Take Me

by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin

  He was a short guy with dark hair and glasses. He must have loved what he did because he didn’t make enough money to get glasses that actually fit, and the little marks on the side of his face where the frames bore into his skin were red. There were papers all over his desk, and his bookshelf was disorganized to the point of annoying me. There was a picture of a young woman, but it was an old picture. Her hairstyle and clothing screamed the nineties. There weren’t any other pictures of her, and I figured she must be an ex since she was too old to be his daughter.

  There weren’t any family-type pictures, though he was prime age to be married with a couple of kids. There were other pictures on his desk and on the window sill behind his chair, but they consisted of what looked to be a build site for a new house and a huge group of people holding tools. There were also pictures of groups of kids holding banners that showcased various walk-a-thons and similar functions.

  “I’m having dreams,” I told him.

  He scribbled on his notepad, which made me want to roll my eyes, but I managed to refrain.

  “Bad ones?”

  “Not awful,” I said. “Not like I’ve had in the past when they put me on meds. It’s just that I haven’t had any like that in a couple years, and they’re keeping me up at night. I don’t know why they’re coming back.”

  “Can you tell me about them?”

  “I…uh…”

  Fuck.

  I should have realized he was going to want me to talk about them. Talking about the dreams meant talking about what happened in the desert, and I didn’t want to go there. All I really wanted to do was get some sleep, and this option seemed to be the most expeditious.

  “Just…just about the past,” I finally said. “I just want to know why they’re back. Why now, when I haven’t really thought about any of that crap for a long time?”

  “If you don’t tell me what they were about, I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be,” he urged softly.

  With my eyes closed, I went through some of the deep breathing shit the first counselor taught me to do when I had panic attacks. I didn’t get those any more – not since the first year – but the breathing still helped sometimes when my brain went into overdrive.

  “I’m…I’m in the hole.”

  “Where you were kept prisoner?”

  “Yeah.” I swallowed a couple of times. “I’m just waking up, like I did every day when it got hot. I kept trying to spit sand out of my mouth, but I never could, you know? There was always more of it.”

  I swallowed hard, but the dryness in my throat made it feel like I was swallowing sand again. I could almost feel it scratching my larynx.

  “Fuck.”

  “Where are you now, Evan?”

  “Chicago,” I said quickly. “I’m not there. I know that.”

  “Can you go on?”

  “Yeah.” I leaned forward, put my head in my hands, and took a minute to center again. “There isn’t much more, really. I’m just in the hole, waking up over and over again, and trying not to eat the fucking dirt. It made me cough, and it would get in my lungs, too.”

  “You haven’t told me much about what happened there,” Mark said.

  “Not something I like to talk about.” I hoped my succinct words and terse voice would dissuade him, but he was a fucking counselor, so that wasn’t going to happen.

  “It was a very significant life event, Evan. You were a prisoner of war for eighteen months. Don’t you think that warrants some discussion?”

  “I talked about it with the last guy,” I reminded him. “The one in the hospital – in Virginia. He cleared me.”

  “He cleared you from the psychiatric hospital,” Mark clarified.

  “Yeah,” I responded as I looked into his eyes, “where I was held for observation only, evaluated, declared unfit for further duty, but otherwise unharmed.”

  “And when was the last time you talked to…” he glanced down at the file in his hands, “…Doctor Hartford?”

  “Before I moved here.”

  “Before you were discharged?”

  “Around the same time,” I said. “He’s the guy who discharged me.”

  “With a diagnosis of PTSD.”

  “Look,” I said, “I know all this, and we went through all this shit when I saw you the first time. Do we really need to do it again? I was really just hoping you could tell me if there’s some kind of sleeping pill or whatever I ought to be taking.”

  Mark looked over my file, glanced up at me, and then back to the file again. He adjusted his ill-fitting sports jacket before settling back into his chair with one leg crossed over the other.

  “I’m a psychologist,” Mark said, “not a psychiatrist. I can’t prescribe medication, though I can make a recommendation to your regular doctor. Honestly, I think you’d be better off if we just talked for a bit. It was recommended that you visit with me at least every other week after you moved here two years ago, but this is only the second time you’ve been here.”

  “I don’t usually need it.”

  “But you do now.”

  I shrugged and leaned back against the chair. I glanced at the couch, and though lying down did sound good, I had never felt comfortable on a shrink’s couch. It was just too cliché. I was glad he had the high-backed chair as an option because Hartford never had.

  “I just want to get some decent sleep without…”

  “Without what?” he asked when I stopped talking.

  I took a long breath. I was so off my game, I was going to fuck up at my job which was completely unacceptable. I needed sleep to focus, and I couldn’t seem to get any rest without Bridgett, the newbie hooker, in my bed. That was about as fucked up as some of the shit I went through in the Middle East.

  Well, no, it wasn’t, but it was still fucked up.

  “I just need some sleep,” I finally said. “I really think if I just got a couple nights of decent sleep, I’d be fine.”

  “How about I make you a deal?” Mark said. “You tell me a little more about your time in the desert, and I’ll talk to your doctor about the possibility of getting a prescription for sleeping pills.”

  “I don’t have a doctor,” I admitted.

  He eyed me again, wrote something down on his notepad, and then looked back up.

  “Taking care of yourself isn’t much of a priority for you, is it?” Mark leaned back a bit in his rolling desk chair. He put the end of his pen in the corner of his mouth and chewed on it a bit. I wondered if he was a smoker because it reminded me of Jonathan and how he would play around with anything even slightly cigarette shaped.

  I checked out his fingers and noticed slight yellowing. Inhaling slowly, I detected the slight scent of tobacco smoke in the office. He didn’t smoke in here – it wasn’t strong enough for that – but the scent was on his clothes.

  I looked up at him through narrowed eyes.

  “It’s a little hectic at work,” I snapped. “The place doesn’t offer health care.”

  Quite the opposite, really.

  “There are still some basics you should be considering. When you were in the Marines, you had regular physicals. Don’t you think that’s important now?”

  “I’m not sick,” I stated.

  “Sickness is relative,” Mark replied. “You are here for a reason, just like you might go to an urgent care facility if you had a cold you just couldn’t shake.”

  “I’m not sick,” I repeated, “and I don’t go to the ER for a fucking cold. I know what I was diagnosed with, and I know I didn’t go and get every single checkbox checked that I was supposed to after discharge, but I also didn’t see the point. I wasn’t getting severance since I didn’t have six years of active service. Hartford gave me the diagnosis just to make sure I could still see him after I left the hospital.”

  “And did you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I sighed.

  “This is totally irrelevant,” I said. “I didn’t com
e here for this.”

  “Your health is exactly why you are here,” he countered.

  “Just forget it.” I stood and began to walk to the other side of the room.

  “I’d like you to stay,” Mark called out. He stood up and took a couple of steps towards me, which emphasized a slight limp. When I glanced down, I could see he wore a shoe with a thicker heel and sole on his right foot. “There’s only twenty minutes left in the session. You can stick it out that long, can’t you? I really would like to talk to you some more.”

  “Morbid curiosity?” I sneered.

  “No,” he replied sincerely. “I’m concerned about you.”

  “I don’t want anyone writing a fucking book about it, all right?”

  “All right,” Mark replied through narrowed eyes. “What makes you say that?”

  Tensing a little, I tried to keep myself from actually balling my hands into fists. Whenever I thought about Hartford and his ideas, I wanted to punch something.

  “Hartford wanted to write a book.”

  “Ah.” Mark shifted in his seat. “Well, I’m not much of a writer, and I really just want to know how you are doing now, so can we finish the session? I mean, you already paid for it.”

  Forcing myself not to roll my eyes, I sat back down in the chair and looked at him.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “All I really know is the part that is a matter of public record,” Mark said. “Anything you want to tell me that isn’t still classified would be a good place to start. If you’d rather talk about the known stuff, that’s fine, too. It’s up to you.”

  There was a lot that was still classified as far as I knew. It wasn’t like there was anyone coming out here to debrief me of any changes, of course. Regardless, it was best to go with the things that could be found by anyone who did some digging.

  “You see the video tape?” I asked. An involuntary cold shiver went down my back, and my stomach tightened up.

  “I have,” he admitted. “I watched it again when you were assigned to me, but I had seen it on the news before then.”

  “That guy – that writer guy,” I said. Inside my head, tiny little explosions began to commence in the center of my skull. My hands clenched without my permission, and my mind fought to only say the words, not actually see the pictures. “You know the one? When they had us all on our knees in front of the camera – right after the bags were taken off our heads – he was on my left.”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “He kept saying he had a wife and kids,” I remembered. “He kept begging them and talking about his two little girls.”

  I hesitated. Most of this was on the tape – the one they played over and over and over again. There were probably five hundred copies of it up on YouTube. Most of it, but not all of it. There was a whole bunch of it before that part that never got out of the government’s hands.

  “Before they had us on camera, when the guy was talking about his kids – there was one of them – one of the insurgents – he said someone had to die, and I told them to just shoot me instead of the writer guy because I didn’t have a family. It didn’t make any difference though. They shot him anyway.”

  Pain in my lungs made me stop speaking for a second. They were trying to go into overdrive or something, and it took all my concentration to stop myself from hyperventilating. My fingers gripped onto my knees in an attempt to stop shaking, but at least my voice remained steady.

  “Sometimes I think he got off easy,” I said. “Thinking that sometimes makes it hard to sleep, too.”

  “That’s a change in your thinking,” Mark said. “At least, as far as what you talked about when you were here before. There’s nothing about the video in Doctor Hartford’s notes.”

  “Maybe it’s still classified and no one remembered to tell me.” I shrugged. “If you see any MPs coming up the driveway, give me a chance to run, okay?”

  I laughed, but he didn’t smile, and I couldn’t really hear the humor in my voice, either.

  “It was on the news a lot.”

  “I was still in Saudi Arabia when it broke out,” I said, “then Germany, and then the hospital in Virginia. I didn’t see it for a couple of months – not until they were discharging me. It was a year old by then, anyway. It’s not like I had paparazzi following me or anything when I got back. Instead, I had freaking MPs. The whole media circus didn’t have any effect on me.”

  “You think something like that just goes away after a year?” Mark asked.

  “No,” I said, “but it wasn’t the worst anyway.”

  “What was?” he asked quietly, but I shook my head. He must have realized he wasn’t getting any of that because he changed tactics.

  “Did you dream about that time?” he asked. “Did you dream about the video?”

  “No,” I said, “just the hole.”

  “Your focus when we first met was on the others who were with you when you were captured. Your dreams then revolved around feelings of guilt – that you should have been able to do something to save them.”

  “Yeah.” I cleared my throat, and my head began to pound a little under the effort of not remembering. “Not those dreams. None like that this time.”

  “You still blame yourself,” he observed.

  “I fucked up.”

  “You were ambushed.”

  “I was the one tasked with not letting that happen,” I said. “I was their officer. I was in charge. I fucked up, and they died.”

  “Do you expect yourself to be omnipotent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Evan,” Mark sighed, “you know that isn’t reasonable.”

  “I don’t give a shit about reasonable,” I said. “It’s what I should have done. They were counting on me.”

  “I have the files,” he reminded me. “Full investigation. You were found to be completely without…”

  “I don’t give a shit about what they said!” I snapped.

  Mark’s eyes went wide for just a half-second before his carefully constructed therapist’s mask came back into play. He couldn’t completely hide his shock from me. I could almost hear little gears clicking in his head as he considered this new information. He wrote on his notepad while his eyes stayed on me. I could just imagine the words on the page.

  Evan Arden does actually have an emotion in there somewhere.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I guess I’m a little on edge. Work has been a little hectic, and with the nightmares…well, I’m not sleeping much, like I said. Very sorry for my outburst, sir.”

  Mark stared at me for a moment, undoubtedly wondering what he could say to make me explode again.

  “What you went through was horrific, Evan,” Mark finally said.

  Like I needed to be reminded.

  “You’ve come a long way since then, haven’t you? You still work at the gym?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “I took a little extended vacation. Just got back into town a month ago.”

  “So where are you working?”

  “Nowhere at the moment.”

  “You just said work had been a little hectic.”

  Shit.

  “I…ah…” Damnit! What the hell was wrong with me? I never made such stupid mistakes. “I don’t have a real job. I’ve just been helping out a friend.”

  “Evan, I can’t help you if you keep things from me. You have to trust me if this is going to work. You know whatever is going on, you are completely protected by doctor-patient privilege. Unless you tell me you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else, it will all be totally confidential.”

  Well, that was the problem there, wasn’t it?

  “It’s just…not completely on the up and up,” I said as I tried to buy a little time for a plausible story. I was falling into a pit of lies, and I needed something simple so I could keep it straight. I had already said far more than I had planned to say.

  “Doing what?” he pressed. He wasn’t going to let this go
until I gave him something he would take to be me opening up – trusting him more. What I had said before was in the files – he could have read it already. He needed something new.

  The story actually came pretty quickly.

  “Well, it’s just…” I hesitated and rubbed my fingers in my eyes. I was surely the perfect picture of angst. “It’s not totally legitimate, you know? I’m doing some roofing work for this guy’s brother. Strictly cash, all under the table, you know?”

  “Yes, I know.” He did a wonderful job of not showing his disappointment. I was just pleased he bought it.

  “You’re not pissed?” I asked, supposedly surprised.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I can’t say I think it is the best thing for you because legitimate work will always be in your best interest, but I’m not pissed, as you put it.”

  “My Marine buddies would have a fit,” I said. It was the truth, or at least would have been if I had any Marine buddies. “Everything has to be on the up-and-up, you know? It’s a matter of pride.”

  “And does doing that kind of work hurt your pride?”

  “Yeah, a little,” I admitted with a shrug. In my mind, I considered what I actually did to make my illegitimate cash. “I know it is ultimately illegal and immoral, but if I don’t do it, someone else will. The gym wouldn’t hire me back since I didn’t exactly tell them I was going to be gone for a while.”

  “So where did you go on your trip?”

  “Arizona.”

  “You went to the desert on vacation?”

  I looked up at him, and we just stared at each other for a minute.

  “Yeah…um…I guess I did.”

  “And you’re wondering why the dreams came back?”

  “Well, now that you put it like that…”

  I leaned forward and rested my forearms over my knees. The throw rug in Mark’s office really wasn’t all that interesting, but I stared at the blue, swirly patterns in it anyway.

  “Did your vacation remind you of the Middle East?”