Authors: Margaret Vandenburg
The colonel hated serving Stateside as much as Todd did. He’d fought two tours in Iraq, two in Afghanistan, and was eager to volunteer for his fifth when his leg got blown off by an IED. He called it the dog shit incident by way of setting up his favorite punch line. “I really stepped in it that time, didn’t I?” Calling it an incident didn’t alter the fact that he’d lost his leg. But transforming misfortunes into comedy routines did wonders for his morale. He had an amazing prosthetic device and an even more amazing physical therapy regimen. He walked like any other guy on the base, only straighter, with more determination.
Colonel Trumble always seemed glad to see Todd. He waived off his salute and motioned to a chair. Todd was wary of the informality. Underneath all his horsing around, the colonel was a shrewd officer.
“Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Bourbon?”
Todd mustered up a snicker, even though it felt inappropriate under the circumstances. Everyone laughed at the colonel’s jokes. He was the highest ranking officer on the base.
“How are things out at the trailer park?”
“They’ve been better.”
“So I heard. How’s Brown?”
“A little shaky. But he’ll be fine.”
“Let him fly surveillance for a week or two. Till he gets his mojo back.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“He should be commended for following orders.”
“Yes, Sir.”
In all good conscience, Todd knew he’d have to delegate this particular assignment. It was one thing to let Brown off the hook, quite another to exonerate him. Captain Frick, his immediate subordinate, would have to do the honors. Since the decision to launch drone strikes was always collaborative, nobody could be held accountable. Untold numbers of combatants and consultants had weighed in on the decision to mount the strike—the CIA, Central Command, Special Ops, a team of data processing contractors, and the lieutenant in charge of boots on the ground. Colonel Trumble was only interested in the chain of command culminating in the strike. As long as the chain was intact, the glitch was a glitch, not a systems failure. He was perfectly satisfied with the official report. It coincided with official policy.
Todd was a military man to the core of his being. As Rose put it, not without a hint of pride, he had been born under the star of order and discipline. But following orders issued on a computer screen felt an awful lot like obeying a machine. He knew what the colonel would say.
“This is the new air force, Major Barron. Get used to it.”
That was precisely what he was afraid of. Getting used to it.
He started searching for ways to bring the reality of war closer to home. To be a good fighter pilot, you had to be afraid. You had to risk your life so you wouldn’t underestimate the gravity of death. Otherwise war degenerated into cold-blooded killing. Danger was the only real way to recover the visceral threat of combat. First he tried skydiving. The pull of gravity was about as real as you could get. He postponed pulling the cord, prolonging the sensation of falling to maximize the fear factor. But skydiving in Nevada was a far cry from parachuting in Afghanistan. The absence of enemy combatants made it feel like just another day at the office.
News of a fatal accident at Red Rock Canyon convinced him to take up hang gliding instead. The aerial design of gliders was far more temperamental than parachutes. The prone flight position fostered the illusion that there was nothing between you and the unforgiving earth hundreds, even thousands of feet below. Variable wind patterns created black holes that swallowed up even experienced hang gliders. Unfortunately, Todd was beyond experienced. Wind tunnels posed as much of a threat to air force pilots as five o’clock traffic to race car drivers.
Automatic activation devices. Dive recovery mechanisms. Helmets required by law. Civilian sports were too prophylactic. There was far too much vinyl and canvas involved, protecting you from plunging headlong into danger. Flirting with death wasn’t enough. He needed to have a full-blown affair. This was easier said than done. The matrix of simulation and safety was ubiquitous, shielding him from the real deal. He finally resorted to rock climbing without ropes.
* * *
It was like autism boot camp in the Barron household. Rose squeezed Floortime therapy into the few hours left before and after Max’s ABA sessions with Sasha. No matter how lackluster his response, she managed to rev herself up to dizzying heights of animation. Her voice, which was ordinarily on the sultry side, was elevated at least an octave, resembling a cartoon character on speed. She talked a mile a minute, punctuating everything with exaggerated gestures. Given Max’s hypersensitivity, this frenetic approach seemed counterintuitive, like giving Adderall and other stimulants to kids with attention deficit disorder. But even Todd had to admit that the results were remarkable. Max’s attention span, which had been virtually nonexistent, improved dramatically. He even started pointing at things, the first step toward learning to talk. Rose operated on the assumption that he understood every last word she said.
“Where’s your soldier, Max?”
Rose held out her hands, clenched tight in the manner of guessing games. Max spotted a telltale bazooka peeking through her fingers. He grabbed it and Rose exploded into applause.
“Wowee! You found your soldier! Let’s try again.”
Rose took another toy soldier from a regiment jumbled in the box by her side. This one carried a machine gun. She knew better than to ask Max to relinquish Bazooka Joe, which was clutched tightly against his chest. Periodically, she had to find a different set of props for their Floortime exercises. After a week or two, Max developed an attachment to the objects. She could no longer touch them without catapulting him into territorial tantrums. The soldiers were Todd’s idea. They had been his as a boy. Watching Max play with them provided the kind of connection he craved with his son, oblique but better than nothing.
Rose dangled the second soldier in the air. Max was still fixated on the one in his hand. He started flicking the bazooka with his index finger. Rose let out a loud whoop to attract his attention. She waited until his eyes focused and then made her soldier dance back and forth, just out of reach. Max seemed to smile, possibly even at his mother. When she hid the soldier behind her back, he squealed with what sounded more like delight than autistic screeching. They were actually communicating. In his excitement, Max dropped his soldier. He climbed to his knees and lost his balance. When he recovered, he extended both arms, almost touching his mother’s crossed legs. Then he seemed to forget what he was trying to find.
“Where’s your soldier now?” Rose shrieked.
She twirled around, revealing the toy behind her back. Max lunged at it and fell giggling to the floor. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Rose couldn’t tell whether he was having fun or withdrawing into what Todd called Giddy Land, a private place where laughter was hysterical rather than happy. She put the soldier’s foot in her mouth, hoping to coax Max into making eye contact. Ordinarily he avoided looking at people’s faces. They conveyed too much emotional information, especially his mother’s solicitous expression, which threatened to swallow him. Her smile was like a beast baring its teeth. He peered at her out of the corner of one eye, just enough to pinpoint the location of the soldier. He managed to grab it without touching anything warm or soft or wet. It had been a close call. Too close.
Max retreated across the living room toward a blinding light. Rose watched him squinting into the sun, shaking his head like a horse fending off a pesky fly. She rushed over, trying to intervene before it was too late. The window had already hypnotized him, the bright white noise of light eclipsing every other sensation, even his mother’s grip on his arm. His eyes alternately squinted and rolled to the side, taking refuge in the partial and the peripheral. He started tiptoeing, first tentatively and then almost frantically, as though struggling to climb out of his body.
If Sasha had been conducting an ABA session, she would have captured Max’s attention by any means necessary, hauling him back to the play station if he refused to cooperate on his own. But Rose never forced her son to do anything. Floortime was more about initiating communication than completing tasks. The idea was to inspire Max to desire something so badly he would risk human contact to get it. Enticing him to grab the soldier was secondary to initiating engagement with his mother. The trick was to raise the bar incrementally, moving toward that most elusive and precious of all interactions—eye contact—which made all her hard work worthwhile. She must have progressed too quickly.
The truth was Max hadn’t made eye contact with anyone for more than a month. Todd had noticed it. Sasha had made a note of it in her logbook. Rose had ignored this and every other sign that his recovery was stalled, at best. She had even begun withholding information from Sasha, most notably the fact that Max had begun spinning again. This was the first stimming ritual he had outgrown during the course of therapy, the most serious of all with the exception of head-banging. If they left him alone too long, he would spin around the living room until he wobbled and crashed to the floor. Sasha was prone to interpreting even the most incidental setbacks in an outrageously negative light. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, especially since Rose had no doubt trampoline therapy would stop the spinning once and for all. Max just needed more proprioceptive input to help integrate the far-flung parts of his body. He was, quite literally, lost in space.
Rose squatted between Max and the window, blocking his view of whatever it was that drew him so compulsively to the light. Optical wavelengths only he could see, perhaps. Or the soothing nothingness of sensory overload. She was afraid he would blind himself. He peered around her, twisting his upper body into a series of impossible positions, like a plant contorting its shape to reach the sun. His motor skills were usually impaired, but he could be extraordinarily agile in pursuit of one of his fetishes. Every time she moved, he moved. They were interacting, to be sure, but the language they were using was too pathological to qualify as actual communication.
“Max! Don’t you want to find another soldier?” Rose ran over to the box and grabbed a handful. “These were Daddy’s soldiers, did you know that? He used to play with them when he was a little boy. Just like you.”
She started lining the soldiers up across the windowsill, something Max himself might do. Arranging objects was apparently much more interesting than playing with them. Rose was wary of feeding into his compulsions. She was desperate. The bright light glinted off their various weapons, yet another enticement. Max remained oblivious to everything but the blanket of light, wrapping his senses in its warm embrace. Rose wished she could draw the drapes, if only to protect his eyes, but Max would go ballistic. She remembered that fateful afternoon when they finally decided to consult with Dr. Dillard about why a boy would spend all day every day glued to a window, staring into the sun.
Max started pulling on his eyelids, another behavior they thought he’d abandoned long ago. Rose refused to believe he was regressing. He had the benefit of the best of all possible treatment options. But there was nothing wrong with looking for yet another program to complement ABA and Floortime. There might be some aspect of his cognitive development she had overlooked. Her Facebook friends had already recommended every weapon in their therapeutic arsenals. So she’d have to strike out on her own. Somewhere in the vast outer regions of the World Wide Web, there must be something truly miraculous, the ultimate cure of cures everyone else had overlooked.
* * *
He likes to stand with his forehead almost touching the glass, drinking in the light. The brighter it is, the more it soothes him. If he concentrates hard enough on the white light, he can’t see the streamers things make when they move too fast. Silver and gold with fiery red tails. He can’t smell Mommy’s perfume, which follows him everywhere. He can’t hear his sister popping her gum. He can’t even hear the furnace clicking on and off, on and off at maliciously irregular intervals. The light blocks out everything else, bathing his senses in whiteness.
* * *
The civilian casualty episode didn’t exactly trigger a conversion experience. Brown was still a beer-guzzling slacker. But he stopped hotdogging and started really listening to Todd’s pep talks about the ethics of combat. He deferred to his commander’s judgment and tried to act prudently under pressure. The other members of the peanut gallery, most notably Kucher and Poindexter, were not impressed. They razzed him about being teacher’s pet in an effort to shame him back into their ranks. Brown dug deep and stood his ground, retaliating the way self-respecting military men have retaliated for millennia. He told them to fuck off.
Recruitment posters list integrity, service, and valor as air force core principles. Once you actually wore the uniform long enough to scuff your boots, you learned that prudence was the better part of valor. Hurling yourself headlong into battle was a heroic fantasy only civilians could afford to entertain. In actual combat you ended up dead, not decorated with medals of honor. In virtual combat, the fact that it was impossible to be killed or even wounded increased the threat of making fatal mistakes. The safer you were, the more likely you were to end up with innocent blood on your hands. It was all the more important to be prudent when your life wasn’t on the line.
Paradoxes always abounded in war. They were waged to keep the peace. Hiroshima saved lives. That kind of thing. Drone warfare was especially paradoxical. Virtual pilots thousands of miles away from the action were trigger-happy. Statistically, they were up to two times more likely to bomb mistaken targets. The cause of this itchy trigger finger syndrome had yet to be determined. The psychology of virtual warfare was still in its infancy. It could have been as simple as boredom, not to mention complacency stemming from watching too many video-game deaths on too many computer screens, none of which produced a single drop of blood. The cause could have been physiological rather than psychological, phantom reflexes or synapses firing in response to sense memories registered during countless years of playing war games on laptops. Danger had a way of honing reflexes and tempering the kind of bravado that backfired in real combat. All these factors finally convinced Todd to invite Brown to go rock climbing.