At first, we visited Albert every week. The halls of the institution were brightly lit and carried sound alarmingly well. It was impossible to discern if the scream you heard was right behind you or yards ahead into the brightness. The smell of industrial disinfectant (a smell I associated with Band-Aids from my boyhood), though it permeated the atmosphere, could not quite mask the odor of human life exerting itself at its most biological level. Rachel’s newly permed hair glowed like a curly halo in the bright fluorescent light as we made our way down the corridor. Later, that night, as we performed our dutiful sex act, I would smell vestiges of the disinfectant in the curls.
Albert’s suite (Mrs. Jones, the matronly administrator, used this word- suite -six times when originally describing to us the accommodations) was nicely, if practically, furnished. No glass, no hard angles, lightbulbs secured behind metal cages, all furniture securely bolted to the floor. On one visit, before entering Albert’s room, we stood in the doorway and watched as our son interacted with Jack, his suitemate (another selection from Mrs. Jones’s argot).
“Albert, Albert, did you hear what I said to you? I said, good day, sunshine.”
Albert, sitting on his bed, uncrossed and then recrossed his legs. He rocked back and forth.
“Albert,” Jack said, “did you hear what I said? I called you sunshine!”
Albert continued to rock back and forth, but Jack was insistent. “I called you sunshine! Albert! Albert!”
Albert rocked even faster yet; he grunted and smoothed his hands over his hair. Classic signs of Albert’s growing agitation. He yelled at Jack. “Leave Albert alone! Jack, leave Albert alone!”
Jack apparently recognized the danger in Albert’s voice. He skulked past me and Rachel, muttering to anyone who might care, “Jeez, all I did was call you sunshine.”
Albert saw his parents watching him. He jumped from the bed and ran to us. “Mommy, Daddy! Albert did bad wrong. Albert did bad wrong.” Bad wrong was Albert’s newest catch-phrase. He used it whenever he saw us. Apparently, Albert had decided that his sentence at the institution was the result of his wrongdoing. And he was right.
Our visits grew less frequent. Albert aged physically. He grew into something of a hulk. A mostly silent giant who looked like neither me nor Rachel. At one point, there was talk of a group home for Albert. As Mrs. Jones described it, a group home is a noninstitutional setting for those with developmental disabilities similar to Albert’s. A group home is staffed with workers called houseparents. Living in a group home was apparently a great advantage. The list of applicants was long, but Albert was considered a prime candidate. The group home would offer something that Albert would find at no institution no matter how advanced its therapies. It would offer him normalization. Mrs. Jones used this word- normalization -in our meetings. Over and over, she repeated the word as though it obtained some magical quality when spoken aloud. Normalization. Normalization. Normalization. Your son is now normal.
Or perhaps the magic the word wove was on Rachel and me. With a wave of the bureaucratic wand, your son no longer lives in a barren institution. You are now free from guilt. Please return to your former lives. Your son now lives in a normal home, just like you. You can visit him there, just as you would visit a son who was normal. You can return to your normal lives. Everything is normal now.
A month before he was to move to the group home, Albert killed his suitemate, Jack, in a dispute over a pair of socks. We never heard the word normalization again. Albert did move, however. He was transferred to a larger facility called the Hendrix Institute, where he is given daily doses of Mellaril, Haldol, and Ativan. The few times we have visited him there, he has been only semiconscious. His clothes were soiled with fecal matter, drool slicked his unshaved chin, and scratches covered his face-self-inflicted from his ragged, broken fingernails. Neither Rachel nor I have ever spoken of objecting to this heavy regimen of antipsychotics and sedatives. Why would we?