The Home Front

by Margaret Vandenburg

  “Has he painted arcs before?” Todd pointed at the semicircles.

  “Never. Just circles and lines.”

  “Which one did he draw first? The circle or the rectangle?”

  “The circle.”

  “What difference does it make?” Rose said.

  Todd picked up the first portrait. Half a dozen art therapy sessions had yielded the same circle with vertical lines sprouting out of the top. It was either evidence of yet another obsessive-compulsive pattern, an autistic barrier erected to prevent communication with his family. Or it was Max’s way of acknowledging that he was actually part of the family, something that Todd himself found increasingly difficult to feel, let alone express. The rectangle cracked the code, confirming the latter interpretation. It was no longer possible to see the circles and lines as anything but a father figure.

  “You’ve been right all along,” Todd said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not just shapes.” Todd traced the image in the second portrait with his index finger. He tried to feel what Max must have felt when he painted the rectangle. He wondered whether the little loops were part of the original design or an afterthought. One way or another, they were unmistakably meaningful. An entire history, once lost in translation, came into focus.

  Rose and Sasha looked incredulously at one another. Todd had prided himself on his pragmatic approach to Max’s illness, accusing them of grasping at straws. He had habitually refused to acknowledge that the circles and lines represented his presence in the portraits. Now the tables were turned. He alone understood that the rectangle with handles represented his impending absence. The second portrait lamented the loss of what was so hard-won in the first, a story line culminating in what would amount to abandonment, if he went through with it. In this light, redeployment was an act of cowardice based on the assumption that winning the war on terror abroad was more likely than defeating autism on the home front. The fact that such a complicated emotional matrix could be reduced to such simple terms left little room for evasion. All along, without know it, Todd had been choosing between Afghanistan and his son. Max was calling his bluff, forcing him to make a conscious rather than unconscious decision.

  “He’s telling a story,” Todd said.

  It was Rose and Sasha’s turn to be skeptical. Moving from literal to figurative representation was one thing, a remarkable developmental feat. But stringing signs and symbols together into a linear narrative was quite another. They had no idea what Todd was talking about until he pointed out the loops. Even then, it took time to piece the story together, let alone understand its myriad implications.

  “How do you know they’re handles?” Sasha asked.

  Todd left the table to fetch his duffel bag from the coat closet. He dragged it across the floor the way Max did, grasping the loop on the end rather than the one in the middle. He hesitated to tell them about Max’s epic struggle with the bag. This was between him and Max, the time-honored story of fathers and sons lost and found again. He hesitated to tell them anything at all for fear of colonizing Max’s message. The simplicity of his vocabulary in no way precluded multiple meanings. If anything, it inspired a wider spectrum of interpretation. The shapes spoke for themselves. Let Rose and Sasha draw their own conclusions.

  * * *

  Rose found herself wandering around the house a lot. She tried to remember what she used to do with her time before discovering the Source. Virtually nothing came to mind. It was as though her brain had been washed clean, leaving no memory of her former self. Todd was decent enough not to talk about it much. But Rose knew full well he had thought she’d been abducted by Tashi and her cronies. She almost wished it were true. Abduction assumed there was someone to abduct, an authentic identity she might recover now that she wasn’t living her life online. Who had she been when she and Todd were first married, before Max’s diagnosis? All she knew for sure was that she was still a wife and mother, a set of facts that did very little to help solve the riddle of who she might have been, once upon a time.

  Judging from the weeks that had transpired since she last logged on to the Source, she was a devoted housewife who loved, above all, to clean closets and shelves. She wandered around opening doors and cupboards, searching for something. Far from finding anything of value, she felt compelled to throw everything away. The impulse to purge seemed counterproductive, given her need to fill the void left by bogus New Age promises. But her compulsion overwhelmed every other consideration, rational or otherwise. She made short work of the kitchen, jettisoning stale herbs, consolidating stray packages of flax seed and wheat germ, and tossing out unopened staples with lapsed expiration dates, some of which actually predated her abduction. She took this as a sign of how egregiously she had neglected her responsibilities, which fueled her determination to make a clean sweep of the entire house.

  Rose knew better than to touch, let alone discard, anything belonging to Max. Todd’s stuff was so well-organized, there was nothing expendable, except maybe an odd sock here and a broken gadget there. Maureen was another story entirely. She came home from school to find a pile of clothes next to the recycling bin. Given the general state of their daughter’s bedroom, which Todd called a disaster area, Rose assumed she wouldn’t miss ratty old clothes that had been balled up in the backs of drawers and closets for years. No exaggeration. But Maureen had her own system, apparently. Underneath her disregard for superficial tidiness, she shared the Barron family’s genetic predisposition for order.

  “What are all my clothes doing in the garage?” Maureen demanded.

  “Not all of them,” Rose said. “Just the ones you never wear.”

  “What are you doing with them?”

  “I’m taking them to the Salvation Army.”

  “They’re my favorite.”

  “You haven’t worn them in years, Maureen.”

  “I’m saving them.”

  “Saving them for what?”

  “So they won’t wear out.”

  “You’ll outgrow them before you’ll ever wear them out.”

  “I don’t care. They’re my favorite and I’m keeping them.”

  Rose was reminded of Max’s outrage when she made the mistake of trying to dispose of Ralph and Harry. She conceded that she had crossed a boundary, which effectively ended the quest to find herself amidst the domestic flotsam and jetsam that is the purview of wives and mothers. But expanding the parameters of her search was easier said than done. At a loss as to where to turn next, she nearly suffered a relapse. She actually logged on to the Source and was one number away from renewing her membership before she hurled her MasterCard across the room. Living life online was no longer an option. At the same time, she couldn’t conceive of an alternative without surfing the web. She limited herself to half an hour a day, thirty precious minutes of feverishly looking up listings of local events. She confined her searches to a thirty-mile radius, trying to resist the magnetic pull of the universe, whose abundance masked the black hole that had engulfed her.

  Las Vegas and its environs had plenty to offer tourists and rattlesnakes, but not much of interest to Rose. She blamed herself. Without knowing who she was, how could she expect to find anything worthwhile to do? Other people had hobbies. She had an autistic son and an Internet addiction, which had pretty much monopolized her time since his diagnosis. The important thing was to get out. To try new things. First she enrolled in Bikram Yoga classes at the Om on the Range Yoga Center. The clientele reminded her too much of her soul mates, especially Nirvana and Libra, who had been avid Hatha practitioners. Rose was obviously still in the grip of an addiction to New Age fads. Next she tried Pilates, which attracted an entirely different, tonier crowd. She quite liked them until she joined the group for lunch, where all they discussed was getting work done. She thought they were talking about their jobs, not their plastic surgeons, a misunderstanding that inspired her to check out the want ads online. Almost any gainful employment seemed more wor
thwhile than hobnobbing with ladies with nothing better to do than obsess over crow’s feet. But she was really only free from nine to one, the hours Sasha spent with Max. The rest of the day, Rose was still his Floortime facilitator. Even waitressing jobs demanded more flexibility than her commitment to his recovery would allow.

  She started to doubt whether she’d ever work again. Not that it bothered her too much one way or the other, as long as she felt fulfilled. Most parents relied on their kids for fulfillment, of course, especially mothers. This had been the source of Rose’s biggest mistake. She could no longer afford the luxury of pretending Max would attend a regular grade school in a year or two, counting on New Age fairy tales to alleviate her disappointment in his recovery. Wishful thinking had almost destroyed her marriage. It had placed a terrible burden on her son, as though his progress, or lack thereof, defined her worth. Her need to be absolved of the guilt she felt as his mother stemmed more from intolerance than from love. She kept reminding herself that nothing terrible had happened to Max, nothing she as a parent might have prevented. He didn’t have a problem. She did.

  Once she let go of her expectations, she noticed a change, one she didn’t know whether to attribute to Max or to herself. Either she was simply more accepting of his behavior, or he was actually less distracted lately, not quite so distant. Even when he was in his own little world, that world appeared to intersect with the one she inhabited. He seemed less alien. The idea that he had ever seemed alien at all was something she hadn’t dared admit to herself until now. This admission relieved them of the need to pretend otherwise. Once in a while, rather than whipping Max into Floortime frenzies of activity, she would just let him be. They would hang out together, he doing his own thing, she trying to figure out what her own thing might be. He would spend the afternoon straightening the rug fringe while she straightened up the rest of the house. He seemed calmer, somehow. Or she was calmer, especially once she finally found an outlet, something she liked to do as much as he liked twisting each little string until it lay perfectly straight where it belonged.

  She discovered it accidentally driving to the farmers’ market downtown. The feeder highway was even more jammed than usual, bumper-to-bumper all the way from Sunrise Manor. All the locavores this side of Red Rock Canyon must have been converging on the same few bushels of fresh fruit and vegetables. On second thought, they looked more like tourists en route to some casino matinee, probably David Copperfield’s magic show, judging from the preponderance of comb-overs and blue hair. The assholes in the left lane wouldn’t let her merge, and she ended up getting squeezed onto the freeway exit. Once she curved out of the on-ramp, she stepped on the gas. If she didn’t hurry, there wouldn’t be any raspberries left. She jockeyed into the left lane, leaving several semis and a Cadillac in the dust. The feel of the wheel and the grip of rubber on the road triggered a sense memory. She instinctively rolled down all the windows. Blasts of desert air sent her hair flying in the wind. By the time the exit back to Las Vegas appeared in the rearview mirror, she was pushing eighty. Speed alone precluded returning to Sin City, let alone the fact that there was nothing there for her. Her Taurus kicked into overdrive. It wasn’t a Jaguar, but it held its own on the open road. Everything fell into place.

  Real driving means driving without a destination. In the desert there is nowhere to go and nothing to see except more of the same. Sagebrush and sagebrush. Mile markers ticked by with incantatory regularity, serving no real function. Distances were too vast to be measured mathematically, an exercise as futile as counting grains of sand to determine the size of a dune, much less the entire Mojave, stretching from Nevada to California with a shaft of road shot from one end to the other, long and straight and true. She measured her momentum against a lone bluff in the distance, what was left of a volcanic cone that lent the landscape a prehistoric improbability. The scale of it all provided a kind of corrective, a way of distancing herself from the narcissistic notion that she was the center of the universe, the source of anything, let alone everything. It had been all about her for too long, as though her pretty little head could change anything, the location of a single sagebrush or the bluff itself, immense, yet barely a blip in the big sky.

  Once she reached the open road she never pulled off except to eat and gas up, all at the same lone truck stop at the junction of Interstate 15 and Clark County 215. The first few times she ventured out, she brought a picnic lunch from home, things like hummus and pita and slices of fruit that were easy to eat in transit. But health food on the road felt incongruous, even a little ridiculous, like caviar at a baseball game. Jack’s Truck Stop was famous for its double cheese-burgers and super-sized sides of fries. The fact that she hadn’t eaten red meat for so long gave her pause. She ordered a Sprite to wash it all down, drawing the line at caffeine. Eventually she caved in completely, abandoning herself to the unadulterated rush of classic Coke. Mustard. Catsup. Extra pickles and minced onions. No wonder they called it relish. The drive-thru girls got to know Rose so well they recognized her Ford at the pump. By the time she finished gassing up, her order was ready and she was back on the road in no time.

  Buzzards wheeled overhead, which meant something managed to live in that godforsaken country. Predators had to eat something, after all, nocturnal animals hiding in holes by day and scuttling over the desert floor by night to lick dew drops from parched pebbles. Once in a while Rose spotted one of them, not running for its life but splayed and baking on the pavement. For long stretches of time, roadkill was the only evidence of other drivers. Truckers avoided this stretch of the county highway, which was so far off the beaten track even advertisers had abandoned all hope. Roadside signs were completely effaced by sandstorms, all but one which read, “o opping.” This sign took on a strange significance. Its capacity to communicate without fully articulating its message seemed emblematic of something important. O opping became a kind of mantra for Rose. They were syllables, not words, signs without sound not unlike Max’s hieroglyphic shapes. The more she drove the more she understood that less was more out there. The desert itself was all the more expressive by virtue of its mute minimalism. What was true there might be true everywhere.

  One day she thought she might take Todd driving again. She might even show him her sign, though it wouldn’t necessarily mean much to him. O opping. Any attempt to explain its significance would be futile, at best, a reduction of its meaning to mere words. Let him draw his own conclusions. They would probably stop at one of the motels along the way, just for old times’ sake. They would probably laugh at how lame the Taurus was compared to the Jaguar. But speed and wind and the open road were the same, no matter what the trappings. The ineffable allure of driving for the sake of driving was something her husband had always understood implicitly. He was a pilot, after all. Flying was its own raison d’être, too, which is why Rose ultimately accepted Todd’s decision to redeploy.

  * * *

  Todd worried about Farley when orders came down to reassign his drone to the big mission. Surveilling the old couple’s hotel had been his sole responsibility for months. Their grandchildren had visited. Birthday and holiday celebrations had come and gone. Clients smoked untold numbers of cigarettes on the communal front porch, and the old man snuck his fair share behind the garden shed, eliciting stormy fights and steamy reconciliations with his wife. Farley was privy to everything, bearing witness to their most intimate interactions. But he showed no signs of missing the old couple. He showed no signs of anything at all, transferring his indefatigable attention to the compound in Abbottabad without skipping a beat. Todd finally realized there was no reason whatsoever to worry about Farley. His detachment wasn’t a symptom of some kind of personality disorder that might compromise the big mission. He was, if anything, a model drone pilot, impervious to emotional distractions. Man and machine were melded into a single unfeeling, unblinking eye. Farley was a true new millennial pilot, a human panopticon.

  Todd was the one who missed the old coup
le. In spite of his ability to compartmentalize fear and even empathy, when necessary, he was still a quintessentially twentieth-century air force officer. Geographical distance had not yet fully effected indifference, the inevitable byproduct of drone warfare. He had watched over Farley’s shoulder, a kind of backseat driver insinuating himself into the private lives of potential targets who turned out to be people. Hundreds of man-hours and a million dollars of military resources had been expended to assess their threat level. Zero. The hotel was just a hotel. The intelligence Farley had gathered was filed away for future reference, most notably the fact that the old couple’s make-up sex was spicier than ever, even after half a century of married life. This intelligence had made a deep impression on Todd. He would never forget the old couple, who seemed emblematic of something important. This same intelligence had made no impression whatsoever on Farley, who saw the couple as nothing more than a potential threat. He was equally detached from the drama of the big mission, in spite of the fact that classified information suggested that the new compound under surveillance was far more than just a compound.

  Landing the big mission was a feather in Colonel Trumble’s cap. If there had ever been any doubt as to whether he was the most respected commander of RPA combat patrols, this assignment dispelled them. Todd’s position in the chain of command was far less certain. He had no way of knowing how many other squads were surveilling Abbottabad, if any. Colonel Trumble wasn’t at liberty to discuss the overall tactical operations plan. It was entirely possible that Todd’s squad was flying solo, in which case he had been singled out as Colonel Trumble’s right-hand man. Evidently, the kerfuffle surrounding his redeployment request hadn’t hurt his prospects. All the more reason to expect he would have heard from Central Command by now, one way or the other. He was watching his e-mail almost as assiduously as the compound, still waiting for official word on the status of his application. The suspense was killing him.