My son Zach was born with brain damage that occurred during
his birth. His brother Gerry—older by three minutes—is fine. Zach is now 24,
but his comprehension skills are roughly that of an eight- or nine-year-old. He
can read, but he doesn’t understand many of the sentences.
He can’t add a hundred plus a hundred, although he does know
the result is “a lot.” I took him to see the movie Spartacus when he was nine,
and after a blood-flowing scene at a Roman villa where Kirk Douglas
single-handedly killed two million buffed-up soldiers with a plastic knife, he
turned to me and said, “Look, Dad! A pool!” He has always loved pools.
As Zach grew out of childhood, I never knew how much he
would understand. While his vocabulary expanded rapidly, his knowledge of what
words meant did not keep pace. When I tried to explain something abstract, I
could sense him sifting through his hard drive with its millions of data
points. But the hard drive did not help him with concepts like preventive
health measures or racism.
Instead, our relationship had been largely predicated on
games. He loved goofy hypotheticals: What would happen if he did something I
told him he could not do. When I kissed him good night, he invariably asked me
if there was a certain word or name he could not say after I turned out the
lights.
“What can’t I say?”
“You can’t say Rick Lyman.”
“What happens if I say Rick Lyman?”
“I will have to come back upstairs.”
Dressed in his usual T-shirt and gym shorts, anticipating
the tickling war we referred to as cuddies, he began to giggle. I walked down
the stairs and waited at the second-floor landing. He was plotting strategy.
“RICK!” he screamed. (I did nothing.)
“RICK LY!!!!” (I did nothing.)
“RICK LYMAN!!!!!!!!!!!”
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