“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.<
br />
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.
The chimney was crowned with an impossible overhang. Nobody in their right mind attempted it. Two routes peeled off, one to the right up a diagonal groove, the other to the left over a belly roll. Without hesitation, Todd planted his right foot on the lip of the groove and lunged, arching his back and extending his arms to their utmost reach. He grabbed the overhanging ledge with both hands as his legs swung free. His left hold held. His right slipped and he dangled by one arm, swinging back and forth, back and forth, with nothing above or below to clutch as if his life depended on it, which of course it did. The rope dangled from his waist, more a formality than anything else. He hadn’t clipped in since inserting himself into the rock at the base of Black Widow Chimney. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. Max’s did. A bouncing baby, precocious as you please until his third birthday. The most beautiful boy in the world, blowing out the candles on his cake, squealing with delight one week and with terror the next, a haunted child haunting his father, a specter even more terrifying than the eleven hundred foot vertical drop five fingers away.
Todd’s body responded to the threat while his mind looked on, pondering the futility of it all. Instinctively, he gathered up all his remaining strength to save himself, sticking with the gluey tenacity of a spider to the rock. He crunched his stomach to lever his legs forward, rotating his torso just enough to curve his left foot close enough to toe a crack, but not far enough to compromise the angle of his hand hold. His arm ached with the effort to support the tension of so many muscles moving in so many different directions. Four moves later he was standing on top of the overhang, safe but far from sound. The pain in his muscles subsided, leaving room for the full force of his emotional agony. He untied the rope around his waist, the umbilical cord connecting him with his family. It slithered off the rock, plunging into the void before the nearest carabiner arrested its fall. Short of diving headlong off the cliff, Todd could never escape his domestic demons in Nevada. Paradoxically, his deployment to Afghanistan was like a lifeline. Only it and the unmitigated danger of combat stood between him and doing something stupid enough to clear his mind once and for all.
* * *
There’s something wrong. No there isn’t. Yes there is. No there isn’t. His sister wasn’t arguing. She was eating. Daddy picked up his plate and threw it against the wall. Is there something wrong now, he said. Mommy didn’t pick up her plate. There’s something wrong with you, she said. Not him.
His sister got to eat dessert in front of the television. They cleaned up the mess. I’m sorry. I’m sorry too. Maybe you’re right. I don’t want to be right. I just want everything to be okay.
They kept saying Max Max Max. He wished someone would answer so they would be quiet. He curled up deeper into the place where nothing is ever wrong. No matter what they say.
* * *
Rose’s phone conversations with Tashi completely clarified everything every time. But time was a funny thing. Technically, it didn’t exist, of course. Quantum physics had confirmed what seers have known from the beginning, which is actually indistinguishable from the end. Time is an illusion, a mere mortal construct. Alpha and Omega and everything in between are part of the eternal Now. Nevertheless, time continued to play tricks on Rose. One minute she had clarity, the next she was plagued by the same questions Todd raised during what he called their scintillating conversations about her guru. Far less negativity was attached to her version of these questions, but they plagued her all the same.
On the phone with Tashi, Rose was able to live in the moment. Answers to eternal questions, which seemed light years away when she was on her own, manifested themselves effortlessly. Tashi refused to take credit for anything. She was just the messenger, a kind of glorified Western Union courier delivering the cosmic equivalent of telegrams. We must first love ourselves before we can love another stop what we see depends on what we look for stop we only lose what we cling to. The truth was always simple, not to say pithy, always capable of being expressed in a single declarative sentence. Change your thoughts and you change the world. It is better to travel than to arrive.
Tashi insisted these truths were self-evident. But Rose couldn’t muster them up when she needed them most, arguing endlessly with Todd. Even when she did manage to remember a stray truth or two, he shot them down one after another, calling them slogans just to piss her off. He had several pet peeves, but one in particular really whipped him into a frenzy. Disease is a state of mind. Todd said it was a cheap shot New Age pseudo-spiritual way of blaming the victim. How could innocent children be held accountable for manifesting disease? Tashi had answered this same fundamental question thousands of time, with reference to world hunger, poverty, and genocide, among other atrocities. She answered it with complete confidence and comprehension. Her voice alone vanquished uncertainty, the voice of cosmic clarity. If only Rose had been allowed to tape their conversations. In the interests of focusing on the Now, the Source prohibited recording devices of any kind. Every session with Tashi embodied living in the moment.
Rose remembered something about technological proliferation and the alarming incidence of autism in the richest, most advan
ced countries in the world. Something about gifted children channeling sensory overload, harbingers of things to come. Prophets were always misunderstood. But they were wont to retreat into deserts, not into themselves. What good was the gift of prophecy if no one could understand the message? Deep down, Rose had no doubt Max was gifted rather than disabled. But she was having trouble digging down to the source of his genius. She needed another conversation with Tashi.
Rose never bothered telling Todd about her one-on-one sessions with Tashi. He would have found out on his own if he hadn’t been so busy at work. Something big was happening over in Pakistan. Judging from his level of preoccupation, Todd and his team were actually making it happen. He wasn’t at liberty to talk about it, but Rose could always gauge his stress level by a tiny little muscle spasm in his left cheek. No one else probably even noticed. He was working so many extra hours he didn’t have time to pay the bills. A model air force wife, Rose was only too happy to pick up the slack at home, which meant Todd never saw the MasterCard bill with the $75 charge for every private phone call. Plus tax. They were on a tight budget. Too bad the armed services didn’t pay overtime.
Rose didn’t consider it lying. More like don’t ask, don’t tell. One of the secrets to the success of their marriage was that they kept secrets when full disclosure would cause more harm than good. The culture of the military bred this kind of secrecy, known professionally as discretion. It was difficult to break the habit, especially when it came in handy. Todd wasn’t at liberty to talk about God knows what. In turn, Rose knew better than to talk about God or whatever matrix of forces was responsible for manifesting universal abundance and prosperity. The last time she made the mistake of bringing it up, Todd said he wished the universe would quit manifesting such an abundance of crapola. Enough was enough.
As long as Todd was too preoccupied to tend to their finances, her secret was safe. Still, Rose would have preferred avoiding a paper trail. But the Source wouldn’t accept alternate methods of payment, not even certified checks. To schedule an appointment with Tashi, you had to enter a credit card number. Rose logged on to the site, plugging in a password created with a very specific intention: MAXimumPlenitude. First she had tried just plenitude. It had already been spoken for. She had assumed MAXimumPlenitude had too many characters until she learned that, in keeping with the promise of abundance, the Source accommodated passwords of unlimited length. Tashi had thought of everything.
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