10.
***
They were a family.
Kevin Angel Randall had stayed in the hospital for nearly three months, enduring problem after problem, treatment after treatment, operation after operation to deal with the seemingly unending set of challenges he had to endure. It felt sometimes to Robbie as though some higher power had intentionally shoved up roadblock after roadblock to get in the way of Kevin's ability to live. After one problem came another. And after that problem came another. And after that problem came still more, until even Doctor Cody was forced to remark that he had never before heard of a child who had suffered so much in its fight for survival.
When he said that, Robbie remembered shivering, because he got the distinct impression that the doctor was leaving something out. Specifically, that he was leaving out the words "and lived." But then, on second thought, Robbie was actually glad in a way that Kevin had had such a rough road of it. Because surely things couldn't go any worse now. Surely things would look up. Surely things would go well.
That was why the first Christmas was so optimistic. Kevin was eight months old, and grappling with the motor control needed to stand. Robbie loved that his son was - against all apparent indicators and predictions - developing so well, but he also knew that he was going to miss some things. Like the Army Crawl.
The Army Crawl was what he called his son's primary mode of transport back in that first year. At first, Kevin had just lay there like a human pudding, not doing much more than eating, burping (and making other noises), and pooping, and Robbie began to realize that one of the reasons that having a baby was so hard was that they were simply boring. Not that he didn't love the kid - he did, and would gladly have sacrificed his own life at any time if it had meant the difference between life and death for Kevin. But that didn't change the fact that it was hard to have any kind of intimate relationship with a person so small you could put them in the palm of your hand, yet with an inside so impossibly big that it was capable of pushing out enough poop that Robbie was seriously considering looking into the cost of shovels and pitchforks for dealing with the problem.
Sleeping was good. Robbie loved it when Kevin slept in his arms. Unfortunately, Kevin didn't do that terribly often, but was instead determined to stay awake night and day, taking approximately six hundred short naps in a twenty four hour stretch, which meant that consequently someone had to help him wake up and deal with the fact that he was no longer inside the comfortable space of his mother's womb every four to six seconds. It was hard, and Robbie remembered that one night the baby monitor had gone out because its batteries had died. He tried to replace the batteries, but was so exhausted from a constant series of wakeups and cranky crying jags that had lasted for what felt like the last sixteen to eighteen millenia that he kept dropping them. And then when he finally did manage to put them in, the monitor still didn't work, and he realized that he had put the batteries in backwards.
Lynette woke then, because Robbie, in a totally uncharacteristic fit of pique, threw the monitor so hard against the wall that it dented the drywall and the monitor exploded into its molecular components. He was terribly embarrassed that his wife had caught him in such a fit of rage, but more than that he was tired, and cranky, and determined to let the universe know it.
Soon thereafter, though, Robbie horrified his wife even more when he finally discovered a way to make Kevin sleep. It was an accident, really. It was one of the long nights when Kevin seemed determine to cry and poop his way steadily through the night, and it was Robbie's turn to take over in the never-ending battle to get the kid to do a little bit of sleeping. He walked around, bouncing the boy lightly against his shoulder and singing softly to him, but no number of renditions of "Hush Little Baby" or "Wheels on the Bus" would quiet the child, and Robbie had finally slumped, exhausted, on the couch and turned on the television.
All they had was basic cable, and it turned out that at three in the morning the only things on basic cable were infomercials and horror movies. Robbie neither wanted to learn how to buy into the latest fitness craze nor find out how many girls had gotten drunk and flashed a camera last Mardi Gras, so he turned on a horror movie.
And blood and guts had never been such a godsend. From the first moment that a teenager got stabbed wickedly from behind by a mask-wearing maniac, Kevin Angel Randall settled down. He stopped crying, stopped twitching, even stopped pooping for goodness sake. He just calmed down and squirmed deep into Robbie's arms and fell asleep.
Lynette came out of the bedroom a few moments later, awakened no doubt by the sound of oversexed teens being dispatched with a large barbecue fork, and immediately scolded Robbie for subjecting their son to such horrific imagery. Robbie pointed out that Kevin had approximately the same memory capacity as a sea sponge, so probably would not turn into Jack the Ripper later in life.
Lynette was not amused by this.
Instead, she turned off the television, silencing the sound of horror mid-shriek.
And Kevin - little, innocent, beautiful Kevin - instantly awoke and began screaming. Lynette tried to comfort the baby, but he would not stop crying - and, of course, pooping at intervals so short that Robbie began to wonder if the boy was turning hollow inside - until finally Robbie marched over and turned the horror movie back on again.
Kevin immediately quieted.
Not even Lynette, as smart and capable a woman as any that Robbie had ever met, could argue with that kind of results. Instead, she just put the now-sleeping Kevin back in Robbie's arms, turned the television volume down a notch as though in a final act of defiance, then marched into the bedroom to get some sleep.
After that, whenever Kevin was acting up in the middle of the night, all Robbie had to do was sit down on the couch, curl his son up on his lap, and turn on whatever B-grade slasher flick was on television at three a.m., and Kevin would be out like a light.
He would also stop pooping as much, which was such a miracle that Robbie seriously considered calling the Vatican to inquire about the possibility of having Freddie Kreuger beatified and made into a saint. He did not, however, ever mention this to Lynette. Her capacity for humor was great, but it had boundaries, and Robbie had no wish to incur the wrath of a wife whom he loved so much.
So Kevin learned to sleep, and then learned to roll over, and then learned the Army Crawl. It started out as the Poop Scoot: he would stick his butt up in the air, then inchworm his way across a floor, unable to so much as turn if he ran into something in his path. But then the Poop Scoot disappeared, and the Army Crawl came into being. It was the most amazing thing Robbie had ever seen: little Kevin would get down on forearms and toes, and crawl across the shag rug like a Green Beret slithering through a forest under tracer fire. Robbie laughed the first time he saw it, laughed so hard he thought he was going to have to be hospitalized for a hernia.
So all through that first Christmas, Kevin Army Crawled everywhere. He Army Crawled through the rooms, he Army Crawled around the table where Robbie and Lynette had put their tree (high enough that their son could not possibly get to it and pull it over on himself), and he even Army Crawled through every one of the boxes that his Christmas presents had come in - while neglecting the toys themselves. It was wonderful, and Robbie had allowed himself to think that the worst was over; that things were going to go well for them from then on.
That was the first Christmas, however. This Christmas - Kevin's second Christmas - was different. This Christmas was not spent nearly so much in paper and ribbon and stockings and Army Crawling as it was spent in tests and hospitals and anxiety.
It started early, shortly after Kevin's first birthday. He started crying again, rolling jags of weeping that reminded Robbie and Lynette of his first few months, when all he did was cry and sleep. And no matter what, they could not find a way to comfort him. Not even a good horror movie on his daddy's lap was enough to console whatever angst was hiding in his young heart.
The crying happened day and night, for no apparent reason. One moment he would be watching Sesame Street or Teletubbies happily, the next he would be screaming. One moment he would be eating his dinner quietly, shoving mashed potatoes into his mouth - and hair and nose and belly button as though he was determined to become the first human to perfect the process of osmosis - and the next he would be curled up on his high chair, crying so hard that it was only the small seatbelt that kept him from falling to the tile floor of the kitchen. One moment he would be holding his mother, the next he would be shrieking and gnashing at her like a rabid dog.
The crying continued, and one day Lynette discovered that, rather than holding Kevin tightly to her, if she dangled him on her knee as far away from her as possible, he would quiet. He didn't want to be put completely down, but nor did he want to be cuddled. It was as though he hungered for human companionship, but could not stand the feel of another person's skin on his own.
Then, right about the time that they came up with this new way of caring for their unique (not strange, never strange or Lynette would draw and quarter him for saying such a thing) son, he began doing something more subtle but much more troubling than merely crying.
Robbie was the one who noticed it first. He was the designated peek-a-booer in the family. Lynette would do in a pinch, but she just didn't have the je ne sais quois to be more than a merely competent peek-a-boo partner. Robbie, however, was ready to turn in his amateur card and go on the professional circuit. He was a master of silly faces and sounds, of making his eyes blink in just the right way, of sticking out his tongue at just the right moment so that Kevin would collapse in laughter. Over and over they could play, with Robbie invariably being the one to tire of the exercise first.
But after a while he started noticing that Kevin's peek-a-boo game was off. Not that he wouldn't play; he was as game as ever to play. But when they did play, Kevin gradually changed his manner of playing. He would pull Robbie's hands apart like a pair of barn doors as he always had, but instead of looking at Robbie's newest funny face and laughing, he would look beyond Robbie. He would look through Robbie, as though he were examining Robbie's soul...and more than that, as though he were finding it wanting somehow. Nor would he laugh. Just open the hands, look through his father, then shove the hands back. What had been a joy for both of them became something more like a rote exercise.
When Robbie brought it up to Lynette, she immediately worried. The threat of mental handicap that Doctor Cody had mentioned over a year previously hung over every day of their lives, casting a light shadow that lent a dimness to even the brightest moments. But when they took Kevin to the pediatrician, a genial older man named Doctor Abernathy, the man had not been able to find much at all to be worried about.
Still, it troubled Robbie greatly, that his son no longer looked him in the eye. No longer looked at much of anything.
And then there were the cars.
For his first birthday, Robbie had given Kevin a package of ten wooden toy cars. Kevin had played with them relentlessly for a few days, then they somehow made their way to the corner of his room and were forgotten for more interesting toys. Until one day when Kevin was fourteen months old, and Robbie came home from work to the sound of wretched crying.
And it wasn't Kevin. It was Lynette. Robbie hurried to the back of the apartment, and found Lynette sitting next to Kevin, who was playing - rather nicely, Robbie thought - with the cars. Robbie actually smiled when he saw his son playing that way, and felt slightly irritated with Lynette for just sitting next to their son and crying her eyes out. Both of them had decided very early on that they would try not to yell or cry in front of Kevin, would instead try to shower him with happiness and positive feelings only.
"What's going on, Lynny?" he asked, and even as he did so his irritation tempered into concern and shame. Concern for Lynette, who was clearly devastated about something, and shame at his own first reaction. Why would I be angry when someone I love is crying? he thought. Why would I want to reprimand instead of comfort?
"It's Kevin," said Lynette between tears.
"What about him?"
"He's playing with the cars."
"So?" Robbie looked again at his son. He still didn't see anything amiss. "That's what we bought them for."
"But look at how he's playing with them," said Lynette.
And Robbie did. He really looked. And realized that his wife was definitely right that there was something wrong about the way Kevin was playing with the cars. There was no vroom-vrooming, no crashing and bashing of the cars together.
Instead, he was simply lining the cars up. Over and over he would line them up, then move them apart, then realign them again.
"It's a little weird," admitted Robbie, but he still didn't understand why Lynette would be crying the way she was just because the kid wasn't having a demolition derby with the vehicles. "But why are you crying, sweetie?"
"It's not a little weird. It's a lot weird. Watch what he's doing."
Robbie did. He watched even harder, and eventually he saw what Lynette was alluding to. He cocked his head as he watched, unsure for a few moments if he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.
Yes. He was.
He tested what he thought he was seeing, and took a few of the cars out of line, then mixed all the cars up in a jumble.
Kevin lined them up again.
Robbie repeated the exercise.
Kevin lined the cars up again.
And this time, Robbie gasped. The cars were all different shapes and sizes, most of them about the size of his fist, with wheels of different colors. There was a purple pickup truck, a red tow truck, a yellow sports car, and so on and so on. Not one of them was the same. But each time he mixed up the cars, Kevin would line them up according to length and height, smallest to largest.
Moving slowly now, Robbie took one of the cars away, and this time instead of merely moving it away from the group, he put it in his pocket.
Kevin's reaction was instantaneous. He began screaming and banging his hand against his head, hitting himself so hard that Robbie could see the vague tattoo outline of the boy's handprint against his skin.
He's not saying anything, thought Robbie. Just screaming.
And not looking at me.
Robbie took the car back out of his pocket and gave it back to Kevin, who immediately quieted and began putting the cars in line, then moving them apart, then putting them back in line again. They watched him do it until late in the night, and Kevin never stopped. Not even when his diaper was so full that it made an audible squishing sound against the carpet, not even when it was well past dinnertime, not even when it was way beyond his normal bedtime. He just kept moving the cars together, then apart, then together, then apart.
And made not a single sound the entire time.
The next day, Robbie took off work and took Kevin to Doctor Abernathy, who this time agreed that something might be amiss and gave them a referral to a neurologist. The neurologist listened patiently while Robbie explained what had been happening, with Lynette sitting beside him and Kevin in a corner, still playing with the cars.
The neurologist, a diminutive woman in her fifties named Doctor Chen, nodded, then came back with a box. She dumped the box out in front of Kevin, burying his cars in a pile of Megablocks, the large version of Legos that were built with toddlers in mind - though not for children of Kevin's young age.
Kevin looked like he might be considering screaming, then took hold of one of the blocks. He held it in his hand as though weighing it, then put it together with one of the other blocks. Then put together another, and another. Soon he had a tower almost as tall as himself, twelve inches to a side and straight up in a perfect pillar, like a rainbow obelisk.
Doctor Chen picked up the tower, and Kevin immediately moved back to playing with his cars as though the blocks had never existed. The doctor brought the tower to her desk, then looked at Robbie and Lynette for a long time.
Finally, she said, "Do you want the hard version or the soft version?"
"Just tell us," whispered Lynette.
"I'll have to run tests, but I suspect that your son is autistic."
Robbie had been worried about this very thing, but he felt rage growing within him like a scythe-bearing beast, ready to cut down everything in its path. He half-rose from his seat. "How can you say that?" he asked in a harsh voice. "How can you say that after listening to us for less than ten minutes and then just having him build with your stupid blocks?"
Doctor Chen waited patiently, looking at him with kind eyes, and slowly Robbie sat back down. "I'm sorry," she said then, "but I've been doing much more than simply listening to you. I've been watching your son, and he is displaying classic symptoms of the disorder: marked impairment in the ability to make eye contact, which I tested when I went over and gave him the blocks. He also shows a marked and abnormal preoccupation with repetitive tasks, based on your telling of what he's been doing with his toys and what I observed of him with his cars. Then there's this," she said, and touched the tower.
"What about it?" asked Robbie, still trying to calm the anger that continuously wanted to boil up within him. "It looks like he did a damn fine job."
"He did," agreed Doctor Chen. "Too good a job, in fact. Note the fact that he has done three things with this tower that are completely beyond the abilities of most normally functioning children his age."
"What?" asked Lynette in a quiet voice. "I didn't see anything." But Robbie got the impression she had seen something, and that it had scared her tremendously.
Doctor Chen spoke softly, but firmly. "First of all, I would like to point out the tremendous amount of focus that your child put into this task. There was no break, there was no wandering gaze. As soon as he had assessed what the blocks were for - in itself unusual for someone of his age - he put them together, without any kind of cajoling or need for someone to make him do it."
"So he's smart," said Robbie. "Shouldn't that be a good thing?"
"Mr. Randall," said the neurologist kindly. "No one is saying that Kevin is dumb. Indeed, he may be the smartest person in this room in certain respects. But that doesn't change the fact that he is not acting as a normally developing child does."
"You mentioned two other things," interjected Lynette. "What are they?"
"Well, color and symmetry, to put it simply," said the doctor. She pointed at the tower. "A perfect pillar, four blocks to a side, completely symmetrical. This is not only beyond most children Kevin's age, it wouldn't occur to them to try to do it even if they were capable of trying such a thing. Similarly, note that he has grouped all the colors in the tower together with other like colors. There is no helter-skelter mixing of hue, there is simply red with red, blue with blue, yellow beside yellow, and so on. Similar to the way he organizes his toy cars, he is organizing these blocks."
"Why does that mean autism?" asked Robbie, though he could feel his mental defenses and sense of denial against the diagnosis fading, along with his anger.
Doctor Chen steepled her fingers and leaned back in her chair. "Please understand that no one knows everything - or even terribly much - about autism. There are many theories why autistic children act the way they do. One of them is that they are born without certain filters."
"Filters?" said someone, and Robbie was in such a state of shock that he could not even tell if he had spoken or if it had been Lynette who had said the word.
"We are constantly bombarded by sensory information every moment of every day. Sights, smells, tastes, touches, sounds, they all combine to create a world that is terribly overwhelming."
"I've never noticed that," said Robbie instantly.
Dr. Chen smiled as though he had just fed her a soft pitch on a baseball diamond. "No. You wouldn't. Because you and I and your wife have filters that enable us to discard what is useless and take in only those things that matter most to us. But many people - myself included - believe that autism is a reaction to a lack of this filtering system. Imagine what it would be like if you had no way of throwing out extraneous matters - everything from the noise of the air conditioning in your house to the sound of the innocuous Muzak in an elevator - and were instead inundated with anything and everything. How would you react?"
"I'd want to crawl into a hole," said Robbie.
"Exactly. You would seek to find ways to limit your sensory inputs. For example, you might avoid eye contact, since eyes communicate incredible amounts of information. Or," she added, tapping the tower, "you might take a jumble of colored blocks and reduce it to one large block, with the colors grouped in the smallest sets possible."
Robbie couldn't talk for a moment. He wanted to, but no words that he could think of seemed either adequate or appropriate. Mostly, he just wanted to say some very nasty words, though whether he wanted to say them to himself, or Doctor Chen, or someone else was anyone's guess.
"What do we do?" asked Lynette.
The kind woman behind the desk sighed as though that were the real question, the only question. "We wait," she said. "There is no way to be sure of autism at this young an age. I'm going to order some tests to see if it isn't some other disorder that we can tag physiologically, but if they come back negative or inconclusive, then it is just a question of waiting to see what does - or does not - develop next."
Doctor Chen sent them home soon after that, along with some brochures and numbers of support groups, and Robbie and Lynette settled into the business of waiting to see what would happen. It looked more and more like autism as the days and weeks and months went by, however. Kevin grew more obsessed with creating order out of chaos, with bringing anything that smelled of randomness into some bivouac of categorization or pattern. He would no longer look at them, for anything.
Then, close to Christmas, Doctor Chen called and informed them that she had a colleague who wanted to give Kevin a series of tests that would give them a clearer picture of what was going on in his unique - and uniquely troubled - brain.
They went immediately, and spent the day in a place that looked more like a high paid lawyer's office than that of a doctor, with plush carpeting, comfortable seats, a fish tank, and many other indicators of wealth and rank. Doctor Chen was there, as was her colleague, Doctor Stanton, a man who looked too young to be a doctor but whom Doctor Chen assured them was a highly qualified neurologist and a specialist in abnormal cerebral physiology.
And then it was home again, home again, jiggity jog, to wait for the results. Christmas, easily Lynette's favorite holiday and one that Robbie himself also loved, came almost as an afterthought, and so it was almost appropriate that when Doctor Chen called, her first words were, "I'm so sorry to interrupt your Christmas, but I thought you'd want to hear what Doctor Stanton found."
"Of course," said Robbie, motioning for Lynette to get on the second phone extension and listen in.
"It's definitely autism," said Doctor Chen, having known them long enough now to know that they would want to hear the straight story, with no puffery or padding. Still, even though it was the way that Robbie preferred to get good or bad news, he still felt as though someone had hit him in the gut with a jackhammer.
"How can you tell?" said Lynette from the other phone.
"There are a few signs that are highly indicative. It's mostly rather arcane stuff - I don't even understand it all myself - but the gist is that there are certain brain functions that are highly randomized in autistic people."
"Randomized?" said Robbie.
"Yes, it feeds into my theory, actually. It is as though there are certain parts of the brain that lack the ability to function in a patterned, self-centered way. Put simply, the brain does not have the ability to distinguish between what is important and what is not; or even perhaps between what is oneself and what is the outside world. An autistic person is not, as you said in our first meeting, Mr. Randall, a stupid person. It may well be that he - autistic people are five times more likely to be male than female - is actually so smart he perceives everything at once, and it's like overloading a supercomputer."
Robbie was not consoled by this jaunty view of his son's disability. "Is there any way to cure it?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Mr. Randall, I'm sorry," was all that Doctor Chen said.
And through it all, Kevin spoke not a word, though he was now over a year and a half old. He just sat in his favorite corner, a place with nothing but white walls to look at on two sides, and played with his cars.
Robbie felt his heart break.
But it was nothing compared to the feeling he would experience a few months later, during the magic show.
***