The Horse Boy Read online

  Copyright © 2009 by Rupert Isaacson

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The author is grateful for permission to use an excerpt from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss, copyright ® & copyright © by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P., 1960, renewed 1988. Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05325-9

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Part One

  1: The Seven-Year Child

  2: Into the Inferno

  3: The Horse Boy

  4: A Time for Dreams

  Part Two

  5: The Adventure Begins

  6: Lords of the Mountains, Lords of the Rivers

  7: Mongolian Brother

  8: West with the Rain

  9: Fits and Starts

  10: A Father’s Mistake

  11: Rowan 1, Fear 0

  12: The Van Boy

  13: Repairing the Wind Horse

  14: The Heaven Horse Lake

  15: Guinea Pigs of Moron

  Part Three

  16: Into Siberia

  17: The White Ibex

  18: Farther Up and Farther In

  19: The Ghoste at the Top of the Mountain

  20: A Hawk in the House

  21: Interview with a Shaman

  22: Miracle at the River

  23: Four Minutes and Fifty-two Seconds

  Epilogue

  Illustration

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY RUPERT ISAACSON

  The Healing Land

  For my son

  And for Kristin, for her unrelenting bravery

  Prologue

  THE HORSE DIGS its back hooves into the dirt and gives one last, scrambling effort to reach the top of the rise. I lean forward, taking weight off the horse’s straining back, trying not to crush my little boy, sitting in the saddle in front of me, trying not to look down at the dizzying chasm below. For one terrifying moment, the brown-and-white horse slips backward. Then, with a final heave, we are up on top of the high mountain pass.

  “Hit Daddy!” My five-year-old son, Rowan, whips round, laughing, and aims a smack at my sore, bleeding lip. I flick my face away to the side. Above us are clouds and cool, rushing air. Behind us, and thousands of feet below, the great Siberian forest, stretching to infinity. To our front, a bare wilderness of mountain tundra.

  “Snow!” Rowan points at the wide streak of white still clinging to the higher tops above us, where a pair of ravens fly, cawing madly on the wind. “Get down! Get down and play in the snow!”

  Like a normal kid. Almost.

  The horse, which Rowan has christened Blue, dips its head, stretching its neck after its effort. Before us rises a great stone cairn set with animal skulls, blue prayer scarves, and prayers scribbled in Cyrillic script on loose sheets of paper weighted down by heavy rocks, fluttering in the wind.

  Somewhere ina this mountain vastness is the shaman of the reindeer people. Half a year it has taken to track him down. Will he heal my son? Will he even know how?

  PART ONE

  1

  The Seven-Year Child

  IN APRIL 2004 my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism. The feeling was like being hit across the face with a baseball bat. Grief, shame — this weird, irrational shame, as if I had somehow cursed this child by giving him my faulty genes, condemned him to a lifetime of living as an alien because of me. Of watching, horrified, as he began to drift away to another place, separated from me as if by thick glass, or the see-through barrier of dream.

  I had to find a way into his world, into his mind. I found it, amazingly, through a horse, Betsy.

  But let’s start at the beginning.

  DECEMBER 27, 2001. A year when the world was still reeling from the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. My tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired — and eight months pregnant — wife, Kristin, and I were at a friend’s house, having tea, when, like something straight out of a movie, she suddenly went pale and stood up.

  “Oh God!” she said, looking down over her swelling belly. A pool of fluid lay thick and clear on the parquet flooring.

  “Jesus!” I said, and reached for the phone.

  One high-speed rally drive up the rainy freeway later (commuters honking and flashing lights at my crazed lane changes), we were being fast-forwarded through reception to an emergency C-section. Kristin was screaming as the contractions began to come so fast that there was no trough between them, only one long, endlessly drawn-out, tearing agony that brought shrieks of an eerie, crowlike intensity from somewhere deep in her suffering body. She wasn’t dilating properly, and Rowan was lying breech. We’d meant to have him turned that week. “No time for that now!” quipped the doctor as Kristin was wheeled into the operating room. Then, to me: “Want to watch?”

  Out the window went all our holistic natural childbirth ideas. It could not have been more clinical. And I, usually too squeamish to look at blood and guts, found myself watching intently as the doctors sliced Kristin open, moved her innards to the side, and pulled out a blue, surprisingly large human being, my only thought being “Please, Lord, let him be in one piece.”

  A short time later, while they brought Kristin around from the anesthetic, I stood alone in the private room with Rowan (almost seven pounds, despite being a full month premature), looking down at him as he lay, belly up, wrapped in towels, in a kind of plastic tray. His blue eyes were half open, looking into mine; his tiny right hand clasped around my index finger. The clock on the wall showed a few minutes past midnight.

  Which meant, I realized with a start, that Rowan had decided to come into the world exactly seven years to the day that Kristin and I first met, and almost — once I’d figured out the time difference — to the very hour that we had first spoken.

  Which was surprising, because when I met her, she hadn’t wanted to talk to me at all.

  “Oh God, another hippy,” she’d thought to herself on seeing me, and turned away. It had been in southern India, in the town of Mysore. I’d been hired to write a guidebook to the region. She was there doing research for her psychology Ph.D. I, with hair down to the middle of my back, had been trekking up in the rainforests of the Western Ghats, staying with hill tribes. She had been interviewing Indian girls bound for arranged marriages, trying to find out at what point they put aside their natural sense of what was fair and accepted a system in which wives must bow to their husbands’ every whim. Though we had not yet become acquainted, we could not have been more different — Kristin was a suburban girl from California, and I was British, born to southern African parents, brought up partly in the center of London, partly on a remote farm, training horses.

  But the moment I saw her, stretched out in a beach chair by the pool of the Southern Star Hotel, all long-legged, tan, and languid, like some fashion model on the beach at Cannes, with strange sparkling lights dancing in her black eyes, a voice in my head, accompanied by an almost physical pull of intuition under my diaphragm, said, clear as day, That’s your wife.

  No, I thought; can
’t be. And I jumped into the water.

  But when I surfaced, the voice was still there. That is your wife. Go talk to her. Now.

  In fact, it took a full twenty-four hours before she deigned to talk to me. By then I had only one day left in that town, being honor-bound to move on the next day to continue my guidebook job’s busy itinerary. I went into a charm offensive, tinged with desperation, and managed at last to get her to spend an evening with me. Unable to resist the impulse, I told her what the voice in my head had said, bracing myself for the inevitable “You’re crazy.” Which, predictably, was the first thing out of her mouth.

  Then she surprised me. “But then, I’m pretty crazy myself. In fact,” she added, “I wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”

  It turned out to be quite a story: the previous year she had left her husband for another man, and now she was waiting for that man to leave his wife. Except he was dragging his heels. “I’m messed up,” she said. “I’m the first to admit it. But I’m not available.”

  Which of course for me was like a red rag to a bull.

  I pulled out every stop and managed to persuade her to come (along with some friends of hers) to the next big town, where I had a swanky hotel room for free and where we could all camp out. And from that moment, despite some initial resistance on her part, we embarked on seven years of high adventure: through the remoter corners of India, then to London, where she took a year off from working on her Ph.D. to come live with me, then to southern Africa for another guidebook contract, and finally — when she had to return to the United States to finish her degree — to Berkeley, California. We married, and I, being a travel writer and therefore able to live pretty much anywhere, became the ideal academic’s husband, following her first to Colorado, where she got a postdoctoral position, and finally to the University of Texas at Austin. Or rather, to the heat-soaked, cicada-singing countryside of oaks and meadows just outside, so that I could indulge my dream of having horses for the first time since my boyhood, which I’d largely spent in the saddle. In fact, ever since early childhood, when my parents would find me out in the horse pasture on my great-aunt’s farm, happily talking to the big beasts, I’d been riding semiprofessionally, breaking and training horses of all kinds. Truth be told, I was something of a fanatic.

  Meantime, I went back and forth repeatedly between the United States and Africa, researching a book on my family’s bizarre connection by marriage to the last hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, and writing about their strange culture of healing through the use of trance and their struggles to regain their lost hunting grounds, taken from them to make national parks and diamond mines. Just as the resulting book was published, Kristin announced she was pregnant.

  We decided to name the child Rowan, after the tree that, in all the old British folktales, is the tree of white magic. Keep rowan wood in your pocket and the bad fairies can’t touch you. For a middle name we chose Besa, after a Bushman healer I had become close to. And so it was that, shortly after midnight and two days after Christmas 2001, I found myself, dressed in green scrubs and shower hat, lost in wonder at this physical result of my love for the girl I had seen by a pool in India seven years before.

  “Seven years to the day,” I whispered aloud. “Welcome to the world, Rowan Besa Isaacson, with your blue, blue eyes. What adventures have you got in store for us?”

  WE BROUGHT HIM HOME on a day of rare Texas frost to confront the reality of parenthood without the help of the sassy but motherly nurses who had looked after us in the hospital — for like most new parents, we knew nothing about child care. We could not believe the gift of this extraordinary little being that was our son. We obsessed about not rolling over and crushing him at night, checking every ten minutes when he was asleep that he was still breathing, worrying that he might not eat enough. Fat chance of that; he barely let the nipple out of his mouth, even when asleep. Like most new babies, Rowan slept half the time, googooed and gagaed adorably the rest of his waking moments, then pummeled away at his mother’s breasts like a miniature sumo wrestler before going to sleep again. He didn’t cry much. We were amazed at how easy this parenting business was. What was all the complaining about?

  Even when Kristin had to drag herself back to work from her short maternity leave, it didn’t seem too tough. I’d take a bottle or two of breast milk from the fridge, put Rowan in the baby carrier, and head over to my neighbor’s barn, where I was training a young horse, working it in the round pen while Rowan dribbled and giggled and occasionally spit up on my chest. I told myself I wouldn’t push him to become a horseman. But I was lying, of course, already imagining how I’d teach him to ride, share adventures on horseback with him. For her part, Kristin, a long-term Buddhist, indulged her own fond images of someday engaging in long spiritual and philosophical discussions with her intelligent, spiritually and intellectually precocious son. Like all new parents, we projected our own dreams and desires onto our kid, and projected hard.

  Rowan was an early walker and began to say his first words before he had turned a year. We were overjoyed, reassured by his precocity, flattered to quiet hubris by the reflection of what we fancied were our own superior intellects. We were only vaguely miffed when, instead of enunciating “Mummy” and “Daddy” for his first names, he learned the names of all the Thomas the Tank Engine trains. “Hen-ree!” he’d say, turning to me with a strange, intense passion and holding up the little green toy engine whose name was indeed Henry. “Hen-ree!”

  He’d make beautiful patterns of the trains, and of toy animals, spending hour upon hour lining them up in surprisingly coordinated order by size and color on the living room floor. We applauded his aesthetic sense, this early and seemingly instinctual grasp of form, and fantasized about whether he’d end up an artist, like my mother, or perhaps an architect, like my father. When his always obsessive breastfeeding began to be accompanied by strange yogic posturing (sometimes resulting in his twisting right off the nipple and flopping onto the floor, almost tearing poor Kristin’s breast off in the process), we nodded sagely, believing that our son evidently had the passionate nature of a writer or explorer. When he started to babble bits of dialogue from his Thomas the Tank Engine videos, we smiled, thinking he’d be an early conversationalist.

  When Rowan was eighteen months old, Kristin, as a psychologist trained in child development, began to be a little worried. Rowan wasn’t pointing. Nor had he added any words to his limited vocabulary, beyond echoing back bits of dialogue from the kids’ videos he watched (what autism experts call echolalia). Nor did he show his toys to people, as many infants do. When someone said his name, he would not look around.

  Concerned that he might have some kind of speech delay, we contacted the state’s early childhood intervention services and organized — responsible parents, you see — a weekly visit from a speech therapist. Rowan ignored the therapist, but after a month or two he could say “It’s Woody,” when holding up his Toy Story doll. He could say “Toy Story,” when he wanted to watch the damn thing (about eight hundred times a day). He could say “It’s an elephant,” when looking at a toy elephant or a live one on the TV screen. But he couldn’t say “Mommy” or “Daddy” or “Hello” or “I’m hungry” or “Can I have” or “Yes” or even the usual toddler’s staple, “No.”

  If he wanted something, he grabbed your hand and led you to it: the fridge for food (only crunchy foods, like bacon and apples), the VCR for Toy Story or animal documentaries (choose the wrong one and he’d simply scream till you got it right).

  Both Kristin’s and my parents lived thousands of miles away. “You’re too indulgent with him,” complained Rowan’s grandmothers when they came on their rare visits and saw him ignore us whenever we tried to engage him. “You just let him get away with things. Can’t you be firmer?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kristin worriedly. “I don’t know.”

  Then the tantrums started. Not the usual “I’m frustrated because
I don’t understand/can’t get what I want” tantrums that all kids have. We already had those. Now came something new: a demonic, almost possessed edge, materializing suddenly, out of nowhere. One minute he could be happily lining up his toys or playing with the garden hose (obsessive about water too), or even asleep; the next he’d be screaming, half in rage, half in seeming agony. Sometimes for hours. Why?

  Something had to be wrong — but we never considered that it might be autism. I mean, he was so emotionally connected. He looked you in the eye. He came to us, arms outstretched, for hugs. Friends tried to reassure us: “Oh, I didn’t talk till I was four years old.” “Cesarean babies are often slower to develop.” “Try speech therapy.” Well, we had been doing that, and it hadn’t made any headway with him. We tried occupational therapy. Rowan ignored those therapists too. He raged and cried when made to sit with them, then went back to lining up his animals, his engines, yelling “Toy Story!” and “It’s an elephant!” but never anything more. Then even these scripts began to come less and less frequently. He would stare off into space. Go silent for long stretches of time, until one of the strange, demonic-possession tantrums would descend and consign him and us to an earsplitting, emotionally shattering domestic hell. Our boy, our beautiful boy, was floating away from us, and there was nothing we could do.

  Until one night, when Rowan was about two and a half, Kristin went upstairs, got on the computer, and typed in “autism, early signs of.” She found a link for “Likely signs that your child has autism,” put out by a well-known university, and clicked on it.

  There they were:

  • Lack of showing toys to parents or other adults

  • Lack of gestures: pointing, reaching, waving, showing

  • Lack of sharing interest or enjoyment with others