For Angel
1.
The typical nightmare ends with the victim shooting bolt-upright in bed and trying to orient himself to his surroundings as the dream he just escaped melts away. Mine didn’t end that like that. I woke up but didn’t sit up; au contraire, I awoke in a prone position and stayed that way, hollering at the top of my lungs, panicked but motionless. Whatever had happened in my dream, I took it lying down. So while I may have been less than a lion in real life, in my nightmares I was a complete pussy.
“Kevin! Wake up!”
Allie, my wife. She shook me vigorously, either trying to shake me awake or shake me to death so I would shut the hell up. I opened my eyes and quickly catalogued everything around me. My bedroom, my senses said. A hand on my shoulder, not a claw. My wife, not the enemy. My house. I’d had a bad dream. Nothing to see here, nothing to look at, all’s well, sorry for the interruption, carry on.
I stopped yelling. I lay still for a moment and stared into the master bathroom before flipping over and pressing my face into Allie’s chest. Her warm skin smelled like lavender. She held me as my heart rate returned to normal and confusion and terror yielded to understanding and shame.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Silence. Then:
“What was it about?”
“You know,” I replied.
I let her hold me for a long time, because it felt good and she smelled good and I needed pleasant things just then. She made it easier to resist the urge to remember my dream. My mind likes to pick at scabs. Left to its own devices, it wouldn’t rest until it made me unhappy again.
“I think you need to see somebody,” she said.
“I’m just nervous about doing the show,” I replied, still talking to her chest. I intended to keep my face there until she forcibly evicted me. “Stage fright. It’ll pass.”
“This is more than stage fright.” She pushed me back so she could look at me. My recent behavior had dug deep lines of concern into her face. “You need help.”
“I need to drink more and work less.”
“You should go see Tom’s friend, the psychologist. You shouldn’t have to go through this.”
“I don’t need a shrink,” I said, pulling away.
“Okay, Kevin, I need for you to see Tom’s psychologist friend. I shouldn’t have to go through this.”
Tom Spicer, the Spicer in Carwood, Allison, Spicer and York, P.A., held a certain amount of influence over me. I had practiced with the firm for ten good years. Maybe not so good the last six months, but the nine and a half years before those had earned me enough brownie points that my personality issues resulted in a cautious referral to a shrink instead of a Go Work Somewhere Else meeting with the equity partners. Tom had given me a business card and said: Talk to this guy right here. You can trust him.
He had given me the card two days ago. I hadn’t called the number on it yet.
“I don’t like seeing you like this,” she said. “It’s not right.”
I snuggled back up to her. “I can handle it,” I said into her chest.
“But I can’t. I need this to be over. We need this to be over. And it can’t be over until this stops. Not really.”
I inhaled her scent. The nightmare seemed far away now, the mindless terror a distant memory. My heart rate fell. I remembered Abby as a tiny baby, how Allie would hold her just like she was holding me and how she would first stop fussing, then stop moving and then fall totally asleep. Maybe it was the smoothness of her skin or the steady heartbeat beneath it; either way, Allie’s presence reached a place inside me that nothing else could, an elemental control panel where she could slow my heart or speed it up at will.
She kissed the crown of my head.
“You’re still my hero, you know,” she murmured. “Getting help isn’t going to change that.”
I was falling asleep now. “Mmmhmm.”
“You won. You did it. Now it’s time to clean everything up, okay?”
“Mmhmm.”
“So you’ll call that number in the morning?”
“First thing,” I mumbled.
She continued to hold me until I fell out of the world again. This time, I had no nightmares.
2.
In early February of this year, I shot and killed two men in my home. I call them “men” only because I understand that I’m supposed to do that. They had two arms and two legs and walked upright and had opposable thumbs; everybody else called them men. Me? I didn’t think two arms and two legs made somebody a man any more than the absence of a carapace and antennae made him not a cockroach.
“Quit calling them ‘roaches,’ okay?” Craig Montero, who had become my coworker, then my friend and finally my attorney, had advised me of this before I ever talked to the press. “No ‘vermin,’ either, or ‘rats’ or ‘snakes’ or anything like that. You’re an innocent homeowner forced to defend his castle and his family. You didn’t want to kill these guys; you had to. You are deeply saddened and traumatized by what these men forced you to do. Your sympathy goes out to their families.”
“I am deeply saddened and traumatized by what these men forced me to do,” I repeated in his office, a carbon copy of my own. “My sympathy goes out to their families.”
“Don’t grin when you say it.”
“Okay.”
“That’s fucked up. It makes you look fucked up.”
“Okay.”
“Heroes don’t gloat.”
“Okay.”
“Dangerous psychopaths gloat. You’re not a dangerous psychopath.”
“Okay,” I said yet again.
And so I called them “men” to the outside world even though I didn’t believe they qualified. They entered my home through an unlocked door in my basement and found me asleep on my man-cave couch in front of the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game. They used my own softball bat to crack me over the head in an attempt to kill me, then proceeded upstairs with a little bag of goodies that included handcuffs, duct tape, rope, a knife, pretty much anything that might be useful to you and a buddy if you’re looking to rape a woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter. But, contrary to the greater weight of the evidence—see Nazi Germany vs. Humanity, (1933-1945), The Rwandan Genocide vs. Humanity, (1994)—God existed. He placed His hand between that bat and my skull. I regained consciousness a few moments later, woozy and terrified but otherwise okay. I whipped my AK-47 out of my gun safe—tucked away in my man-cave—and charged up to the ground floor, where I shot them both. They never even found the stairs.
Anyway, I became a killer that night out of necessity, and that sucked because I respected life. A divorce lawyer by trade, I had never intentionally whacked anything higher than a wasp. In my mid-twenties, I accidentally ran over a box turtle on one of the myriad back roads that crisscross southern Alamance County, North Carolina, and the experience left me so riddled with guilt that I actually had to pull over and do some deep breathing to deal with it. I sat in my car on the side of the road and thought about how if I hadn’t been screwing around with my CD player, I’d have seen the turtle and could have avoided it. I felt terrible about it then—it sucks to kill anything, but it really sucks to kill something cute—and I continued to feel bad about it long afterwards. So much so that whenever I see a turtle trying to cross the road now, I pull over and help.
But I never experienced a shred of remorse for shooting the two dildos that broke into my home. You’d think that a civilized man, an educated man, a family man like me would have felt something at having taken human life, no matter the necessity. I’d seen documentaries where veterans of various wars teared up in front of the camera over bayoneting this Nazi or napalming that North Vietna
mese, pick your former enemy. These people had trained for it, yet they cried on camera. They needed counseling.
I had to have Craig Montero tell me not to grin.
My brother Bobby had an explanation for this.
“You’re a hard son of a bitch,” he said to me over beers one time in the wake of the shooting. A Marine and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bobby was a logical choice for me to consult regarding my feelings about taking lives. “I never thought I’d say that, but there you go. You’re a hard son of a bitch.”
I appreciated that, because Bobby was a hard son of a bitch himself. And now, instead of calling me a chairborne commando, a REMF (Rear-Echelon Mother Fucker) or something more prosaic—like pencil-pushing pussy—my brother called me a hard son of a bitch. I liked that.
“And because you’re a hard son of a bitch, you don’t give a rat’s ass about these two guys. And think about it, dog; what were these guys going to do to Allie and Abby?”
Dog, instead of man or dude. Another thing hard sons of bitches called other men.
“Seriously, duct tape and handcuffs? After I found that shit out, I’d have gone back over and killed them again. Fuck them. And fuck anybody who thinks you should feel bad about it—including you. Listen, did you rip yourself up that time you killed the copperhead in the garage?”
There—I had intentionally killed. Five years ago, Abby found a poisonous snake coiled up beside her little pink bicycle in our garage, and I cut its head off with a shovel.
“No,” I admitted.
But at the same time, I didn’t say to Bobby then, I hadn’t felt proud of it, either. There existed now a dark truth I hadn’t related to anybody; when I thought about pulling that trigger I felt not sorrow, remorse or disgust but pride. I sat in court, in my car, on the john and thought, I’m awesome. With the twitching of my trigger finger, I cleansed mankind. I excised two bits of gangrene from the flesh of my species. A mediocre father, husband and lawyer, I finally did something not only extraordinary, not only courageous but good. I made society a better place. Whether that made me a psycho or not, that was how I felt. I wanted a parade.
So when I finally walked into Dr. Robert Koenig’s office for the first time, I actually didn’t go in there to discuss my feelings, to analyze my healing, to share my pain or anything like that; I went to brag. And to maybe figure out why, when I felt nothing but pride over this, it still gave me nightmares.
“So,” said Dr. Koenig, “are you a gun enthusiast.”
Despite the diplomas on the wall that marked him as a graduate of Emory University and the University of Georgia, he asked the question in that instantly recognizable way peculiar to those from Pennsylvania—the up-and-down of the sentence, the absence of the expected interrogatory rise at the end. Echoes, perhaps, of the German immigrants who had settled the area where he grew up. I smiled at the inflection. Allie had talked like that once, as a freshman in college there at the beginning of the years in North Carolina that would gradually eradicate her Yankee accent. When she got drunk or spent too much time around her family, it would come out again. Did you like the pot roast. Did you run into a lot of traffic there on 95.
Are you a gun enthusiast.
I answered, “I am now.”
A battered issue of Southern Rifleman, the monthly gospel of gun nuts everywhere, rested in my hands. The magazine exerted a calming effect on me; consequently, I hadn’t let go of it since coming in. This probably made me look crazy here, which was totally not my desired effect. My dark hair, thinning but still there, poked this way and that in a fashionable mess that required a dab of gel and almost a whole minute of teasing to perfect. The suit I had worn today remained hung on a body from which all unnecessary fat had melted over the preceding months. I had always been handsome—hey, man, I can’t lie—and at thirty-six, the weight loss only enhanced this. I looked good, I thought. Felt good, too. Not at all like a man who should clutch a gun magazine like some kind of redneck security blanket.
I forced myself to lay it in my lap. The coffee table that stood between the Doc and I looked like a beaten refugee from a fraternity house. Scratches, cigarette burns and drink rings marred a cheap veneer surface that ruined the chord of understated luxury prevailing throughout the rest of the office. The suede couch and chair and the mahogany desk could have come from a showroom in New York or London. The conference table looked like Craftique. And among all this, here at my knees sat the furniture droppings of a passing Wal-Mart. I didn’t want my precious magazine—the trophy I had received for my good deeds—on that damn thing.
The separation of hand and Southern Rifleman lasted exactly two seconds, and then I picked it up again. I cleared my throat.
“Umm…I’m not a subscriber. Somebody told me about this, so I went to Barnes & Noble and got one. I thought maybe it’d be a good thing to show you.”
“Can I see it?”
He tacked a question mark to the end of that one. I looked down at my magazine for a moment, then forced myself to hand it over.
“What am I looking for?”
“Turn to the back. There’s this section called Heroes of the Month, where they do these write-ups of everybody who bagged a home invader since the last issue. Back page. Mine’s the first paragraph.”
He opened the magazine. The pages sounded like dry leaves as he turned them. He was a thin man, a marathon runner by appearance, with fingers almost as long and skinny as his legs. He wore jeans and a navy-blue turtleneck sweater. The narrow face and bald head perched atop the shoulders recalled Steve Jobs, the departed icon of Apple fame. He even wore little rimless glasses like Jobs and sported the same carefully-cultivated beard stubble. They could have been twins.
He located the story and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his prominent nose. I waited as he read. When he finished, he closed the magazine and handed it back to me.
I gripped it in both hands again. Realizing how crazy I looked then, I blushed and forced myself to set it down.
“See, Doc, I’m not just a Hero of the Month,” I said. “I’m a double Hero of the Month. That’s what it says. Listen, before I came in here, had you ever heard of me?”
He nodded.
“Thought so. Everybody in Burlington knows who I am now, because I’m a double Hero of the Month. I’m Kevin Swanson. I’m a bad son of a bitch, I’m a hard son of a bitch, I deserve a frigging medal. I’m on top of the world. My teenage daughter thinks I’m cool again, and my wife respects me as a man again. I have 1500 Facebook friends, up from 95 in January. I can tell you with complete sincerity that my life has never been better. Never. That’s God’s honest truth. Yet here I am in a shrink’s office. Talking to you.”
He regarded me silently, a skinny finger over his skinny lips. He appeared deep in thought, as a psychologist in session should appear—although, I realized, he could have been thinking about anything. An upcoming oil change on the Mercedes, perhaps, or whether he should get kale or spinach to go with the organic free-range chicken tonight. He looked like an intelligent man, an intellectual man, but I learned a long time ago that some people just looked thoughtful.
“Why’s that?” He asked. “Why is the double Hero of the Month in a shrink’s office, as you put it?”
“My wife wants me here,” I answered. “Tom Spicer wants me here. I’m having nightmares, so I’m not sleeping right, so I’m keeping my wife awake and showing my ass at work. I’ve told opposing counsel in at least two different cases to eat shit—not figuratively, I actually told them to eat shit and then I hung up on them—and I said the same thing to a client last week. And you don’t tell clients to eat shit. You say you disagree with their assessment, you can say you’re sorry they feel that way, but you don’t tell them to go eat shit. Especially when you charge what Carwood, Allison charges. Fortunately for me, my client reported me to Tom Spicer. She could have reported me to the Bar.”
“So why do you think the double Hero of the Month experience nightmares and person
ality issues over an action the rest of the world views as praiseworthy?”
I thought for a moment.
“Stage fright,” I said.
“Stage fright?”
“Stage fright,” I said again. “Tomorrow night, I’m going to be talking about this with somebody else. On the radio.”
3.
Ages before the shooting, I learned that I suffered from Toothpaste Syndrome. I discovered this over the summer between sixth and seventh grades, when Bobby and I enrolled in an aikido class through the parks and recreation department in Catawba County. The teacher, a short, powerfully-built retired Marine named Henry Burton—we called him “Sensei”—taught me about it my first day in the class.
“Toothpaste Syndrome occurs when the shit hits the fan and you forget everything you’ve been taught,” Sensei said. “The squeeze comes on and all your knowledge, all your training, squirts right out the top of your head. Like a tube of toothpaste.”
I remember standing there in slack jawed shock. Not just because an authority figure had said a word like “shit,” but because while Toothpaste Syndrome had afflicted me my entire life, only then did I learn that there existed a name for it. And what a perfect name! What a clever, humorous yet stunningly accurate way to describe what had happened in every crisis situation I had ever experienced! Or at least what I thought of then as a crisis situation. Throughout my life I had suffered from a noticeable inability to rise to the occasion. Fights and snarky remarks from fellow students, white trash or black trash bumping into me at the mall and glaring at me with disrespect instead of apologizing—my brain always responded to an adrenaline dump by shutting down. I could pull my hand off a hot stove but I couldn’t launch a smart comeback, lacking as I did the quick wit that came so easily to everyone else. My zingers typically arrived hours later, on the bus or in bed or in the shower, when the instant danger had subsided and I’d had time to think. I always knew what to do, what to say, hours later. When the heat came on, though, I forgot my lines.
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