Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  She got up and stood at the window. Then she went back to the sink and ran cold water into the pot she’d boiled the pasta in. I poured myself a little wine. There was still one glass left in the bottle. I grew reckless once more.

  “I want you back,” I said.

  Instantly there came a kind of sigh from Agnes, part exasperation and part sorrow. Now she’ll throw me out for sure, I thought, but she didn’t.

  “You know what this looks like, don’t you, Charlie? Your girlfriend walks out and you run straight back to me. You come here and tell me it’s me you want now. That’s what it looks like. How am I supposed to feel about that?”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  She was sitting at the table now, gazing straight at me, and she was angry, but not angry like Nora, not destructively angry, not hysterically angry. Seriously annoyed, rather.

  She gave a snort of amusement and picked up her napkin. “You are the end,” she said.

  I reflected on it later: you are the end. I should have said, And you are the beginning, but what kind of nonsense was that?

  “I don’t know why I’m so fond of you,” she said.

  Now this I took very seriously indeed. This was in the nature of a major development, a breakthrough. I stared at her intently. I remembered how we used to do this long ago, stare into each other’s face without blinking.

  “But it makes no difference,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  No answer. Displacement activity. Pour herself a little wine. Push the glass around, slopping the wine from side to side. Cassie’s door opened, a blast of sound.

  “Mom!”

  “Later.”

  The door closed, the music muffled once more. I smiled.

  “Yeah,” said Agnes.

  Where were we? She’d told me it made no difference that she was fond of me. I wanted her very badly and all at once I saw it was possible. Not just possible, inevitable.

  She’d been waiting for me. Seven years apart, so what. My one other serious relationship in ruins, so what. All the more reason. There was a clear light in my head.

  “Calm down, Charlie,” she said.

  But the light was still there, and it didn’t go out even as she threw back her wine in one swallow and stood up from the table.

  “I’m going to bed now. By myself.”

  “When can I see you again?”

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  But at the door of the apartment she let me kiss her, and I held her very close for several seconds until she turned away, and with her face averted pushed me out into the corridor and closed the door. A few moments later I was out on the sidewalk in the heat of the night with the traffic stalled and honking on Nassau Street, and I didn’t feel merely better than I had in years, I felt like a man who’d just got out of jail.

  That night I dreamed I attended the funeral of Leon O’Connor. It took place at an old indoor swimming pool. Through a set of high glass doors I entered a hall of watery shadows with a vaulted roof where long glass panes, black with dirt, were framed between arching iron ribs. Large-bulbed lamps in broad tin shades were suspended in a line from a traverse beam high above the water, but they couldn’t dispel the sepulchral gloom of the place. Birds fluttered high in the obscurity. Dead birds floated in the water. There was a dense crush of firemen and I had to squeeze among them to reach the coffin, where I could just glimpse Agnes and Cassie. They hadn’t seen me, and it was important that they know I was here. The firemen made it difficult for me to get through, and as I moved across the damp slippery duckboard I almost lost my footing several times, and had to cling to one or another of them for support. There was a smell of mold and chlorine, also indistinct booming sounds I took to be the words of the service. At last I reached the coffin, but it wasn’t a coffin anymore. Now it was a metal gurney, and it wasn’t Leon lying on it. It was Danny.

  I awoke with a start, sweating, trembling, short of breath; I felt I was suffocating. It was the familiar horror, seeing the body as though for the first time. This is what trauma is. The event is always happening now, in the present, for the first time.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sam Pike and I had been hearing stories of men who went berserk in the war. The vets talked about them in a way that was hard to define precisely. First there was a kind of incredulity, which shaded into dismay, even disapproval, but within a matter of seconds you could hear admiration and then reverence steal into their voices. As though someone who so clearly should have been excluded from the society of men was possessed at the same time of transcendent power capable of arousing awe. These were soldiers who exposed themselves to certain death and survived, at least for a while, who jumped onto the fortifications and blazed away at the enemy and did not fall. Men who’d gone over the edge into sustained outrage and fury, and in that state seemed to the soldiers around them to have assumed an almost godlike status because they were no longer restrained, no longer afraid, careless of their own lives and unrelenting in their aggression. Most men who went berserk were spoken of in the past tense because they didn’t survive for long. They behaved as though they were invulnerable, these wild gods who loved killing and showed no mercy and could not die until of course they did die. A number of guys in the group had stories about such soldiers, and it became clear that in certain men exposed to sustained danger in combat a distinct pathology emerged, one of its features being this raging suicidal recklessness. I began to suspect that this had happened to Danny.

  He was getting into fights. One time he appeared at the group with a heavy bandage on his hand. Frequently there were cuts and bruises on his face. Another time he limped in, hurting badly from an injury to his foot. There was no point in asking him what had happened. Danny wasn’t someone you asked such questions, though I did try to look after the wound on his hand. I told him we could go up to Surgery, where I’d clean it up and give him a new dressing. But no, he was okay. “Forget about it, Charlie. It’s cool.” I told Billy Sullivan I was worried. Did he know what was going on? With the effects of heavy drinking growing ever more apparent, and the various abrasions on him, and the limping and the bandages, he looked like a street person or a bum.

  “He loses it,” said Billy, “he just fucking explodes. You have to get out of there, and fast, man. There’s no way of predicting it. He feels like shit afterward.”

  “Explodes, what, with rage?”

  “Rage, sure. Then he’ll just start throwing stuff, bottles, whatever, and when they try to throw him out it’s this big bust-up and that’s why he comes in looking like a train wreck.”

  Billy was a bear of a man. He’d piloted helicopters for a reconnaissance unit in the combat zone and saw his copilot melted by a stream of flame from a shell that hit the chopper but failed to detonate. I remember him telling the story bent forward with his elbows on his knees and his head sunk low. At the end he had lifted his head. His face was the color of ash.

  “Should’ve been me, man,” he said.

  So Billy shed some light on what happened to Danny when he was out in the bars. These episodes of explosive rage weren’t particularly surprising in a man who for several months had lost any sense of moderation in combat, including concern for his own survival. Danny could not speak of these things, but it was clear to me that he wouldn’t heal until he did speak.

  One of his few contributions to the group had stuck in my mind.

  “I never expected to get home alive,” he said. “I never wanted to.” There was a silence. He heaved a sigh, blew out some air. “Fuck, I never did.”

  “Did what, man?”

  Danny looked up with a grin. “Get home alive.”

  What a wealth of pathology lay in that admission. It was the first time I’d encountered a man so profoundly alienated from his own humanity that he felt already dead. I decided not to tell Agnes about it, but I did tell Sam Pike. He asked me what I imagined would happen if I asked Danny straight out what he’d done that he found so hard to co
nfront. Was I afraid there’d be violence?

  “I think he might stop showing up.”

  “And?”

  Sam had a swivel chair in his office high in the building, overlooking the East River, and he liked to suddenly swivel away and stare out the window. It allowed him to swing back when he chose to, the effect dramatic.

  “I think if I say nothing one day he’ll feel secure enough to start talking about it.”

  Sam had his back to me. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Because that day might never come, and while I wait he’s in hell.”s

  Sam was silent. We stared out across the water at the Long Island City warehouses. It was summertime. The day was still, the drowsy water sparkling in the sunlight. A tugboat came down the river; a police launch headed up. The silence continued, one minute, two. Silence is never innocent in a psychiatrist’s office. Sam was waiting.

  “He’s a very sick guy,” I said. It sounded inadequate even to my ears.

  Sam swung back around and lurched forward, his hands coming down flat on the desk. “For Christ’s sake, man, why not just tell him? Tell him you want to know. See if he’s got a problem with that.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” he snorted.

  Sam was my boss, but of course he was much more than that. My idealization of him was a kind of compensation for my own father’s inadequacy, so he was a paternal surrogate onto whom I projected frustrated filial needs. We both knew that. When he suggested I confront Danny I questioned the approach I’d been taking up to then, which largely reflected the attitude of the group, the habit of respecting the special status Danny had acquired, which somehow exempted him from having to talk about what had happened before they shipped him home.

  I said this to Agnes when I got back to Fulton Street that night. Cassie was a year old then. We were sitting at the table when I told her I thought it might be the moment to push Danny harder. Agnes worried constantly about her brother, and at times I imagined her asking herself why we didn’t seem able to help him. I hoped with this suggestion to deflect what I felt to be her unspoken accusation that we were doing nothing for him. But to my surprise she didn’t at once warm to the idea. We had finished eating. I rose from the table and gathered the plates, and as she sat rolling a cigarette I watched her from the sink.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Absently she chewed at her lower lip, something she did when she was anxious. She pushed her hair back from her forehead.

  “You think I shouldn’t?”

  “This is Sam’s idea?”

  “Mine. I discussed it with him.” A small lie, this, which would come back to haunt me.

  “But he thought it was a good idea?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  Her doubt strengthened my resolve. I had always participated in Agnes’s tortured deliberations about her brother, and shared her preoccupation with the difference the war had made to him. She seemed unable to forget the man he’d been before he went, and what he was now.

  “He’s getting worse,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “He looks terrible.”

  “I know!”

  Nobody doubted that Danny was tough; more than tough, he was indestructible. And although he was abusing his body mightily it showed no sign of breaking down anytime soon. The damage was superficial, the scrapes and gashes he acquired in barroom scuffles, and the puffiness that came with the drinking. He ate solid food and had a rent-controlled apartment on East Second Street, and in fact there was no reason he couldn’t live like this for decades more. But it worried us that one night he’d get beaten up far worse than usual, or stumble into the street in front of a cab or a truck, or go into the river. Any one of a thousand disasters could befall a man who lived like Danny did in New York City. Were we just to wait until it happened? I said this. Agnes was still not convinced.

  “There’s a reason he does it,” she said.

  She meant the nightmares, of course; the horror. I was reminded then of the culture of the house in which she’d grown up, the alcoholic father and the long-suffering mother who drank defensively. In such a house it was accepted that pain should be dulled with alcohol. The idea of anesthesia had strong valence in the unwritten code of the Magill household. Agnes was abstemious herself, but at some level she felt it was all right for Danny to drink as much as he did, and she condoned it. It was the effect the war had had on him she hated, not his response to it.

  “But he’s so confused right now,” she said.

  “You’ll apologize for him whatever he does.”

  “He’s all right when he comes here.”

  She would make no demands of him. She would encourage him to drink if it deadened his pain. She hated that he was suffering and she didn’t care how he dealt with it.

  “I can’t just stand by and let him go on like this,” I said. “He does nothing useful.”

  “Why should he do anything useful? Didn’t he serve?”

  She looked up at me as she licked a rolling paper. It was as though she had torn a curtain from a screen. Suddenly revealed before me was a picture I hadn’t seen before.

  Danny went to Vietnam; I did not. Danny served. Five years later I would’ve handled such a thrust with tact, if I handled it at all. If it was a thrust. But I was young. I bridled. I responded with more heat than I needed to.

  “So the war excuses him from all responsibility,” I snapped. “Is that your point?”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  I calmed down. Agnes was pacing around the kitchen, smoking, stopping at the window to stare at the street five stories below. Now she sat down opposite me and took my hands in hers.

  “Are you sure about this, Charlie? Does Sam really think it’s a good idea?”

  “Will you trust me?”

  Moment of truth. What was she to say? No, I won’t, I won’t trust you with the precarious balance of my brother’s mind, I fear you’ll be clumsy, you don’t know enough, you’ll blunder in and ruin everything. Did I see these thoughts flicker behind her eyes as she sat across the table from me, gripping my hands? Gazing at me with utter seriousness? But she didn’t say anything. She should have, perhaps, though it would’ve done no good. It might have made things worse. She realized that as well.

  I didn’t see Danny again until the group met the next Thursday night. He seemed to have acquired no fresh injuries. The session ran about three hours, largely an ongoing discussion of Billy Sullivan seeing his buddy burned up beside him in the helicopter, and his insistence that it should have been him. I wanted to get at the thinking behind this. I also wanted Danny to see me give Billy some kind of resolution, a little peace, even, as a result of his willingness to open up.

  “Why should it have been you, not your friend?”

  “He was a good man,” said Billy.

  “You’re not?”

  The other men sat listening, several of them leaning forward, staring at the floor, elbows on knees.

  Billy sat back, gave a kind of hoot of laughter and turned to the other guys, grinning. He stretched his legs out in front of him and cocked his head to the side, gazing at me with the laughter dying now on his big sad bearded face. “Ask me that in ten years, Doc.”

  I glanced around the room. It was a warm night. Most of the other guys were grinning now, and even Danny had that look I’d seen once or twice, a softening of the features, an opening to something, anything, other than the vigilance of a man who expects at any moment to be ambushed, sniped at, booby-trapped, wasted.

  Years later I had another patient, a woman of sixty, a judge, who told me that the world was no longer hospitable to human life. She grieved for her lost sense of security. She felt that her future was foreshortened, that she was living on borrowed time. This woman was sexually assaulted in her own chambers, and I remember her saying what Billy said. She was a mature woman of high professional standing yet she couldn’t think of hersel
f as anything but worthless because she’d been raped. Because someone else had treated her as worthless. Toward the end of one of our early sessions she told me she felt she deserved it. She must have, she said. She’d been punished, and for good reason. I asked her if she recognized that this sort of thinking was pathological. She said it made no difference, it was how she felt. I then asked if she also felt that by talking about it she would eventually come to understand that she’d done nothing to deserve being raped. That’s when she’d said what Billy had said: “Ask me in ten years.”

  I talked to Danny when the session ended. It was late, and I guessed he was ready for a drink. Part of the code to which he clung involved never showing up for the group other than sober. I knew what this cost him, and though we never spoke about it I imagined he held off out of respect for the others. He wanted to be a good witness, and this didn’t go unremarked. Danny probably drank harder than any of these hard-drinking men but he held off on Thursdays until after the group. Not all of them were so responsible. I asked him if we could talk, just the two of us.

  “Sure,” he said. “We’ll go to Smithy’s.”

  That was a bar, not what I had in mind. “What about a cup of coffee instead?”

  “I need a drink, Charlie.”

  He lifted his eyebrows and touched his top lip with his tongue. His eyes were cold: arctic indifference, I sometimes saw it in him. He needed a drink. I acquiesced, thinking I had no choice. Smithy’s was the place Agnes and I had gone to the first night she showed up at the hospital. It was an old-fashioned New York saloon, dark wood paneling, scuffed and splintered, a plank floor, a bored bartender, a few old men and some long-haired kids at a table by the jukebox. Framed photographs of old-time boxers on the wall. We sat at the far end of the counter on bar stools. It was smoky and hot. A ceiling fan turned listlessly overhead. Danny ordered bourbon with a chaser, I ordered a beer. I remember the words of the song on the jukebox. We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ’cross the floor, something like that. I can never hear them now without thinking of that night.