What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife?

by David Harris-Gershon

  I was stubborn, committed, and utterly useless. Things were not good.

  I wasn’t sleeping. Noa wasn’t sleeping. Jamie was growing impatient. My yawns were increasingly becoming both a genuine physiological response to sleep deprivation as well as desperate attempts to take in enough oxygen when normal breathing failed me. But instead of relenting, I upped the ante and went all in with a measure the book called “Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan,” named after the author, a pox on her name.

  According to the book, the problem with our pacifier-using baby was something it called the “sucking-to-sleep association.” In short, Noa was a full-blown sucking addict, only able to settle down once a nipple, or a nipple-substitute, was between her lips. The problem came when her pacifier, having dutifully fulfilled its mission, slipped from her parted, sleeping lips, at which point she would startle. My job, according to Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan, was to wean her from this rubber dependence using trickery. I was to launch a smoke-and-mirrors strategy after pulling the pacifier from her lips as she slept:

  Often, especially at first, your baby … will startle and root for the nipple. Try to very gently hold his mouth closed with your finger under his chin, or apply pressure to his chin, just under his lips, at the same time rocking or swaying with him. (Use your key words if you have developed them.) If he struggles against this … go ahead and replace the nipple or pacifier, but repeat the removal process as often as necessary until he falls asleep.2

  Use your key words if you have developed them. The only key words I’d developed were fuck, shit, and fucking shit. Still, I was diligent about the technique, memorizing the steps and practicing the chin hold – thumb under the chin and index finger on the nose – which was supposed to mimic the pressure of a pacifier lodged in Noa’s little mouth. Whenever she drifted to sleep, I’d pounce, wiggle the pacifier away, and squeeze her mouth closed. This often resulted in flailing, not the promise of continued slumber. After the first episode – watching me wake Noa by ripping the pacifier from her resting lips – Jamie threw in the towel. “This is absurd.” But I remained diligent, becoming the sole practitioner of Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan. I was dedicated to its methodology, to its misguided system for imposing calm and order where none could possibly exist.

  “How long do you plan to do this?” Jamie asked, completely spent after a night in which I intentionally tortured the three of us.

  “The book says that we can break her, if I’m vigilant and consistent, in around ten days.”

  “Ten days? You plan to take the pacifier out every time she falls asleep for ten days?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But the book says we should see a major reduction in night wakings if I do this.”

  “Here’s an idea: we’ll see a major reduction in night wakings if you don’t wake her by taking the pacifier out of her mouth when she’s sleeping.”

  “But that’s not the plan.”

  “I can’t take this for ten days.”

  “But what if it’s the only way?”

  Jamie looked at me, holding our daughter, who had fallen asleep in her arms while feeding, and shook her head.

  For months, Jamie had been undergoing a therapy called EMDR, for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which aided psychotherapeutic recovery through a strange blend of bi-lateral stimulations, such as alternating beeps fed into stereo headphones. The technique was a bit of a mystery, and sounded suspiciously New Age. But the woman who created EMDR, Francine Shapiro, had tested it on trauma victims, people who had gone through terrible experiences – Vietnam, sexual assault and molestation, emotional abuse3 – and claimed magical results. Jamie was also claiming magical results.

  One night, after getting home from a therapy session and putting Noa to bed, Jamie sat me down on the living room couch and, with the sort of energy I usually reserved for recapping fourth-quarter comebacks or walk-off home runs, began giving a play-by-play of the day’s therapy session:

  “Today was really interesting. Want to hear?”

  “Sure,” I said, fidgeting.

  “Okay, first thing Suzy did, after giving me the headphones and vibrating things to hold – the ones that alternate right–left in sync with the beeps – was to get me to envision a younger version of myself, not exactly my inner child, but along those lines.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “So I thought about ‘her’ in my old room – you know the one in Pittsburgh that my Dad’s turned into a workout room?”

  I nodded.

  “So anyway, I envisioned myself in my old room, an adolescent me, and then was told to envision myself now, my present-day self, walking into the room and engaging the girl in conversation.”

  “Why?”

  “To help with some anxiety I’m having now.”

  “From the bombing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait, so why the imaginary girl talk?”

  “Who I am relates to how I’m responding to things now.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I didn’t understand.

  “So anyway, I did what Suzy asked, the whole conversation thing, and it was really strange.”

  I stared out the window, trying to figure out if the pulsing light atop the Washington Monument was blinking at a rate slower or faster than a true second.

  “Hey, are you even listening to me?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “What did I just say?”

  “You said you were in your old room talking to yourself.”

  “Basically. Ask me what my conversation was about.”

  “What?”

  “Ask me.”

  I tried to sound curious. “What was your conversation about?”

  Jamie mapped it out for me, after which she said, “The really amazing thing is that after this imaginary talk, I suddenly felt amazing relief.”

  “That’s great,” I said, deciding the blinking light was pulsing slightly slower than the pacing of a second hand.

  “And then Suzy described what was happening in my brain. This is a simplification, but basically some of my memories are stored separate from my emotions, and the back and forth stimulations, the vibrations and stuff, make connections between each side of the brain. So it kind of helps extract emotions from one side to go along with the memories on the other. Helps reunite them so they can be processed. Kind of amazing, huh?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound sincere.

  “You should do it.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “You should think about it. There’s another person in the practice who uses EMDR who I got a recommendation for.”

  “Naw, but thanks.”

  Just then Noa let out a whimper. I hopped off the sofa, crept to the doorway and peered in, hoping everything was fine, hoping she’d settle on her own – that things would just resolve themselves without the need for any intervention.

  We abandoned the sleep book and Pantley’s Gentle Removal Plan, at which point I had to confront the fact that my insomnia rivaled my daughter’s. Unable to settle down most nights, I would pacify myself with the Internet, playing chess with some stranger in Singapore or finding an amateurish distraction at www.addictinggames.com. My favorite there was Kitty Cannon, a game I first encountered at JDS after hearing the giggles of middle-school boys coming from the corner of a computer lab. I snuck up on them to find students huddled around a single screen, shooting an animated cat from a silver adjustable cannon. The group’s spokesman, Ben, turned around and began a sales pitch.

  “Hey Mr. H.-G., have you ever seen this?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s so funny. Watch this.” He then shot a kitten, the screen scrolling in tune with its velocity across a green field riddled with explosives, razors, trampolines, and Venus Fly Traps. After bouncing off a trampoline into the air, then hitting some dynamite held by a floating balloon, which further propelled it forward, the kitten
finally bounced to a bloody stop. Six hundred and seventy-five feet.

  “Aw, that’s weak,” squeaked one of Ben’s sidekicks.

  “Yeah, that was a bad one. I got over one thousand feet once,” Ben gloated. He pointed to the screen and explained. “See the red number? That’s the angle. You can adjust it to set the cannon any way you like. And the power bar you just have to hit at the right time, when the line is full. Want to play?”

  “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, properly assuming my role, despite salivating internally.

  “It’s not dumb, just silly.”

  “Fine, but shouldn’t you guys be doing research?”

  The bell rang, and everyone scattered, a smattering of Shabbat Shaloms echoing around the lab. My students had forgotten to log out, and Kitty Cannon sat idly on the screen, waiting for some action. Just once, I thought, and started playing.

  Kitty Cannon began taking its toll. I fell into a pattern of consistently dozing on the Metro during my morning commute, occasionally missing my stop. At school, the complicated block schedule confounded me such that I’d realize, as my students waited for me in a classroom, that I was supposed to be teaching. And at home, simple acts, such as remembering to turn off the stove, proved challenging. At one point, I put a dirty diaper in the microwave and a burrito in the garbage, my mouth open, trying to intentionally yawn.

  It got to the point that Jamie didn’t have to convince me to seek help – it was clear that I needed fixing, that I needed an intervention. Deciding to give therapy a try, I sheepishly asked Jamie for a recommendation.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” I said.

  “I’ll help you,” she promised, deciding upon a therapist and scheduling an appointment for me.

  A week later, I found myself on the twelfth floor of a Dupont Circle office building, attempting to appear relaxed while reclining on a suede couch. Sitting across from me was Kathy4 – a tall, attractive blonde with a gentle manner that masked a professional ferocity.

  In our first few sessions, Kathy allowed me to dance, to bob and weave, around the topic of the terrorist attack. I offered detached shrugs and averted eyes, keeping my elbows tucked close to my body, the gloves under my chin, a defensive posture. Eventually, tired of the show and the footwork, she swung. “David, let’s just lay everything on the table so we can see what’s what. It’s the first step, getting the whole story out. Which is why I’m going to ask that you please recount, in painful detail, the entire narrative of your traumatic experience, from beginning to end.”

  After forty minutes of going through the chronology for the first time – plucking images of Israel from constricted layers of grey matter and placing them before us both – I walked out of her office and felt absolutely nothing. No paroxysmal convulsions brought on by recalling all the muck. No clichéd breakdowns, on my knees supplicating with fists clenched. Just disembodiment.

  On the way home, I felt relief – not because any psychic healing had occurred, but rather because I’d achieved a great escape. I had managed to talk about the attack, finally, with no emotional fallout.

  I was a brick wall. I was impenetrable. I was one tough fucker.

  In our next session, I showed up prepared to analyze my narrative, assuming we’d spin our wheels around the story. I knew enough about psychoanalysis to suspect an impending Freudian dive into the past in order to claim it, or understand it. But I was taken aback when Kathy sat down and, after cycling through some pleasantries, said, “I think we need to talk about your guilt.”

  “My guilt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guilt about what?”

  Kathy smiled faintly and explained that she wanted to seize upon something I’d recalled during the narrative construction of the attack. Something that I had let slip tangentially, she said. Something that stood out, she said. She always looked for the tangents, she said.

  The tangent to which she referred was something I had apparently mentioned offhand, as a bit of back story, about how we had all created a magical world of make-believe in Israel in order to remain sane. We had pretended that Hebrew University was a collegial oasis of integrated study outside the greater conflict, a universally agreed-upon no-fire zone. Kathy mentioned how I had recalled for her, unprompted, my walking around the campus before the attack, quietly inspecting Palestinian workers, about the newspaper article, the one which dreamed up a hypothetical attack, about how I knew the dangers all along.

  Kathy:

  Do you not remember telling me about all that?

  Me:

  I mean, I remember it. I remember the article. And I guess I said all that stuff last time, since you clearly know it. But I honestly don’t remember talking about it.

  Kathy:

  You were on auto-pilot.

  Me:

  Yeah.

  Kathy:

  What we’re going to do is try to take you out of auto-pilot.

  Me:

  But what if I like being on auto-pilot?

  Kathy:

  Exactly.

  Sitting before her on the sofa, picking at the parallel lines of suede running down the square cushions, I listened as she discussed the power of guilt, the overriding control it can have in obfuscating everything, in tamping down everything, in shutting off our emotional centers. That guilt was responsible for my numbness, for my ability to tell the story of Jamie being bombed without a hint of sadness or anger, without any emotional fallout. Where was the sadness? Where was the anger? Where were any of the normal stages one passes through when processing and moving beyond a trauma? I wanted Kathy to be wrong, but intuitively I knew she was right. And that was when she decided to hit hard:

  Kathy:

  You need to grieve.

  Me:

  Umm –

  Kathy:

  See, it’s your story. You can sit here. You can tell it – but it means nothing to you. It’s just floating, disconnected from anything real, disconnected from who you were before the attack. Because if you truly felt how the story of what happened relates to you now, you’d have grieved, or felt grief. Or sadness. Or anger.

  Me:

  Okay. So – what now?

  Kathy:

  Do you have anything tangible, anything physical that could help you?

  Me:

  Help me?

  Kathy:

  Help you access what happened. Something that you can look at or hold that recalls what happened.

  Me:

  Umm – I don’t know. I mean, even if I did, and I’m not saying I do, there’s nothing that it could connect with. I was caring for Jamie in the hospital, isolated, knew only that world. I never flew back for the funerals, never went to the memorial services for Ben or Marla, never really processed any of it. They’re just gone.

  Kathy:

  You don’t understand – forget your friends. Have you ever cried for Jamie?

  Me:

  What?

  Kathy:

  For what she experienced: the physical pain, the horror of it all, the guilt of surviving, the long recovery. In all that time you were caring for her, did you cry?

  Me:

  I don’t think so.

  Kathy:

  Forget your friends for the moment; you haven’t grieved yet for your wife. For all she lost. For all she endured. That’s your narrative before this, David, your life with Jamie. Didn’t you say she might have been pregnant?

  Me:

  Maybe. I don’t know.

  Kathy:

  Have you grieved for the fact that your first child may have been killed in the blast?

  Me:

  Why are you doing this?

  Kathy:

  I’m trying to help. You’re paralyzed. No anger. No sadness. At least not expressed as such. And yet you feel tense, can’t breathe, always feeling overwhelmed, wondering why.

  Me:

  I’m sad. Really, I am.

  Kathy:

  When was the la
st time you cried?

  Me:

  I got choked up a bit when watching the movie Magnolia recently. I get like that sometimes when watching emotionally-layered dramas, particularly those involving people struggling to overcome situations or past events. I seek them out, actually.

  Kathy:

  So when you’ve attained a distance, a disconnection, you’re able to feel some emotion, particularly when characters might be struggling like you have in the past. You seek out movies to feel that emotion, don’t you? To see how others, struggling like you, express their darkest, most painful emotions.

  Me:

  I’m not struggling.

  Kathy:

  You’re in therapy for a terrorist attack that’s rendered you semi-functional.

  Me:

  You said therapy is normal, that I shouldn’t feel like a freak when I told you I felt uncomfortable paying to talk with someone, that I felt like it was some strange form of urban prostitution.

  Kathy:

  That was nervous wit, not honesty.

  Me:

  Fine.

  Kathy:

  You want permission to grieve, permission to feel all those things you should be feeling, all those things characters in the movies you watch feel. But instead you feel guilty about not having prevented all this, and now feel guilty about feeling guilty. You feel guilty about not crying, about not feeling any emotion. So much guilt.

  Me:

  I’m Jewish.