Read Online The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown - Free Book Online

and pain.
    The first time it happened he was nearly three and he was sitting in the bath. By that point in his life, his calm in the bathwater was almost biblical. Eight gallons and three quarts was the ancient Hebrew measure of a bath: that was about right for Walker, until the warmth hit his chest, whereupon he got nervous again. The trick was to stay within his narrow zone of comfort.
    That first good photograph was a fluke, taken as he looked up from endlessly turning a toy in his hands. I had bought sinking submarines and squirting whales and swimming frogs, but he liked the measuring cups and sieves that let the water trickle out. He liked the noise they made.
    The first shots Johanna liked, unequivocally, were taken when he was seven. Seven years of trying to catch Walker in a pose she wanted to look at.
    It was a hot day in the summer, and Walker, per usual on hot days, was wearing little more than a shirt and a diaper. He was lounging on his back on the couch in the TV room, in an orange T-shirt, wearing a pair of my sunglasses, which Hayley had slipped onto his head. This in itself was daring: Walker was hell on glasses and sunglasses alike, and took no time at all to break their arms and shatter their lenses. Johanna had recently interviewed Robert Evans, the late film producer. By then Evans was in his seventies, but he still personified the sixties Hollywood mogul—tinted shades, cravats, starlets on his arm, a voice that seemed to have been strained through smoke and money. Nothing fazed Evans, nothing embarrassed him. As soon as she saw the shots of Walker, Johanna started calling him Walker Evans, and pinned them to the kitchen cupboard, a reminder of his charm. It was his Nothing Fazes the Boogle look. I imagined he was reminiscing about Natalie Wood. When I look at it now I remember the chant he had in those days (he doesn’t do it any more), a rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah routine that was clearly his way of telling a story, when he knew he had the floor. He could have been on the telephone, luring someone into an obvious deal. There was to be no interrupting him on this one. He had no words, but he had tone down.

    It was a miraculous shoot, in any event, that steamy day in the TV room: the very next shot in the series conjured up not Evans, but the comedian Drew Carey, who has since assumed Bob Barker’s role as the host of The Price Is Right . Evans and Carey—two men who, apparently, were more than willing to play a role, even degrade themselves, to be in showbiz.
    In the Carey shot he looks more wary, confident but watchful, taking in some inanity across the sound set. A normal photograph made it possible to imagine he was normal too.

    My favourite photographs were of his more private moments. When he was barely a year old, we rented a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay, a few hours north of Toronto. It was an isolated place forty minutes by boat from the nearest marina, surrounded only by other cottagers on other islands, accessible only by water. It was so quiet when the wind was low I was afraid the other cottagers could hear Walker’s crying, or even my shouting. But the quiet changed him; up there he transformed, became surer of himself, less distracted. Sometimes he looked out toward the orange sunsets at the end of a fine day, with the breeze blowing, as if he could see something a thousand miles away across the water of the bay—the long view. He knew the place, knew its feel, anyway, even if he didn’t know where he was precisely, or couldn’t show it. We have a photograph of him there, in Olga’s arms, the only time she ever came up in seven summers (it was the one place she wouldn’t go: she hated snakes, and the island had rattlers), his weird tuft of hair golden in the sunset light: the God child, Johanna called the picture, and he looked it. It was the first place I ever imagined him to have an inner life, a life private from the rest of us. And it was there, one afternoon, as