The parrot can’t hurt you

She seemed neither happy nor sad, just matter-of-fact about her love.

JUNE 13, 2020 13:15

ADMIRING FINE feathered friends on a 2018 visit to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. [Illustrative] (photo credit: MIRIAM ALSTER/FLASH90) — ADMIRING FINE feathered friends on a 2018 visit to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. [Illustrative]

(photo credit: MIRIAM ALSTER/FLASH90)

‘Man, you just got a haircut,” Oren says as we enter the dark interior of the small animals building at the zoo. The man, with a couple of kids circling around him and his wife pushing a baby in a stroller, is completely bald, in that way that so many Israeli men are.

Oren, who is 21 and has autism, has learned that he usually gets a laugh when he says this to bald men, and this guy is no exception.

“A big haircut,” the man says.

Oren is already moving on. “Palestine viper,” he says, and he recites the names of all the animals in this exhibit.

“Fat sand rats... carpet viper... Iberian ribbed newt... golden spiny mouse... Nile crocodile,” he says.

I struggle to keep up, because at this point in the weekend, after I’ve been taking care of Oren for over 24 hours, I’m exhausted as we make our weekly Saturday afternoon zoo visit. Oren didn’t sleep well last night, and when he wakes up, he wakes me up. I don’t know if he’s having nightmares or is anxious about something. He talks all the time, but most of the time, he can’t even tell me if he’s feeling sick and certainly not how he feels sick.

There is a strict order in which he wants us to look at the animals. I used to think I ought to vary it, but since Oren started living in a group home during the week, I don’t have the heart. So much in his life has changed. He needs something to remain the same, and maybe so do I.

“Penguins, can you swim?” he says, as we pass their little pond, but these are the most lethargic penguins on earth and spend most of their time standing stock still. He’s hurrying to get to one of the two spots in the zoo he pays attention to, the parrots. He would stand watching them for an hour if I let him. The noise of these slightly grimy, oily winged blue and green birds terrifies and attracts him at the same time. He sits on the ground a bit back from their cage stares at them as they make a deafening racket.

“The parrot can’t hurt you,” he says. “It just makes noise.” Like many people with autism, he often repeats what has been said to him exactly. “I” and “me” are words he rarely uses. “It can’t hurt you. It just makes noise.”

‘I’M SCARED!’ Oren says and hugs me as a green parrot lets out a particularly ear-splitting screech. (Yaakov Naumi/Flash90)

How he developed this obsession with parrots and their noises is a complicated story that goes back to his early childhood in New York. I have learned to respect his obsessions, but today I am weary.

“Let’s go,” I say.

“Let’s stay just one more minute,” he says.

I watch the families filing past us, about half of them either Russian or Arab, and envy them that they are in their happy period with their little kids. Some of them give Oren a curious look, some smile.

“I’m scared!” Oren says and hugs me as a green parrot lets out a particularly ear-splitting screech.

“Let’s go.”

“Just one more minute. The parrot can’t hurt you.”

AT THE bears’ pen, Oren looks over the railing, down into the small moat that keeps the bears away from the fence, where he can see fish and turtles. While the lions are lazy and overfed, these bears have a wildness about them that most of the animals lack. A surprisingly thin bear stands on a rock, looking at us and clicking its yellow teeth. If we were to lean too far over and fall, it would be using us as dental floss in about 30 seconds, so I’m poised to grab hold of Oren if necessary.

But he knows how far he can go here. “There’s a turtle. There’s a fish. There’s a turtle,” Oren says. The bears don’t rattle him the way the parrots do.

Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese writer, has a son with brain damage and wrote a story, “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness,” about taking this boy to the zoo, where they are tormented by thugs and the father ends up falling into the polar bears’ pen.

“... [T]wo people are about to be destroyed,” he thinks when it looks as if the bears are about to devour him, because only he truly understands his son. “The fat man began to function as a window in his son’s mind, permitting the light from the outside to penetrate the dark interior which trembled with pain not adequately understood,” Oe wrote, and I am that window for Oren. Even I don’t always understand him, but I get more of what he is talking about than anyone else.

“There’s a turtle,” he says.

I reach up and put my arm around his shoulders. He is so much taller than I am.

Climbing the hill, we settle into Oren’s second-favorite spot, Noah’s Ark, one of those educational exhibits that includes a movie about the zoo, played on a loop. Oren would watch it all day, but I usually limit it to three times. I use those 30 minutes to read The New Yorker on my phone, or chat with my friend in New York, who has just woken up and is deciding what New York thing she wants to do today. Her daughter, who was born just a few months after Oren, is about to finish college. They were babies together, side by side in strollers in the park, but today this girl is deciding which psychology grad school program to go to.

“Let’s watch it again,” Oren says after the zoo film ends the second time.

“One last time,” I say, turning off the chat on my phone and going back to The New Yorker.

The last part of the zoo ritual is getting Oren something at the snack bar and as he eats his bag of Shush –he’s learned how to order and pay on his own! – I notice that the Russian family at the next table has a boy in a wheelchair, who looks about 12, and a slightly younger girl. The boy’s arms have been propped up on a tray and his head his held stiffly in place by a brace, but he seems fully in control of his slightly crooked grin. His mother, a slender woman with long frosted blond hair and skinny jeans tucked into ankle boots, spoons food into his mouth delicately, managing to keep her long pink/purple fingernails clean.

I’ve seen them before. We had just moved to Jerusalem and it was early in the morning on the second day of Rosh Hashana, one of the quietest moments of the year. The move was hard on Oren and he was having meltdowns every day, big ones. His sleep cycle was way off and he was up before dawn, so at first light we were walking around, waiting for the synagogue to open. Crossing a playground, I heard a Russian song, sung in a woman’s lilting voice, a song of raw beauty that floated across the concrete path to us, landing on us like a silk scarf. It was this woman singing, pushing the boy to a bench under a tree. As she sang, she sat down next to him and stroked his hands and his face. She seemed neither happy nor sad, just matter of fact about her love. Because this boy had been deprived of oxygen for maybe 60 seconds at birth, she would spend her life next to him.

So many times over the past years, this image of the two of them and the ghost of her music has come back to me. I’ve thought I saw them a hundred times and now here they are. I watch her wipe her son’s mouth and wish I could sing a song like hers to Oren, who has just finished his snack and gets up to throw out the empty bag. I want to ask her to sing to us, but of course I don’t.

I stand up and we start heading home.

“It just makes noise,” he says.