I like museums at night – there is just something about seeing the art after most people have gone home.
I had just gone to the first opening at the Israel Museum after the coronavirus pandemic had more or less calmed down, and it was so relaxing to walk through the empty corridors and look out the glass windows at the Valley of the Cross. The exhibit was a large, realistic painting called The Bureaucrat by Matan Ben Cnaan. It shows a group of people in a field in Israel looking pleadingly at a man with a clipboard. The artist said he copied it – the grouping, the faces, the tense body language – from a photo of prisoners arriving on the platform at Auschwitz.
There was a panel at the event, and they had an interesting commentary about it. They seemed to have thought a bit about the same ideas the painting had raised for me: What would I have done if I had lived during the Holocaust? How would I have protected my son Oren, who is in his 20s and has autism?
The audience listened intently as they [the panel members] spoke. It was such a Jerusalem evening, with those old couples I see at all kinds of exhibitions and events. I used to hate and envy them, especially when I would overhear them talking about their adult children who were finishing the army and going to medical school or opening hi-tech businesses and getting married and having children. I don’t hate them anymore. It’s harder to hate them when they’re wearing corona masks. They look scared and creepy and childlike all at once.
But it’s not only that. I don’t hate them anymore because things are different with Oren now.
When the opening was over, I tried to head to the outdoor sculpture garden to wander for a few minutes in the cool air, but it was blocked off. Oren used to like going to the museum and walking in that garden before we slipped into our routine of the zoo every Saturday afternoon.
THE LAST time I remember taking him to the museum was during the summer he turned 18, one of our hardest times. My mother, who had become too demented to live on her own in New York, had moved in with us. I couldn’t work as much as I had been because I was taking care of her part of the time, and to write at all, I had to hire someone to look after her – in addition to the students I hired to help me take care of Oren in the evenings, when he often had tantrums.
So my income was down, my expenses were up, and my mother’s pension and savings were stuck in America and I had no one to help me get them out. The customer service employees on the phone lines would hear the desperation in my voice and put me in the automatic scammer category, denying me access to every account she had.
My ex-husband had always said he would help care for my mother when the time came, but now he was long gone. My mother, angry that I had whisked her away from her beloved New York, was sitting on the couch all day, criticizing me, as mothers do. I had to do all my work and any exercising in my bedroom.
We had just gone through a war with Gaza that had included missiles fired at Jerusalem. It had thrown Oren’s school schedule out of whack; now it was the end of the summer and he was home for 14 indescribably long days. When his repetitive questions began to bother my mother, she would start yelling at him. I could not leave them alone in the living room, even to go to the bathroom. He didn’t react right away but later in the day, he would have violent tantrums, usually when I told him it was time for him to stop playing on the computer.
But that wasn't the worst of it
BUT THAT wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that I had stopped sleeping.
All right, that’s an exaggeration. I slept a little, but never more than four hours a night and usually much less. I had a sleeping-pill prescription at one point, but my doctor said it was too much, I needed to stop, and he wouldn’t renew it.
He didn’t understand, though. My father had been bipolar, and I knew how it was when someone stopped sleeping – the sloppiness and the craziness that came out. I could feel myself heading that way.
The day we went to the Israel Museum back then, my mother was home watching tennis with my younger son, Ben. It was okay to leave them together, and I hoped my mother would never lose it with him the way she did with Oren. Ben was affected by Oren’s tantrums more than any of us, I felt. Oren was my son; as his mother, I had signed on for this, for better or worse. But Ben had never asked for any of this, and as Oren’s outbursts had gotten worse, Ben had gotten more and more withdrawn and rarely came out of his room.
Oren and I walked through the sculpture garden that summer day and stopped outside the children’s wing. The guards are real tough asses there, and Oren’s loud voice and jumping would instantly get him thrown out of any other part of the museum. He climbed the structure outside that kids were allowed to climb, a kind of pyramid that he lowered himself down into until only his long feet were visible.
Being upside down like that seemed to calm him, and he was quiet as we walked into the children’s wing, where a film about cities was showing, called Dies Irae. The room where it was playing was cool and empty, and we sat down. I had to Google dies irae to find out that it means “day of rage.” The film showed rapidly shifting cityscapes, and Oren and I were both transfixed.
I had brought a book with me to read during any kids’ movie we might see there. It cheers me even now to remember that I was actually reading a book then. How could I ever have found the time and energy?
But it was the perfect book for me right then: The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter. It was a novel about an unemployed journalist who made disastrous real estate and career decisions and briefly tried to deal weed to help him out of the mess he was in, while coping with a cheating wife and a live-in, senile father. A different story from mine, but we shared a few things – including insomnia.
AT ONE point in the story, the hero read an article about chronic insomnia which said that it causes “‘a steep decline in neural activity which can eventually lead to severe hallucinations, delirium, manias, even psychotic breaks – then death –’ Then death? Wait. Just like that? Shit... A few days without sleep and you go from slurred speech and bad decisions to... death? Well, that hardly seems fair. It feels like they left out a few steps.”
I had seen the psychotic breaks of my own father and I knew I was slipping, slipping. God, I shouldn’t have been driving at that time. It’s funny that they can test your alcohol level but not the fact that you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in months.
“Empire State Building,” said Oren as an image of New York flashed on the screen. He had lived in New York until he was four and was still crazy about the subways and big buildings, which he looked at on YouTube videos. I had not been able to bring him back for a visit in years, his behavior being too erratic, but his love for the city was strong.
“The Chrysler Building,” he added a moment later.
A few months earlier, when my friends’ kids in the US were graduating from high school and my Israeli friends’ kids were joining the army, Oren’s father and I had gone to family court to become his legal guardians. That’s what you will eventually have to do when you have a special-needs kid after he turns 18.
The school sent home the initial paperwork, and a government representative came to the school to do back-to-back interviews with parents and the kids – just a formality. Eventually, we had to go to the court building without Oren and do some final paperwork. A few weeks later, the document showing we were now his guardians arrived in the mail.
“The Statue of Liberty,” Oren said, and my mind reeled with gratitude to the filmmakers and curators – that they had come up with something that Oren found absorbing.
The day before we visited the museum, The New York Times had run a magazine story on what they claimed were the nearly 10% of people diagnosed with autism who “lose their diagnosis” and become completely mainstreamed, usually as a result of a kind of behavioral therapy that had left Oren in worse shape than before he started it. People kept emailing this article to me.
I have forgotten almost everything about the Dies Irae film, but it must have been a masterpiece because it made me forget about my mother and all of my other problems – for as long as 20 seconds at a time. At the end of the film, a quote from the Requiem Mass appeared on screen, and I scrawled it down on the back page of The Financial Lives of the Poets:
Remember that I am the cause of your journey;
Do not lose me on that day.
The most relaxing place in Israel
WE WALKED out of the children’s wing. Oren asked to go home, but I couldn’t face the nightly routine yet, with all the possibilities for tantrums and outbursts from my mother, so I suggested walking a little more in the sculpture garden and, to my surprise, he agreed.
It can be the most relaxing place in Israel. Wherever you turn, there is another cluster of trees and another sculpture, and it seems as if you will never come to the end of it. We saw a small white entrance to a boxy structure. I assumed it would be filled with the kind of heavy abstract modern sculpture that I don’t have patience for. But we walked in anyway.
It was a small white marble room, ringed with benches. There was a square opening at the top, and when I looked up at it, I was blinded by the glare of the sun high in the sky. Oren walked across the empty space, sat down on the bench, and tilted his head back. I followed and sat down next to him as he put his feet on the bench and stretched out his long legs. I glanced around to see if there was a sign forbidding this – we had been kicked out of so many other spots around the museum before. But there was nothing.
I followed his gaze upward and saw that from the side we were on, the square framed a perfectly blue piece of sky, dotted with white wisps. This description doesn’t do justice to the purity of the image. It was a brilliant exhibit, and there was no way you could look at it without being entranced by the beauty of the sky. I glanced at Oren lying there, so sweet and relaxed, and I stretched out myself, my head next to his, looking into that patch of blue – and we drifted off to sleep.
We were suddenly awakened by a large and stern guard. I sat up instantly, feeling startled but unusually rested. The problem wasn’t that we had our legs on the bench; it was that the museum was closing.
Oren understood and was ready to leave.
We walked slowly along the gravel path with the other stragglers.
As I looked at Oren walking alongside the reflecting pool just outside the exit, the sun glittered on the water and I saw that I had not lost him – and that I would never lose him.