“Look at this, Max. We’re drawing a picture.”
Sasha manipulated his limbs, trying to get him to sit at the table like the little boy in her picture. He kept collapsing like a puppet severed from its strings. Sasha moved her chair closer to his so he could see her picture even with his chin resting on his chest. In theory. He gave no indication of seeing anything.
“Look at all these circles and lines, Max. You can draw anything you want with circles and lines.”
Next Sasha drew a picture of Rose standing over Max’s left shoulder. She was pointing at his picture with apparent enthusiasm. Sasha’s little mother and son were nothing more than glorified stick figures. But they were remarkably animated. In college, she had taken a couple of cartooning classes. Her favorite comic strip was B.C. Its elemental sensibility made sense to her. Nothing was really very complicated. Just profound. This primal approach was the key to her success as a developmental therapist.
Max’s stare was no longer vacant. He had managed to find something infinitely fascinating either on his shirt or under the table. His body was still limp but he was popping his lips the way he did when he was lost in his own world. Sasha lifted his head so he could see her drawing. The popping stopped. When she let go, his chin dropped back onto his chest as though his neck couldn’t support the weight of his head. The popping resumed.
“That’s your mom, Max,” Sasha said. “You and your mom. Now let’s draw your dad.”
Todd’s distinguishing feature was his hair, which was cropped short and the same vivid red as Max’s mouth. He was smiling, too, equally enthralled by the little boy’s picture of nothing.
“What are you drawing, Max?”
She slid his paintbrush, which had fallen to the floor, back into his left hand. Then she loaded her brush with red and started painting circles on the little boy’s blank canvas, one after another until there were three rows of four, a perfect rectangle of circles.
Max didn’t look up, but his lips had stopped popping somewhere around row two.
She dipped her brush again and painted a stripe on Max’s arm. He didn’t lash out the way he usually did when someone tried to touch him. He didn’t move at all until she started painting the fourth stripe. Then his eyes alone shifted away from whatever it was they were or were not seeing so he could watch what Sasha was doing. The brush flattened the hairs on his arm. Then they inched back up, glistening with paint. Together they watched it dry. Sasha proceeded to the other arm. Max’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly, tracing the pattern of the work in progress, one stripe after another, until there was another sequence of four.
“Four lines on each arm,” Sasha said. “Four circles in each row.”
Sasha pointed to each stripe, one after another, and then to each circle on the canvas. Max’s eyes followed her every move.
“Next time you’ll do it yourself. You’ll count to four with your paintbrush.”
* * *
The car goes too fast. He can count all the mailboxes. But he can’t add up all the house numbers going forty miles an hour. The speed limit is thirty. Mommy never slows down unless there’s a red octagon or a little red circle hanging so high he can barely see it from the backseat. Car seats are like straightjackets, which aren’t really straight. Even Daddy says so.
There’s a mall with seventeen stores, a theatre with sixteen screens, three drive-ins, and hundreds of cars parked between diagonal lines. Two with their lights left on. Some parked backward, which is upsetting, so he counts the ones with little balls on their antennas instead.
There’s way too much going on way too fast. When things get really bad he rolls his fingers up into a little telescope. He closes one eye and raises the scope to the other, like a captain on a ship. That way he can zoom in on one thing at a time. Everything else disappears. He can still hear what isn’t there so he groans to focus the noise inside. Mommy turns on the radio, which is fine as long as no one talks. He changes the pitch of his groan to the same key as the song on the radio.
He likes it better at home where no one can look at him through the window. People in other cars glare at Mommy. She drives too fast. People’s faces are terrible. They never stay the same. One minute they smile, even when they have food stuck in their teeth. The next they look like murderers on TV. If he looks through the window they look back.
He focuses his little telescope on the white circle in the blue square. He doesn’t like squares and he doesn’t like the chair in the circle. But he loves the wheel on the chair. There’s another circle on top of a line. Like the little balls on car antennas, only much bigger. Nothing is bigger than the wheel. He’s never seen such a big circle, not even at home.
~ IV ~
Todd left work even later than usual, well after the swing shift commander had everything under control. Telltale intelligence had been gathered on his watch, and he wanted to see whether the bombed compound was really a viable target. Undercover operatives picked through the rubble for hours before they were able to collect enough evidence to corroborate the kill. The strike had, in fact, taken out Inayatullah, a Taliban commander. They finally found his left hand, incinerated but still wearing a wedding ring matching the description of the one placed on his finger by his wife, Wasila, who was not a Taliban commander. It turned out she was also killed in the strike. So it goes.
Rose would be pissed when he got home, but that was nothing new. Todd had been missing dinner a lot lately, ostensibly due to an accelerated rate of offensives. Winter was approaching, and terrorists and other beasts hibernated in the high country. Colonel Trumble issued an order to make hay while the sun shines, by which he meant kill as many bastards as possible before the snow flew. Big game hunting season in Nevada primed the pump for manhunts in Pakistan. Brown and Gomez had already bagged their quota of elk and antelope. Thankfully, there were no quotas on men. Bad guys were always in season. They were just easier to track in September than in December.
If Todd had stopped to think why he didn’t mind working late, he would have realized hunting season was a lame excuse. He didn’t stop to think about it. Ordinarily, he was as introspective as the next guy. But under the circumstances, he couldn’t afford to be self-aware. Acknowledging that things were going from bad to worse at home would do more harm than good. Just when he thought he was coming to terms with Max’s condition, his wife went off the deep end. Working overtime was a convenient solution to these problems. Keeping his family at arm’s length softened the blow.
He drove for miles without passing another car. Las Vegas glowed on the horizon in an otherwise pitch black desert peppered with nuclear test sites. They made Todd feel safe the way a fleet of F-16s made him feel safe. Drones, less so. They were like loose cannons, comparatively. All the surveillance monitors and satellite feeds in the world would never substitute for a man in the cockpit. Drones had sensors on their bellies, not eyes in their heads. They stared without seeing, recording unlimited amounts of unfiltered information, none of which they understood. There was something uncanny about them, something terribly familiar. It was better not to think about how they reminded him of Max. In the interests of verisimilitude, engineers designed robots with human features, to make them more user-friendly. Sometimes it felt like that’s all they’d ever accomplish with Max, the behavioral therapy equivalent of simulated emotional engagement. Then he remembered Max as a baby, his free and open expressions of curiosity and joy. Todd had tried to figure out what went wrong a dozen times a day over the past year and half, a total of 6,564 futile attempts. In an effort to avoid his 6,565th failure, he turned on the radio to distract himself.
O’Reilly was bashing the Democrats for waging class warfare against the rich, who were already paying their fair share of taxes. The poor were lazy. Todd finally switched off the radio when a caller from Floy, Utah, stated the obvious. Health care was a privilege, not a right. Universal coverage was unconstitutional. Todd agreed, in principle. But Max’s diagnosis had changed everythin
g. Their insurance only covered basic medical expenses, and there was no way they could afford all his requisite therapy on an officer’s salary. It was a sad day in hell when family pressures undermined your political convictions. Todd found himself increasingly nostalgic for the good old days in Iraq. His overseas deployments had apparently made him unfit for anything but combat duty. He should have been grateful for the opportunity to serve his country without having to leave his family behind. At least that’s what the Pentagon said when they were spinning the drone program, trying to sell it to pilots, to Congress, to anyone who would listen. Todd couldn’t help thinking of Max again, spinning like a mad dervish in the living room. All roads led to Max.
Todd parked the car in the driveway to avoid waking him in the morning. The garage door squeaked almost imperceptibly every time it opened or closed. WD-40 worked temporarily. But it took a can a week to keep the damned thing lubricated. It was hard to justify that kind of expense when they were having such trouble making ends meet. The rest of the family could barely hear the squeak even when they were awake. Max would bolt out of a deep sleep, terrorized by something no one else could hear. It was one of an arsenal of sounds he couldn’t tolerate, along with the dishwasher and the ceiling fan in the dining room. He didn’t seem to mind every other fan in every other room. But one flick of the dining room switch and he went crazy. It must have had something to do with sound frequencies rather than decibel levels. Loud noises didn’t bother him a bit. You could hold a blow dryer right next to his ear and he wouldn’t even notice. Rose vacuumed around him when he was fiddling with the rug fringe. But if you turned on the dishwasher, even in the dead of night, watch out. They had been washing dishes by hand going on a year now.
Todd peeked through the garage door window. As usual, Rose’s car was parked dangerously close to the bike rack. He had hung a tennis ball from the ceiling to help her negotiate the distance. A lot of good it did. She’d driven a good two feet too far anyway. Not that Rose was solely to blame. Max had probably started screaming his head off the minute the garage door started rolling back. Rose was a tough nut. She took Max’s phobias in stride. He could yell all he wanted, but she wasn’t about to leave her car in the driveway. Granted she drove a Taurus now instead of the Jaguar. But the former used car saleswoman in her refused to submit even a Ford to the elements day in and day out. Max would have to learn to compromise like everyone else. After all, expanding his comfort zone was an integral part of behavioral therapy. She let him have his way with the dishwasher, but he’d have to learn to live with the garage door.
Usually Rose greeted Todd at the door. But she was nowhere to be seen. He could hear Maureen in her bedroom, as usual, chatting on her cell. Once her homework was finished, she was allowed up to two hours of phone time. She spent the rest of the evening responding to her Facebook friends. There were never enough hours in the day to keep up with them all. She was either incredibly popular or completely incapable of distinguishing between real friends and virtual friends. Todd might have considered limiting her Internet usage if it hadn’t seemed hypocritical. After all, he spent way more time than she did chained to a computer screen, trying to distinguish between allies and enemies. At least most of her online contacts were local, kids she actually met face to face on occasion. His were on the opposite side of the planet, and he’d never met a single one of them.
He heard muffled voices coming from Max’s room. The door was closed and he figured he would try to sneak down the hall. He very rarely had the opportunity to relax alone in his own home. Watching a game on the tube was a real luxury. Technically, he was supposed to put Max to bed every night. But the process went more smoothly when Rose did the honors. Yet another reason not to rush home from work every night. As he passed by the bedroom door, the word perfect assaulted his ears. It was one of a handful of words he couldn’t tolerate, along with scarcity, abundance, and manifesting. He should have kept walking anyway to avoid a scene. But he had asked Rose not to use that word. They had a pact. She kept pestering him to quit disciplining Max, so he had a bargaining chip. Todd would stop reprimanding him for doing something wrong as long as Rose stopped pretending he could do no wrong. Come to find out she was cheating behind his back.
Todd was a professional eavesdropper. He listened in on conversations via wiretaps authorized by the CIA. His drone sensors were powerful enough to zero in on men boinking their wives in the privacy of their own homes. He knew full well that he shouldn’t spy on his own wife. He wasn’t the type to monitor her Internet trail, like so many husbands he knew. He didn’t have to. His powers of deduction had been honed by years in the intelligence business. The minute a new word crept into Rose’s vocabulary, he was all over it. Perfect was the worst offender. Shortly after she discovered the Source online, he accused her of joining a cult. To this day, she still had no idea how he figured it out. He flattened his ear against the door. She had crossed a line, forcing him to follow suit.
“I want you to know how special you are, Max,” Rose was saying. “You’re Mommy’s little prophet. Perfect in every way.”
The language of perfection was bad enough, more of the same old crap. But the bit about the prophet was even worse, something Todd had never heard before. Rose must have a new guru. Todd checked the impulse to bust into the room. He needed to assess the threat level, which could only be determined by piecing together a portrait of the New Age clown responsible for brainwashing his wife. Patience was a cardinal virtue in surveillance operations.
“Relax, Max,” Rose said. “Everything is as it should be.”
Todd appreciated Rose’s attempt to relieve Max’s chronic anxiety. Judging from the tone of her voice, almost a whisper, he assumed they were spooning in the crescent moon position. Todd had resisted this treatment until Sasha asked him if he’d ever felt out of control of various parts of his body. Of course he had. He was a pilot, a trained parachutist. But no matter how often he jumped, his body was still disoriented by the sensation of free-falling from a plane. Instinctively, he arched his back until the chute opened, restoring his equilibrium. Max did the same thing, turning almost inside out in an effort to stabilize himself.
“He’s trying to locate where he is,” Sasha had said. “He needs to be squeezed and pressed, preferably in a crescent shape, so he can begin to feel that he is self-contained, a body with a beginning and an end.”
Rose, who was not a trained pilot, seemed to understand instinctively. She was a mother. There was something embryonic about the crescent moon position. Sasha encouraged them to talk to Max while they spooned, to introduce language into this physical approximation of what she called an integrated personality. So they crooned in his ear, saying he was safe and everything was going to be all right. But he wasn’t a prophet, and everything was far from perfect. Todd couldn’t take it anymore. He opened the door as softly as he could, given his outrage. Rose stopped talking the minute he walked in.
“You’re a wonder, Rose,” Todd said softly. “Nobody can comfort Max the way you can.”
Todd felt like a bomb in a nursery. If he blew, Max would too, setting off an explosive chain reaction. Inconceivable amounts of will power enabled him to channel his rage into the dulcet tones of the considerate father of a child with autism.
“But if you keep telling him he’s perfect, he’ll believe you, Rose. He won’t try to get better.”
Todd tiptoed his way through the minefield of toys on the floor, none of which Max actually played with. Instead, he arranged them in patterns with militaristic precision. One misstep, one disturbance of his son’s rigid sense of order, however slight, and Todd would trip the switch. The whole room would explode.
“When you’re finished, we can hash this out. I’ll be in the bedroom.”
Todd stood over the bed. It was bizarre. Neither his wife nor his son acknowledged his presence in the room. One was definitely playing possum, to protect the tenuous tranquility of the other. Maybe Max was pretending, too, for his o
wn weird reasons. Maybe even the same reason. To protect himself. One could only hope. The alternative was too awful to bear, that there was no self in there to protect. Todd left the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
* * *
At first it feels like her body is swallowing his. He tries to escape but he’s surrounded. She rolls him up in a little ball. He likes his shape but not hers. When he stops moving she stops too. That way he can forget she’s there and concentrate on being a little ball, his favorite shape.
When he breathes she breathes. He holds his breath and she isn’t there. Except when she’s talking. She’s so far away he can’t hear her. He holds his breath and she disappears completely. When she leaves he pretends she was never there. That way he can have the little ball all to himself.
* * *
Rose slammed into the bedroom. It was her turn to be angry. She had always had a short fuse. All the serenity and perfection in the universe couldn’t change that. She managed to blow up less frequently than before, now that she was so goddamned grounded. But when she did, the fur flew just like the good old days. When she completely lost touch with reality, Todd purposely tried to get her riled up. There wasn’t any other way to cut through the bullshit.
“You could have waited,” Rose said. “It’s a miracle he didn’t wake up.”
“Hallelujah,” Todd said. He switched off the TV and tossed the remote across the bed. “It’s like Lourdes around here. A bloody miracle a minute.”
“Let’s skip it, Todd,” Rose said. She stood at the foot of the bed, glaring at him. “I already know what you’re going to say anyway.”
The Home Front Page 9
