Fade to Black - Proof

by Jeffrey Wilson

  “That was it,” Jack answered, uncertain what else to say.

  “You woke up?” Lewellyn watched him, but his expression remained soft and sympathetic.

  “Yeah, sort of, I guess.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “Well,” Jack was unsure how to explain it, “I mean I woke up, but I was confused. I wasn’t sure where I was. I wasn’t even sure who I was. I mean, I think I knew who Pam was—”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yeah, I mean I knew it was Pam, but I didn’t know who the hell I was. For a moment, I mean. I was scared, terrified really. I fell out of bed. The room seemed unfamiliar. It scared the shit out me. And something else.”

  Jack paused again. He was going into scary territory now, but he was more afraid of keeping things back than he was that David Lewellyn might think he was crazy. He had to get help, had to know what the hell was wrong with him. He needed this classy but seemingly compassionate man’s help. He needed help to make this shit stop.

  “Well,” he began, “it was like part of me was still there, you know, still in Fallujah. Like the ceiling seemed to be missing—”

  “What do you mean missing?”

  Jack felt more frightened than ever. He had forced his mind away from these thoughts the last week. This was the stuff that felt crazy. But it was too late to stop, so he continued.

  “Well, I looked up, and I could see sky, you know, instead of a ceiling. And I could still hear shouting. And gunfire.”

  Dr. Lewellyn considered this for a moment and jotted something in his notebook. Then he looked up again.

  “How long did that last?”

  Jack thought a moment. “Just a few minutes, I think, maybe even seconds, I’m not sure. Then the ceiling just kind of, I don’t know, filled in or something. Maybe I was still kind of half asleep?” He desperately wanted some reassurance.

  “That’s not really very unusual,” Lewellyn said, crossing his legs again. “Sometimes when we awaken from a really terrifying dream, it lingers in our mind. It can be very distressing.”

  “Terrifying,” Jack corrected.

  “I’m sure,” Dr. Lewellyn agreed. “Go on. What happened next?”

  “Pam was scared.”

  Lewellyn nodded and started writing again.

  “She was crying on the floor beside me. I had a cut on my head that was bleeding a little. She didn’t know what the hell was wrong. Then Claire—”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Yeah, our little girl. She started crying and I was better.”

  “What do you mean better?”

  Jack thought a moment. What did he mean? Better how? He was himself again, he thought. He was Jack, and not Casey Stillman.

  “I sort of figured out who I was—and where. Her cry—I knew it was Claire, and it just sort of, I don’t know, oriented me or something.” Jack was tired. He felt perspiration on his forehead. The telling had taken a lot out of him, and he had a long way to go. There was the incident in the school lounge when he had seen the report on the news. There was fucking Simmons and his two ghastly visits to him. He had been awake for those for sure, hadn’t he? How could he explain that, a dead Marine visiting him at work? There was the bloody bathroom, and the tooth. Mostly there was the calling, the pull he felt, to go back to his Marines in Fallujah.

  Come back, Sar’n. You belong here with us.

  Jack doubted he had the energy to go on. He looked up and saw that Dr. Lewellyn was watching him patiently. He said nothing, but held the doctor’s gaze, wondered if the fear and desperation were obvious in his eyes. The doctor leaned back in his chair.

  “Can we switch gears a second?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Jack answered, relieved. “But there is some other stuff. Strange things…” Jack’s voice trembled again, and he felt tears well up again in his eyes.

  “I’m sure, Jack,” Dr. Lewellyn said softly. “And we’ll get to all that. I want to talk about your family a moment. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. He felt more like a passenger now, an observer as this kind man worked to twist the top off of his head and peer in. Dr. Lewellyn stood up and placed his leather folder in his chair.

  “What else do you have going on today, Jack?” he asked as he walked over to his desk.

  “I took another sick day,” Jack answered. “I’m yours as long as you need.” He tried to screw a smile onto his face, but failed. “I just want this shit to stop.” Another tear spilled out onto his cheek and wound its way to his chin, where he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  Dr. Lewellyn picked up the phone on his desk and called his receptionist to clear the next hour, as well. Then he came back to his chair and handed Jack a small box of Kleenex, squeezing his shoulder as he passed. He resumed his position and opened his notebook, getting his pen to the ready.

  “Tell me a little about your family, Jack,” he said.

  And Jack did. He didn’t know how long he talked, was unsure if he could even summarize what he had said. He painted a picture of Pam, his one true love, and the powerful force her love had been in his life. He talked about her unconditional support, how he felt most like himself only when he was with her, how he believed he was a better person because they were together. He talked about their ability to communicate with just a look from across a room. And how they could spend an entire afternoon, just sitting and talking about nothing and everything, and have more fun than he thought most people had on a Caribbean vacation.

  “She is really everything to me,” he concluded.

  Then he talked about his little Claire Bear, his joy, the physical product of his love for Pam. He found himself telling stories like a proud dad, going on and on, and apologized.

  “Don’t be silly, Jack. It sounds like you have a wonderful family and a very healthy, loving relationship with Pam.” The psychologist was smiling.

  “I’m very lucky. I know that.” Jack wiped another tear from his cheek, unsure why the hell he was crying now. “I feel bad that I’ve kept some of this from her.”

  “What have you kept from her?” the psychologist asked.

  “Well,” Jack paused. “The bad stuff. I mean, some of the things we haven’t talked about yet.” Dr. Lewellyn nodded as if he understood and jotted something in his notebook. Jack thought again of how he was afraid to tell Pam about Simmons visiting him at school, of his “breakdown,” and meeting with Stuart Anderson and the school nurse. Worse, he thought about his lie about the nightmare on the couch the day before, seeing the bloody bathroom and Simmons in the backyard.

  “Can we talk about the war in Iraq for a minute?” Lewellyn asked.

  “Yes,” Jack said, but he felt his stomach flip. “But I really think I should tell you about some other things—some very disturbing things. You asked why I felt compelled to come in today. Well, these other things, these things that happen when I am awake, are the reason.” Jack realized he was pleading. He had come in unsure if he could even talk to this stranger, and now he was begging to tell him the most frightening part. Once he had opened it up, he had to get it out, like draining pus from an abscess.

  Dr. Lewellyn pursed his lips and thought a moment.

  “Ok, Jack. Let’s talk about the things you see when you’re awake.”

  So Jack spoke again without pause, except in response to Dr. Lewellyn’s occasional, “Hold on, Jack.” He told his story in as much detail as he could recall, his voice cracking at times, tears running down his face again. He spoke freely, holding nothing back, interjecting at times his emotional responses—not just his terror, but his feeling of connection to these men he felt he really knew. He talked of his desperate need to tune into the news, hoping to catch the names of the men who had died in the street in Fallujah, and his haunting belief that he would know not only the names, but also the faces. Bennet, Kindrich. Simmons, and of course, Sergeant Casey Stillman. He talked fondly of his men and gave some of the details of their lives. He spoke of his p
articular fondness for Simmons, the carefree boy from Albany. He (or Casey) had taken Simmons under his wing, hoping to train him to be a truly tough and career-oriented Marine. Then he cried when he again relived the visits from Simmons, and the way he had been calling him to come back to them, to his men, his Marines. He talked of the bizarre guilt he felt that he was not there.

  When he was done, he laid his head against the back of the leather couch, exhausted again. He looked at his watch and was amazed to see that he had been talking for over an hour. He looked at Dr. Lewellyn, who was flipping back through many pages of notes in his tidy leather notebook. Jack said nothing more as the psychologist reviewed what he had told him. He had expected to feel great anxiety about what the doctor would think. Instead, Jack felt only a tired sense of relief that he had gotten the story out—he had purged himself in some way. He closed his tired eyes and waited.

  Finally he opened his eyes in response to the sound of Lewellyn setting his leather-bound collection of Jack’s madness on the wood and marble table. Dr. Lewellyn’s warmth masking any judgments he might have formulated.

  “Would you like something to drink, Jack?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Jack answered quietly.

  “Coke okay?”

  “Great,” Jack answered, though he really preferred Sprite.

  Dr. Lewellyn walked stiffly over to a small refrigerator next to his desk and got two cans of soda out. He walked back and handed one to Jack, then took his seat, sipping his own soda as he did. He sat quietly for a moment, apparently thinking about where to go next in his evaluation. Jack drank deeply from his own can and realized his throat was dry as a bone. The first swallow burned as it went down. Then he waited patiently.

  After a few minutes Dr. Lewellyn looked at Jack and smiled.

  “What do you think of the war in Iraq, Jack?”

  Jack felt confused by the question.

  “What do I think?”

  “Yeah,” Lewellyn said, setting his Coke on the table. “What do you think? Are we right to be there?”

  “Well, it’s not really for me to decide,” Jack answered without thinking. “I mean, we follow orders. The commander in chief makes the call. We’re there as a force to project his policy.”

  Lewellyn considered this a moment.

  “Jack, who in your family is in the military?”

  “No one,” Jack answered. “My dad was in the army in the early seventies, but never went to Vietnam. My mom was always home with us.”

  “Do you have any close friends in the military? Anyone you know who is over in Iraq? Have you ever considered a military career?”

  “No,” Jack answered honestly. It felt funny somehow, like it wasn’t quite true, but he didn’t know why.

  Lewellyn considered this for a moment. Then he did something else that surprised Jack and made him a bit uncomfortable. He got up and sat on the couch beside Jack, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He rubbed his face. Jack was again overcome by how familiar he looked. Then the psychologist put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You’re not crazy, Jack.” he said plainly. “You know that, right?”

  Jack shifted uncomfortably again. He sure as shit did not know that. It was, at the moment, his biggest fear other than falling asleep or seeing a dead Marine in his backyard.

  “I guess,” he said. “Doc, I just want this to stop. I feel like it is driving me crazy. And it’s killing Pam, too.” His voice was pleading.

  God, please make this stop.

  “I know, Jack,” Lewellyn said, confidence in his voice. “And we will. We’ll stop it together.” He leaned back on the couch beside him and stretched out his back. Then he looked at him again. “Jack, Barton is right. You do have a terrible stress disorder, like PTSD that soldiers get after combat. I don’t know why,” he said honestly, causing Jack to grimace, “but we’ll figure it out. Together.”

  Dr. Lewellyn got up and headed for his desk where he grabbed a piece of paper from a book like a prescription pad.

  “Jack, if you can take another day off I would like you to come back tomorrow at ten a.m. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.” Jack answered, his voice nervous but full of hope. Dr. Lewellyn handed him a slip of paper and Jack looked at it. It was an appointment card.

  “In the meantime, I’m going to phone Jim Barton and ask him to call in a prescription for you. It’ll help you sleep and you shouldn’t have any nightmares, okay?”

  Jack sighed heavily, visibly relieved and closed his eyes. “Thank God,” he said.

  “Now the only problem is it’s likely to make you feel a little hung over in the morning, okay? You’ll sleep, but you won’t dream much, and that’ll make you feel poorly rested.”

  “No problem,” Jack said enthusiastically. He didn’t care if he got cancer from the damn thing, as long as he didn’t go back to Fallujah, riding in the body of a dying Marine. Jack thanked the doctor profusely, shook his hand, and then picked up his insurance card from the receptionist and left. In the hall he leaned back against the wall and felt tears well up again, though he was unsure why. He cried quietly in the hall for a few minutes, then collected himself and headed for the elevator.

  He was going to be all right. David Lewellyn would help him, and he would be fine.

  As the doors closed on the elevator, Jack felt the tug of familiarity again. He definitely knew this guy, but had no idea from where.

  Chapter

  12

  The pill worked. Whether by placebo effect, or by activating—or inactivating—some chemical pathway in his brain, Jack didn’t know or care. After an awkward evening where he promised his crying wife that the psychologist would be able to make everything all right, Jack slept without dreaming. When he woke up he still felt tired and had a vague headache, but those side effects did little to diminish the relief he felt that another night had passed without a visit to his personal purgatory. He found himself stiff and uncomfortable in the same position he last remembered from the night before.

  Jack lay beside his sleeping wife, lost in thought. The sigh of her breathing had an amazing and calming effect on him. He lay beside her, stroked her hair, and thought again about his meeting with Dr. Lewellyn. He decided he trusted him, that he liked his easy style and the way he let Jack lead the conversation. He still felt anxious and unsure, still terrified truth be known, but he was also filled with hope. If a few more painful and emotional hours with the psychologist would help him put all this behind him, it was well worth it.

  As he lay there, he let his mind drift back to the images of Fallujah. He tried to let the pictures from his dreams unfold like a remembered movie. He tried to pick out some detail he had missed, which might give him a satisfying “Ah-ha!” of insight as to the root cause of his nightmare. He thought a lot about Dr. Lewellyn’s words, that they could find what caused his obsessive thoughts about a war seven thousand miles away, and that the insight might help him make it stop. True, he was horrified by the images of the war that came via the talking heads into his safe and quiet world, but weren’t millions of others? He hadn’t seen many of them chasing visiting corpses down the halls of the neighborhood school. Why did he feel so personally connected to all this? He came up with nothing, but he was haunted again by the unsettling feeling that he was indeed a part of it somehow; that it owned him. He belonged there for some reason.

  Come back, Sar’n. You belong here with us. We need you.

  Jack shuddered. Simmons’ words—young Simmons from Albany. Jack closed his eyes and let his hand run over Pam’s warm, soft shoulder. She stirred and sighed.

  The evening had been difficult for Jack, but worse, he sensed it had been a strain on Pam, as well. She needed some reassurance that he had been unable to give her. He told her in very general terms of his meeting with Dr. Lewellyn. He shared with her what he had told him about his dreams and his obsession with the news. He emphasized Lewellyn’s confidence that he could help with Jack’s “stress disorder.” Jack
cringed as he imagined their next meeting starting with “so, tell me about your mother…were you breast fed?”

  Pam didn’t ask for more and seemed content that there was hope in this Dr. Lewellyn, but Jack was sure it must bother her that there were things he didn’t share. His description of the meeting fell way short of accounting for the intense three hours he was with the doctor. Jack wrestled with a heavy guilt that he didn’t share more with the woman with whom he had shared everything, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk with her about his breakdown at school, or worse, his visits from Simmons. If Lewellyn thought he was crazy, so be it. It was his job, if he thought that, to fix it. But there was no way he could bear the thought that his wife might begin to believe that her husband had slipped the chains of reason and gone over the edge, into some pit of madness. So he kept that part to himself, despite the fact that he needed his wife’s support now more than ever. He had never kept anything from Pam—not ever.

  Jack rolled over now and wrapped his arm tightly around his wife’s waist and hugged her. The smell of her hair and the feel of her against him filled him with peace and joy, as they had since the day they first lay down together.

  “I love you so much, Pam,” he said, soaking in the warmth of her.

  She squeezed his arm gently.

  “I love you too, baby,” she said sleepily. “I’m so proud of you.”

  Jack held her like that for a long time and watched as the pale light through the window grew into an orange sunrise. Then he slipped quietly from their bed. He padded softly down the hall in his bare feet to Claire’s room and stood beside her crib. He watched her beautiful face as she slept in the growing morning light. He loved his little girl so much, and he felt happy tears run down his cheeks as he watched her. How could he ever bear to be apart from his girls? How did those young Marines possibly stand the separation from family, and the fear of never seeing them again? He didn’t think he could ever do it. If he was ever separated from his girls he could never give up on getting back to them, no matter what it took.