of not being understood? Could it have been as simple as needing to hear me say the next line, as wanting a response to an anxious call, the assurance of a shared picture book and fixed storyline to confront an apprehension that arises in a world of ever-changing scripts?

Of course, it could mean many, many things. At the time when he had begun to lose language, when physical gestures had taken over where words had existed, Jacob could have found an emotional affinity with these lines. His mind could have woven the tone and color into some meaning to which he only had access—but sought to share. To his young ears and eyes, did the slapstick of the Bad Guy capture the dangers of adult whims and warnings? (And did Bill’s cage and Pete’s urgent pecking at the lock lead to the worrisome tone of Jacob’s echolalia?) Even words meant to name what has passed or to point toward the present feast can carry worry. Their exodus is a reminder of the place where even God cannot be named, where the words that come tell of the need to slaughter the lamb and shut the door, where the passage to freedom runs the muddy gauntlet of the Red Sea, where the banks of the path rise like cresting waves. How should I hear his words? Were they a sign of a feast prepared, a banquet set for those who have endured years of slavery? Or a prophecy of famine, a slave’s straw mat spread with the last of the unleavened bread?

I climb the stairs to find the book and look again at the last page. Even now, in a remembering that pulls at my chest, I feel a tightness, the expiration of breath in the body memory of a distant confusion. There stands Bill with that silly, toothy grin suspended above the table. Just beneath Pete’s beak rises the steam from what appears to be a bowl of rice or mashed potatoes. To the left, the Bad Guy streaks disrobed through the desert night. Above the feast, a yellow slice of moon smiles amid the blue.

And the stars, I want to say they seem to fall from the sky like manna; I want to say that they flew like doves back to Noah’s ark. I want to see signs of passing things, of what has been and not what will be endured. No hunger. No apocalypse of water. But, in the outlines of this tale’s beginning, I am still caught up in the young father’s grieving, his struggling to make out the meaning of Jacob’s words. I feel in my gut that distant time and place. It is as if I am the last of the chosen scrambling toward the distant shore. I hear the merciless thunder of the collapsing waves amid the cries of the faithless and know that I have surely lost my way.