What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

I explained how it hadn’t worked – explained the copying and pasting and deranged zooming in on bodies sprawled along the ground, the manipulation of images. She pivoted in her office chair and reached into a drawer, dragging out cords and electronic dials. After she’d finally untangled everything, she tossed over two plastic knobs attached by wires to what looked like an antiquated game controller resting on her desk.

She handed me pair of headphones, put two plastic knobs in my hands – a tiny L and R printed on each one – and ignited the machine. High-frequency beeps softly alternated between my ears while the plastic knobs buzzed in synchronicity. L: beep-buzz. R: beep-buzz. It felt as though I was being given a hearing test while holding a couple of agitated hornets. I was immediately incredulous. This commotion was supposed to correct my trauma narrative? This is what had granted Jamie magical results?

Jamie was eager to see EMDR work its therapeutic magic on me. But her hopeful expectations only complicated matters, for while I was afraid to disappoint her, I also knew that significant results would not be forthcoming.

“I just don’t believe in it,” I confessed one evening, returning home after yet another lukewarm session.

“You just have to give it a chance. Can’t you pretend to believe?”

“I’m too self-conscious. It’s obvious what’s going on while it’s happening, and I can’t take it seriously. Today, I was supposed to convince myself that there aren’t any terrorists lurking around in our lives, and that I don’t have to protect you from anything anymore, as if I didn’t already know this. That’s what I kept thinking: You already know this.”

“Maybe you don’t know it.”

“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I do. The point is it’s just too obvious, the whole approach.”

“It’s as though you don’t want it to work,” she said.

“You know, they say the more intelligent you are, the more difficult it is for this type of stuff to work. That’s probably the problem.”

Jamie sighed heavily – the sarcasm failing to distract this woman too sharp to be sidetracked by such nonsense. “Don’t you think it’s helped some?” she asked.

In truth, it had, to a degree. The physical symptoms – the suffocating and insomnia – had dissipated somewhat, though not entirely. And fatherhood had improved substantially. Despite this, it was clear that my most persistent, deeply seated anxieties had not been rooted out by therapy, as evidenced by some transparently absurd displays of hyper-vigilance. One moment, everything would be fine; the next, I’d be driving to Wal-Mart at midnight for mouse traps or a smoke detector – whatever item that moment called for in order to keep everyone I loved from dying.

Yes, there was more work to be done. But I was done with therapy, and informed Kathy that the time had come to say goodbye, using finances as an excuse, unable to justify the money we were spending given the modest salary I earned as a high school teacher in one of America’s most expensive cities.

And while I kept telling myself that hyper-vigilance was part of becoming a father, was an evolutionary imperative, the evidence continued to stack up against me.

Exhibit A: The Toilet Lock: When our daughter morphed from a cute, stationary blob into an agile crawler, our small, one-bedroom apartment revealed itself to be a hazardous minefield. Everything was dangerous: the coffee table corners capable of knocking a teetering baby unconscious; the shelves, which were poised to topple over with one good yank; the cords running from our lamps and other electrical devices waiting to wrap themselves around an unsuspecting neck.

Determined to defend my child from the persistent dangers the world now presented, I found myself open-mouthed, purposefully yawning, in the safety section of Babies “R” Us. There were outlet guards, cabinet latches, table-corner pads, window-blind-cord wind-ups, floor electrical-cord concealers, shelf and armoire tension-cable mounts, baby gates, and toilet locks. Everything displayed was manufactured by Safety 1st, the market seemingly cornered by this outfit branded with a phrase routinely intoned by fire-fighters and cops visiting classes of fidgeting but impressionable kindergarteners.

Safety first, I thought, nodding obediently, buying one of each.

At home, Jamie seemed genuinely grateful as I crawled around our living room floor, lining the walls with plastic tubes (cord concealers), adhering transparent buffers to the coffee table (corner pads), and unscrewing the outlet covers to be replaced with bulky, box-like structures that opened with a latch and hid electrical plugs from wandering hands (outlet guards). Then, I pulled it out.

“What’s that?” Jamie asked.

“A toilet lock.”

“A toilet lock. It’s to lock the toilet.”

“Why are we locking our toilet?”

“It’s a drowning hazard.”

Jamie looked at me incredulously. “You think Noa is going to drown in our toilet?”

“I don’t know. I mean, she could crawl in there. It’s possible. Otherwise they wouldn’t make this locking thing.”

“Why don’t we just close the door when we’re not in the bathroom?”

“Yeah, but what if we forget?”

“You’re seriously going to lock our toilet.”

“How does it work?”

“I have no idea,” I said, pulling it from the package and reading the instructions. “There’s this swinging arm, which is designed to spring over the closed toilet.” I held up a plastic rod.

“How do you attach it?”

“It looks like I have to take off the toilet seat and screw it between the seat and the cover.”

Jamie rolled her eyes and left the room as I disassembled the toilet and installed the lock. When I’d finished, I product-tested it, closing and opening the toilet, watching the arm magically lock over the lid when it was closed. I invited Jamie in to admire my handiwork.

“See if you can figure out how to get it open.”

She inspected and declined. “Could you just show me how to unlock our toilet?”

“Yeah, just press the red button – hold it down – and swing the arm away from the lid while opening it up.”

Jamie tried unsuccessfully. “You need three hands for this. How do you press the button, move the arm, and open the lid at the same time?”

I stepped in and demonstrated the technique. “Press the button with your left hand and swing the arm with your right. Then, when the plastic arm has moved all the way off the lid, release the button real quick with your left hand and grab the arm before it swings back. Then you can open the lid with this one,” I said, waving my right hand.

“I’m supposed to perform these gymnastics at 3 a.m., when I have to pee?”

“Why are we doing this?”

“So Noa doesn’t drown in the toilet.”

Often, friends visiting would excuse themselves and reappear a few minutes later with a sheepish grin: “How do you open your toilet?” At which point Jamie would look at me, embarrassed, knowing that it wasn’t just a toilet seat lock that was the issue. I’d skip over to the bathroom for the demonstration, saying, “It’s to protect the little one;” saying, “You never know what can happen.”

Exhibit B: Mattress Wrapping: After Noa was born, Jamie and I shared one common fear: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). We had read the pamphlets – tucked in clear, plastic shelves on the walls of Jamie’s doctors’ office – about how, for no perceptible reason, babies everywhere were silently dying during the night, parents finding them motionless in their cribs, cold to the touch. Researchers, confounded and grasping at straws, said that infants sleeping on their stomachs had a higher propensity for dying during the night.

We also rejected the crib-down-the-hall approach, instead embracing co-sleeping, refusing to allow our infant to cry herself back to sleep, alone, in a darkened room. The three of us slept in one bed together, where we tossed and woke each other up nightly. Friends and family were worried that Jamie or I would roll over and smother Noa in our sleep, but I knew such horror stories were rare, an awful plight primarily restricted to heavy drinkers and the morbidly obese. That wasn’t my concern. Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about SIDS. During the night, after we’d abandoned the sleep book, I’d wake, lick a finger, and place it before Noa’s lips to make sure she was breathing. I felt wholly out of control, having no way of knowing when or where it might strike as I pressed my ear to the sheets, staring at her abdomen, looking for the rise and fall of her chest in a darkened room where nothing could be seen.

I decided to research the subject, to wrest control away from this mysterious plight, and came across a bit of obscure literature about Dr. Jim Sprott, a chemist and forensic scientist in New Zealand who claimed to have uncovered the cause of SIDS. His theory was that the fire-retardant chemicals found in bedding, when consumed and processed by the fungi that commonly and quite naturally accumulate in mattresses, are converted into nerve gases that interfere with an infant brain’s ability to transmit signals to the lungs and heart. Which is why, according to Dr. Sprott, infants sleeping on their stomachs expired more often – their faces were buried right in the source of these noxious gases.

Dr. Sprott’s defense against the SIDS epidemic was simple: wrap mattresses with a plastic barrier to eliminate the effects of potentially toxic off-gassing. His data were so compelling that in 1994 New Zealand’s government adopted and promoted his advice, encouraging parents to place baby mattresses in a specially designed plastic bag. I found Dr. Sprott online and read on his mattress-wrapping product’s website – www.cotlife200.com – statistics which seemed unimpeachable. No babies had died in New Zealand on wrapped mattresses.⁵ Or so his numbers told.

Convinced, I decided to encase our king-sized bed with plastic sheeting, an initiative which was quite daunting. When Jamie walked in to see me maneuvering our bed and asked what I was doing, she vetoed the idea of out of hand.

“You’re not wrapping our mattress.”

“I know. I’m just seeing if it’s possible.”

“Well, you can stop. It’s comfortable, and I don’t want it turned all crinkly.”

“But Dr. Sprott – ”

“David, stop. I read that co-sleeping babies do much better. But maybe you can wrap the crib. For the naps.”

“Good thinking.”

So I rushed out to Home Depot and grabbed a roll of ten foot by one hundred foot construction sheeting.

On returning to the apartment, I placed the plastic on the living room floor and wrestled with the mattress. The trick was to cover it tightly such that one side remained a perfectly flat, comfortable surface upon which a baby might sleep, an objective that proved nearly impossible. Each time a side was lifted, folded over, then taped, the material would buckle, forming crisp, raised ranges of creased plastic. The harder I pulled, the firmer the creases became. Jamie, watching me grunt and tug with frustration, suggested treating the plastic as though it were wrapping paper, slitting the material so as to form four parallelograms, one on each side that could easily be folded over.

“This isn’t a present that has to be wrapped. It’s more like toxic waste that has to be hermetically sealed,” I explained.

Picking up a roll of duct tape, I kneeled over the mattress, flexing my fingers and forearms. There was only one way to go about things. I had to impose my will. Grasping handfuls of plastic with spear-tipped strikes, I fought until a section was successfully taped to the exposed underbelly. I made my way around the mattress systematically, progressing until all of the exposed cloth was secured. When I flipped the mattress over, the surface of Noa’s bed looked like disorganized bubble wrap. I worked my fingers into the pockets of trapped air, massaging each one to the open edge of the plastic, pulling the plastic tighter to be secured with more silver strips of industrial-strength tape.

After two hours, I sat on the ground, soaked and disheveled, fingertips rubbed raw and peeling. Jamie walked in.

“You’re done.”

“That took a long time. You used the whole roll of duct tape?”

“That’s a lot of tape.”

Jamie walked to the bathroom and returned with a large bath towel, a soft layer to be placed between the crinkling plastic and Noa’s bedding. She sat down on the ground opposite me, and silently we smoothed the towel flat against the mattress and pulled the fitted sheet over, smoothing down the edges, while Noa lay face up on the floor of the hallway, a domed mobile entertaining her, her legs kicking absently.

Exhibit C: The Xylophone Incident: Once, we took a trip, left our apartment for a week, and gave the neighbor, a nice guy, a gentle guy, our mail and door keys, asking him if he would be kind enough to collect the bills and junk catalogues for us while we were away. Which he did. But after returning, on our first night back, lying in bed, I started to think, What if he made a copy of our key? What if he’s not so innocent? Isn’t that what people always say on the news when something tragic happens? “He seemed nice enough,” or “He was so quiet, I never would have suspected.”

I rose and started thinking tactically. Okay, it’s midnight. Too late to get the locks changed, and barricading the door would be ridiculous. That would wake everyone up. Finally, I saw it and grinned: Noa’s toy xylophone, out of which I constructed a makeshift alarm. With the xylophone propped against the doorframe, metal keys facing out toward the ceramic floor, it was certain to produce a racket if disturbed. Satisfied, I returned to bed with a hammer and placed it under the pillow. Just in case.

I spent that night awake, acutely aware that the source of this improvised security system reached back to Jerusalem: reached back to the Israeli security apparatus that had failed us, to bi-national strategies of violence that had failed us, to the unstable and unsustainable Israeli–Palestinian conflict that had failed everyone. I had enough experience with Kathy to diagnose myself: using a child’s xylophone for home security was a post-traumatic response to a post-traumatic life. I knew my brain was yelling, Someone tried to murder her, was yelling, You didn’t protect her then. Everything connected back to the source, back to burned flesh and skin grafts and shrapnel covered with blood. And I knew, You’re not healed. You’re not where you want to be.

My head on a hammer and a xylophone against the door, I wondered if I’d ever move beyond the trauma, if I’d ever over come all that continued to press tightly around me. The thought of stasis brought on a quiet, cold panic, which rose solidly from my diaphragm and swirled around the back of my throat, a frozen steel rod being washed in the esophagus. I can’t continue this way, I thought, drifting fitfully into a recurring vision of some ethereal exodus, wandering the sand-swept wilderness of the Negev, beyond Mitzpe Ramon, descending into a steep crater where I let the bone-crushing silence press everything noxious out of my eardrums. I lay down in a cracked wadi, blood dripping from my earlobes, listening to the ibex scrabble down the crater’s red walls, looking for a drink. Glancing sideways, I locked eyes with a bronze sand fox, creeping close, and said, It’s fine. Drink. You can have this.

Kathy:	So, how are things?
Me:	Your homework assignment sucked.
Kathy:	Excuse me?

Kathy:	Have you ever heard of EMDR?
Me:	Unfortunately. Jamie’s told me a little about it.
Kathy:	Well, we’re going to try something different.
Me:	So you’re not preparing to shock me with all those electronics, right?
Kathy:	No, nothing like that. We’re just going to use some physical stimulation alongside our cognitive work, since it appears you had a bit of trouble correcting how you think about your trauma narrative when you were on your own.
Me:	So no zaps or shocks?
Kathy:	No, this won’t be painful. It’s bi-lateral stimulation. Just vibrations and sounds that might help “massage” your synapses as we talk.

Me:	What in the world?
Kathy:	You can adjust the level of vibration with the dial there. You see it?
Me:	Yeah.
Kathy:	How’s the volume? The beeps should be faint, but audible.
Me:	Yeah, they’re good. But –
Kathy:	Great. So let’s start by quickly outlining your trauma narrative again.
Me:	Again? I’m kind of tired of telling it –
Kathy:	Yes, again.

Doctor:	Put her to sleep on her back. The prevalence of SIDS is greatly reduced.
Us:	Why?
Doctor:	We have no idea.