IT IS NO ACCIDENT THAT THE CLINIC IS A STONE’S THROW FROM Dover.
At nights, I lie awake listening to the whine of jet transports ferrying our troops around the world. By day, I sit with soldiers, sailors and aircrew, many of them fresh from battle, most of them sharing similar symptoms to mine.
There are few rules.
We’re not allowed drugs or alcohol.
We can leave when we want.
What’s said in the group stays in the group.
On Day One, I meet the first of my four therapists.
What I tell them is largely the truth. I describe my lability of mood, my darkening thoughts, the sense I am on a slippery slope that leads to a place I’ve already been. I tell them about the pain in my left side that keeps me awake nights. I tell them, too, that it’s probably a blessing, because when I do close my eyes, I get a conflation of images: dead people mostly, the girl in the abaya, Gapes, Lefortz, and the V-22, upside down, moments before it spirals into the ground.
The two incidents I still can’t conjure up are the ones I need to: what happened in the V-22, and my final moments with Hope in the wreckage of the Jeep.
I need a treatment to stop me from sliding down and they know it. But after a week of prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapies that are proven to work the world over for the kinds of symptoms that I have, they are surprised there’s no improvement.
Halfway through the second week, I’m lying on my bed, in the darkness, eyes closed, when I hear a knock at the door.
It opens and the light flicks on.
I blink under the glare.
Mo Kerchorian is standing in the doorway.
We walk along a muddy path above the bay the morning after. Tankers carve in both directions through the gray, choppy waters between the river and the ocean.
Mo hasn’t spoken to me since I called to apologize for the world of shit I dropped him into the night Lefortz was killed. But DJ has been quietly persuasive. I don’t know what he said, or how he even got to Mo, but for the past week my buddy from Georgetown has been liaising with my therapists, checking on progress, or the lack of it, and guiding their strategy.
When they reported no improvement yesterday, Mo told them he would oversee my treatment directly and jumped on a plane.
‘I told them your mood state and neuralgia are linked to the energy of multiple traumas which has nowhere to go but inward. To move forward, we have to expose those traumas to the light, allow your subconscious to make a meaningful narrative of everything that’s happened, process it, then move on.’
He makes it sound wonderfully simple.
We walk on another hundred meters. I hear the mournful sound of a ship’s foghorn somewhere in the distance.
‘But your cop buddy told me there’s more to it than that,’ he says.
‘There is.’
‘And that it’s not just about the pain.’
I hesitate, but only for a moment. ‘I need you to recover some memories for me.’
‘From the V-22 crash?’
‘Not just that. From the Jeep.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Speak to me.’
I hesitate. ‘I’m worried you might …’
‘What? That I might come to the conclusion you’re crazy?’ He laughs. ‘Josh, I knew you were a fuck-up from the moment we met.’
I manage a smile, then tell him about the voice in my head – the voice that had told me to undo my belt, then Hetta’s, and let go.
Not just any voice.
Her voice.
For all their independence, Community-based Inpatient Clinics are still military facilities and neither of us has any way of knowing who might be listening in. So Mo and I decamp to a Holiday Inn ten miles down the road.
We leave our phones in his car and unplug every device in the room. I settle into the armchair and focus on his pre-brief. His theory is that traumatic memories are held in every cell of the body. Mainstream medicine dismisses this as junk science, but assisted by an endorsement from our mentor, TVB, Mo’s therapy has been adopted by the VA network – with the caveat that it remains ‘experimental’. You say yes at your own risk.
Mo has immersed himself in my notes, including X-rays and MRIs going back years. When the V-22 crashed, he believes it triggered an acute reaction to my other unprocessed traumas: the dead baby in the abaya; Gapes’s shooting; Lefortz’s death. And my final moments with Hope in the wreckage of the Jeep.
He makes me count backward from ten and within a few seconds I’m under. I hear his voice, am conscious of sounds in and outside the room, but am suitably relaxed – in a state that desensitizes me to the acute feelings of anxiety that get in the way of answering the big questions.
We start with the night I went into Fallujah. The visceral feelings I tried to bury no longer rear their ugly heads. I must have processed those, at least. So we move on. It’s the same with the deaths of Gapes and Lefortz. Mo grunts his approval. I hear him tap some notes into his iPad.
Now he takes me aboard the Osprey.
‘Tell me what happened when the engine failed.’
Under hypnosis, it returns. Schweizer vomits because he knows what we all know: we’re not going to make it. But at that precise moment I’m imbued with an enormous sense of calm. I feel Hope by my side. I hear her talking to me. Her voice is soft, soothing and clear. She tells me exactly what to do.
Undo Hetta’s belt. Now yours. Trust me, Josh. Trust that it’s all going to be all right.
Let go.
The V-22 rolls. We slide across the floor and hit the bulkhead and the fuselage wall.
Through the mayhem of the exploding engine:
Reach beneath you. There’s a handle. Grab Hetta. Pull the handle.
The door falls away and we tumble into space.
We’re thirty meters up, falling toward trees ready to break our fall. I glance right, see the V-22 seconds before it hits the ground, and brace myself for the impact.
Trust, Josh. I’m with you. Let go.
And then it’s like the transmission stops.
The picture goes black. My breathing becomes labored.
‘Relax, Josh,’ Mo says. ‘It’s all right. What do you see?’
‘Nothing. I don’t see anything.’
‘OK. Where are you?’
‘On the ground. At the crash site.’
‘Why can’t you see?’
‘I’m unconscious. But I can still hear and smell. Fire. Burning.’
‘OK. Tell me what—’
‘She’s beside me.’
‘Who?’
‘Hope.’ My voice catches.
Mo guides me. ‘Keep talking. What’s happening?’
‘The V-22’s cooking off all around us. She’s lying right next to me. Talking to me. She’s telling me that I need to go back.’
‘Back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where to?’
I try to make sense of it.
‘To the night Jack died.’
‘Jack?’
‘Old guy. Lived with her mother. Hope really loved him.’
‘Were you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘He said something to her.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear. Right afterward, though, right after he died, Hope removed something from under his pillow.’
‘What?’
‘An envelope.’
‘Do you have the envelope?’
‘No. But I know what was in it. A photograph of Mac … and the other guy.’
‘Mac?’
‘Jack’s nickname. When he was in the Marine Corps. In ’Nam.’
‘And the other guy?’
‘Jack’s pilot. Freeley.’
‘And Hope is telling you this is important?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
‘She’s telling me she loves me. And …’
‘And …?’
‘That she’s sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For what happened … to us.’
‘OK. Let’s move on. Ask her permission to go to the wreckage of the Jeep.’
I do as he says. My breathing becomes labored again.
‘She’s not letting me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there’s something else she wants me to know. Something that’s more important.’
‘What?’
‘She’s taking me back. A long time back. To a night soon after we were married. We’re on the beach. I built a fire. She’s lying next to me. Her hand on my shoulder. Music’s playing on the porch. That song she used to love …’
‘What song?’
I feel myself drifting deeper.
‘“Stardust”.’
‘By Nat King Cole?’
I shake my head. Smile at the memory. ‘No. The first version. The Ella version. She absolutely loved it. Used to play it on our CD player. From our porch. We’d lie on the beach, night after night, letting it wash over us, as we watched the stars.’
‘And that’s where she wants to take you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly, I feel my whole body go tense. ‘Something’s happening, Mo.’
‘What?’
‘She’s telling me I have to wake up. I don’t want to. I want to stay with her, but she’s shaking me.’
‘Josh?’
Before he can bring me out of it, I snap to. It’s so real, I roll off the chair onto the floor, convinced the flaming branch of the tree is about to fall right on top of me.
I go to the bathroom and take a moment to compose myself. I look in the mirror at the gray-blue eyes staring back at me. I’m still me and I’m still here and so is the pain. I limp back into the room.
‘What did it all mean?’ I ask.
‘I’m not certain, to be honest.’ He pauses. ‘You want me to regress you again?’
I shake my head. I couldn’t go through it twice. And I’m not sure it would do any good anyway.
‘The therapy will continue to go to work,’ Mo says. ‘You may find it’ll help loosen something in the days and weeks ahead. What it prompted, though, was interesting. You sure about that photo?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘In an envelope?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else with it?’
I tell him about the ankh, the tree of life and the silver, eight-pointed star.
‘Interesting guy, this Jack.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The ankh and the tree are Jungian archetypes, Josh. You don’t need me to tell you that. I don’t know about the significance of the ankh, but the tree meaning is obvious. It’s symbolic of your life. Roots that anchor you to the ground, branches that soar skyward, symbolizing all your hopes, your ambitions—’
‘And the eight-pointed star in a circle?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on this shit, but these are very clearly messages from your subconscious.’
‘It was like she was there, Mo.’
‘Fella, I’m not denying she was real to you.’
‘The envelope exists. I found it in a box of her things in a garage at her mother’s place. Real, solid things. Are you telling me I’m being presented with objects manifested by my own psyche?’
‘This is powerful stuff, Josh. Stuff you’ve never dealt with.’
He’s avoided the question.
He looks at me. ‘So you now have a choice. The hurt, your mood-state and everything you’ve described are linked. As a doctor, and your friend, I am bound to tell you what I think’ll make you better.’ He pauses. ‘You can medicate. I can give you shit that’ll help you get through the day; that will dull the pain in your side, too. But I don’t think that’s what you want to hear.’
‘What’s the alternative?’
‘You know this better than me. You follow the advice your own subconscious is giving you. Go see the pilot.’
I have no idea where Freeley fits into all this, but a thought from the garage keeps replaying: Gapes connects me to the President and the Engineer, Hope’s portrait of Jack, and to a nickname I didn’t know he had.
‘I don’t even know if he’s alive.’
Mo accesses the veterans register.
Colonel Nelson Freeley is seventy-eight years old and living in Vermont, close to the Canadian border. Five hundred miles away.
The distance isn’t the problem. The fact that I may still be under surveillance is.
‘As your therapist, I circulate a report that you’re not well enough to present a threat to anybody except yourself,’ Mo says. ‘That what you need to recuperate, more than anything, is rest and some light travel.’
I nod.
Nobody – not even the intel community – is going to waste time on a washed-up nut-job.