8

The Fox

Distress and cunning were indistinguishable from one another.

It almost reminded them of Kai.

Lausanne, Switzerland: a restaurant close to the International Olympic Committee’s headquarters. A young woman and a man in his mid-fifties are eating lunch. They are father and daughter. One can discern this from their eyes and familiarity. A quick espresso to top it off. The waiters watch impatiently, sternly rattle the cutlery. It’s almost 2:30 p.m. The two have gotten carried away chatting. They are talking about the past, about Kai.

HENRY: Remember the cobra?

LINOY: Of course, I do. We even have it on tape. We were so shocked! I watched it again recently when I cut the video for Kali’s wedding. Someone always had to hold Kai’s hand to make sure he didn’t run away. On the old videos, it’s often Kali who grabbed hold of him.

HENRY: Yes, she was his guardian. More bodyguard than mother.

LINOY: And you guys were always filming. Zoom in, zoom out.

HENRY: I have no talent for that.

LINOY: True. Sometimes you can’t even see us.

HENRY: Do we have videos of us in Heidelberg?

LINOY: More from the US.

HENRY: We had a lot of fun in Heidelberg.

LINOY: I don’t really remember.

Henry, hesitantly : You were five, a little girl. . . . One thing I meant to ask you: it must have been challenging growing up with a brother who could be so difficult, who demanded so much attention.

LINOY: I took him along to the mall once and, I don’t recall why, but he threw a fit. I started crying. And I remember he stopped and looked at me, like, “What’s going on? What have I done?”

HENRY: When did you first realize he was different?

LINOY: I don’t remember ever thinking like that. He was just a bit wild. He always attended our birthday parties and made friends with our friends.

HENRY: How did they respond to Kai?

LINOY: They always ask me how he’s doing when I run into them. Everyone who met him wants to know. He leaves a big impression.

Henry, hopeful: So, you guys didn’t even notice that he was drawing all that attention to himself?

LINOY: Kali did. She has said that to me. I don’t remember feeling that way. I just remember thinking sometimes that he was a bit out of control. And that I was scared because we always lost him. Aside from that, I think, it was actually quite relaxed, not particularly chaotic. I started seeing things a bit differently when I was a teenager. Before that, I just thought of him as a baby who had to be taken care of.

Adults can learn a lot from trying to see the world through a child’s eyes. Just as children aren’t particularly concerned about skin color, they at first don’t pay it much mind if a child behaves a little differently. That’s just the way it is. Kali and Linoy didn’t even see Kai as different. Sure, he had some quirks. Linoy will never forget how he petted the cobra, or how he jumped out of the boat in Thailand and she grabbed him by his bathing suit. You never knew what you were going to get with Kai. But they didn’t find him different, no. He was just Kai.

They weren’t even particularly considerate of him. They took him everywhere and treated him like any sibling. They fought, pulled each other’s hair, made up again, laughed, played, cuddled, and always found it curious that their parents were so protective of their brother, that he could get away with so much. Then again, how could Henry have been strict with Kai? He loved his kids and had promised them at birth to always be gentle and patient. He knew what it meant to be raised by the whip. Growing up, he was paralyzed with fear when his grandfather got mad; his chest tightened up, and he felt a tingling sensation inside, like his veins were full of ants. Henry never wanted his children to feel that way. They should take life easy, learn to fly.

What was he to do now that one of his children was threatening to fly away? How strict can you be with problem children? How much freedom can you grant them?

They returned to San Francisco with the terror from the cobra episode still pulsing through them. Their worried eyes followed Kai’s every move. And yet, they still granted him liberties that Kali and Linoy could only dream of. They didn’t force him to eat his salad or do his chores, didn’t reprimand him when he was rude. Observing Kai, Henry often found it hard to distinguish between distress and defiance. There was no distinction anymore between “poor Kai” and “naughty Kai.” Sometimes he had the impression Kai knew all too well how to play his cards, that he was a master of manipulation.

Henry remained lenient, usually tried speaking with Kai. He enrolled him in a Montessori school for their last few months in the United States. The Montessori system promised structure as well as freedom. Parents with difficult children are often drawn to this type of school. It was founded by Maria Montessori, one of the first women to study medicine and get her doctorate in medicine. She was brave and headstrong, and she loved children. After completing her own education, she took a job in the psychiatric wing of a hospital, working with disabled children, lost souls whom she hoped to bring out of the shadows. She invented games for them, known as sensorial materials, which stirred their imagination and awoke their curiosity. And the children made progress. It turned out that some of them weren’t disabled at all, just stunted and neglected by a society that didn’t provide their minds with an opportunity to thrive.

Maria Montessori founded nurseries, where children could learn freely, without reward or punishment. She believed that children wanted to learn and participate in the adult world, but that one shouldn’t rush or force them, letting each child decide for itself, deliberately, on its own terms. A conspicuous number of our most influential entrepreneurs are Montessori graduates, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin—little troublemakers, nerds, geeks—who still love to talk about how going to the right school set them on their paths.

Montessori schools also set limits. The students are expected to clean up after themselves and listen to each other. “It is our duty to prevent the child from doing anything which may hurt or offend others,” Maria Montessori once said.

Kai and his teachers developed conflicting opinions about what constituted such an offense. Kai was offended by people using metaphors or suddenly changing plans, while the teachers were offended by the tantrums he threw in response. When he spat at a classmate—he spat a lot—that was it. The child’s parents considered suing Kai; you can do that in America. Kai got kicked out of school. Their year in the United States was coming to an end, and they would just have to keep trying in Israel.

During those last few weeks in San Francisco, Henry settled more conclusively on autism. The cobra incident had been pivotal. So had Michael Merzenich. Henry met with his famous Berkeley colleague whenever possible. Merzenich had once been considered a crank. He had questioned the dominant consensus, which stated that the human brain was immutable after childhood, that it couldn’t change, grow new connections, or develop new abilities. Merzenich went so far as to say that we could change our brain through thought alone, that we could cause it to grow and make certain diseases disappear. A scandalous claim. It contradicted a natural law: a window can’t open itself; it requires a determined hand or a gust of wind. A ball can’t choose to fly, a foot has to kick it. Only something material could bring about physical change, as determined by the law of causal closure. To many of his colleagues, Merzenich’s claim was tantamount to saying that you could open a window or move a ball with your thoughts alone.

Today, Merzenich is an icon. The old experts turned out to be wrong, their assumptions false. Today, we know that the brains of taxi drivers grow when they learn their city’s map by heart. We know that people can learn new things well into their old age, and that particular thinking techniques can alleviate schizophrenia and depression. We know that sea nomads in Thailand who live on boats learn to read underwater, meaning that their eye reflex has changed in a way deemed impossible. The brain forms itself. There is a word for that: neuroplasticity.

But it wasn’t this insight that drew Henry to Merzenich. He wanted to know more about another of his colleague’s theories. Merzenich had studied autism and determined that it was caused by neurons, the cells that transport signals—Henry’s field of expertise. Some neurons amplify signals, ensuring, for example, that the command to take your hand off a hot stove arrives very quickly in your brain. Then there are neurons that inhibit signals, say, the urge to pet a cobra. That’s what Henry wanted to speak with Merzenich about.

“Autism? Your son?” Merzenich looked concerned. Over the next few days, he let Henry in on his theory. After they had discussed everything, he turned to him and said: “Why don’t you visit Lynda and Michael Thomson in Canada? They specialize in both autism and ADHD. Excellent scientists. Most importantly, they aren’t armchair scientists. They apply their research.”

Henry devoted his last days in America to the family. They went to the beach often. The water was even colder, the wind still blowing briskly, the seaweed on the dunes getting musty. Those were pleasant days. Henry and Anat watched Kai hopefully. He was bronzed by the sun and laughing a lot. He wrestled with his father. He had gotten so strong!

They decided to go on one final road trip. They drove through Arizona, the kids squabbling in the back because someone refused to comply with Kai’s desired seating arrangement. They drove along a lonely, endless road, white stripes at the shoulder, yellow stripes in the middle, red mountains on the horizon. Suddenly, in the distance, something appeared in the middle of the asphalt. Henry slowed down as they drew closer.

“A fox!” Henry exclaimed.

It stood there pathetically, panting, with its red bushy tail and head lowered, its tongue hanging out. They drove around it slowly.

“It’s thirsty. It’s going to die,” said Linoy.

“It’s hungry,” said Kali.

“It’s going to die,” said Kai.

They pulled over sixty feet down the road. The fox was hardly moving now. It turned its head ever so slightly, looked at them, pleading. “Oh, my god, we have to give it some water,” said Kali.

“And something to eat,” Linoy added.

Kai remained silent.

Henry cautiously stepped out of the car and placed a bowl of water and a bit of bread and cheese on the tarmac. He got back in, drove a little way down the road, then pulled over again.

Was the fox strong enough to reach the food? Suddenly, it lifted its head and tail and shuffled toward it. As it ate and drank, something like a smile rose to its lips, the way dogs smile when they’re sated and comfortable, sprawling next to a barbecue grill on the lawn.

The Markrams made a U-turn and drove back. They had to see this. As they got closer, the fox let its head, tail, and tongue hang. It looked abject and miserable again, like it was on its last legs. The family laughed and gave the fox a bit more food, and tried to explain it all to Kai, who was staring out the window with his mouth open. And somehow, though he was oblivious to metaphors and tactics, Kai seemed to understand it more readily than one might have expected. The fox also knew how to play the cards it had been dealt. In the following days, Kai talked about the fox more or less nonstop, how it had gotten the food and water it needed to survive in the desert by pretending to be sick. What a smart fox! Its trick had worked so well! Distress and cunning were indistinguishable from one another. The fox was a master of manipulation. Somehow this seemed all too familiar.