Dibs: in Search of Self

He was a boy locked inside himself, a small, silent figure huddled in the corner of the classroom. The teachers spoke of him in hushed, worried tones. Dibs would not talk. He would not play. Some days he crawled around the room, hiding under tables; other days he sat mute and unmoving for hours. When it was time to go home, he would fight with the fury of a cornered animal, screaming, “No go home! No go home!” His parents, a brilliant scientist and a former surgeon, had judged him mentally defective. Was he? Or was he brain-damaged, or psychotic? No one could get close enough to find out. It was at this point, when the school was considering asking him to leave, that I was invited to meet him.

When he first came with me to the playroom, he moved like a shadow, his steps heavy and uncertain. He circled the room, tentatively touching each toy, naming it with a questioning inflection. “Bed? Chair? Table?” I would affirm each word, and in this way, we began to build a bridge of communication. He walked over to the doll house, peered inside, and then, with a sob in his voice, he began to repeat a desperate, urgent phrase. “No lock doors. No lock doors. Dibs no like locked doors.” He took the father and mother dolls and sent them away. Then, piece by piece, he dismantled the walls of the doll house, freeing the rooms from their confinement. In that small act, Dibs began to take down the walls he had built around himself.

His mother was a woman encased in a cool, precise armor. In her immaculate home, a place that seemed untouched by any child, she offered her son to me not as a boy in pain, but as data for a scientific study. She had accepted what she called “the tragedy of Dibs,” and made it clear she expected no miracle. She spoke of his retardation, of her own abandoned career, of the shame she and her husband felt. She would cooperate, she said, but she would not come for interviews herself. There was nothing more she could add. Her fear was a palpable presence in the room, a fear as profound and isolating as her son's.

Week after week, Dibs came to the playroom. His intelligence, so long hidden, began to emerge in startling flashes. One moment, he was a baby, sucking on a nursing bottle and asking for help with his coat. The next, he was arranging paint jars in the precise order of the color spectrum, reading the labels aloud, or spelling the names of the colors with crayons. He was a child of stunning contrasts, his advanced intellect wrestling with a deep, unmet emotional need. He was cautious, testing the safety of this one place where he could simply be, where no demands were made and no judgments were passed.

The sandbox became the stage for his buried rage. He would line up the toy soldiers, and one in particular became the focus of his play. “This is Papa,” he would say, and then he would bury the figure deep in the sand, building a mountain over its grave. One afternoon, after he had tried to share a moment of joy with his father in the waiting room, only to be told to stop his “senseless jabber,” I understood the depth of his pain. That pain finally found its voice in a song he composed in the playroom, a song of hate for locked doors and angry words, a song that ended with a promise to kill his enemies with a little hatchet.

Then, one morning, his mother called. She came to my office and the armor she wore so tightly finally cracked. She spoke of a brilliant career as a surgeon, abandoned for a child she felt had ruined her life. She confessed to years of relentlessly testing Dibs, trying to force proof of the intelligence she secretly knew was there, desperate to deny that the fault might lie in her own emotional coldness. She told me of a recent night when Dibs, after his father had again called him an idiot, had screamed, “I hate you! I hate you!” and kicked him. For the first time, her husband had wept. It was, she said, a terrible moment, and yet a relief, as they faced their failure not as scientists, but as two frightened, lonely people.

As the walls came down in his home, the walls within Dibs crumbled too. He began to speak of his friend Jake, the gardener, who had told him stories and saved for him the tip-end of a branch from a beloved tree his father had ordered cut down. In the playroom, his play became more creative and integrated. He built a vast city with a miniature world set, a city full of friendly people, schools, and parks. He replayed the drama of his family, but this time with a new ending. He set the doll house on fire, trapping his parents inside, but then, as they cried for help, he wept. “I weep because I feel again the hurt of doors closed and locked against me,” he sobbed, and then he rescued them.

On our last day together before the summer, he seemed to know it was a time for farewells. He took the nursing bottle he had so often clung to for comfort. “Goodbye, baby bottle, goodbye,” he said. “I do not need you anymore.” He hurled it against the radiator, shattering it. His final request was a surprising one: he wanted to visit the big stone church across the street, the one whose chimes had marked the end of every hour we had spent together. Inside the vast, silent space, dwarfed by the soaring arches, he was filled with a sense of awe and fear. As the pipe organ began to play, he whispered, “It is so beautiful it fills me with brightness and beauty.” As we left, he turned and waved timidly toward the altar. “Goodbye, God,” he said. “Goodbye.”

Years passed. One spring afternoon, I was sitting by my open window when I heard a familiar, lilting voice. It was Dibs, now a boy among boys, excitedly trading a friend the first worm of the season for a blue marble. When we met on the street a few days later, he greeted me with a radiant smile. His mother had asked if he remembered me. He looked at her, a twinkle in his eye, and then back at me. “Of course, I know the lady,” he said, his voice clear and confident. “She is my very first friend.” He had gone in search of himself, and in a small room with some simple toys, he had found his way home.