SUBJECT: BENJAMIN HORACE KRISTAL.
BACKGROUND.
Interviews conducted with both parents. Patient’s younger sister (Jenny age 6) disappeared outside the family home. Apparent abduction. She’s still missing—no progress has been made by the police. Laurie Kristal (patient’s mother) is exhibiting severe emotional distress and psychodynamic guilt. She states she allowed her daughter to walk to a neighbor’s house by herself. “God will never forgive me.” Jake Kristal (patient’s father) shows symptoms of repression, withdrawal, self-isolation. Emotional fraying clearly evident between spouses.
Laurie Kristal relates that patient has been disruptive in school. Nonverbal in family home. Emotionally unresponsive. Frequent physical outbursts.
Incident: Parents discovered daughter’s bed torn apart, with the mattress turned over and several of the wooden slats smashed. Some of the pillows had been ripped. Patient denied doing it.
Incident: Patient covered himself in red paint at school. Has been violent in schoolyard with other children—school board is considering expulsion. Patient offered no explanation for these behaviors.
Incident: Mother (Laurie) discovered the patient had neatly laid out his missing sister’s clothes across his bed. She states this is the way she used to do it for her daughter every morning before school. Mother states the clothing was different color, but similar to the kind Jenny wore the day she was abducted. Father (Jake) disagrees. “Just some clothes he found in the hamper.” (Dissociative Identity Disorder?)
Laurie states the patient exhibits almost no recall of the morning his sister was abducted—it’s as if his memory of that day has “been erased.” Patient is suffering a recurrent nightmare: being locked in a closet with poisonous snakes with the closet set on fire. Patient is terrified by this very specific and recurrent dream. He’s resisted sleeping due to his fear of having to repeatedly undergo this clearly traumatic nightmare.
FIRST SESSION.
Benjamin exhibits markedly insular posture. Appears sleep deprived (nightmares). Notably underweight—mother (Laurie) says patient is not eating well since sister’s abduction. Shows little eye contact. Nonverbal. Unresponsive.
Insight-oriented play therapy instituted.
Patient piles blocks up, then repeatedly knocks them down. Robotic motions. Monotone responses to questions. What are you building, Ben? Nothing. Or: Don’t know. Why are you knocking the blocks down, Ben? I want to.
When offered animal play figures, he shows no interest. Noticeable aversion to the horse figures. Refuses to even touch them. (Follow-up) Don’t you like horses, Ben? No. Why don’t you like horses, Ben? (Shrugs) Didn’t your sister like horses, Ben? (Silence)
Drawing is aggressive. Breaks two crayons. (Relaxation techniques?) His picture is indistinct—black swirls. What’s that a picture of, Ben? Jenny’s room. Why did you draw your sister’s room? (Shrugs) Is your sister’s room black, Ben? No. (Patient tears up the picture.) Why did you destroy such a nice picture, Ben? (Patient unresponsive.)
During puzzle play, patient chose family dinner scene. Patient noticeably leaves sister/daughter out of puzzle. Why did you leave out the sister, Ben? She’s not there. Where is she, Ben? In school. Why is she in school when her brother’s home? She’s swimming up at the lake. Without her family? She went on a playdate.
What are you girls looking at?”
The librarian had walked into the room where I was sitting with Father Krakow and eight-year-old Ben.
What was she doing here?
Looking over our shoulders. It was as if I’d suddenly been sucked back through a time portal, from that room in the St. Luke’s Center where a therapist/priest was wondering what’s up with this screwed-up eight-year-old—not that different from the screwed-up twenty-year-old who enjoyed posting half-page sentences on Facebook—and I was back in the present day. Where a flash drive was noticeably sticking out of the USB port of the library’s computer.
“School research,” Tabs said, her hand strategically curled around it.
The librarian hesitated—trying to peek past our bodies.
“Okay.”
“We’re cramming for a test,” she added. “A humongous one.”
The librarian nodded as if she could relate to humongous tests, even though the last one she might’ve taken would’ve been with a quill pen.
She shuffled off.
“Whew,” Tabs said, fake-wiping the sweat off her forehead.
“Maybe we should shut it down,” I said.
I was hoping she’d say, Good idea, pull that little black drive out of the USB, and then the both of us would bounce. It was that feeling again—that I was going to see something I wasn’t meant to. That I was being bad and there was going to be hell to pay. I was going to be put back into the punishment room and never, ever let out.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Tabs said. “She’s blind as a bat. Say . . . why are we looking up Ben anyway?”
Because in Pennebaker’s last message, he’d said I have questions about your son. About Ben. Because in a house that’d been warm and welcoming before warm and welcoming started to turn creepy, Ben was the cold spot. Because my faceless Facebook friend had told me to find out where Laurie and Jake had committed him twelve years ago.
Ask them where they sent their son.
Because.
“I need to know why everyone’s playing pretend. To understand what happened back then. I think it’s got to do with him.”
“Ben? He was eight.”
“The day I showed up—that night—he went past my door and he laughed. Like, I know you’re not who you’re saying you are. I know you’re not Jenny.”
“So? You’re not Jenny.”
“How did he know that? I mean for sure? That was before I fucked up and forgot to log out of his memorial page. How did he know that first day? Why was he so sure?”
“I repeat. You’re not his sister. And she’d been like dead for twelve years. It must’ve seemed impossible.”
“He knew.”
Ben’s second session was even more unproductive than the first.
The patient was uncommunicative, unresponsive, uncooperative. One big un. Ben apparently sat with his hands in his lap staring out the window.
Don’t you like it here, Ben?
(No response)
Wouldn’t you like to play with something, Ben?
(No response)
What would you like to do, Ben?
(No response)
The patient was reacting to exterior displacement, according to Krakow’s notes—a fancy way of saying he’d been dumped in a Catholic hospital for wacko kids and left there. The ward nurse noted signs of agitation, emotional distress, and possible night sweats. I could relate. I myself had tried screaming that first morning when I woke up in a strange bed. I had the lip scars to prove it.
Ben had it a lot easier. He just had to hang with an understanding therapist who kept begging him to play with blocks.
(Need to promote an empathetic, inquisitive, trusting, and therapeutic alliance with patient.)
The patient wasn’t jonesing for alliances.
Then or now. I remembered him marooned on that orange love seat on my first night home.
Okay, Ben, we can just sit here and not talk if that’s what you’d like. That’s perfectly okay. We can just sit here quietly together. Sound good?
It must’ve sounded good enough, because that’s what Ben did.
No further communication with patient today, Krakow wrote at the end of the session.
There were a lot more where that came from.
A bunch of sessions where nothing much happened except Father Krakow asking questions and Ben not answering them. A lot of them about that dream of his—locked in a burning closet with a bunch of snakes. Ben kept up his mute act—he wasn’t talking.
By this time, Krakow had ventured a diagnosis—Ben was suffering from childhood traumatic grief.
Avoidance of talking about the deceased (or missing) person, or doing things associated with that person (i.e., refusal to touch the horse figures). Disruption of learning (i.e., acting out in class—paint incident). Numbing (i.e., noncommunication and withdrawal). Increased arousal (i.e., destruction of bed, fighting with classmates). Nightmares (specific and recurrent).
He ticked them off like one of those checklists Karen Greer’s mom used to put together before family outings. Snacks. Tissues. Bug repellent. Fruit juice. Handi Wipes. Except we Greers were generally going somewhere fun like the Oky-Doky Amusement Park, which had a ten-story water slide, while Ben was basically going off the deep end.
EMDR . . . ?
Krakow wrote in capital letters. Then typed it again farther down, this time leaving out the question mark.
I googled it.
“Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.”
“Well, that clears it up,” Tabs whispered.
“A psychotherapy treatment that facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories to bring to an adaptive resolution. With successful EMDR therapy, affective distress is relieved, negative beliefs are reformulated, and psychological arousal is reduced. During EMDR therapy, the patient attends to emotionally disturbing material in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus—the most commonly used one being therapist-directed lateral eye movements.”
“Sorry,” Tabs said, “not fluent in Greek.”
No, just Latin.
“I think it’s a kind of hypnosis,” I whispered. “A way to take Ben back.”
“Back . . . to what?”
“To that emotionally disturbing material. To what happened.”