by Lewis Shiner
“You seem very kind,” I said. “Thank you.”
She stood up. “People are not designed to deal with this kind of violence. You have nothing to be ashamed of. It’s the violence that’s unnatural, not what you’re feeling. The violence is literally inhuman.”
She was about to walk away, then hesitated. “I have a colleague who studies people who’ve been in serious auto accidents. He’s found that nearly half of them show significant levels of PTSD. Years later their nervous systems are still flinching from the impact. And that’s nothing compared to victims of violent crime, or what Iraqi veterans go through once they get home.
“The point is that even as our bodies show this incredible ability to heal, we can’t keep up neurologically. Human beings are far more sensitive than we give ourselves credit for and violence does much more damage than we want to admit. It fosters more violence and numbs us to the effects, which fosters more violence yet. It’s a disease, and it’s contagious.”
She pushed her chair across the room. “So that’s my wish for you. That we can stop this disease from growing in you, and make you fully human again. Good luck. I’ll check on you again tomorrow.”
*
I asked my nurse if there was a computer with Internet access anywhere in the hospital.
“What you want it for?” he said.
“I want to check my email. Five minutes.”
“You guys are crazy. Can’t keep away from that shit even when you’re in the hospital. Just chill, man. You be back up to your neck in all that mess soon enough.”
*
The next day, they let me sit outside for a while. The sun was bright, the sky a deep and even blue. I wore sunglasses and a blue baseball cap that Lauren had found in my storage shed to protect my eyes from the glare. She’d also found some of my old clothes, and though they hung off me, the familiarity was comforting.
I was able to experience the wonder of it—to be alive, to have my physical pain under control, to inhale the air that smelled of autumn leaves and the chlorophyll in the lawn that had not yet given up for the winter. To know that I was healing and that better days lay ahead. I was sure then that I would eventually dance again and that I would go back to Buenos Aires. I stopped there and did not let myself think about Elena.
I made a list in my head of the things I wanted and that night I laid them out for Lauren.
“I don’t need to be here,” I said. “There’s nothing they can do except give me drugs and I can take those anywhere. They’ve run every test they can think of. I want to get a place of my own, start working a couple of hours a day remotely, get a massage, see my chiropractor.”
“You can’t be on your own yet,” Lauren said. “You can’t drive, you can barely get around with the walker. But yes, there’s no reason to keep you here. I’ll bring you home tomorrow.”
“Home?”
“Our house. Where did you think?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Silly. We are still married, you know.” There was something flirtatious in her voice that made me tense up. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’ll go get the discharge paperwork started.”
*
By the next morning she had turned her downstairs office into a room for me, complete with a rented hospital bed. It was strange to be in the house again, which seemed enormous—the cathedral ceiling in the living room, the vast, beige-tiled expanse of the kitchen, the multi-tiered back deck. She’d put the rest of the box of old clothes in my room, along with a random box of my books, though my head still wouldn’t let me read. There was a TV and a DVD player and a boom box. She had moved her computer upstairs, she said, “to get it out of the way.”
I was anxious for her to go to work and trying not to show it. Finally, making sure once more that I had the numbers for her Blackberry, her pager, and her office, she kissed me on the forehead and left.
I gave her ten minutes and then worked my way upstairs. I did it sitting down, lifting my rear end carefully from one step to the next. It took fifteen minutes and left me dizzy and out of breath. I’d had to leave my walker downstairs, so I crawled into her bedroom on hands and knees.
She used a professional cleaning service to keep the rest of the house presentable, but the bedroom was her retreat, where chaos ruled. The bed was unmade, showing mismatched cream and forest-green sheets. The floor was littered with cast-off clothes, the end tables loaded with glasses and books and half-used tissues. The intimacy of it was erotic and my mind, against my will, went back to times we’d been in that bed together.
She’d made enough room on the dresser for a keyboard, mouse, and flat screen monitor, connected to a desktop tower on the floor. I could just reach the keyboard when I perched on one corner of the bed. The system woke up as soon as I touched the mouse, the monitor light turning from red to blue. My hands shook as I loaded up a browser and went to my email account.
I had 53 unread emails. I looked at all the return addresses twice. Nothing from Elena.
I didn’t put it past Lauren to have tampered with my email, so I went to the backup on my service provider, a backup that Lauren didn’t know about. It had the same 53 messages.
I went through the messages again to make sure Elena hadn’t tried to get in touch with me through someone else. I was surprised at how much it hurt. Something in me had wanted to believe, against all common sense.
I tried to write her and couldn’t find the right tone, the one that wasn’t desperate or accusing or superficial—Dear Elena, I am fine, how are you?
Leave her alone, I thought. Let her deal with this however she needs to. The more I thought about it, the more final it seemed. I heard her telling me it was for the best. I heard her running from my hospital room.
It was easier going down the stairs than getting up them. When I got to the bottom I took hold of the walker and pushed myself into the bathroom, leaning on the counter to stare at my transformed face. The drooping eyelid made me seem sinister, the bandage on the burn made me look hard. My face was gaunt, haggard, old. And she was so young and so beautiful. What could she possibly want with me? I’d been kidding myself to think it could last.
Not to mention the way I’d collapsed, betrayed Mateo, would have betrayed her if they’d asked.
The pain in my right eye felt like it would destroy me. I took two Dilaudid tablets, which did nothing at all, cranked the bed into an N shape, and propped myself up with every pillow I could find. I lay in darkness and fought to stay one position change ahead of the pain. It was a full-time job, but my brain found time to call me names just the same. Loser. Fool. Cripple. Traitor.
*
On my second day out of the hospital I called my old manager in Research Triangle Park, and she called Bahadur, and the end result was that Thomas, the hardware guy for my group at Universal, came by the house to drop off a laptop, preloaded with a remote network client.
He shook his head when he saw me. “Hope them sons of bitches paid for doing that to you.”
“They’re all dead,” I told him. There was something in my voice when I said it, a certain relish, that was out of place in Lauren’s palatial Southwest Durham home.
“That’s good,” Thomas said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
After that I worked as much was I was able. Some days it was an hour or two, some days five or six. Reading from the computer screen didn’t bother my head the way reading from the printed page did, though I had to keep the overhead lights off.
I traded instant messages with Bahadur every day. My initial feelings of distance from him melted over time. I couldn’t blame him for not standing up to Lauren. She was a force of nature.
La Reina had told everyone that I’d been in a traffic accident and Bahadur had agreed to go along. No point, he said, in feeding the office gossip machine. I didn’t really care one way or the other.
He said that my landlady had put my things in storage and was keeping them until I let her know wha
t to do. He offered to ship them to me and I told him to wait. He said she also wanted to know if she should rent out the apartment.
“Elena’s not there anymore?”
“Guess not,” Bahadur wrote. “She said it was empty, except for the boxes. I guess Elena packed them for you.”
“You haven’t heard anything from her?”
“Sorry,” he wrote. “No.”
This will get easier, I told myself. Somehow I will get through this.
Endless trivial details eroded my will. Canceling and replacing the credit cards that had been in my wallet when I was kidnapped. Getting a new driver’s license. Dental appointments, medical appointments, chiropractic and massage. Finding a shrink. Renting audiobooks and DVDs to pass the idle hours because I still couldn’t handle the glare from a printed page.
I cut down on drugs. Ibuprofen was all I took for pain after the first few days. I kept my feet elevated and iced them after using the walker. I kept my left hand mostly elevated too, and typed with my right. I had also iced my testicles, ten minutes out of every hour for three days, and they had shrunk to nearly normal size.
One night, after I’d been home a week, Lauren gave me a quick exam. She decided the burns needed only Band-Aids and the ribs were improving. When she got to my groin, she stroked the testicles gently and said, “And how are these little guys?”
My penis stood up in response. There was some pain, not enough to impair anything. Lauren was fresh from the shower, smelling of expensive soap and conditioner, obviously not wearing anything under her damp gray T-shirt and sweat pants. It was hard for me to breathe.
She held my penis with one hand. “Maybe we should have a little function test.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said. My voice had a small tremor.
“You’re not the doctor here.”
She pulled her T-shirt off. It was the body I remembered so well, that I had once loved above all things.
“Lauren—”
“What?” She gave me a mischievous smile. “We’re married. It’s perfectly legal. Expected, even.”
“What about your surgeon friend?” It was the first time I’d brought up her lover.
“Patrick? What about him?”
“Aren’t you sleeping with him?”
She shrugged. “On occasion. But he’s married too. And this is none of his business. This would come under the heading of recreational therapy. Very healing for you.”
“You talk about us like we’re still married, but for me that’s over. It ended in Buenos Aires.”
“Are you talking about your little girlfriend? You’re not kidding yourself that there’s any future in that, are you?”
I took her hand away. “I think you should go now.”
She put her T-shirt back on. She was still smiling, though I could see her feelings were hurt. “I still love you, you know. I wish you wouldn’t shut me out.”
I nodded and looked away until she sighed and kissed my cheek and went upstairs.
*
The Ativan was tougher to shake than the Dilaudid. My first night without it, I lay awake all night. The next night I took an herbal sleep remedy and woke up screaming at two in the morning. My stubbornness kicked in and I stayed with it. The third night I tossed and turned and finally got a few hours of decent rest.
The next morning, as I wheeled my way into the kitchen, Lauren was working a crossword puzzle. She smiled and tossed it on the table when she saw me.
My eyes saw the pattern of black and white squares on the page and with no sense of transition I was on the black and white tiles of the kitchen in Buenos Aires. I could feel the hands of the thugs on my arms. Our oak kitchen table was suddenly made of stainless steel.
I couldn’t stop screaming. Lauren put her arms around me and I shoved her away, lashing out with my fists. Without the walker to support me, I went down, banging my forehead on the table as I fell.
I thrashed on the floor, flailing out with both arms and legs, then Lauren came back and sat on top of me and forced the little round Ativan pill into my mouth and under my tongue and held my jaw closed, talking to me calmly, saying my name over and over.
“Rob, it’s okay. Rob, listen to me. Rob, you’re having a flashback. You’re okay, Rob. You’re in Durham, nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
I was still making noises through my nose, blowing snot down my chin, but now I could see Lauren and the real kitchen and I let her hold me while I cried. Then the Ativan kicked in and I went to bed and slept for ten hours straight.
*
Despite the lack of apparent progress from one day to the next, I took stock after I’d been out of the hospital for a month and the improvement was clear. I’d been going in twice a week for a medical massage, once a week for chiropractic. The dentist had ground down the teeth on either side of the missing canine and replaced it with a permanent bridge. I had gel-soled shoes that allowed me to get around for short periods with a cane instead of a walker and even to drive. I wore a protective cap over my left index finger.
Every time I checked my email, I held my breath until I saw that there was nothing from Elena. When I lay awake at night I would compose long, passionate letters to her in my head, and in the light of day I would talk myself out of sending them.
I saw an MSW twice a week for psychotherapy. The goal, she said, was to build up enough confidence between us that I could talk about what had happened. She wanted me to “own” my experiences.
I didn’t.
One thing got me through the pain and loneliness and fear. That was my increasingly vivid and detailed plan for revenge.
I hadn’t told Thomas the complete truth. Not everyone involved in torturing me was dead. If Osvaldo hadn’t informed on me, someone else had.
I had a good idea who it was.
*
I took my time. I began to swim laps at the Duke pool, taking advantage of Lauren’s connection to the university. I went into the office one day a week, then two. I switched from Ativan to Valium, 10 mg at bedtime only, and after a week I was sleeping again, though not without nightmares.
My feet had recovered from the initial trauma. I had developed some plantar fasciitis as a secondary symptom, tightness and pain in the connective tissue that ran from the heel through the arch of my left foot. Stretching and Ibuprofen kept it under control.
Gradually I was able to read again and, thinking of Bahadur, I lost myself in suspense novels where justice always found a way to triumph.
Lauren replaced the hospital bed with an ordinary double mattress and mentioned, in passing, that I was welcome to move upstairs if I liked. She let me know in other small ways that she was available, from smiles at the dinner table to making sure I caught frequent glimpses of her body. The irony was profound. For years I’d wanted nothing more than for her to desire me. It wasn’t like I didn’t want her or even fantasize about her. It was just more stubbornness on my part.
Christmas was awkward, relieved mostly by Sam being home for a week. One night he stayed up with me after Lauren had gone to bed and he said, “I made Mom tell me everything they did to you.”
I was stretched out on the sofa and he sat in an armchair near my feet. He was leaning forward, his hands clasped, his eyes glistening.
I felt my mind clamp down, refusing to let the subject matter start conjuring memories. I nodded stiffly.
“I can’t…” he started, then broke off. “It’s so hard to get my mind around it. Things like that, they just don’t happen.”
I remembered how shattered he’d been in third grade when his bicycle was stolen. I wondered, for the thousandth time, if other parents spent their lives feeling this helpless.
“I guess,” I said, “the point is that they do happen. Just not so much in this country, not to people like us.”
In a perverse way, it was a good couple of hours. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d talked that plainly. Then the next day it was back to the jokes,
back to being an imitation of a family, going through the motions.
Not a day, not an hour, went by that I didn’t think of Elena. But each day it was easier not to write to her, easier to accept that it was finished.
*
In late January, Bahadur sent an instant message to tell me he’d applied for a transfer to Bangalore. A development position had opened up that would mean less pay, but he would be closer to his family.
“And my parents have found a girl they think I might like.”
It was one shock on top of another. “Are we talking arranged marriage, here?”
“Not exactly. It would be my choice. But my parents have a good idea of what is suitable.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know. A month, maybe?”
The idea of Buenos Aires without Elena or Bahadur seemed grim and lonely. Almost as grim and lonely as North Carolina.
*
The second week in February, I called the Executive Assistant to James Watkins, Senior VP, Software Development, at the New York office. I told her that I had some personal and confidential information from Isabel in Buenos Aires that she had asked me to discuss with him, and that I needed just fifteen minutes of his time. His assistant told me how difficult it was to catch Jim in his office and asked if I could put it in an email or possibly talk to anyone else in the organization. I was polite and firm and slightly mysterious, and said I could see him any time, night or day. She told me she would call me back.
She called the next morning and, after one more attempt to talk me out of it, offered me an appointment for the next day, Thursday, at 6:15 in his office. She emphasized that he really could give me no more than fifteen minutes. I said that would be fine and booked a flight for the next morning and a room for that night at the Sheraton where Universal had a discount.
