Authors: Margaret Vandenburg
Trying to engage with his family in the wake of torching a family was beyond him. He was sick of blaming himself for shutting down. No amount of training could prepare a man for this level of emotional complexity. He kept trying to muster up the energy to actually feel his feelings, as Rose put it, a valiant effort that usually backfired. Anger surfaced much more readily than anything else. Under normal circumstances, he might have fended it off. If only he could gather Max in his arms, summoning up the spontaneous love buried beneath layer upon layer of protective detachment. But he knew better. The only way to keep the peace was to keep his distance. He resented the fact that Rose didn’t come to the rescue. She seemed even less accessible than Max, completely oblivious to his profound need to reconnect. As far as she was concerned, everything was hunky-dory 24/7. She had shut down even more completely than he had.
“That guy from the bakery walked him all the way home,” Rose said.
“Which guy?”
“Matt. The one from Alabama.”
“Unbelievably nice of him.”
“Can you believe Max figured out how to get there? All by himself?”
Todd decided to choose his words carefully. He didn’t want to blame Rose for letting Max run off any more than he wanted to be blamed for not joining the search party. They were both doing the best they could. But asking him to marvel at their son’s incredible journey was going too far. Max should be spanked, not praised.
“Have you told him it’s wrong to wander off alone like that?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s precisely the point, Rose. He wanders off and gets rewarded with cookies.”
“He’s still working on understanding yes and no. Somehow I don’t think he’s ready for right and wrong.”
“What’s the difference?”
Rose gave him that look. In the good old days, she would have said something withering, like how for a smart guy he could be pretty stupid sometimes. Now all he got was that goddamned Zen expression of hers. She and Max had practically the same look on their faces, sitting side by side like twin Buddhas. What a family.
“I’m not going to have this discussion right now,” Rose said. “With him sitting here.”
“Why not? Afraid he might understand and learn something?”
“Can’t you see that this is a huge step forward?”
“Several huge steps forward. Across two busy streets.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Me?”
“Max finally shows some initiative. And what do you do? Complain.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m concerned.”
“Concerned that he’s finally reaching out? Making connections with other people?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Max perks up every time we go to that bakery.”
“A bakery is a far cry from connection with another human being.”
“He’s crazy about Matt.”
“He’s crazy about cookies.”
“Why walk all that way just for a cookie? He could have just raided the cookie jar.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Having made his point, Todd was ready to move on. Their little spat was in danger of escalating into a fight he didn’t have the energy to win. “There must be something we’re not thinking of. Something about the bakery we don’t see.”
“Listen to you.”
“Now what?”
“I can’t tell if you’re hell-bent on disagreeing with everything I say. Or just constitutionally incapable of seeing anything in a positive light.”
Todd anticipated the trap in the nick of time. If they continued in this vein, Rose would accuse him of being disingenuous on the phone.
If you imagine the worst, you’ll manifest it.
A more narcissistic philosophy was inconceivable, as though the universe gave a shit what people thought. Or was it just infantile, a bunch of little girls wishing upon a star? Todd assumed the majority of Source groupies were women, whiling away idle afternoons, if they were lucky. And then there were the unlucky ones, contending with autistic kids and disaffected husbands. Trying to feel less powerless. At least Rose had an excuse. If she wanted to believe Max had negotiated two busy streets and remembered to make three left turns and a right, just to see his buddy Matt, so be it. Let her have her theories if they made her feel better.
“Have it your way, Rose,” Todd said. “It’s not worth arguing about.”
Rose was right about one thing. It had been a prodigious journey, even if Max wasn’t a prodigy. For once he had deviated from his rigid routine, initiating what appeared to be a spontaneous act rather than robotically performing the same rituals day in and day out, month after month. Todd had his own theory, which he kept to himself. No doubt Rose wouldn’t approve. He suspected that Max’s apparent spontaneity masked a deeply embedded fetish, one so powerful Max felt compelled to sacrifice smaller obsessions in service of this larger one. He decided to retrace his steps, to try to discover the source of his fixation. He didn’t mean to pathologize his son’s motivation. If it was, in fact, Matt the baker, he would owe Rose an apology.
Todd got up earlier than usual the next morning, to give himself time to walk to the bakery before driving to work. He put on his jogging shorts to camouflage his intentions. No need to let Rose in on his little experiment until after the fact. She was still all excited about Max’s breakthrough with Matt. As far as she was concerned, it was a turning point. They now had concrete evidence that their son could form meaningful relationships with people rather than just things. She actually called it a friendship. Next thing you knew, Max would be on Facebook.
Todd slipped out the back door and ran down the street a block before slackening his pace. He tried to imagine what Max would see as he walked along. That lady curbing her dog? Probably not. Max had zero interest in pets, let alone their owners. A dog might as well be a chair as far as he was concerned. In this, they were told by his doctors, he was an atypical child with autism. As if there were such a thing as a typical child with autism. Everyone had their theories.
A school bus roared by. Todd was amazed at how fast they drove, with such precious cargo. Their flashing lights and robotic stop signs must have made their drivers feel invincible, like firefighters careening around corners with official impunity. Todd remembered idolizing not so much firemen as fire trucks when he was a boy. The attraction was speed. It had always been all about velocity for him, trucks breaking the speed limit, planes breaking the sound barrier. That little boy had grown up to be a pilot. But Todd had lapsed back into his own mode of perception. Speed meant nothing to Max. He had a fire engine in his truck collection, but its most salient characteristic was its color, not its function. He always placed it fourth in his lineup, presumably to maintain the sequence of red, tan, and brown established by the first three trucks.
Would Max have noticed the school bus? In a manner of speaking. He probably would have seen a streak of yellow, without bothering to identify the object itself, since color was so much more interesting than actual things, let alone people. Of course Rose had figured out a way to see even this in a positive light. If Max’s color palette was any indication, he was capable of expanding his comfort zone when he put his mind to it. A year and a half ago, he had had only one favorite color, and a dull one at that. Tan. Now, in addition to a penchant for red and brown, he could also tolerate orange, yellow, and sometimes even blue. Perhaps this little boy would grow up to be a painter. In the spirit of saving their marriage, Todd refrained from pointing out that their son could barely pick up a fork, let alone a paintbrush. Details, details.
It was, in fact, his obsession with details that made Max incapable of seeing things in their entirety. Why see that lawn when you could see the pattern left by the mower? Who cares about cars whizzing by when you can focus on the double yellow line in the middle of the road? It was a wonder Max hadn’t been mowed down on his epic little walk. He loved parallel lines almost as much as he loved circles. If you gave him crayons he’d fill sheet after sheet of paper with parallel lines in red, tan, and brown, in that order, sequences of exactly the same number of lines in each color.
Todd tried to concentrate on the yellow lines to the exclusion of everything else. They seemed static. Uninteresting. Maybe that was the point. They would never move or change in any way. They were completely predictable and they rendered traffic patterns predictable, forming a boundary between cars going one direction or another. But this was probably taking things too far, into the realm of function. They were just lines and they were yellow.
Todd crossed two busy streets and made three left turns and a right. He tried to think of them spatially, ignoring landmarks altogether, as though tracing a pattern on a map. Max loved maps. They reduced the world to a configuration of lines and colors, the very picture of the world he lived in. Todd saw the bakery sign in the distance. It featured a muffin and a cup of coffee, a brown square with a dome and a white semicircle attached to a thin white crescent. The sign itself was hexagonal. It hovered in a sea of blue, which Max may or may not have recognized as sky.
It was still early, too early for the bank across the street or the grocery store on the corner to be open, none of which Max would have noticed. The bakery had been open for business since dawn. Todd could smell it all the way from the parking lot, something Max would have done. Scents meant far more to him than sights and sounds. He often closed his eyes to fend off overstimulation. He plugged his ears, but never his nose. Rose read this as a sign that there was hope for the rest of his senses, that with practice he would learn to cope with a broader range of stimuli. The assumption was that he wanted to learn these things, that somewhere deep down he wanted to be more human, less isolated, best friends with Matt the baker.
Matt was busy behind the counter, setting out freshly baked pastries and muffins for the morning rush. An early bird mother, obviously in a hurry, wanted a loaf of rye bread. Todd let her go first. Then he ordered a bear claw and a cup of coffee. He paid and put the change in a tip jar.
“Thanks,” Matt said.
“I should thank you for rescuing my son yesterday,” Todd said.
“Max?”
“Max.”
“I didn’t really rescue him. It’s not like he was lost or anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“He seemed perfectly happy, sitting out there all by his lonesome. It took a bunch of cookies to finally convince him to move.”
“Sitting out where?”
“In the parking lot.”
“He never came inside?”
“Nope.”
“Where did you find him?”
“Like I told you. In the parking lot.”
“Where exactly? Could you show me?”
“Sure.”
Matt untied his apron and left it draped over the cash register. Todd left his muffin and coffee on the counter. They walked out the front entrance and past a couple of picnic tables to where the patio gave way to the parking lot.
“Here,” Matt said.
“On this little curb?” Todd asked.
“Just past it. Right here.” Matt leaned over and pointed at a patch of pavement.
A series of diagonal lines indicated a no-parking zone. Next to them, precisely where Matt was pointing, was an accessible parking space. A blue square surrounded the usual stylized chair with its enormous wheel. Max probably hadn’t noticed the chair.
“Was he sitting or standing?”
“Sitting cross-legged. Like I said, it took several cookies just to get him to stand up.”
“Was he doing anything?”
“Not really. Just sitting minding his own business. With a big grin on his face.”
Todd didn’t owe Rose an apology after all. There was no guarantee she would change her mind, even after he told her about the parking lot. But the evidence was conclusive. Max had negotiated two busy streets and made three left turns and a right not to find Matt but to make a pilgrimage to a big white circle in a blue square. The apotheosis of shape, if not color. The blue background shone in the morning sun. The white was blindingly bright, which may have accounted for why Max had chosen that particular afternoon for his visitation. He had apparently been unable to resist its freshly painted splendor.
“I’d better get back inside,” Matt said.
“Thanks again.”
“All in the line of duty.”
Todd watched until Matt disappeared back inside the bakery. He didn’t want to be seen staring at the pavement the way his son must have stared at it. When he was sure no one was watching, he sat down. He crossed his legs. The more he looked at the circle surrounding him, the more meaningful it seemed. He resisted the impulse to interpret it symbolically. Max wouldn’t have. Abstractions mesmerized him. Numbers. Patterns. Shapes. But they were things in and of themselves. They didn’t represent anything. Circles were circles, not symbols of eternity or the cycle of life, much less a sign of disability. A child irresistibly attracted to an accessible parking space may have been rife with interpretive potential for someone like Todd. But to Max, the circle was attractive precisely because it didn’t mean anything at all.
Max’s circumscribed world seemed nihilistic. Solipsistic. But sometimes, when Todd watched his son blissfully engaged in whatever it was that engaged him, it didn’t seem pathological at all. Just different. What was wrong, really, with privileging shapes and patterns over meaning and people? Nothing whatsoever, if circles made you happy. It meant living in complete isolation. But Max actually seemed to prefer it that way. Ultimately, Todd had more of a problem than Max did. It meant a father in search of a son might never find him.
* * *
Every Wednesday morning from ten to eleven, Rose had a conference call with various soul mates scattered across the country. She couldn’t imagine how she’d survived before discovering the Source. Every major decision she made was thoroughly vetted by her soul mates. No problem was too big or too small. Aging parents. Unruly pets. Getting your needs met. They walked Tracy through what might have been an ugly divorce, were it not for the group. They helped Pam visualize her way out of debt. Rose talked a lot about Max. Nobody ever tried to console her. There was a reason for everything. They all agreed that Max’s condition was a remarkable opportunity for growth. It wasn’t really even an illness. Pathology was more a mindset than an actual affliction, a manifestation of blocked energy. Opening yourself up to abundance could cure virtually anything.