Bedtime

 

Alex will be 15 next month and he goes to bed at 9:30. I wish he could go to bed later, but with Alex there’s this window. If he’s up until 10:15, he’s up until 11. And he’s up at five.

 

I can live with that. Marines get up at five. I had an aunt who got up at five: She worked the day shift at what we in Bangor, Maine, in the mid-1970s called “The Hospital” and had to be there at seven. She went to bed at nine.

 

“Alex,” I say to him, “head down now.”

 

Alex’s brother Ned is 12 and already we’re hearing stories about how when he’s at an overnight at a friend’s or at summer camp he stays up until the wee hours. Once we (i.e., Uncle Rob) drove Ned back to camp in the middle of the night; Ned later reported that he arrived at the camp in the middle of the night and at about seven the next morning headed to a water park in New Jersey. So that’s Ned at his age.

 

I try to settle Alex as Jill, out in the dining room, tries to grab a few minutes online before she goes to bed. “Alex, head down.”

 

I get on Ned’s bed. Ned doesn’t use his bed anymore; he sleeps in our bedroom these days. We’re not happy about that.

 

The whirr of the air conditioner is loud, because I think Alex broke it by running it in February. I would try to stop him, but when I’d come in the morning there it would be on “A/C.” He only knows that the click of the knob and the whirr seems to help him sleep. “Alex,” I told him in February, “don’t do this or you’ll break it!”

 

“Fan,” he says, “fan fan!” He holds his arm up toward the window. “Fan!”

Ned’s bed has new sheets on it (haven’t changed them in four weeks) and they’re cool and crisp, but I turn the A/C to Fan on these nights that are still cool get my ass in there. “Are you happy now, Alex? Go to sleep?”

 

No. “Giraffe!” Alex says. He means a plastic animal that we bought him once. “Giraffe!”

 

“All right, Alex, lay down and put your head down !”

 

He doesn’t: I see his black form wriggle from his bed and throw open the bright light of the door. He’s black in the light of the hallway as he heads out into where Jill is trying to grab a couple of minutes online.

 

I have to get up. “Alex. Come back.” Sometimes he does. Sometimes he gets back into bed on his own, and I in the dark I stab buttons on the outdated stereo in what used to be their room and hope that whatever I press makes him go to sleep. 

iProblem

The Nationals

First it was brownies. Then corn-on-the-cob. Then blueberries. Watermelon – and when I knifed it up and presented it to Alex in pieces in the bowl, he tried to slide it back together into a whole watermelon. That was cute and useless at the same time.

 

For a while there was chicken, deep-fried from places like Popeyes or McD’s. Once he tore into the Popeyes Tenders and found that they’d just come out of the fryer. “Careful, honey,” the lady behind the counter said. Sometimes at home we baked frozen in-the-box nuggets. Still Alex would maul them, other times leaving nothing but tan crumbs in the bottom the shallow dark-blue plastic bowl that seems to have become his in the moments of feeding. “How does he do it?” an old friend asked me once, watching Alex, “on no food?”

 

Fuck if I know. Jill got him to eat brownies in a Queens diner when he was a toddler. Later we smashed a blueberry or two across his front teeth. Strawberries too, I think. I forget. I’ve begun to forget. A lifetime later, Jill got him to nibble corn-on-the-cob at a Manhattan Street fair.

 

I saw her doing this with him and moved to help when she said, “Leave us alone. We’re doing fine. Get’im when he’s hungry.”

 

Month by month, Alex’s dinner evolved into three Hebrew Nationals fried for a few minutes in a crappy little tin pan we’re ruining with Hebrew Nationals. I dumped the slices into the blue plastic bowl. I slice the hot dogs into pieces about three-quarters of an inch wide. Any more or less and you’re just fooling yourself. “Alex, hot dogs.” Months on months he took the plastic bowl of sliced Hebrew Nationals in his fine fingers. Then one night he didn’t.

 

Then another night he didn’t. “Alex, don’t you want hot dogs?” Even tonight:

 

“Alex, hot dogs?”

 

“Noooooo!”

 

“Alex, hot dogs?”

 

“Nooo! That’s o-KAY!”

 

I’d feed him something better: I’ll give $500 cash to the person who gets him to eat a steak, baked potato and salad. But it was hot dogs. Hot dogs. I sent Hebrew Nationals (and God they are good – have you tasted them?) to him night after night.

 

“Nooooooooo.”

 

Nooooooooo. And he’s supposed to live on .. what? Alex’s reb-hab nurse notices this; every Thursday and Friday evening the blue plastic bowl comes back to her.

 

One Thursday, she tries chicken from the Chinese joint around the corner. “Try it,” the nurse says to him, “Good boy! Chew! Very good!”

 

“Chew, chew,” Jill says. “You’re eating it!”.

 

Later I ask Jill the secret. “I would say the trick with Alex is getting him when he’s hungry.” Jill looks at him. “Alex, all right? All right.”

 

Alone

 

Anne, our neighbor, has dropped by. She’s a smart lady who has set up a number of good situations for herself and her daughter. Her daughter is one smart person; she goes to a private school –paid for with scholarship – with the kids of Tom Hanks. How about that? If I had to pick one person to help with a parenting situation, Anne would be awful close to the top of the list.

 

She turns to me in our kitchen one night when both of the boys are home. “You can’t leave him alone at any time, can you? I mean, she got older and I could leave her alone. But you can never leave Alex alone, can you?”

 

No. Maybe it was six months ago (maybe a thousand years ago) that the phone rang at 4 a.m. It was a neighbor telling us that Alex had entered her apartment and turned on all the lights. Another neighbor – enormously successful professional man – found Alex in his apartment at about 4 in the afternoon and offered to help me escort my son back to my home. Another neighbor I caught early one Sunday morning phoning the security guard of our building and saying, “Yes, there’s a strange autistic boy in my apartment.” Pretty sure he’s gone into Anne’s place, too, and the place down the hall and the place up a few floors.

 

“Heard our door rattling at 3 a.m.,” one of the best friends we may ever have said once. She lives up on the 12^th floor. “Thought it was the wind.” Just the other morning Jill and I got into the elevator with a neighbor and her dog. The dog seemed sweet. So did the lady, especially when she went for all the gentleness you can muster when something like this has happened to you and said, “I just wanted to say that your son came into our apartment the other day. My husband was asleep on the couch and nothing happened but-”

 

You could tell she was angry and sorry and felt a pain in her heart that she had to mention this. “-I thought I would mention it.” Jill and I thanked her. Does she have a little daughter? I wonder. Alex has a mustache and sort of a beard now. I’m afraid to leave home for more than a day because I wonder if Jill can handle him physically. A mother is supposed to handle a son, of course, sometimes for much of his life, but not physically.

 

Sometimes Jill says they’ll understand. Sometimes she says “fuck’em.” I wish I agreed with either statement.

 

Even if he doesn’t bolt on any given morning, I still have to roll out when I hear Alex rustling in our bedroom for his iPad. He generally starts the day by rocking in his bed. Some mornings, by way of a gift, I guess, I don’t hear the rocking at all. Some mornings, almost the time the alarm was going to go off anyway. Some mornings, 5:30.

 

Then he charges into our bedroom where the iPad has been charging overnight because he depletes it day after day, believe me. He fires syllables over our heads. Jill’s the one with the tough full-time job right now and I don’t him to wake her up. “Alex, quiet!” Pad pad pad he goes, one by one igniting each light in the house.

 

“So why,” an intelligent reader might ask at this point, “don’t you just charge the iPad in the living room, let Alex know that, and let him get up at dawn and sit on the couch and start the day with his private entertainment while you sleep?” Great idea. And it worked until that 4 a.m. phone call. After that call, I’m just scared of the dark.

 

Attack

I’m coming from the kitchen balancing a bowl of soup when I hear Ned’s shattering “Ow!”

 

What’s happened now? “He bit Ned!” Jill says as I round the corner. Ned’s head is in Jill’s lap, and I see the shaking shoulders I’ve seen way too often on my family members. We all see it – except Alex, who charges his little brother. He plunges toward Ned with his forearm to his teeth. You think it’s all elbow until he whips his arm out of the way and sinks his teeth down like Christopher Lee.

 

I grab Alex’s arm and waist and his neck and arms in what Uncle Lee in his martial arts period used to call “a full nelson”. I have my older son who has autism in a full nelson. “Alex stop this. Stop this or you could wind up in some place where they’re not this nice to you and you will have a problem!” Think I like saying this to my son? I manhandle Alex over by the door – what the hell else am I supposed to do? – and he collapses to the floor, screeching. He wraps his arm around my legs and bites my legs. (“Did he break the skin?” Aunt Julie asks the next day. “No, of course not.” Of course not, for now.)

 

“Jill,” I say, “I need you to stay home tomorrow. I know she can’t: Her boss is tough and anyway I don’t mean it. What I mean, as I’ll assure her later, is that saying it meant something to me.

 

He bit me. He bit me, the little bastard who stared at me through the plastic wall of the NICU isolette. It’s not right he does this. “Alex, you have to calm down...” He falls at my feet and wraps his suddenly strong arms around my leg and sinks his mouth toward my legs where I feel the what he’s always saved for his own forearm but on this night went into ned and into my leg. “Alex, get up! Alex please!”

 

I get him to the couch; he plunges toward Ned again. We didn’t go through the last 14 years to wind up like this. “Alex, leave your brother alone. Get a grip on yourself-” I take his chin – look at the beard he refuses to shave – and try to turn it toward my face. This always worked when he was a little boy, when all he did was bolt from our apartment and from restaurants. “Alex, get a grip on yourself or you’re going to have to go somewhere where they won’t be so nice to you.” I don’t know what I mean by this, but it seems to make Ned cry harder.

 

The fat moment peters out as Alex starts asking “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ He slaps his own face. Alex looks like’s about to cry, says Ned. And he does. “Sorry,” Alex says. “Sorry.”

 

“Ned,” says Jill, “are you all right? Watch the movie with us.”

 

“I know what to do,” Ned replies. “Just let me go to my computer.” He plays Minecraft on his computer. “I’m building solar panels,” Ned says. “Just let me go do that.”

 

Jill and I sit at the table and talk about eventualities. That’s what we always do. “Let’s get through this,” I tell her. I settle Alex down in his bed. Sometimes I listen to music on my iPod or play “Angry Birds” on his iPod while he goes to sleep. Not tonight. I stare at him as he falls asleep.

 

I come out to the table where Jill is sitting, staring at words of her own she’s written on her computer. The rims of her eyes are red. I tell her we’ll get through this. “That’s not what I’m crying about,” she says.