Kathy:
Not funny.
Me:
That’s just because you’re not Jewish.
Kathy:
Here’s my suggestion. Find articles online, or pictures even, relating to the attack. Look at them, look at them and think, “I didn’t do this.” Say it over and over again until you believe it. It may take minutes, may take hours, may not work at all, but it’s worth a try.
Me:
Why do I want to do this?
Kathy:
For anger. The anger you feel toward yourself, which we’ll call guilt, needs to be re-directed toward those who actually did this. It’s an opening, a cognitive trick which I hope will release you from the burden of responsibility and help you realize emotionally the stakes of your story. I know it may sound strange, but it’s worth a try. The self-blame has paralyzed you – your belief in it has paralyzed you and continues to generate anxiety responses, the manifestations of which you complain of – shortness of breath, insomnia. You believe you are responsible for the attack. You believe you did it by failing to mention the dangers. And every time you think it, even if you don’t realize you’re thinking it, it’s causing debilitating symptoms. Our goal is to change your thought from “I did this,” which is not even a conscious thought but is nonetheless wreaking psychological havoc, to “I didn’t do this.” If we can change your thinking, we might change how you relate to your story. That’s the theory I’m going with, anyway.
Me:
But I blame God, too. I’d rather play that guy.
Kathy:
Let’s stick with blaming yourself for now.
Me:
Okay.
That night, I went home and, for some reason, heeded the doctor’s advice after Jamie fell asleep, turning on the computer and rolling a chair to the screen, where I searched for articles, wanting information, data – impersonal bits of dry, formulaic exposition. And I found them: archived pieces chronicling the attack, the destruction, the numbers maimed, killed, missing. Remembering the phrase – I didn’t do this – I began uttering it repetitively while monitoring myself: Do I feel anything yet? Reading sentences, repeating the phrase, I took internal readings: Nope, nothing yet. The thought arose that perhaps I was trying too hard, that such emotions couldn’t be forced. It had to be a natural, organic process. So I tried scanning the articles free of motivation, free of expectations, and became obsessed with my approach, couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering if I was doing the exercise naturally, correctly: Am I doing this right? Flummoxed, I moved from words to pictures, unsure what I was looking for or how to go about absorbing whatever it was that lay in wait for me to find. Most newspapers had archived photos of the attack, the majority of which depicted the physical wreckage – the beams bent, the ceiling collapsed. Occasionally, there was a photo of random people sitting, blood running down a forehead or streaked across a face, people looking dazed. None of them did anything for me, despite my mumbling, “I didn’t do this,” to which I sniped back occasionally, “No fucking shit, genius,” the sarcasm skipping a needle working hard to detect something deep in the grooves, circling back on itself, going nowhere.
Then, a disturbing thought came to me. Maybe I should look for Jamie. Maybe if I see her, saying “I didn’t do this” will work. But I couldn’t find an image of her, and her absence elicited a per verse new distress as I scanned countless pictures, hoping to find her face, hoping to find an archived, imagistic record of history. Something capable of proving that all of this had happened. That it was real.
The psychological experiment was failing badly.
Me:
Is that anger? No, just frustration. You’re frustrated about not finding a photograph of your injured wife so you can say, “I didn’t do this,” because your therapist told you to do so, because you don’t already know it.
Me:
You realize you’re looking for photos of your wife, injured. And you’re mumbling.
Me:
I know. You think I’ve lost it, don’t you, that all this is crazy.
Me:
Actually, I think it’s comical, all of it. You should see it from where I’m sitting, over here. All this manic activity. And the irony piled on, that thing you keep saying, having the opposite effect.
Me:
This isn’t funny, you fuck.
Me:
Was that anger? That’s anger. Well done.
Me:
I’m talking with myself. I’m mad at you. Meaning me. Meaning it doesn’t count.
Me:
Now that’s funny.
Me:
Go away.
I should have stepped away from the computer, the experiment ruined by my hyper self-awareness, by my biased attempt to skew the outcome, the failure proving that the experimenter should never double as the subject. Superimposing a mantra on my psyche was clearly not going to work, but I refused to give up, just as I had refused with Noa’s pacifier. So I moved to Google’s image search, which brought me to an Israeli site housed by the Foreign Ministry that, unbeknownst to me at the time, collects photographs taken by Israeli investigators from every terrorist attack ever perpetrated against civilians. Evidence of war, of injustice, of the Garden not yet attained. For posterity.
Realizing what I had stumbled upon, I swallowed, then clicked, and clicked again. I typed in the words Hebrew University, and froze. I wasn’t prepared. Wasn’t prepared for the image that appeared. An image of bodies covered partially by black bags and scattered in close proximity. Some faces were exposed. Others shielded. The picture had been taken from above at some distance, most likely from the cafeteria’s roof. One of the bodies, sprawled on its back, only had the face covered. That’s Ben, I thought. His body was large, distinctive. I knew. The mouse in my hand gripped tightly. Looking at him, lying on the ground, dead. Why is this online? Why is his head covered? This shouldn’t be here.
I am still uncomfortable with what happened next. For an hour, I looked at these images from the attack that had been archived by the State of Israel, scrolling, copying, and pasting pictures into a graphics program, zooming in, trying to identify my friends, to know for sure that, yes, That’s her, That’s him, that they hadn’t simply disappeared.
Maybe it was an unhealthy dedication to the task at hand, a deranged, focused attempt at trying to evoke something, to open an emotional well and produce some cognitive surge within. Looking at the bodies, knowing my wife could have easily been among them, I thought, I didn’t do this. Copied. I didn’t do this. Pasted. I didn’t do this. Enhanced, zoomed in on hair, on the legs, on the shape of things. I didn’t do this.
By the time I had closed the graphics program, deleted the pictures, and shut down the computer, it was nearing dawn, a pinkish haze beginning to illuminate the Washington Monument’s tip miles to the south. The refrain, I didn’t do this, was etched in my mind, the idea of self-blame branded there alongside those images of partially covered bodies sprawled on the campus cobblestones.
Rising, I reflexively searched for the nut pulled from Jamie’s intestine, which had been placed in a backpack not long after her surgery and forgotten. I found the black bag, made by Swiss Army, stuffed in the closet. After pulling it out, I reached in and felt around for the nut. It was still there, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag.
I thought about its trajectory: made somewhere in Israel, bought in Jerusalem, taken to Ramallah, placed in a bomb which was placed in a backpack which was placed in a cafeteria at Hebrew University on July 31, 2002, then thrown into my wife’s body by the force of a remotely-detonated blast, removed by surgeons and dropped in a plastic container, handed to me, taken out in a hospital bathroom, scrubbed with shaking hands, placed in a plastic bag, then transported to Washington, and forgotten. Until now.
The nut had once been hexagonal, but now one side was caved in, giving it the shape of a half moon, except that the concave side bent by the blast was jagged, with two of the hexagonal sides formi
ng teeth, a wicked smile. A jack-o’-lantern’s mouth. All Hallows’ Eve. The nut’s original purpose – tightening – was still apparent in the threads winding within it, while two sides on the unbent portion, the portion that must have been facing outward, away from the explosives, were smooth and angled perfectly at 60°. But the smile was scored, rough, the bent edges sharp, capable of drawing blood. And despite its size, the metal had an impressive heaviness to it, a denseness exposed by gravity’s jilted pull when lifted, when rolled around between the thumb and pointer finger.
Taking it out of the plastic bag, placing the nut between my fingers, I tried to squeeze it, to bend the steel back, to change the shape of things, make it round, whole, wondering how something so solid could be rendered malleable in the flash of an instant, nauseated by an explosion that could achieve such power.
But then I thought that, perhaps, I was overestimating things, giving the blast too much credit. Maybe the nut, rather than bending from the combustion-induced torque, bounced off of something hard before finding Jamie. Maybe it first hit the floor, a wall, the table’s synthetic surface. Maybe it wasn’t bent by the mere force of heat and release when the bomb exploded, as I’d always assumed, as though how it bent mattered, as though it changed anything. Regardless, it felt like a revelation, this thought – maybe the nut hit something first.
A few days after Jamie’s surgery, I had finally opened the lid of the plastic container in a hospital bathroom and pulled out the nut. There was a fine, transparent film covering the crooked hole, a dried, plastic-like layer of organic material – some hardened fluid from Jamie’s body. I swallowed. Then, I ran the nut under hot water, scrubbing it vigorously, hoping to remove everything stuck between the threads, wedged in the smile’s teeth.
After cleaning the nut, I put it in a pocket, held on to it, despite the memories it elicited, because it was the first thing I could wrap my fingers around and think, This is something. Everything else was ozone, air disappearing.
11
During our next session, Kathy was eager to receive word on how things had gone regarding my in vivo “I didn’t do this” experiment.
Kathy:
So, how are things?
Me:
Your homework assignment sucked.
Kathy:
Excuse me?
I explained how it hadn’t worked – explained the copying and pasting and deranged zooming in on bodies sprawled along the ground, the manipulation of images. She pivoted in her office chair and reached into a drawer, dragging out cords and electronic dials. After she’d finally untangled everything, she tossed over two plastic knobs attached by wires to what looked like an antiquated game controller resting on her desk.
Kathy:
Have you ever heard of EMDR?
Me:
Unfortunately. Jamie’s told me a little about it.
Kathy:
Well, we’re going to try something different.
Me:
So you’re not preparing to shock me with all those electronics, right?
Kathy:
No, nothing like that. We’re just going to use some physical stimulation alongside our cognitive work, since it appears you had a bit of trouble correcting how you think about your trauma narrative when you were on your own.
Me:
So no zaps or shocks?
Kathy:
No, this won’t be painful. It’s bi-lateral stimulation. Just vibrations and sounds that might help “massage” your synapses as we talk.
She handed me pair of headphones, put two plastic knobs in my hands – a tiny L and R printed on each one – and ignited the machine. High-frequency beeps softly alternated between my ears while the plastic knobs buzzed in synchronicity. L: beep-buzz. R: beep-buzz. It felt as though I was being given a hearing test while holding a couple of agitated hornets. I was immediately incredulous. This commotion was supposed to correct my trauma narrative? This is what had granted Jamie magical results?
Me:
What in the world?
Kathy:
You can adjust the level of vibration with the dial there. You see it?
Me:
Yeah.
Kathy:
How’s the volume? The beeps should be faint, but audible.
Me:
Yeah, they’re good. But –
Kathy:
Great. So let’s start by quickly outlining your trauma narrative again.
Me:
Again? I’m kind of tired of telling it –
Kathy:
Yes, again.
Jamie was eager to see EMDR work its therapeutic magic on me. But her hopeful expectations only complicated matters, for while I was afraid to disappoint her, I also knew that significant results would not be forthcoming.
“I just don’t believe in it,” I confessed one evening, returning home after yet another lukewarm session.
“You just have to give it a chance. Can’t you pretend to believe?”
“I’m too self-conscious. It’s obvious what’s going on while it’s happening, and I can’t take it seriously. Today, I was supposed to convince myself that there aren’t any terrorists lurking around in our lives, and that I don’t have to protect you from anything anymore, as if I didn’t already know this. That’s what I kept thinking: You already know this.”
“Maybe you don’t know it.”
“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I do. The point is it’s just too obvious, the whole approach.”
“It’s as though you don’t want it to work,” she said.
“You know, they say the more intelligent you are, the more difficult it is for this type of stuff to work. That’s probably the problem.”
Jamie sighed heavily – the sarcasm failing to distract this woman too sharp to be sidetracked by such nonsense. “Don’t you think it’s helped some?” she asked.
In truth, it had, to a degree. The physical symptoms – the suffocating and insomnia – had dissipated somewhat, though not entirely. And fatherhood had improved substantially. Despite this, it was clear that my most persistent, deeply seated anxieties had not been rooted out by therapy, as evidenced by some transparently absurd displays of hyper-vigilance. One moment, everything would be fine; the next, I’d be driving to Wal-Mart at midnight for mouse traps or a smoke detector – whatever item that moment called for in order to keep everyone I loved from dying.
Yes, there was more work to be done. But I was done with therapy, and informed Kathy that the time had come to say goodbye, using finances as an excuse, unable to justify the money we were spending given the modest salary I earned as a high school teacher in one of America’s most expensive cities.
And while I kept telling myself that hyper-vigilance was part of becoming a father, was an evolutionary imperative, the evidence continued to stack up against me.
Exhibit A: The Toilet Lock: When our daughter morphed from a cute, stationary blob into an agile crawler, our small, one-bedroom apartment revealed itself to be a hazardous minefield. Everything was dangerous: the coffee table corners capable of knocking a teetering baby unconscious; the shelves, which were poised to topple over with one good yank; the cords running from our lamps and other electrical devices waiting to wrap themselves around an unsuspecting neck.
Determined to defend my child from the persistent dangers the world now presented, I found myself open-mouthed, purposefully yawning, in the safety section of Babies “R” Us. There were outlet guards, cabinet latches, table-corner pads, window-blind-cord wind-ups, floor electrical-cord concealers, shelf and armoire tension-cable mounts, baby gates, and toilet locks. Everything displayed was manufactured by Safety 1st, the market seemingly cornered by this outfit branded with a phrase routinely intoned by fire-fighters and cops visiting classes of fidgeting but impressionable kindergarteners.
Safety first, I thought, nodding obediently, buying one of each.
At home, Jamie seemed genuinely grateful as I crawled around our living room floor, lining the wa
lls with plastic tubes (cord concealers), adhering transparent buffers to the coffee table (corner pads), and unscrewing the outlet covers to be replaced with bulky, box-like structures that opened with a latch and hid electrical plugs from wandering hands (outlet guards). Then, I pulled it out.
“What’s that?” Jamie asked.
“A toilet lock.”
“A what?”
“A toilet lock. It’s to lock the toilet.”
“Why are we locking our toilet?”
“It’s a drowning hazard.”
Jamie looked at me incredulously. “You think Noa is going to drown in our toilet?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she could crawl in there. It’s possible. Otherwise they wouldn’t make this locking thing.”
“Why don’t we just close the door when we’re not in the bathroom?”
“Yeah, but what if we forget?”
“You’re seriously going to lock our toilet.”
“Yeah.”
“How does it work?”
“I have no idea,” I said, pulling it from the package and reading the instructions. “There’s this swinging arm, which is designed to spring over the closed toilet.” I held up a plastic rod.
“How do you attach it?”
“It looks like I have to take off the toilet seat and screw it between the seat and the cover.”
Jamie rolled her eyes and left the room as I disassembled the toilet and installed the lock. When I’d finished, I product-tested it, closing and opening the toilet, watching the arm magically lock over the lid when it was closed. I invited Jamie in to admire my handiwork.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 11