The Home Front

by Margaret Vandenburg

  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 Faceb
ook 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.

  Something about this particular kid spoke to Todd. Brown didn’t remind him of himself. Todd was a model of military precision and discipline. Brown couldn’t even keep his shirt tucked in. But as clueless as he was when he showed up at Creech, he emerged as the one lieutenant with a hint of the right stuff. In another era, combat missions would have scared the shit out of him. He would have emerged a better man. This new breed of warrior was at a distinct disadvantage. There was virtually no way to instill fear into the exercise of dragging a mouse across a virtual battlefield. Todd knew he was taking a chance, letting Brown into the inner sanctum of his death-defying rituals. There’d be hell to pay if the colonel found out a commissioned officer was climbing without ropes. The air force had invested too much money in his training to play games with death. But they’d left him no choice. The absence of clear and present danger was jeopardizing the integrity of his men. Unless you put skin in the game it was just a game.

  Brown had done a little rock climbing growing up near the Shawangunk range in upstate New York. He had preferred getting drunk and chasing tail. But there were several early adolescent years when he and his buddies had to settle for more wholesome pursuits. He was long and lanky and considerably more powerful than Todd. What he lacked in finesse he made up for in brute strength. The first few times out, they used ropes. Todd gave him a few pointers, surreptitiously gauging his willingness to take risks. Brown was a quick study. His technique improved with every climb, magnifying his natural athleticism. He seemed to scale cliffs in a single bound. Todd was more compact and deliberate. It took him two or three moves to accomplish what Brown did in one. Risk was his middle name.

  The first time Todd climbed freestyle, Brown just unfastened his gear and started up after him. Zero fanfare. They looked like David and Goliath ascending an almost sheer rock face, becoming one with it. When they reached the top and stood looking over the precipice, Todd debated breaking their pact of silence. He hesitated to put what they were doing into words for fear of killing it. But he didn’t want Brown to think they were just being daredevils for the macho thrill of it all. Quite the opposite. If humility wasn’t what they were after, it was something close to it. Fighter pilots couldn’t afford to be flat out humbled by death. But they needed to have a healthy respect for it, to make sure they were meting it out honorably, not randomly, only when duty demanded the ultimate sacrifice.

  “You know why we’re doing this, right?”

  “Climbing?”

  “Without ropes.”

  “It’s more exciting.”

  “It’s more dangerous.”

  “Bring it on.”

  Had Brown been a soldier in the field this would have been a classic response. Valor in the face of an imminent enemy threat. But they were thousands of miles away from the nearest combat zone. Something had been lost in translation.

  “Bring what on?” Todd asked.

  “Danger.”

  “Danger for the sake of danger?”

  “Whatever.”

  Todd kicked a stone over the cliff. They could barely hear the sound of its impact far below.

  “What would you say if I asked you if flying drones is dangerous?”

  “I would have said no until a few weeks ago.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “You know what happened.”

  “All of a sudden it was real, right? Not just another frigging video game.”

  Brown remained silent for a long time. Vultures were circling at eye level, surveying the deep canyon.

  “I guess I learned that the hard way.”

  “That’s why we’re here. To keep it real.”

  A flock of grackles dive-bombed the vultures. Whether they did it to defend their territory, or just for sport, was impossible to determine.

  * * *

  Rose was surfing the net, trying to track down additional treatment options for Max, when she stumbled across the Source. She googled the neurological and environmental causes of autism for the millionth time, hoping to discover something new. The one thing she learned from Dr. Dillard was that diagnosing the root cause of a medical problem was the first step toward discovering its cure. Then, out of the blue, the Internet manifested testimonials describing autism as a source of enlightenment. At first she thought she had clicked the wrong link. Then she knew that it was meant to be.

  I was devastated when my son was diagnosed with autism. It felt like a death sentence. My husband had to take a second job to cover treatment expenses, which put a terrible strain on our marriage. We tried everything, to no avail. Our little boy Tony seemed lost to us, locked in his own alien world. Then I found the Source. The power of positive thinking changed everything instantaneously and forever! I came to understand that Tony is differently abled, not disabled. He is perfect and complete in his own special ways. Since that fateful day, Tony has become a source of inspiration. I call him my little prophet. His autism is a blessing in disguise, now that I’ve learned to listen with more than just my ears.

  Kitty Gurnsey
>
  Little Rock, Arkansas

  For a split second, even Rose thought there was something fishy about Kitty’s conversion experience. She knew what Todd would say. The power of positive thinking sounded an awful lot like wishful thinking. Then she remembered all the times Max heard and saw things she couldn’t hear and see. He had been diagnosed with hypersensitivity, as though the acuity of his five senses were a problem rather than a gift. At times his otherworldly expressions seemed visionary. Rose was reminded of Hans Asperger’s observation that a dash of autism is an essential aspect of genius. What if Mozart and Wittgenstein had been pathologized rather than patronized?

  Rose clicked on the link, and the Source changed everything instantaneously and forever, just like Kitty Gurnsey said it would. Its home page was dazzling. Ancient origins notwithstanding, enlightenment was surprisingly user-friendly in the digital age. A soaring orchestral score serenaded a sublime seascape with waves carrying words of wisdom on their crests. As each successive wave broke on the shoreline, the words sank into the sand, making way for new revelations.

  The source of all knowledge and power is within, waiting to be summoned at will.

  The power of thought is limitless.

  Everyone is in complete control of everything.

  An Introductory Guide to All Knowledge and Power started scrolling across the screen, assuring Rose that there were no accidents in the cosmos. At the same time, nothing was predetermined. Rose herself had manifested the answer to all of her questions. She was exactly where she was meant to be, at the Source of the Universe.

  Before she even had a chance to finish reading, a voice intervened. The Introductory Guide began to fade, ultimately vanishing altogether. The voice introduced itself as Tashi, one in an eternal series of messengers translating what imposters called the Secret, as though power and prosperity were somehow elusive rather than omnipresent.