Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “So what’s up?”

  “Here’s the question,” I said.

  A word I once heard used about myself in those days was earnest. I dislike the connotations—humorless, hectoring, persistent, dull. Perhaps Danny didn’t see me like that.

  I sat with my hands flat on the bar. Frowning and earnest, I asked, “So what happened to you after your buddy got killed?”

  Down went the bourbon, the shot glass pushed across the counter. Wordlessly, the bartender refilled it and picked what he needed from the heap of dollar bills I’d thrown down.

  Danny spoke quietly, not looking at me. “It didn’t happen to me. I made it happen to them.”

  “You want to tell me what you did?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Sure I do.”

  I remember when I said this he looked straight at me, and this time his eyes weren’t cold; instead they seemed to burn into my unseasoned, unknowing soul, and I was suddenly afraid. I was out of my depth. At the same time I was committed to what I was doing. I told myself it was good I was afraid. This was my work, and at last I was facing the real diseased part, the sickness in this man’s mind. It didn’t matter that we were in a shabby midtown saloon instead of the safe, formal setting of the basement room we’d just come from. He turned away, and his eyes in the mirror behind the bottles flickered to my mirrored eyes and held them for a second or two. There arose in him, or so I imagined, a desire to let the poison out.

  “We didn’t have to be there, Charlie.”

  “Go on.”

  He stared at the counter shaking his head. Did he mean Southeast Asia or the place where his buddy had died?

  “Somebody fucked up. We shouldn’t have been there.”

  Then he lifted his head and turned back to me and pronounced the words slowly, swaying slightly on the bar stool, almost in a trance and as though chanting a mantra. He beat his fingers on the counter in time to the words. “We didn’t—have to—fucking—be there, man! We didn’t have to be there!”

  Such weird and bitter fury in him as he said this, his fists clenched and eyes cast down. It was still so fresh that it might have happened yesterday. Now he was shaking his head. We sat in silence for some minutes.

  “It all went to hell for me after that. I didn’t care about any of it anymore. All I knew, the more of them I wasted the better I felt.”

  “Killing made you feel good.”

  “Less bad. Every time it got easier. And there was other stuff.”

  He was drinking bourbon steadily and I had the impression of a spigot opened, the flow intermittent yet unstoppable. He was speaking rapidly but in tones so low it was difficult to understand him. The jukebox was loud, that didn’t help, and the long-haired kids were getting rowdy. Danny didn’t look at me, he just muttered at the counter, pushing the shot glass over, and I kept adding dollars to the soggy pile in front of us.

  “Four months, Charlie, until they shipped me out of there. I was an animal, I just wanted to kill. And I messed with their bodies if I could get at them. That’s not an animal, that’s worse than an animal. Animals don’t kill because they like it.”

  “They kill to eat.”

  He seemed all at once to awaken to his surroundings. They kill to eat. He looked around with a familiar expression, as though he was expecting at any moment to be attacked. He stared at the table by the jukebox. One of the kids shouted, “What the fuck you looking at?” and I thought he was going to take them on. Abruptly he got off his stool and walked out of the bar onto the street. It happened so fast I was paralyzed for a few seconds. Then I went after him, looking up and down the sidewalk, but he was gone. He’d disappeared into the city. I went back into the bar.

  “You want another?” said the bartender.

  On the subway going home, sitting among the rolling beer cans and abandoned newspapers, staring at the ubiquitous spray-can graffiti and being eyed by the few wary passengers traveling that late in the evening, I tried to see the encounter in a positive light: I had got Danny talking. But I knew his abrupt departure wasn’t good. Though I’d got him to open up some, I’d had no chance to give him any sort of help in handling the storm of feeling that came with the arousal of those memories. I doubt I could have comforted him; probably nobody could.

  Or perhaps the group could. Sam Pike said this when I saw him the next day. Perhaps only the group could handle the fallout, when Danny allowed himself to remember. As it was he’d drink all night so as to drive off the demons, and I didn’t want to think about that because I was responsible.

  Agnes saw all this at once. “What have you done?”

  She was waiting up for me. Barely was I through the door than she was there, asking if I’d been with Danny. Yes, I told her wearily, I had.

  “What happened?”

  I was hot and irritated, and angry with myself. I’d been confronted with what I regarded as my own inadequacy. I couldn’t explain my intimation that I’d done real harm, but Agnes saw it and she was horrified. I told her how Danny had left the bar. I hadn’t had the time or the guile to tailor my account. I told her the stark truth.

  “I don’t believe you could have been so dumb! You took him to a bar? To talk about Vietnam?”

  I was aware of a cluster of reactions, none of them worthy. I didn’t defend myself, nor did I attempt to minimize what had happened. I sat with my elbows on the table and my face in my hands.

  “You’ll just have to go find him.”

  Unable to be still, she was pacing the kitchen with her arms folded tight across her chest. I put my hands on the table and lifted my face to where she stood gazing down at me, the dismay of a moment before now replaced by conviction. There was something to be done, after all.

  “He could be anywhere.”

  “Then I’ll go,” she said.

  She couldn’t contemplate the prospect of doing nothing. One or the other of us had to go out into the night and of course it was me. Frayed and exhausted, bitterly angry with myself, I told her I wanted to change my shirt. Then I’d go over to the East Village and look for him.

  “Bring him back here,” she said. “I don’t want him out there all night. Christ knows what he’ll do. I’ll tell you where to go, Charlie, go to Seventh and B and if he’s not there ask Boone where he’s drinking tonight.”

  There followed a list of bars, above St. Mark’s and below, in any of which Danny might be found. I changed my shirt and went out again. A hot summer night on the East Side brings people out of their apartments and into the streets, which were more crowded at midnight than they’d been at noon. The mood was festive on some blocks, sinister on others. At one in the morning the air was still hot, the sidewalks busy, traffic cruising and people screaming. Every time I was accosted, propositioned, threatened, I asked if Danny Magill had been around.

  “Danny who, man? I don’t know no Dan Magill, man. Yo! You know Dan Magill, right? No, man, don’t nobody know no Dan Magill around here. What else you want?”

  Some did know Danny, mostly bartenders, but nobody could be sure of having seen him that night. At four in the morning I was in a seedy joint on Rivington Street and had given up. I sat at the bar and drank a beer. There were after-hours places I could have checked out, but I saw no point. If he was in the neighborhood he’d be drunk by now, and there’d be little for me to do except try to make sure he didn’t get hurt, and I had no idea how long he might tolerate that. Not long, was my guess. So I went home.

  Agnes was still up. She was at the door at the first sound of my key in the lock. Her face, full of hope, at once collapsed.

  “No good?”

  “Nobody’s seen him.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Bed.”

  She had no more emotion left in her. She was empty, incapable of further anxiety until her body was replenished by rest. Within moments she was asleep. I lay in the warm darkness listening to the fan, watching the curtain stir as the whisper of a breeze went stealing by, and for a few se
conds I entertained the notion that no harm had been done, that Danny had simply gone out drinking as usual, that he’d effectively locked down his nightmares and what had happened earlier was of no consequence. Agnes was just overreacting. She was a little irrational when it came to her brother. All would be well. And thinking this, I fell asleep myself.

  It was impossible to sustain that hope over the days that followed. Agnes announced the next morning that she was asking Maureen to take care of Cassie while she looked for Danny. I didn’t try to dissuade her. But I did attempt to convey something of the optimism I’d felt just before sleep the night before. She was having none of it.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “Don’t even try to cheer me up.”

  This was said with brisk disdain. She had expressed no anger in the morning, and I realized this wasn’t because she’d decided I was blameless, that my impulse had been sound and I couldn’t have known, nobody could, what the consequences would be. No, she expressed no anger only because there was no point. She’d come to that conclusion the night before while I was out trawling the bars. She had raged at me in her mind and wept tears of angry frustration at the sheer folly of the callow man she’d had the misfortune to marry, but she had come to terms with the new reality and knew that nothing would be gained by anger. She felt it, of course she did, and it fueled the manifest contempt in her voice. My instructions were to find out what Sam Pike had to offer.

  I remember he swiveled his chair around from the window and gazed at me. “Oh, Charlie. So what did you say? What triggered it?”

  I recounted the conversation. There was a long silence. Finally he said it would’ve been better if I’d done it in the group. I was to let him know if Danny showed up at the apartment on the weekend.

  He didn’t show up at the apartment, and he didn’t show up for the group the next Thursday night. This worried Sam, and it sure as hell worried me. Sam clearly hadn’t anticipated that I’d attempt psychotherapy with Danny Magill in a bar. He might have shouted at me, told me what an idiot I was, and I wish he had. But he too saw no point. I think he realized that I understood the scale of my blunder. He’d asked me almost at once how Agnes had reacted and he nodded when I told him, as if that’s what he’d expected. But all he said by way of reproach was to repeat that he wished I’d done it in the group. By this point of course I wished the same thing; in fact there was nothing I wished for more ardently. My own stupidity astounded me. What had I been thinking? I’d been thinking, My god, Danny will talk to me, and if he wants to talk in a bar, then so be it. But I wouldn’t have tried this with any of the other men. It was because he was Agnes’s brother.

  When he didn’t appear on Thursday night, someone said, “Where’s Danny?” and I was alert for any reply that might shed light. I wanted to hear one of them, Billy Sullivan, I hoped, say he’d seen him the day before, they’d gone out to the track, or taken in a movie. But there was nothing. Sam Pike showed up, this his first appearance in a fortnight, and I didn’t have to ask him why. Even so, I was unable to concentrate on the discussion. Sam opened the meeting by apologizing for missing the last two sessions, then summarized the group’s concerns the last time he’d been with us. I told him about Billy’s account of losing his copilot, and his belief that he should have died instead.

  “I understand that,” said Sam. “So what happened then?”

  Billy started to talk, and his words reminded me of what Danny had said in the bar. I’d sensed there was more he wanted to tell me, and that it was those memories that had driven him out into the night. I tried to imagine how the evening might have gone had I handled it differently. When he’d told me we were going to a bar, if I had insisted we just wait until the room was empty and talk there, and if I had then suggested that I ask him some questions next week with the group present—

  But now there was this hideous uncertainty surrounding him, and a mounting anxiety. We knew he’d been back to Second Street on at least a couple of occasions because he’d been seen in the building, though Agnes never found him home. And he had no telephone. Her anger remained steady, though still unspoken. I had the feeling that when this was all over, when Danny had finished driving everybody crazy and we could breathe again, then I’d hear exactly how she felt.

  Sam was talking about loss of compassion in the wake of a friend’s death, and from loss of compassion he moved on to loss of humanity. I put Danny out of my mind and concentrated on what was being said.

  The call came on the Sunday. It had always been Danny’s bad day. His worst hangovers occurred on Sundays. The city was quiet then, places were closed and a man alone was forced in on himself in ways he wasn’t any other day of the week. I might have known it would be a Sunday. I took the call early that morning. Agnes was still asleep. It was Danny’s neighbor on Second Street. She said I should come at once.

  When I got home some hours later I made Agnes sit down at the table and then told her what had happened. I have never since that day seen such anguish on a woman’s face. In my work I deal with the effects of trauma, but I am never present when the damage actually happens. That morning I saw a woman to whom the worst thing she could imagine apart from her child dying had just occurred. She simply stared at me with her hands clenched tight on the table, shaking her head slightly, the tears streaming unchecked down her face. She reached for me and I held her as she wept. I’d found him in his room. He’d blown his brains out. I’d had to kick the door in.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sometimes a failed relationship will confirm in a man a suspicion of his incapacity to sustain intimacy. I fell into this trap. In fact for some time after the end of my marriage I held fast to this belief, and saw no real reason to challenge it: I was unable to save anything. Even had I wanted to keep my marriage alive I doubt I could have succeeded. The fact was, since I could no longer face Agnes after what happened, I thought it best to end the marriage as quickly as possible. She despised me for this and I suppose I despised myself, which is of course a feature of depression. I remember telling her that she’d be better off without me, better able to get on with her life. The inadequacy of this as justification for leaving her was made very clear to me. I tried to explain how corrosive it would be, her conviction of my responsibility for Danny’s death.

  “Then change my conviction,” she said.

  We were all in shock, me most of all. I’d been the first one into the apartment. I’d seen what that gunshot had done to his head, and I couldn’t forget it. At least I had the distraction of the funeral arrangements and of contacting the men in the group. None of them blamed me. None of them was surprised. They were upset, they were saddened and angered, but not surprised. At the time we were only just starting to realize what this war would cost in terms of suicides. Years later, by chance, I ran into Billy Sullivan as I was coming out of a movie theater on Sixth Avenue. Life had not been kind to Billy. He walked with a stick and wheezed badly. He was maybe a hundred pounds overweight. His skin was red and flaking, his long hair thin and sparse. He had trouble on the sidewalk, this bulky, wheezing man. He cursed pedestrians who brushed against him in their haste. We went for a beer and talked about Danny, as well as two other men who’d turned their guns on themselves. Billy had been down to Washington to see the Vietnam War Memorial.

  “You know how many names they got on that thing?”

  I came up with a rough approximation.

  “More than that have killed themselves.”

  I went to see my mother and she at once connected Danny’s suicide to our own relationship, hers and mine.

  “Ah, Charlie,” she said. “Always trying to help people who don’t want it.”

  We were in her apartment. It was about six in the evening, and she’d been drinking. I remembered her spectacles, black-rimmed and thick-lensed, hanging on her bosom from a piece of string. Her skin was gray, but her eyes were as sharp and bitter as her mind; she had yet to suffer the series of strokes that eventually destroyed the force indomit
able.

  “That’s why you’re in this line of work, isn’t it, Charlie? You like getting into other people’s private business. You like to intrude.”

  Where did this come from? I wasn’t ready for it. I’d thought I’d find sympathy here, for I sure as hell couldn’t find it anywhere else. “But you needed me,” I said.

  “I never needed you. You just interfered. You were always interfering with me, same as with that poor boy, and now see what you’ve done.”

  “I think I have to leave Agnes.”

  “You sure do. Smartest thing you’ve said yet.”

  I never understood why she hated Agnes, since she’d never showed any possessiveness toward me.

  A few minutes later, after she’d had another drink, she told me she wasn’t surprised. “You’re just like your father,” she said. “Just walk away, why don’t you? You got another woman already?”

  I couldn’t take any more of it and told her I didn’t realize I’d injured her so badly. She was sitting forward in her chair, her elbow on her knee and her forehead pressed into her fingers, which held a lit cigarette, the other hand clawed around her glass. At these words her head came up and she stared at me. She seemed shocked. Then, inexplicably, tears were coursing down her cheeks. “You didn’t injure me, Charlie,” she said hoarsely, “it was me. I injured you.”

  “No—”

  But she was already making for the door, head down, glasses dangling, one arm flapping at me to leave her alone. I followed her to her bedroom, where the familiar drama played out, me at the door asking to be let in, her inside weeping. But this time she wouldn’t unlock the door. I sat in the living room with the lights off but she didn’t come out of her room. It was after ten when I left.

  I remember nothing of the funeral, although I have a vivid recollection of what was the first of many visits I’ve paid over the years to the city morgue, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, this one to identify Danny’s remains, which came up from the basement on a metal gurney. They’d cleaned him up but again I had to look at the mess he’d made of his head. It did more than haunt me, it became yoked in my psyche to the guilt I felt. And the memory did not fade or change; it returned with all the immediacy and specificity of the experience itself, usually in my dreams. It is hell to remember like this, to possess a memory that will not decay. Back at the apartment Agnes was sunk deep in grief, and we moved around each other in almost total silence. Maureen cooked food that nobody wanted to eat and brewed pots of coffee nobody wanted to drink. I had already decided that I would move out at the beginning of September.