The Grid

by Nick Cook

  I wait for Kate to replace the sheet, but before any of us can look away, she takes the back edge of Guido’s scalp between her thumb and forefinger and gently lifts and repositions it on what is left of his skull.

  Hetta doesn’t move, but Wharton bounces his not inconsiderable weight from foot to foot, as if he is contemplating escape.

  With the blood almost drained from it, the knotted scar tissue of the dead man’s face reminds me of Halloween masks we used to buy as kids. It’s hard not to be drawn to the jagged starfish of bone, flesh and skin that stares back in place of the right eye, though the doctor is trying to direct our attention to something else: a set of small lesions on the surface of the keloid that run around the head, fractionally above the ears and several centimeters above the eyes – roughly the line a hat would rest on. They are barely noticeable, but unmistakably there: six of them, evenly spaced and roughly the size and shape of a dime.

  ‘What do you think made those?’ Hetta asks.

  ‘I really don’t know – but whatever it was, it went on long enough to leave a lasting impression on …’ Kate stops. There is no medical vernacular – no language of any kind – to describe what is left of him.

  Hart and I walk out into the fading light. It has stopped snowing, but the low cloud seems to indicate more on its way.

  As I turn my phone back on, it vibrates with a dozen messages, one of them from Molly, reminding me of the Deputy Chief of Staff’s Moscow planning meeting that’s about to start in the Roosevelt Room.

  The other message I pick out is from Lefortz. He suggests we meet for a drink at the usual place, a sports bar between the Whitehurst Freeway and the Georgetown Canal. I’ll go there after I’ve finished my weekly meeting with my mentor, Ted van Buren. TVB’s study is in the Medical and Dental Building, part of Georgetown’s Department of Medicine. The bar is a fifteen-minute walk.

  Hetta is heading to her office several floors below Cabot’s suite and offers me a ride. She is as silent as I am. Perhaps we’re thinking the same thoughts. I see the look in Guido’s eyes, the blood bubbling in his throat; his effort to signal me with his hand.

  The informal term amongst pathologists for what we have just witnessed is a ‘human canoe’ – a body with nothing in it.

  Of Guido’s three manifestations of trauma, only his memory lapses could be deduced from the pathology.

  I’m missing something, a connection between the brain injury, the stammer and the myoclonus, and it’s only when I’m sitting in my office after the Moscow planning meeting that I finally see it.

  Shortly after our new trauma center opened, we received a soldier who had been running away from a suspected roadside bomb when it detonated in Sarwan Qala, a godforsaken hole in Afghanistan. The blast blew him clean off his feet and threw him against the side of a building, which then collapsed on him.

  He suffered a severe TBI, and was placed in an induced coma and flown back to MacDill. When we started to bring him out, he began kicking off all the bedclothes. Every time we replaced them, he kicked them off again, as if his life depended on it.

  The nurses were quietly infuriated, the doctors baffled. It only stopped when we brought him back to full consciousness. And then we realized he’d been sprinting, as he had been when the bomb had detonated, because his life did depend on it. He was returning to his primal objective – survival – when he’d been robbed of consciousness.

  Cognitively, he made a near full recovery. But he was left with a reflexive tic in his right leg, because the trauma had imprinted: the messaging had locked deeply in his body as well as in his brain.

  For a while, he was rendered speechless, too, but we sorted that out through cognitive behavioral therapy. He was left with a mild stammer. The myoclonus, though, remained defiant, until we treated it subconsciously.

  Doctor Mo Kerchorian, a genius I studied with alongside Ted van Buren, had developed a technique that cured his affliction. Some psychotherapists dubbed them ‘cell memories’. Part physiotherapy, part hypnosis, it had been right on the edge of the medical mainstream. Mo went on to establish a clinic within the Department of Neurosurgery at the Stanford School of Medicine, part of the Veterans’ Association Health Care System.

  I glance at my watch. It’s coming up to four o’clock on the West Coast. I get three rings before going to voicemail. His youthful, heavily accented voice invites me to leave a short message.

  I ask if he had ever come across a Marine on the system, probably from the Appalachian region – Kentucky, West Virginia or Tennessee, maybe – who had been treated for flashbacks that presented as cell memories.

  6

  I HAIL A CAB ON 18TH STREET AND ASK THE DRIVER TO TAKE ME to the Medical and Dental Building on the Georgetown campus. The falling snow, which has started again, forces the traffic to move slower than usual on the E Street Expressway, obscuring my views of the Capitol Building, the museums and the memorials. The Potomac is a wide, black lagoon beyond the lights of the Kennedy Center.

  After my combat experience, it was a foregone conclusion that trauma and PTSD would be my thing, and that at Georgetown I would receive a year of expert tuition at its renowned Department of Medicine, where van Buren was the Associate Professor.

  His specialism is trauma and cellular level treatment at the micro- and nano-scales. A dozen years ago, when I arrived as an ex-military physician ten years older than the other students, a lot of it was beyond me. But I liked the fact that he thought way outside the box.

  TVB was a giant in every way, with a cheerful, ruddy face, wavy white hair and blue eyes that twinkled beneath an earnest, inquisitive brow. He wore a trademark tweed jacket and red moleskin pants, and had a habit of sharing shots of Bulleit Bourbon with his pet students in his Old Curiosity Shop of a study on the top floor of his Georgetown home. Like the rest of the house, it was piled high with papers and periodicals, dog-eared textbooks, stuffed birds and antique maps, many of his parents’ native Holland, which they left hours before the Nazis invaded.

  Ted had been born in Boston a couple of years later.

  I’d always been drawn to a snapshot – in color, faded with age – that he kept on a shelf behind his desk. It had caught him at a moment when everything must have seemed possible. Ted, arms outstretched, is holding Jo up to the sky, while his wife Susan looks on. His expression, bursting with love, reminded me of the way Eric Abram had looked at Hope on our porch in South Tampa.

  Hope had been planting aloes in the front yard with the sun in her hair when she spotted a frail and confused old man across the way. She’d asked if he was all right, and, hands trembling, he’d shown her a scribbled address and a black-and-white photograph.

  The address – in our street – had belonged to Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot who’d dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The photograph was of Eric’s wife, Lola, whom he’d lost several weeks earlier, after nearly sixty years of marriage.

  They’d met while he was in Reno, Nevada, on his way to a remote airfield near Wendover on the Utah border where he’d maintained the Enola Gay in the months leading up to the action that ended the war in the Pacific. They’d married pretty much on the spot.

  When Tibbets got to hear about it, he summoned Eric to his office. Eric had told Lola nothing, but believed he was going to be court-martialed. Their mission was deep black before deep black was even invented.

  Instead, Tibbets put him on an overnight train to Reno with a forty-eight-hour pass and an order to make the most of his honeymoon. It was an act of kindness he and Lola never forgot.

  Hope had sat there holding Eric’s hand while she told me the story. I knew how she felt about the military, about Tibbets, the bomb and war in general, but right then the poignancy of this old man’s pilgrimage – his desire to find the house of the man who’d helped to change his life – was all she cared about. Eric felt her warmth, and so did I.

  He started to tell us about the house he and Lola had owned on the beach, close to a point where the wat
ers of Tampa Bay meet the Gulf. Much to his distress, he’d had to put it up for sale, so he could move north and be looked after by his daughter.

  He reached into his pocket and showed me the sepia image of a radiant Lola under a bright sun.

  ‘Her hair was blonde and her eyes were this beautiful gray-green, but the guys on the base said I’d found me my very own Rita Hayworth.’

  He took my hand as soon as Hope left to get more lemonade. ‘I came here to be reminded of what Lola and I had.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘And I found me another angel. But I guess you don’t need me to tell you that.’

  Not long after, Hope and I cashed in everything we owned, and with some help from her mother, bought Eric’s house.

  It wasn’t much more than a shack a few meters back from a secluded beach on the point of a causeway, but we loved it. And we told him it was still his to return to, anytime he wanted.

  On the three occasions he did come to stay, he never stopped telling us how much he loved what we’d done to the place. How Hope still had Lola’s eyes. And how we needed to cherish every moment together, because in a blink it was over.

  Hope and I walked the beach there, arm in arm, and swam in the ocean, for which she’d continued to have a longing ever since, as a child, she’d left her native California. And on long summer nights, we lay there in each other’s arms, usually beside a fire, and discussed the life we planned to build together.

  But that was before the war. Before a lot of things I have spent the best part of the last fifteen years doing my utmost to forget.

  I clamber out of the cab, pay the driver and negotiate a path through the piles of shoveled snow. As I cross the threshold of the Medical and Dental Building, I glance up at its classical columns and finely pointed brickwork. I see the glow of van Buren’s study from his third-floor window. One of the promises I made myself when I accepted the job of White House Medical Director was that I would see Ted every week. Not that he knows it, but Thompson gets two world-class shrinks for the price of one.

  Ted is a polymath, but the mind is his real passion, and many an evening at the dinner table in the rambling brownstone at the eastern edge of the campus had been spent discussing the things that propelled his sizeable frame out of bed every day; none more so than his ceaseless exploration of the nature of consciousness – of what makes us ‘us’.

  He is currently working on a funded experiment with a device he’s developed which uses ultrasound to manipulate tiny vibrations within the brain’s neuronal structures – vibrations he believes to be the origins of brain waves, about which so little is known a century-plus after their discovery. He believes that tuning these vibrations will lead to new treatments for a range of neurological, mental and cognitive disorders, including depression and anxiety, two of the core mood states underlying PTSD.

  In typical style, he has rigged up a clinical trial at his home. Volunteers for treatment are invited to stay while he monitors the results. He has tried many times, and failed, to explain to me what the treatment involves – all I’m able to remember is that it’s required hefty investment from some big-shot venture capitalist and involves a computer developed by a tech start-up in Silicon Valley that crunches the almost infinitely complex data.

  Susan is a professor of archaeology, and vanishes into the wilds for weeks, sometimes months at a time, leaving TVB in charge of their two dogs, three cats and a skunk they rescued from a pet store that was closing down on Wisconsin Avenue.

  Jo is married to a surgeon and living abroad. The animals and students are their remaining family, in the environment you’d cherish if you were participating in a clinical trial or suffering any kind of depressive illness.

  I know, because I was. And I still am.

  7

  THERE ARE TWO ASPECTS TO SECONDARY DEBRIEFING. THE FIRST IS to get the facts. The second is to ask the victim how he or she feels about them. I have told TVB that I am upset, profoundly so, by what happened in the bell tower. But, oddly, I can’t tell him why.

  ‘What did you do over the break?’ he asks.

  ‘Read. Walked. Caught up on some movies.’

  ‘You’ve been all right?’

  ‘Never better.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘So am I, Ted.’

  ‘Any dreams? Flashbacks?’

  ‘None. I’m sleeping fine. And I’m eating. And, not that it’s any of your damn business, I haven’t even looked at a drink.’

  I started to drink soon after the war. Then, after the accident, I became one of those people I’d read about but never treated: a genuine, high-functioning alcoholic. And I must have fooled a lot of people, because I kept on working and no one seemed to notice.

  But when I retrained as a shrink, I kicked the booze. I threw myself into psychiatry mostly because I wanted to know what had happened to me, but found, along the way, a desire to help anyone who ever had a traumatic experience, under fire or elsewhere.

  And I thought I was doing well, until the morning I shut down.

  I had been reading, studying, writing for eighteen, sometimes up to twenty hours a day. I went to bed one night and didn’t want to get up the next morning. In the space of a few hours, the world seemed different. I lay with the drapes drawn, staring at the ceiling, for two, maybe three days. When I heard a knock at the door, I told whoever it was to fuck off. When I finally opened it, I was met by the uncharacteristically unsmiling face of van Buren.

  TVB had devised his program for burnouts – bankers, lawyers, doctors, politicians, mainly. It didn’t work for everyone, but it worked for me. He knew I needed sleep, lots of it, so he knocked me out – not in the sterile, hospital-like environment where most people go to rehab, but in his home, where I could still hear the dogs barking, the phones ringing, meals being cooked.

  Slowly, the smell of Susan’s freshly baked bread, the sound of TVB’s Count Basie records, the drugs, and a desire to make sense of everything that had happened, did what they needed to. After three days, I was well enough to study again. For anyone who bothered to ask, I’d simply been under the weather.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll allow me to tell you what I think you’re struggling with,’ says the man who put me back together. He has lost a lot of weight since I first knew him, but his ice-blue eyes still sparkle beneath those wayward brows. He’s wearing a well-worn sleeveless sweater and an old checked shirt – everything you’d want from your favorite Dutch uncle.

  ‘If you set aside the trauma of the shooting, which between us we will deal with, what this man has done is shine a light on you. This would have happened sooner or later, Josh. There is no way as the President’s doctor you could hope to stay out of the limelight for long. And, if you’ll permit me to say so, placing yourself in the front line in the way that you did today was, well …’

  He stops short of saying it. There have been plenty of times when I’ve come to TVB for refuge, but today isn’t one of them. I don’t want to talk about Guido anymore, nor do I want to talk about Hope or Iraq. I need to stay focused. So I change the subject and tell him – not for the first time – about the conflicted feelings I hold for my boss, the Commander in Chief.

  He asks me to give an example of what I mean and I describe Thompson’s behavior during the Pope’s trip to the East Coast last spring.

  After a scheduled visit to a Jesuit seminary in New York City, the President suggested that they should go back inside the church, just the two of them, for a moment of reflection. The Pope accepted and there was an awkward moment for the Secret Service as two of the most influential men in the world disappeared from view.

  Then, miracolo, a paparazzo, who happened to be on the right floor of the building opposite, snapped an intimate portrait through the window of the two men holding hands as they prayed together.

  The picture made the front page of just about every newssheet in the world and the following day Thompson’s popularity ratings went through the roof. Two days later he confounded the commentators ag
ain by attending a closed conference of leading American Islamic clerics. To the media’s infuriation, no insider divulged what had taken place, although there were rumors that Thompson had prayed with them, too.

  So, it’s very safe to say, not everybody loves him, but some now speak of ‘Slick Bob Thompson’ as if he’s JFK.

  ‘The President wouldn’t be the first politician to plant a vote-catching kiss on a baby’s head. And I think it’s good that someone, somewhere, has decided that the leader of the free world should be looked after holistically. Even better that the person charged with that responsibility is you.’

  I mention tomorrow’s appointment. In the six months I’ve been at the White House, I’ve met the President three times. He has regular check-ups, of course, but I’ve promised Reuben I will do them from hereon in.

  TVB reaches into a drawer, pulls out a bottle and pours himself a slug of bourbon. ‘Your job is to see to it that he functions to the very best of his ability, and in the four or eight years he gets to save the world, that he is as fit as he can be.’

  He pauses. ‘At the risk of being a little bit pompous, Josh, this befits your oath of office.’

  He’s right. But here’s what I’d really like to ask TVB, if only I could: Does the dream mean Thompson is vulnerable – that he has a twist of paranoid personality disorder – or does it mean that he’s a legacy merchant, fueled by narcissism?

  Narcissism is the more interesting of the two, because it would suggest a non-classical form of the disorder.

  Acquired narcissism, as opposed to the developed variety that forms during childhood, is fueled by fame, money and power. Hitler had it. It’s also known as the God Complex.

  A God Complex is neither here nor there if you’re a rock star or a Hollywood celebrity. But if you hold a briefcase full of launch codes, it’s a totally different scenario.

  The night of the New Year’s first working day, in the aftermath of a winter storm that’s closed many of the city’s streets, there’s only a handful of people in the Blue Barge, Lefortz’s local, a seedy throwback with a wood floor, a jukebox, a couple of pinball machines and staff who don’t give a shit.