The Slow Ones

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

At first they called it autism, back when autism was like a life sentence in an invisible prison. Then the diagnoses got more and more specific. Asperger’s syndrome. Willem-Gamal developmental disorder. Jakob-specific disintegrative complex. Eventually the doctors stopped using names altogether and assigned us a number: ICD-10 F84.93.

All it meant was that Peter was different.

Oh, sure. The seemingly endless parade of doctors and counselors and social workers used every euphemism in the book. Challenged. Uniquely gifted. Special needs. Never handicapped. Never crippled. And for God’s sake, never different.

But we knew. Ellie and I knew.

We didn’t talk about it much, and when we did we closed the bedroom door and kept to barely audible whispers. As if he could hear us, in his crib down the hall. As if he could understand a word we said anyway. We could have said it all right in front of him, and none of it would mattered. We could have screamed at each other, thrown the flatware, gone at it like jilted lovers in a bad soap opera, and Peter never would have noticed.

That’s what ate me up inside. The sense that nothing we did mattered.

Six pounds, seven ounces. Totally normal in every way. From the tip of his bizarrely misshapen head past the foreskin of his pinkie-sized penis — and you better believe we’d argued endlessly about that — down to the ten toes that I counted over and over again just to be sure I hadn’t missed one. Totally normal. Which, to people who’ve been parents for about forty-five seconds, was a synonym for perfect.

I wiped the sweat off Ellie’s brow with one of those blue towels they only have in operating rooms while Peter gnawed on her nipple. She cried. I cried.

Peter never cried.

Even when he came out, he didn’t cry. All purple and wrinkled and slippery with birth fluids, he didn’t cry. He just stretched out his tiny arms, shivering with the effort of it, and drew his first breath. He coughed a little. The nurse held a suction bulb up to his nose and slurped out a tablespoon of amniotic fluid. He didn’t like that. He tried to bat the nurse’s hand away. She laughed. I laughed. Ellie was too out of it to laugh, but she smiled at our new family’s first little joke.

If we’d known then, I wonder if we would have laughed. I wonder if we would have wept.

Having a baby is like taking a crash course in human physiology. We learned so much, so quickly. There’s this thing called the Moro reflex. Our pediatrician showed it to us. He held Peter in his arms and slowly tipped him backwards. Peter freaked. His eyes got huge and he threw his arms out. The doctor laughed. I laughed. Ellie looked like she was ready to kill us both, rip our bodies to pieces with her bare hands and storm out of the office clutching her baby to her breast. Which just made me laugh harder.

Babies are little bundles of reflexes, and every one of them has a name. Moro. Babinski. The step reflex. The rooting reflex. The tongue-thrust reflex. I whispered something dirty to Ellie when we heard about that one, and she drove her elbow far enough into my ribs to leave me with an angry green bruise for a month. But then she smiled, and later she made up for it.

It’s amazing how many things new parents have to be told. Feed your baby whenever he’s hungry. Don’t even try to establish a pattern; randomness is normal at that age. Make sure he sleeps on his back, but keep him on his belly when he’s awake. Hold him close, because babies are born nearsighted. Born nearsighted! How they ever figured that out, I have no idea.

And the poop. Christ, don’t even get me started about the poop. Babies are apparently born packed to the sinuses with thick, green, tarry … it’s just shocking, is what it is. To think that a little person who has literally never eaten anything, ever, could produce something so … anyway, it goes away after a few days.

Did you know babies aren’t born with belly buttons? Ellie did. I didn’t. She laughed at me and wondered how she’d ever married somebody so profoundly stupid. I told her the gym coach was teaching us boys to play Horse while the girls got the health lectures, so lay off. Then I snuck into the other room and looked it up. “The umbilical stump,” the Web site said in uncomfortably clinical terms, “will desiccate and separate within two weeks of your baby’s birth.”

Okay, so he wasn’t done yet. He was a work in progress. I could deal with that. And soon, in a few days at most, a part of him would dry up and fall off. That’s okay. I’d seen the poop. I could handle anything.

Only it didn’t.

Two weeks went by. Then three. Then a month, and we were back at Dr. Manners’ office for Peter’s first check-up.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said in a tone of voice that made me worry about it very much. “Human development isn’t an exact science. Everyone’s different.”

Then he got out the tape measure and put Peter on the scale, the one that’s disconcertingly like the one your butcher uses to measure out a pound of ground sirloin. He made tentative little sounds in his throat and scribbled illegible notes in the manilla folder.

Ellie caught it before I did.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

Dr. Manners pursed his lips. “He’s a little underweight. Nothing to worry about.”

“How underweight?” I asked. The Web site said he was supposed to eat ten or twelve times a day. Ellie’d only been able to get him to nurse three times, maybe four on a good day. And the Web site said we should go through as many as twenty diapers a day. Peter never used more than five.

Dr. Manners shook his head, dropped the chart on the counter. “He’s significantly underweight, to tell you the truth. But it’s really nothing to be concerned about. Everyone’s different.”

He kept saying that. Every check-up, something would make him go “Hmm” and he’d shake his head and say “Everyone’s different.”

Little did he know how right he was.

It wasn’t until years later that we admitted it to each other, but we knew from early on that something wasn’t right. Ellie said she dismissed it as the overprotectiveness of a new mother. I thought I was just ignorant. We both tried to hide our fears, and we were so successful at it that we ended up reassuring each other right into a silent complacency.

Would it have mattered? Here’s my secret: For years, I thought we could have made a difference. Even after we found out that it wasn’t just Peter, that the problem was bigger than our little family, I knew in my heart that if I’d been more attentive or more concerned or just more paranoid that we could have done something.

Even now, part of me thinks it’s true.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Peter’s two-month check-up fell on the hottest day of the summer. The air conditioning in Dr. Manners’ office was howling, but it was still close in the examining room. Ellie and I were both sweating while we waited.

Peter wasn’t. He just lay with his head on Ellie’s shoulder, quietly dozing like he didn’t have a care in the world.

The tape measure and the scale again. More notes in the chart. Bright lights shined in eyes and ears, and more notes. A regular Fourth of July parade of vaccinations: hepatitis, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, meningitis and others with names I can’t remember and couldn’t hope to spell anyway. Check for diaper rash, check for cradle cap. All perfectly normal.

For a three-week-old.

Then the questions started. How’s he sleeping? What are his eating habits? His bowel habits? Does he smile?

That one threw me. We had answers for all the others. Peter had been our universe for the past eight weeks. We studied his biological habits the way druids marked the rising of the moon on the solstice. Or the equinox. Whichever it was. We were unsurpassed experts on the subject of Peter’s intake and output, his sleeping and waking, all the mechanical processes of his little body.

But did he smile?

I couldn’t remember him ever smiling. Neither could Ellie.

Does he respond when we talk to him?

No.

Dr. Manners put Ellie in the chair and Peter on her lap and had her coo at him. He had her open his onesie to expose his protruding belly and raspberry him just above where his bellybutton would someday be when his umbilical stump got around to desiccating and separating. She had us tickle his feet. His toes curled into tight little fists — the Babinski reflex, I remembered — but he never giggled. Never smiled. Never made eye contact with either of us, or showed any sign that he knew we were there.

“The thing we need to remember,” Dr. Manners said as he took Peter from his mother and carefully examined his umbilical stump, “is that this isn’t an exact science. Everyone’s different.”

If I had a tattoo, it would say “Everyone’s different.”

At six months, Dr. Manners finally said the words we’d been mumbling in our sleep for weeks.

“It’s possible,” he said, “that Peter might have one of several developmental disorders.”

He didn’t pause. I wondered if the teach that in medical school. Don’t linger on the bad news. Don’t give the family time to think. Don’t let it sink in. Just blow right past it.

As he talked, I absently fingered Peter’s bellybutton, still red and scaly from where his umbilical stump had finally desiccated and separated the night before. “There’s a whole spectrum of things that can cause children to develop at a different pace.” He spread his hands. “It’s not an exact science.”

I decided then that the next person who said the words “not an exact science” to me would be spitting out teeth.

There was more, but I don’t remember most of it. Chromosome this and protein that and God knows what else. I held Peter while a nurse drew blood, far more of it than I thought would have been safe for someone so tiny. He was still just under eight pounds, barely heavier than the first time I’d held him.

Something hot and wet plopped onto Peter’s belly, darkening his purple onesie with the thin spots at the elbows and knees. That’s when I realized I was crying.

We didn’t throw Peter a birthday party.

Ellie’s parents didn’t take it well, and her sister was useless. I was an only child; Mom died of cancer when I was in college, and Dad had been in a full-time home since he started forgetting where he lived. It was easier for me. But at least once I week I could count on coming home from the office to find Ellie on the phone with her mother or her sister Jan, crying her eyes out. More than once I had to pry the phone out of her hand and hang up.

We were still taking Peter to the pediatrician every month, like clockwork. We had to find a new one after Peter’s nine-month check-up, when Dr. Manners told us yet again that it wasn’t an exact science. I don’t think I actually broke his nose, but it looked pretty swollen by the time we left. There were a few threatening letters from a downtown law firm, but they trailed off after a few weeks.

Eventually the monthly check-ups started to blur together. They were all the same. A fraction of an inch here, a few ounces there. Sometimes an immunization. Usually a blood draw. Never any answers.

Peter’s twenty-fourth monthly check-up fell on his second birthday. He weighed nine pounds, fourteen ounces.

It’s funny the way we settled into a routine. Ellie never went back into the classroom, of course. She struggled with it for a while, and we added a regular rotation of trips to the therapist to our monthly schedule. She refused to take any pills because she was still breastfeeding — breastfeeding at three and a half years. I wouldn’t have thought it was even possible. She had some bad days, days when I made up excuses to stay home from work so she wouldn’t have to take care of Peter by herself. But somehow she got herself through it.

She started her blog when Peter turned four. That turned into a couple of magazine articles, then she started working on her first book. I think that’s what saved her.

Me? I had work. We were coming around on one of those periodic boom-and-bust cycles and there was a lot of turnover at the office. Eventually there were only a few people left who knew about Peter, and they knew not to ask.

I stopped keeping pictures of him on my desk. It was easier than explaining.

Little by little, day by day, Ellie and I grew older.

And Peter … well, Peter didn’t.

That’s not to say that he didn’t grow older at all. By the time he was ten — and I was forty, and Ellie was thirty-four — he was starting to smile. Not often. Not every day, or even every week. But once in a very great while, by tickling his stomach or whispering boo-boo-coo in his ear, we got his eyes to twinkle a little bit.

By then, of course, we knew we weren’t alone. Some of the more bloodsucking reporters — invariably the ones without children of their own — started calling it an epidemic. Every crackpot from Sacramento to Shanghai got his fifteen minutes. It was a regular smorgasbord of scapegoats. Pollution. Radon. Cell-phone radiation. Depleted uranium. Fluoride in the water. Mutant AIDS. Cable television. The religious freaks, predictably, called it God’s wrath. Predictably, nobody paid much attention to them.

Ellie and I got our fifteen minutes too. We went on Larry King a couple of times, then once more a year later when Ellie was promoting her book. We let those gravediggers from “Dateline” come into our home, string cables along the floor, set up lights and cameras and interview us live. We let twenty-five-year-old make-up girls smear paste on our faces to keep us from looking so old and sad, then watched the grip rig the lights to make us look as old and sad as possible.

We changed our number after that. When the talk-show bookers found us, we changed it again. And again. Eventually they left us alone.

And so we settled back into our routine. The weekly therapy sessions, the monthly check-ups for Peter, every day just like the one before.

Ten more years passed.

For Peter’s twenty-first birthday, we bought him an ice-cream cake with the words “Happy Birthday” in day-glo yellow icing. I wanted to get him a rum cake with “ICD-10 F84.93” on it, but Ellie put her foot down. She never did share my appreciation for gallows humor.

Peter loved the cake. He smeared it on his hands clear up to his elbows, and on his face from his eyebrows to his collarbones. He banged his bowl with his spoon and laughed when little droplets of melted chocolate ice cream dotted my glasses and his mother’s salt-and-pepper hair.

By all outward appearances, he looked exactly like a four-year-old boy.

After cake — and to try to burn off some of the sugar that seemed to linger in Peter’s system for so very long — we took a trip to the zoo. It was a gamble. We hardly went out any more, never knowing when some photographer would jump out from behind a rosebush to snap a picture he could sell to the tablogs for twenty thousand bucks.

But there weren’t any photographers that day. Just pandas and chimpanzees and elephants. Peter loved the elephants. He loved the big bull, with its asymmetrical tusks and bad attitude. But mostly he loved the cow.

“Mama,” he said, pointing.

I laughed harder at that than I probably should have. “Well, you know, you haven’t been hitting the treadmill as much lately,” I said to Ellie, then gasped as she gouged a chunk out of my liver with her elbow.

“Mama,” Peter said again, insistently, pointing at the female elephant.

“Michael, look at this,” Ellie said. She was holding Peter’s tiny hand, reading the little plaque on the fence. “It says she’s pregnant.”

“Mama,” Peter said knowingly.

“Peter,” Ellie said, sweeping him up in her arms, wincing only a little at the stiffness in her back. She pointed to the animated cartoony graphics on the plaque. “See here? She’s got a baby elephant inside her tummy.”

Peter’s eyes went big. He put one palm flat on Ellie’s stomach, stared at the elephant in awe.

“You know,” Ellie whispered to him, “not all that long ago you were inside Mama’s tummy.”

Peter grinned and nodded.

“You were inside Mama’s tummy for a long time, then you came out and decided to grow up,” she said.

Peter thought this over. He looked at the elephant, then he looked at Ellie. Then he stuck out his tongue, scrunched up his face and shook his head defiantly from side to side.

I took Peter from her then, and let her cry it out. The other families politely pretended not to notice.

Eventually there were only the Slow Ones left.

I don’t remember when they started calling them that. I guess it was the only name that stuck. We had to call them something. They weren’t like us. They were different.

The doctors had it all figured out, or so they said. Something about prions and telomeres, whatever those are. I didn’t understand it when Peter’s army of specialists tried to explain it to me, and I didn’t understand it when the news hit the front page of every paper in the world, and by then I didn’t much care anyway.

It all boiled down to, “There’s nothing we can do.”

Peter, like all children of his generation, is perfectly normal in every way. He just operates on a different timeline than the rest of us. His body works at a different pace. He grows more slowly, ages more slowly. Develops more slowly.

Today Peter is just under four and a half feet tall, weighs sixty-two pounds. Totally normal for nine-year-old boy.

He is forty-four years old.

The other babies who were born the year we had Peter are all grown up now, grown with families and children of their own.

And those children are Slow Ones, just like Peter.

The doctors don’t know what will happen when Peter has children. They haven’t the foggiest idea whether his condition will be passed on, or whether his children will grow and age the way their grandparents did. Over the decades there have been countless attempts to study Peter’s condition, the condition that affects all the Slow Ones. All the scientists got for their trouble is a lot of dead rats and wasted grant money.

There was a sort of low-grade panic for a while. I mean, think about it. Parents are getting older just as people always have. But their children are aging one year for five. Their parents are going to be dead and gone before these kids hit puberty. How will they survive? Who’ll take care of them?

It turns out we needn’t have worried about that.

Peter started reading in his late 30s, what the doctors said was equivalent to around five or six, biologically. He didn’t learn in school — schools had long since become an economic and practical impossibility, of course; the government had closed them all down years before. But Ellie, God rest her soul, used to read to him every night, and during the afternoons when he’d sit still. She read everything to him. Children’s books, see-Spot-run, trashy novels, the newspaper, her own books, anything.

One day, Peter started reading along.

And one day, not long after, Peter didn’t need Ellie to read to him any more.

He devoured everything. Every book we owned, from old college textbooks to medical references to the dictionary. Then he started in on the Internet. I’ve cleaned enough peanut butter off of our laptop keyboards to make a million sandwiches. History, politics, math, science, fact, fiction, everything. Peter read it all.

The doctors, of course, acted like they knew it all along. See, Peter’s body developed much more slowly than the rest of us. His muscles and bones and nerves developed more slowly. But his mind was the same as anybody’s. A day had just as many hours for Peter as it did for his parents.

He just had so many more of them.

Who’ll take care of the Slow Ones? The question seems ridiculous now. Now that the years have crept by and we know the answer.

It’s the Slow Ones who’ll take care of us.

I’m putting this away for now. I hear Peter coming upstairs with our dinner. We always eat together, every night. Peter’s not a very skilled cook, and he makes a hell of a racket banging around on his stepladder to reach the top of the stove. But he’s imaginative. We always eat well.

I’m almost at the end of my story. I’ll finish it after dinner.

Michael Laurence Gould entered into rest on Wednesday, December 11, at the age of 74, after a long illness. He was preceded by his loving wife of 41 years, Elizabeth Renee Myers-Gould. They are survived by their son, Peter Myers Gould.

In lieu of flowers, Mr. Gould requests that donations in his father’s name be made to the Leavesbrook Convalescence Home in Cliffport, Maine.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.