Authors: Margaret Vandenburg
“I’m not prepared to go that far,” Sasha said.
Todd resisted the impulse to make a snide comment. At the very least, Sasha was still one orbit short of Mars.
“Why not?” Rose asked.
“He’s obviously more visual than verbal. At this point, there’s no telling how hardwired this is. He may stay that way.”
“But he’s come so far already.”
“He hasn’t come to us so much as we’ve come to him. We’re learning to speak his language.”
Todd picked up the third portrait. He tried to suspend his disbelief. He felt disloyal to Max, as though he were doubting his son’s capacity to communicate. But he honestly had no idea what Sasha and Rose were talking about. What he saw was a circle and some lines, not unlike Max’s round potatoes at dinner and his trains of trucks and cars, snaking their way like minefields through the house. One false move—one disrupted detail in his obsessive-compulsive sequences—and Max would respond with hysteria, not language.
“Why did you decide to leave me out of the third picture?” Todd asked.
“Just a hunch,” Sasha said cryptically.
“Based on what?”
Sasha glanced at Rose before turning back to Todd.
“Sometimes I think Max feels a particular affinity with you.”
Todd watched Rose’s face out of the corner of his eye. He wondered if she had put Sasha up to this, if they were ganging up in an effort to convince him, surreptitiously, to withdraw his request for redeployment.
“He barely notices me,” Todd said.
“He noticed you this time.”
“Where?”
“Here.” Sasha pointed to the circle hovering in the large blank space in the drawing.
“What is it you think you’re seeing here that I can’t see?”
“You.”
“It’s a circle,” Todd said. “Don’t you remember when Max practically got run over, wandering all the way to the bakery to commune with a handicapped parking circle? Back when he was still relatively mobile? Now he’s practically comatose.”
“He’s calmer,” Rose said. “Less hyperactive.”
“Less distracted,” Sasha said. “He’s never really been hyperactive.”
“He’s less distracted, all right,” Todd said. “But what if it’s because he’s less engaged? More distant?”
“Why choose the most negative interpretation, Todd?” Rose asked. “Don’t you want Max to get better?”
“What’s better about substituting one circle for another? Max didn’t plop himself in the middle of that handicapped zone because he was trying to communicate something about being disabled. Surely even you don’t believe that, do you, Rose?”
“I think he was communicating spatially. Abstractly.”
“Where’d you get that particular interpretation? Online?”
“It’s common sense, really,” Sasha said. Things were heating up, distracting Todd and Rose from the task at hand. Let them fight on their own time. “Other kids point to things when they want to communicate. Max just uses shapes instead of his finger.”
“And you think this circle points to me,” Todd said.
“Of course.”
“Why not to Maureen?”
They just looked at him, Rose with mounting exasperation, Sasha with studied neutrality.
“Who’s to say he wasn’t referring back to that damn handicapped parking circle?” Todd persisted.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Todd. Talk about making random connections.”
“Why is that any more random than your hypothesis?”
“Patterns and verisimilitude,” Sasha said.
“Which patterns?”
“The family portraits.”
“Which you drew. Not Max.”
“I didn’t draw these lines.” Sasha pointed at the top half of what she took to be Todd’s portrait.
“Max lines up his trucks, and you call it pathological, not precocious. Why are these lines any different?”
“Can’t you see what they represent?” Rose said.
“No, I can’t.”
“Hair,” Sasha said. “Your crew cut.”
“Yeah, right. And that speck right there isn’t just random, either,” Todd said, pointing to a dried drop of paint. “It’s this mole on my left cheek.”
“Why are you so resistant?” Rose said for the fifteen millionth time.
“Why are you so gullible?” Todd said. Then he realized the broader implications of his remark, which were not lost on Sasha. He turned to her and they exchanged a long, loaded look.
“I’m sorry, Sasha. I didn’t mean to dismiss your efforts.”
“I’m Max’s therapist,” Sasha said. She hesitated before continuing, choosing her words carefully. “And I’m not in the business of family counseling.” She looked first at Rose and then at Todd. She was much younger than both of them. She suddenly seemed much older. “But something is going on here, underneath the surface. And it’s affecting Max’s thera-
peutic environment. I’m going to leave it at that.”
“What are you saying?” Rose insisted.
“We’ve all got some soul-searching to do. To figure out why we’re all responding so differently to the same empirical evidence.”
“Provided it’s empirical,” Todd couldn’t help saying.
“One way or the other, interpretation can be autobiographical. This needs to be about Max, not me or you or Rose or the elephant in the room.”
Sasha had never reprimanded them before. Rose assumed that Todd was her primary target. She couldn’t help feeling that her optimistic approach was being vindicated at last. At the same time, Rose knew she shouldn’t be taking sides. They were all in this together. Todd was alternately embarrassed and enraged. He hated airing their marital dirty laundry in front of Sasha. What right had she to psychoanalyze anyone but Max? For that matter, she was a behavioral therapist, not a psychoanalyst. But it didn’t take an analyst to notice there was an elephant in the room, if not an entire herd, so big they could no longer navigate around it.
* * *
The obvious explanation was that Afghanistan was the elephant in the room. It kept showing up at their weekly meetings with Sasha. Then they found it in their bedroom, especially when they were making love. As the date of Colonel Trumble’s decision approached, it was ubiquitous, the encoded content of every glance, let alone every conversation. Enormous ears and telltale tusks could even be detected between items on grocery lists. By this time next year, Todd might no longer be around to do the shopping. But the obvious explanation obviously only went so far. Otherwise they would have dealt with the possibility of this fourth deployment the way they’d dealt with the other three. Negotiating Max’s condition entailed exploring the kind of emotional complexity they’d been content to ignore before the diagnosis. There was no turning back now. Nothing was pure and simple anymore, not even the desire to redeploy, which was perfectly understandable in a military man. Everything had emotional earmarks, bridges to nowhere either of them wanted to go. The Barron household had been invaded by psychoanalysis and its discontents.
Todd was sitting with Max on the porch when it dawned on him that he had conflicting desires. On the one hand, he wanted to redeploy. On the other hand, he wanted to be there for Max. Not that it made much difference. Max was out to lunch, as usual, in one of his euphoric moods. He must have been witnessing something sublime, judging from the expression on his face. Whatever it was, Todd couldn’t see it. Max’s distraction left him free to study the revised rules of engagement in Afghanistan. They were much more nuanced than tactical directives in Iraq, much more complicated. American forces were no longer authorized to shoot first, ask questions later. Todd wasn’t sure how he felt about these changes. He missed the stark clarity of the old rules. Above all, he longed for simplicity, some sort of refuge from too many problems on too many fronts. In war, there was just one combat zone, just you and the enemy.
That’s when it hit him. The elephant stampeded the porch. It was Afghanistan, to be sure, but there was an underlying psychological conundrum that made the beast loom even larger. Todd was using Max’s condition as an excuse to run away. If he couldn’t play catch with his son. If he couldn’t teach him to fly fish and rock climb. If they couldn’t talk or even sit on the same porch together without feeling more emotionally distant than the remotest mountain outpost on Khojak Pass, why bother hanging around day after unavailing day? He couldn’t be a good father anyway. Autism had stacked the deck against him.
He tried to rationalize his way out of what looked suspiciously like cowardice. Faced with fight or flight, he was choosing the latter. But what difference did it make when they had so little contact? Out of desperation, Todd did something he knew full well he shouldn’t do. He couldn’t help it. Max was sitting there, perfectly content, and he reached out to him. To touch him. Maybe even hold him. Max exploded. One of his fists caught Todd under the chin before he could ward off the blows. Unearthly sounds erupted from his son’s pinioned body. Todd had learned to decipher various shades of fear and agony in his cries not for help but to be left alone. But he had never heard Max sound so angry. No contact at all was preferable to the violence of their embrace.
I love you.
Let me go, you’re killing me.
I want, more than anything, to be a good father.
Then leave me alone.
Rose dashed onto the porch. She had cookie dough sticking to her fingers, little round treats for Max’s snack later that afternoon.
“What are you doing to him?” she shouted.
She rushed forward and gently but firmly pulled Todd off of Max, who remained crouched in his pinioned position. They backed off, giving their son as much room as possible, afraid that he might choke on his convulsive cries. Todd felt guilty enough without the added weight of Rose’s vicious protectiveness, like an aroused mother eagle defending her nestling against a marauding father.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Todd said.
“Nobody’s asking you to do anything,” Rose said. “Just don’t terrorize him.”
“You’ll be better off without me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said it yourself. I can’t do anything right anymore.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Todd.”
“Which way did you mean it, Rose? Either I’m useless, or I’m terrorizing him. Take your pick.”
“Stop twisting my words around. You’re just trying to justify the fact that you’re giving up on him.”
“He’ll be better off without me, too.”
When Todd left the porch, Max’s screams seemed to subside somewhat. He could hear Rose’s soothing voice as he fetched his climbing gear. Everything was packed and ready to go in anticipation of this kind of emergency. He was out the door before Rose had a chance to ask him where he was going. Sometimes Todd wished he were a drinking man. On a scale of one to ten, whiskey was probably a five. Scaling Y2K was a nine with ropes, an eleven without.
* * *
The US Forest Service issued climbing permits for Red Rock Canyon. Too many novices had fallen to their deaths. Rangers actually patrolled the cliffs, which meant Todd had to use ropes most of the time. He couldn’t afford a violation this close to the deployment deadline, not even a traffic ticket. He didn’t want anything to mess up his eligibility. Colonel Trumble was still separating the men from the boys, comparing test scores and flight logs. Only a handful of lucky pilots would get to redeploy. The rest would have to remain at home with screaming kids and the daily prospect of reporting to work in a trailer full of gum-popping joystick jockeys. A lot more than just winning the war on terror was hanging in the balance.
Todd had only attempted Y2K once before, with Brown. They made it halfway up before night fell and they had to rappel down. It took three hours just to scale the face leading to the chimney. Now that Todd knew the way, he felt confident he could do it in two. He was in one of those moods, not so much invincible as intrepid. The academy had trained its officers to simulate this mood every time they climbed into the cockpit. Fear was a useful emotion in civilian life, helping people steer clear of dangerous situations. In combat, where everything was dangerous, it lost its utility. Rock climbing was somewhere in the middle. Fear was a constant companion, useful insofar as it activated the adrenaline necessary to power through the most challenging pitches. The trick was to physically tap into fear without letting it register psychologically. Above all, climbing was an exercise in compartmentalization.
Even with ropes, soloing was still considered reckless, far more dangerous than climbing with a partner to bail you out. But they couldn’t arrest you for it. The forest rangers all knew Todd. They respected his climbing chops. Even more to the point, they deferred to his rank. There was a kind of fraternity among law enforcement officers and military personnel. Firefighters were competitive, always trying to prove they were the toughest breed. But rangers were like cops. They knew where they stood on the continuum of dangerous professions, and they gave credit where it was due. Many of them were veterans, usually marines. The allure of danger had followed them into civilian life, determining their career choices.
Todd dropped his pack at the base of the cliff. Black Widow Chimney was barely visible at the apex of a towering rock face. Pitons left by previous climbers glistened like so many whiskers in the morning sun. Todd chose the most direct, difficult ascent, clipping into the route as seldom as possible to save time. He jammed his way up a tight crack, and then traversed a series of broken ledges to the next pitch. He was too beleaguered to stop and rest. There were too many problems nipping at his heels, propelling him to outpace his demons. Clinging to the cliff’s stony face allowed him to let go of the memory of Rose’s anguished expression on the porch. Even the sound of Max’s wailing, which rose and fell with the wind, grew fainter and fainter. By the time he reached the chimney, his mind was like the blank slabs of sandstone on either side of the fissure. He inserted himself into the rock where the air was still and dank and deathly quiet.
The chimney was just wide enough to accommodate climbers. More sedentary people with love handles couldn’t have wedged their way in, let alone propelled themselves up the damned thing. The sides were covered with moss, slimy and super slick when wet. Needless to say, they were usually wet. Even so, Black Widow would have been a piece of cake to climb if there were ledges or other aberrations in the rock. Needless to say, there weren’t. The only viable technique was to transform your body into a kind of human cork, conforming to the contours of the column, filling it so completely there was no space left through which to fall. It was more an exercise in mind control than anything else, a test of your capacity to withstand the claustrophobic sensation of being buried alive in a stone coffin suspended far above the unforgiving ground below, where you would end up dead and buried if your nerves failed the test. Todd inched himself up the chimney, flexing and unflexing with painstaking precision, filling the room vacated by one muscle with another, slithering snake-like through gravity itself. The rock dug into his skin. He could feel every grain in the unfeeling sandstone, but the pain didn’t register. He was numb to it and to everything else that threatened his concentration, which was ultimately more physical than mental. The site of his being became his body, an inviolable place where anger and guilt and sadness didn’t exist.