The Home Front (22 page)

* * *

Sometimes Sasha tries to stop him. Then she doesn’t. He never knows which Sasha will do what. Not being stopped means he can control something. One thing at a time over and over again. Against the wall. On the table over and over and over. There’s too many feelings in too many places. Too much of everything nobody can control. Sasha should try to stop everything, not him. Keep everyone in one place. One thing is something and something is better than everything again and again.

~ VI ~

R
ose didn’t know what it was at first. It had been so long since she’d heard the head-banging, she thought someone must be pounding on the front door. Or hammering away on some nearby construction project. Then she remembered what she had tried so hard to forget, the dull, hollow sound of flesh and bone on impact. Its perfect regularity, like a drum beat, was almost more terrible than the sound itself. That anyone could be so methodically self-destructive seemed impossible. Surely the desire to do violence to oneself was an aberration—a deranged outburst—not something systematic like this.

Rose rushed to the playroom. She rarely interrupted Sasha’s sessions with Max. She half expected to find him unattended. Even superwoman Sasha took bathroom breaks now and then. But there she was, sitting not three feet from Max, trying to reason with him.

“Max, stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Sasha scooted her chair closer to his. He was hovering over his seat, stuck somewhere between sitting and standing, an optimum position to leverage his neck and slam his head down on the table.

“Max, you don’t do this anymore. We do other things. Together. Let’s build a bridge.”

Sasha pushed stacks of Legos toward him. They jumped up and down with each impact. Rose called from the doorway, but Sasha waved her off. Then she rushed into the room and grabbed Max’s head. He fought savagely, as though his mother were trying to harm rather than protect him.

“What’s going on here?” Rose tried to speak calmly, but the intensity of her struggle with Max made it difficult not to shout. Sasha was obviously upset but too professional to raise her voice.

“He’s got to learn to control himself,” Sasha said. “We can’t monitor his every move. Every hour of every day.”

“You used to intervene.”

“We’ve moved on to a new phase of therapy.”

“You may have moved on. Max obviously hasn’t.”

“Two steps forward and one step back.”

“You call this progress?”

“You’ve got to trust the process.”

“Nobody believes in Max more than I do, Sasha. But I’m not going to stand by and watch him hurt himself. Just to prove a point.”

Max suddenly went limp. He could be playing possum. Or he could have receded so far away, the rest of the day would be wasted. If asked which was worse, being comatose or banging his head, Rose and Sasha would have strenuously disagreed. Mothers were often the least capable of accepting the inevitable pain of the therapeutic process. Especially a mother like Rose, who felt compelled to protect herself, not Max, from feeling the feelings masked by autism. Ultimately, it was a family, not just an individual, disorder.

When Rose caught her breath, she felt chastened. Not so much because she regretted questioning Sasha’s methods but because she had belied her own belief in the myth of Max’s progress. It was miraculous. He was improving by leaps and bounds. At this rate, he would be off the spectrum in time for second grade.

“I’m not trying to prove a point,” Sasha said.

“I know you’re not. And I’m not trying to butt in.”

“If he does it again, let me try this new approach, okay?”

“Is there a reason?”

“A reason for what?”

“That he has—” Rose stopped herself. The word
regressed
almost slipped out of her mouth. The fact that it was still there, lodged somewhere in the recesses of her mind, meant that she was still haunted by the specter of negativity. “That he’s banging his head again.”

Sasha seemed to stop herself, too. If she knew the reason, she wasn’t saying. The times she exceeded the scope of her role as Max’s behavioral therapist yielded mixed results. The fact that autism was a family disorder didn’t mean parents were necessarily open to couples therapy. In this case, a single session would have done the trick, if not the mention of a single word.
Redeployment
. Max may not have had language for it, but the concept was enough to catapult him into paroxysms of head-banging. There didn’t seem to be any other viable explanation for the fact that his recovery was stalled, at best. But pointing this out to Rose wouldn’t make it go away. Neither would all her wishful thinking. Max needed to learn to cope with a full range of emotions, including separation anxiety. The fact that he was responding at all was a sign of emotional development. The next step would be to help him process his feelings more constructively.

“Probably a combination of factors,” Sasha finally said. “Not necessarily all bad. Think of it as growing pains. Max’s response to the fact that his world is getting bigger every day. More complex.”

Now Sasha was speaking a language Rose understood and condoned. Problems were really opportunities, after all. Max had taught her this lesson time and again. If there was a problem at all, it was Rose’s failure of interpretation, not Max’s head-banging.

“I’ll be on the porch if you need anything,” Rose said.

It sounded like a veiled threat. As usual, Rose was being passive-aggressive, speaking a language Sasha understood and condemned. If only she would come right out and say what she meant for once. But this wish, which was based on the assumption that Rose still had access to buried feelings, probably gave her too much credit. Sasha liked to imagine conversations reflecting what was really going on beneath the surface. She still believed in reality, something Rose rejected outright, preferring instead to comfort herself with white lies.

Watch your step, Sasha. You may not be able to monitor Max’s every move, but I can. All the way from the porch.

I’m doing what’s best for him, Rose.

How dare you pretend to know what’s best for my son? I’m his mother.

Therein lies the problem.

Sasha’s favorite professor at the University of Nevada used to tease her for clinging to the concept of reality, a kind of Platonic objectivity hovering above everyone’s emotional experience of a given event. They argued endlessly during office hours, he pontificating from behind his imposing mahogany desk, she perched on the little folding chair reserved for students.

“Feelings are not facts,” Sasha would say to him.

“You sound like a twelve-step program,” Professor Marcus said. He made every effort not to stroke his beard, which he knew full well was a species of stimming. Often as not, the urge was overpowering.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Go right ahead. But it won’t get you very far on your final exam.”

She wrote what he wanted to hear on the exam and pursued a different approach entirely in her independent research project. The A she earned in the course meant far less to her than the progress she was making with Max. She hadn’t delayed getting her PhD just because of him—she needed to save some money—but he figured into her calculations. She tried to resist the impulse to get too personally invested. The last thing Max needed was another parent, another emotional entanglement with an adult projecting her expectations onto him rather than letting him find his own way. They all wanted Max to be his best self. But helping him find himself wasn’t the same as inventing him. He already existed in there somewhere, hiding from something they would never really understand.

Increasingly, interacting with Rose felt like competition rather than collaboration. They scarcely spoke the same language anymore. Mindfulness for Sasha meant recognizing conscious and unconscious motivations. The trick was to integrate the two. Mindfulness for Rose meant formulating a conscious intention—a cause—in order to manifest the desired effect. The unconscious was pathologically inflected, a vestige of old, outdated thinking not worthy of the New Age. To the extent that it lingered in the minds of lesser mortals, it was an impediment rather than a source of insight, anathema to the power of positive thinking. Rose pitied Sasha for being mired in negativity, something that still dogged her, too, but for the grace of God. In the face of adversity, it was all too easy to forget that problems were merely an illusion. Fortunately, there were numerous reminders online, if only Sasha would avail herself of them. In the wake of their disagreements, solace was just a click away.

Rose brought her laptop onto the porch and logged on to the Source using her new password:
YesYesYes
. Tashi encouraged them to update passwords to reflect their spiritual journeys. To date, Rose had chosen
MindOverMatter
,
Perfectibility
,
NowOrNever
,
MAXimumPlenitude
, and
YesYesYes
. She couldn’t imagine being any more enlightened than saying yes to everything in the universe. Several of her favorite soul mates—Nirvana, Omega, Libra, and Athena—were in the chat room. They were discussing the phenomenal good fortune of Nirvana’s having recently lost her job.

At first I was devastated. My husband was a wreck.

Men always take things so hard, don’t they?

Too proud to ask for help.

We thought there was no way we could survive on his salary. Especially since our youngest desperately needed braces. His overbite was getting so bad, kids were starting to tease him at school.

Poor little thing.

Bless his heart.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

You got another job offer?

No, silly. I focused on abundance rather than scarcity. Now every time I get a bill in the mail, I just visualize that it’s a check. It’s like a weight has been lifted.

Ask and you shall receive.

Didn’t Jesus say that?

If he did it’s because he was a prosperity prophet.

All religions are one.

Tell that to the Muslims.

Omega! Talk about a bad attitude!

Sorry. It’s just so frustrating. World peace and prosperity are there for the asking. Will we never learn?

Thousands of people join the Source every year, Omega. It’s just a matter of time.

You know what Tashi says. If we build it they will come.

What about your son’s overbite?

I keep visualizing him without it. At this rate, he won’t need braces after all.

Rose felt better already. The healing power of Nirvana’s visualization calmed her fears, which may have manifested Max’s head-banging to begin with. The law of attraction worked both ways, as a magnet for good and for ill. In the best of all possible worlds, Max was already cured. There it was again, a trace of negativity.
What we see depends on what we look for.
Better to think that he had never been ill at all.
Change your thoughts and you change the world.

Then she heard the relentless thumping again, emanating from the playroom. She tried to visualize it as opportunity knocking. When one door closes, another one opens to realms of possibility unimaginable in scope. The important thing was to focus on the open door, not the closed one. But she found that she couldn’t control her thoughts. Dr. Dillard said that Max’s brain was still developing. His head-banging might cause permanent damage.
Everything you can imagine is real.
How dare she imagine such a thing. It might come true.

Ordinarily the chat room put Rose back on track. Today it wasn’t enough. She typed in a request to communicate directly with Tashi, preferably by phone. The fact that it would be their second session that week meant she was vigilant, not desperate, taking full advantage of her spiritual program. A pop-up window appeared on the horizon of a glorious seascape, requesting Rose’s credit card information.

#
5732 4021 6066 7414 Expiration 11/12 Security 762

Orchestral music swelled as the website processed Rose’s payment, almost drowning out the drumming of Max’s head.

Transaction Denied: Insufficient Funds

There must have been some mistake, probably a transposed number or two. The last time Rose checked, their MasterCard had $250 left, enough for several sessions with Tashi. She retyped her information.

#
5732 4021 6066 7414 Expiration 11/12 Security 762

Rose clicked on the volume icon while she waited for verification. It was already turned all the way up, and she could still hear Max. She couldn’t imagine how Sasha withstood days like this. Her therapeutic distance seemed callous, if not sadistic.

Transaction Denied: Insufficient Funds

Rose panicked. She returned to the request menu and clicked on the Urgent option, something she had only done once before when Todd first announced his intention to request redeployment. Another credit card prompt appeared. At the bottom, in fine print, a telephone number promised to address technical difficulties. Her laptop almost fell to the floor as she grabbed her cell phone. An actual person answered immediately. It took a real, as opposed to automated, operator to field questions about money.

“I’m trying to reach Tashi,” Rose said.

“Have you filled out a request?”

“My credit card won’t go through.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“It says I’ve reached my limit.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to call your bank.”

“Please help me. I’m desperate.”

The voice, which had been relatively businesslike, assumed a more helpful tone.

“Do you have another card?”

“Will you take a check?”

“Only credit or debit.”

“But Tashi knows me.”

“Of course she does. Try another card.”

“Please. Just tell her it’s me. Rose Barron. I’m sure she’ll make an exception.”

The tone of voice shifted yet again, this time taking on a mellifluous cadence as though channeling Tashi herself.