Spending more time cooped up in the trailer obviously had its downside. But there was one big payoff. The squad actually got to see more action. Even at night infrared sensors made everything visible in an incandescent, ghostly way. Surprisingly few dark places were left on the map anyway, given the ubiquity of electricity. But nocturnal surveillance still paled in comparison with what they saw in the early morning light. When the sun started rising over mountain peaks, they switched from infrared to regular high-resolution cameras. The landscape was breathtaking, a femme fatale of natural beauty whose countless cliffs and gullies provided cover for enemy combatants. Surveilling mile after mile of undifferentiated desert in southern Afghanistan, boredom blunted their vigilance. Here, the danger was sensory overload. There was almost too much to take in.
Spring was the only time of year the Sulaiman Mountains seemed to call a truce with nature. It was deceptive, of course, like everything else in the region. Wildflowers sprouted from rocky soil in the wake of receding snow banks. They scarcely had time to bloom before the punishing suns of summer withered their roots. The more inhospitable the landscape, the better it suited militants and terrorists. No one saw them resume their positions in bunkers concealed in caves on the craggy peaks. They seemed to thaw along with the snow, sprouting like sinister flowers from the landscape itself, ready to resume the fight each spring.
Todd was supervising Poindexter, the weakest pilot in the squadron, when Kucher let out a whoop. He had a keen eye and almost always identified visual anomalies before anyone else.
“There they are,” Kucher said.
Todd rushed over to his cubicle just in time to see a cluster of helmets hunkered down in a makeshift dugout. What looked like tiny puffs of smoke kept obscuring their location. On the ground, the puffs were lethal mortar blasts landing dangerously close to a squad of marines.
“Verify the coordinates of the rest of the platoon,” Todd ordered.
“They’re way out of range behind that ridge, Major Barron.”
“Any word on the origin of the threat?”
“It’s coming in now.”
A high mountain village zoomed into view. Dusty footpaths connected a dozen stone dwellings. Suspicious dark specks traversed the adjacent hillside. A third monitor scoped them. A herd of goats scattered, spooked by concussive shell fire blasting from a house on the southern perimeter of the village.
“Last one there is a rotten egg,” Brown said.
Brown was the class clown. Todd could tell from his tone of voice that he was closing in on the target. He couldn’t resist hotdogging, even though it violated regulations. Unless someone kept an eye on him, he performed celebratory dances in his chair every time he scored a hit. This time he cut it short without being reprimanded. The customary hooting and hollering wasn’t forthcoming either. Todd thought maybe Brown was finally starting to grow up.
“Fuck!”
Brown jumped to his feet and stared wild-eyed at his monitor.
“What’s going on?”
Todd rushed over to Brown’s cubicle. The words enemy target were still flashing on the weapons activation screen. A laser-guided Hellfire missile had wasted an Afghan family. A mother’s shredded burqa smoldered in the wreckage. One after another monitor zoomed in on miniature body parts slick with blood. A howling dog had survived the explosion, but nothing and no one else. Mortar fire still streamed from the house on the southern perimeter. Some glitch somewhere had misidentified the target.
* * *
Todd recovered his equilibrium in time to put the kids to bed. Rose had already read bedtime stories. Todd covered the swing shift, tucking them in a second time to make sure everyone understood that they were one big happy family. Maureen always wanted him to read another story, but he hated children’s books. They were either saccharine or preachy. Even Dr. Seuss, who was refreshingly imaginative, couldn’t resist slipping in Marxist propaganda every chance he got. If Yertle the Turtle hadn’t toppled the tyrant tortoise, the pond probably would have spawned wage slaves rather than polly-wogs. Enough already.
Todd preferred making up his own stories. Maureen didn’t object as long as they had plenty of ribbons and bows in them. She loved carriages and ballrooms and princes and princesses in gowns with lots of ribbons and bows, none of which Todd felt qualified to weave into a plausible plot. But every time his tales strayed too far away from Disneyland, she pouted. He was forced to do the best he could with ribbons and bows. Fortunately, they were portable and surprisingly versatile.
“Once upon a time there was a piece of linguine named Sam.”
“Daddy!”
“What?”
“You promised.”
“Don’t worry. This particular piece of linguine had a big bow tie.”
“Make him a girl.”
“Okay. Once upon a time there was a lovely linguine named Samantha with a big beautiful bow in her hair.”
“Linguine doesn’t have hair.”
“Who says? Mom just serves the bald kind.”
Maureen rolled her eyes. She was amused but uncertain whether linguine belonged in the realm of conventional make-believe.
“What kind of hair?” she asked.
“Very, very straight hair. Until you cook it, of course. Then it gets curly.”
Todd could see that Maureen was on the verge of rejecting his story. It wouldn’t have been the first time. She kept him on a short leash, making improvisation all the more challenging. He had to include just enough fairy tale schlock to disguise his unorthodox flights of fancy.
“Did I mention that the bow was red? And that Samantha wore it even in bed?”
Red was Maureen’s favorite color. This reassuring detail seemed to compensate for the fact that the bow wasn’t attached to a silk or, better yet, satin gown. She was also a sucker for rhymes, like every other child on the planet. Pulling her covers up to her chin, she finally settled into the tale.
“One day Samantha was out riding her big black stallion—”
“Daddy!”
“Now what?”
“Kings ride stallions. White ones.”
“Silly me.”
Todd made a show of bonking his head with the heel of his hand, which elicited the desired response. Maureen giggled and squirmed with delight. She loved correcting her father, which was the only reason she tolerated his boring digressions.
“Samantha was out riding her Shetland pony—sidesaddle, of course—when all of a sudden a renegade band of bow tie pastas kidnapped her and locked her in a tower.”
“What does renegade mean?”
“Good question. Let’s ask Puff.”
Todd picked up one of Maureen’s menagerie of stuffed animals. The bed was littered with them. So were the window-sills and the floor, along with millions of other tchotchkes and discarded pieces of clothing. Maureen was a regular Pig-Pen. Todd would never understand how a child with such an appetite for orderly bedtime stories could tolerate such a mess. It drove him crazy, but Rose no longer let him intervene. Max’s psychiatrist insisted that children’s bedrooms were their own personal domain. As long as Maureen didn’t trash the rest of the house, her slovenly habits were beyond her father’s jurisdiction. Todd’s only recourse was to shut her bedroom door, which usually meant kicking several toys out of the way.
Puff was a pink unicorn with a silky white mane. Todd regretted the choice. He hated unicorns, which were vaguely lewd and embarrassing. Puff bobbed up and down in his hand as he spoke in a high-pitched voice.
“Renegade means they’re outlaws. Rogues with their own ideas about how to run the show.”
“I don’t like them.”
“They don’t care if you like them,” Todd said in his normal voice.
“They’re the bad guys?”
“They’re the renegade guys.”
Maureen yawned. Complexity bored her. If a knight in shining armor didn’t show up soon, she’d fall asleep in protest. Nine nights out of ten, lack of interest f
orced Todd to conclude his tales abruptly, or not at all.
“Their king—His Majesty the Imperial Bow Tie Pasta—”
Maureen perked up a little.
“—decreed that Samantha be sent to the guillotine.”
“Why?”
“To sever her big red bow from her lovely linguine body. So she’d look like them.”
“I don’t like this story.”
“Would you like it if I told you the king’s son, the Prince of Bow Ties, thought Samantha was beautiful the way she was?”
“Maybe.”
“He rescued her from the tower and they galloped away on his bright white stallion.”
“And they lived happily ever after,” Maureen whispered. She rolled over and buried her face in her pillow.
“Actually, the king dispatched his knights in hot pursuit,” Todd said urgently. But it was too late. His audience had already taken refuge in la-la land. The whole point of bedtime stories was to make children feel safe enough to go to sleep. But he was always disappointed when Maureen dozed off before he finished. It meant he would never find out what happened, whether a linguine and a bow tie pasta could ever really live happily ever after in Neverland, or whether they would be forced to flee to San Francisco to escape censure. He was left hanging, as usual, suspended in the inconclusive uniformity of fairy tale endings.
He kissed his daughter on the forehead and made for the door, tripping over one of her Barbie dolls on the way out. It skittered across the floor into the hallway. Fortunately, there was no need to tiptoe around Maureen. She slept as soundly as he did. The Barbie just missed hitting a line of trucks leading to Max’s bedroom. There would be hell to pay if even one of them was disturbed. Max had a virtual tape measurer in his mind. Every single truck was in precisely the same place every single night. There was something preordained about their positions, something fixed and immutable, as though Max communed with an omniscient authority that punished the slightest deviation. Todd had stepped over them so many times he could have done it with his eyes closed. The entire family had been inducted into Max’s secret universe, at least to the extent that they religiously avoided breaking its sacred laws.
The diesel flatbed always led the way. It was bigger and brighter than the rest of the trucks. Todd wondered how a boy who cringed from all but tan foods could tolerate a fire-engine red flatbed. The only plausible explanation was proffered by his behavioral therapist. Sasha seemed to know Max better than his parents did. Rose accepted this as a matter of course. Back in the day, she had read and admired Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. But consulting with a virtual stranger to understand his son bothered Todd. The last thing he needed was politicians telling him how to raise his kids. Let alone therapists.
According to Sasha’s latest theory, Max’s rituals were designed to ward off change, a common enough fear exacerbated but not caused by autism. She was adamant about the fact that he was just like everyone else, only more so. She pretended to ground her theories in demonstrable evidence. Max’s favorite trucks were a case in point. Having received them as gifts on or before his third birthday, prior to the onset of his symptoms, he took their vibrant colors for granted. To say they were his favorite toys was the kind of gargantuan understatement only possible in an autistic household. The mere sight of a new truck threw Max into annihilation mode. Even if they were tan, he smashed them against the wall and hammered their wheels off. His parents finally stopped trying to give him new toys for Christmas. Presents were like booby traps, so much so that even watching his sister open gifts terrorized him. His psychic fortress was erected to eliminate the element of surprise. All he wanted for Christmas was to be left alone.
With one inexplicable exception, Max’s trucks were always lined up from biggest to smallest. Even Sasha couldn’t figure out why a pickup half the size of the next truck came second in line. Todd liked to think it was because he drove a Chevy pickup. He was desperate for even a pathological connection with his son. Sasha counseled against reinforcing autistic as opposed to ostensibly normal vocabularies. Rose complied with characteristic enthusiasm, never acknowledging Max’s private languages. Todd complied judiciously. In mixed company, he pretended to ignore Max’s idiosyncratic sign systems. When they were alone, he tried to decode them.
Exactly one inch separated the back fender of one truck from the front of the next. Max’s spatial precision was astonishing. Rose was already predicting a career in engineering. Everyone in the autism community was forever talking about Temple Grandin, their patron saint. You didn’t have to make eye contact with strangers, or even your parents, to design livestock corrals. Something to look forward to, a son whose crowning achievement was figuring out how to slaughter animals without scaring them half to death. Todd knew he had no right to be skeptical, a man who killed other men for a living.
Last in line was an oil truck. Todd’s personal favorite. Growing up in Los Angeles, kids used to pump their fists up and down trying to get truckers to blow their big throaty horns. By far the most responsive were the tank truck drivers. They owned the road and liked the sounds of their own voices. Todd was surprised the oil truck wasn’t closer to the front. It was the only truck with a round body. Other mysterious criteria must have prevailed, trumping its shape. The only thing Max loved more than circles were dust motes, quite possibly because they swirled round and round and round. He could watch them for hours, floating in shafts of sunlight, but only in the living room with the curtains drawn halfway. More or less sent him into paroxysms of blind rage.
Max’s rituals were unbelievably precise and complex. As long as everything was just so—calibrated to fractions of inches and other less tangible units of measurement known only to himself—he spent quiet hours at a time, arranging his toys into elaborate, soothing patterns. Repeating sounds and gestures to block out the threat of everything random and uncontrollable. And, most recently, murmuring sequences of numbers related in ways Todd could scarcely fathom. Sasha was trying to introduce Max to a whole new range of educational toys designed to discover his native languages. He was obviously very smart, underneath all that obsessive-compulsive behavior, quite possibly a prodigy. They say Einstein was on the spectrum as a boy.
Talk about magical thinking. The last thing Max needed was the pressure of unreasonable expectations. Rose was the worst offender. Every time he glanced in her direction she was convinced they’d made eye contact. When he growled, which he did routinely for no apparent reason, she claimed she could distinguish actual words, even phrases. Her latest fantasy conviction was that he had actually learned to wave hello and good-bye. Todd was hard-pressed to tell the difference between waving and flapping, their son’s favorite form of stimming. It seemed incredible that children with autism from Las Vegas to Beijing all seemed to speak the same language, flapping their arms when they were agitated by too much noise, too many people too close, too much of everything everywhere. The fact that Max’s waves hello and goodbye coincided with onslaughts of excessive stimulation did nothing to dampen Rose’s enthusiasm. She waved back, encouraging Todd to do the same. Sometimes he actually did it to keep the peace, feeling half mad for indulging her delusions.
He called her Pollyanna behind her back, muttering to himself to bolster his own more pragmatic approach. In turn, Rose accused Todd of being negative. She and her Facebook friends complained about their husbands almost as much as they compared notes on treatment options. Overall, men were a cynical lot. They pretended to be reasonable when in fact they were pessimistic. They dwelled on the past rather than looking to the future. Todd was especially prone to this particular vice. What if they hadn’t vaccinated Max for measles? What if he hadn’t taken six rounds of antibiotics between his first and second birthdays? What if his doctor hadn’t ignored the early warning signs? According to Todd, their former pediatrician might as well have been an axe murderer. What was done was done.
Before Max’s diagnosis, Rose and Todd seldom fought. When they did it w
as over money or the antics of one of their in-laws. After his diagnosis, their families deserted them and every dollar was invested in Max’s treatment, case closed. So they argued about Max’s prognosis instead. Secretly, Todd wasn’t as negative as he appeared to be. But someone had to occupy that position, to maintain the balance between good cop and bad cop that was the foundation of every sound marriage. There was also an element of self-defense in the posture of the curmudgeon. Underneath it all, Todd was just as vulnerable to disappointment as Rose. The tough air force officer routine was part of a lifelong effort to ward off the agony of feeling too much too often, not unlike his son.
He opened Max’s bedroom door tentatively. Light from the hallway barely illuminated the bed. Todd thought he detected a flurry of arm flapping. But when he walked into the room, everything was as perfectly still as only an autistic child’s room can be still, pregnant with the immanence of alternate realities. Max was already asleep. Or he was comatose, lost in another world far preferable to the one his family inhabited. Or he was playing possum, something they had only recently discovered he did to elude human contact. You never knew with Max. Trying to figure him out was like trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone’s monolithic muteness. Half of the doctors they consulted encouraged them to learn Max’s multiple foreign languages. Rituals and even stimming were a kind of vocabulary. Facial expressions, or lack thereof, could speak volumes, they said. The other half told them to ignore or even discourage these other languages, to force him to communicate with words.
There were so many theories Todd had lost track of them all. He started relying on his instincts instead. He tried to meet his son halfway, with mixed results. Sometimes Max seemed to reciprocate, responding in oblique ways that might have seemed random to the untrained eye. Hide and seek was the only game he deigned to play with his sister, one entirely in keeping with his desire to disappear. Paradoxically, this impulse to hide provided a common language. Todd would tease Ralph and Harry, Max’s favorite stuffed animals, about sneaking into his bedroom closet. Lo and behold, three weeks later, Todd would find Harry nestled behind sweaters on the bottom shelf. As suspicious as he was of Rose’s magical thinking, he clung to the possibility that Max had placed him there, however belatedly, for a reason. Even Todd couldn’t bear the thought that the lines of communication were permanently shut down.
The Home Front Page 3