He knew where the bathroom was because Walt and Robyn showed him, but he didn't know how to ask for it when he needed it. Sometimes he would pee or shit in his pants and laugh, or smear his feces on the walls. He would make high-pitched noises when Robyn handed him the telephone and told him his dad was on the other end. He could say "goodbye," "hello," "thanks," "water," "hungry," "candy." He could repeat the phrases "I love you" and "Hi, Dad" and "Wow." A cadre of therapists had worked with him over the years, tried to teach him skills like brushing his teeth and buttoning a shirt, how to chew quietly. Some of them had quit because he bit them.
He ignored other children, mostly. He'd pick up an object – say, a string of thread – and let it drop, over and over, to see how it behaved on its way to the floor. Sometimes he would spin madly in a circle.
He had so much energy it was exhausting, and he required constant supervision. As he got older, he would sit in the backseat on his way to school with Angela and would bite her on the arm or pull her hair as she screamed. He was fearless and reckless because he didn't have a concept of danger. There was just a connection missing somewhere. That was the easiest way to describe it.
He couldn't carry on a conversation, but he could listen and understand. He could follow directions: Pick this up, please, Christopher. Take it over there and come back. He responded to sign language, because it was visual. He could point to a flash card to indicate what he wanted to eat. He was in an eighth-grade class with 10 other autistic kids, some who didn't speak or even act like they knew the teacher was there. The teacher once had a student who spoke only by reciting an infomercial: "If you didn't buy it here, you paid too much!"
In the callous terms of the DSM-IV – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Christopher displayed "markedly abnormal nonverbal communication." To his father he was shy and curious, and sometimes so quiet and so temperate that Walt could imagine his son was perfectly normal.