by Cole McCade
“It might be,” Vin answered.
With a moan, Gabriel closed his eyes again. Vin settled to sit on the floor next to the cot with his knees drawn up, his back against the edge, and waited with Gabriel’s hand clasped in his. He would wait all night, if he had to. Until the pain passed, even if he knew—from many nights like this—that it would be only temporary, and on another night soon he would once again be here, watching Gabriel suffer and able to do nothing while his closest and only friend writhed in agony, veins standing out against the locked muscles in his arms and his teeth grinding and the pillow soaked with his sweat.
Meaningless. Everything was meaningless, when a man like Gabriel could give everything he had for the sake of others and be rewarded with nothing but this.
It felt like hours, before Gabriel’s tremors began to subside and his breaths no longer filled the garage with rushing sounds like the echoes of a storm. He fell still and quiet, his grip relaxing—and at first Vin thought he had fallen asleep, until his voice ground out from the bottom of his throat like the voice of the dead clawing up from the darkest depths.
“You know what a spider is?” Gabriel rasped. “A spider is just a man who thinks he’s clever, and catches himself in his own trap.”
CHAPTER THREE
“SO TELL ME, VINCENT,” DR. Siebel said—in his strange, dark, richly mellifluous voice, a sound like the texture of immersing one’s hands in cool, grainy black coffee grounds. Hypnotic. “What’s been on your mind?”
He started with that question every session. And every session, as Vin sat on the sleekly upholstered brown leather couch—he refused to lie down—and looked across the room at Siebel, the answer was always the same:
“Nothing.”
It wasn’t a lie.
It was just all he ever told him. Confessing to Siebel felt like confessing to the Devil; there was something off about the man, about the way he was made like a pair of sharp-honed scissors pretending to be a man: too clean, too neat, his handsomeness the sort that could cut with its edges, his uncanny height turning him from a normal man into a scarecrow full of angles and strange notions. He never quite seemed to fit into the serene backdrop of his office; the office was a room of low light and dark neutrals in glossy wood and leather, the combination of colors with shelves of books and curios and the degrees hanging on the walls meant to make the patient feel at once at ease in an unthreatening environment and confident in the doctor’s education, worldliness, and authority.
Vin never felt either of those things. He never felt anything save for a powerful curiosity about Siebel, about the strange way he vibrated about the edges like his frequency was just a few wavelengths out of tune with the room around them. His smile was as bland as featureless miles of unending sand, and something about that smile was sinister enough to keep Vin’s lips closed, his thoughts held close to his chest. He didn’t know what went in that notebook, and how much made it back to the U.S. Armed Forces, slotted into his file as a weapon to one day use against him.
Dr. Siebel was Faust’s Mephistopheles in a meticulously tailored pin-striped suit, and Vin wasn’t sure he wanted the bargain the good doctor was offering.
Yet today, as he looked over Dr. Siebel’s head at the black face of the miniature grandfather clock with its ticking gold hands marking out the minutes until he would be free…he thought of Gabriel. Gabriel asking is this hell? and Vin not having an answer, when he didn’t know what hell was anymore.
Once he’d thought to stand between the lambs of God and the gates of hell, and shelter his flock from the ways of wickedness and Satan’s wiles.
What was he now, then, if not Satan’s instrument? He’d long ago damned and defiled himself, and it was almost a sacrilege to wear his rosary, to carry the name Priest as if he still had that right. He’d shaped his identity around that single word for so long that maybe that was what was wrong with him, now.
He didn’t know who he was, and so he floated in limbo, in purgatory, being and feeling nothing at all.
Dr. Siebel folded his long fingers together, his pen laid aside. “Nothing. Every week it has been nothing. A man cannot survive on nothing.”
“Yet I do. If you can call this survival.”
“How long have you been coming here, Vincent?”
He closed his eyes. “Six months.”
“And if I ask you again what’s on your mind, what will the answer be? After six months, have you taken not one step forward?”
“No. I have not.” He looked down at his clasped hands. The only scars he never hid, when he covered himself head to toe in long-sleeved shirts and jeans, but he refused to wear gloves as if he might be ashamed of the thick ridges of his knuckles and the corded white lines carved across the backs of his palms. He’d earned those scars, paid for them in drops of blood. “Because the answer is nothing. That is the hell of it. I remember once being full—as a body is full of blood, as a lantern is full of light, as a hearth is full of flame. If I sought within myself I did not have to reach far to find laughter, joy, love, pain, loss. In the idle hours in the desert sand I thought on God, and how there could be a place for such in this world we have created. I thought on man. I thought on science. I thought on history, and the workings of life.” He lifted his gaze to the doctor, to his odd flat flinty chips of eyes, not quite black but not quite gray either, the line between iris and pupil blurred and fading. “I have always wanted to know the way a heart works, Dr. Siebel,” Vin murmured. “But I have lost the ability to observe my own.”
“I see.” Then the pen was in his hand, scratching away at the pad, gripped in the tips of claw-like nails; Dr. Siebel’s nails were oddly gray, almost silver, and curved toward blunted points, thick and strangely out of sorts with his otherwise fastidious appearance. Vin watched those nails click against the pen’s barrel with a puzzled fascination; were they the key to understanding what went on behind that waxy, strange mask of a face, to knowing what secrets this man possessed that let him see into others and find the keys they had lost to the depths of their souls? So absorbed was he that he almost missed the doctor continuing, “Seeing ourselves is often the hardest, especially when PTSD clouds our vision. Many PTSD sufferers exhibit a form of dissociation, bordering on depersonalization and derealization. A separation from the self, as it were, classed in the same orders as dissociative identity disorder and yet without creating a separate personality. Only detaching from the existing self. Have you—”
“Do not call me that.”
Dr. Siebel arched a brow—a slow, oddly calculated movement. “Call you what?”
“A sufferer,” Vin said. His jaw ached, and he realized he was grinding his teeth so hard pain shot up into the bone. “That is a word for a helpless victim.”
He forced his jaw to unlock, and looked away, toward the window. The curtains—a soft, muted gold—turned the light into a fine shower of dust with weight and texture. Once, long ago, he would have seen such a thing and thought of God’s light coming down to touch the earth, a small piece of the radiance of Heaven bathing the mortal world in its glow.
Now, he just thought those were tacky fucking curtains that belonged back in the seventies where they came from.
He pressed his lips together and forced his mind back on track. “Being helpless means I have given up.”
“You haven’t, then?”
I do not know, Vin thought—but that, too, was another thing he couldn’t say aloud. “Not yet,” he hedged.
“That’s good. That’s a step.” The pen scratched busily, before Dr. Siebel lifted his head, looking at Vin over the rims of reflective glasses. “Now,” he said softly, something pointed in his cultured voice. “Let’s talk about these fantasies you’ve been having.”
“Fantasies.” Vin spat the word. “That implies that I want them. That I want these thoughts. This violence, this blood painting the inside walls of my mind, these terrible dark images everywhere I look.” He leaned back in the chair, meeting those flinty
, strange eyes. What did Dr. Siebel see, when he looked at him? A broken man, or a monster straining at his leash? Or something else entirely, some kind of experimental subject only waiting to be nurtured into a beast? “I am angry. That is all these thoughts are. I am angry, and I subconsciously wish to punish someone for what was done to me—but my captors are dead, and that leaves me searching, seeking, without a target.”
Dr. Siebel inclined his head with a small quirk of his lips. “Pscyhoanalyzing yourself, now?”
“I have little else to do to fill the time.”
“Have you given more thought to what type of employment you’d like to find?”
“I have given it thought, but what use am I?” Vin shook his head. “Gabriel—my friend, my brother—”
“Yes. You have spoken often of this blood bond you feel with Mr. Hart.”
“—seeks to find his way in mundane things. He has bought an abandoned garage, and says that one day he will make something of it. Yet he only languishes, falling into the dark. Am I to do the same? Pick some pet project that will become my coffin while I lie there and wait to die?” Vin curled his lip. “I am a state-sanctioned killer of men. The only place for me is with the police force or in the back alleys, and neither has any appeal.”
Dr. Siebel made a soft, curious sound. “Why is that, do you think?”
“I want to escape these blood-drenched fantasias. Not live them.”
The doctor just looked at him. Looked at him as if he wanted something, his brows rising slowly until his high, smooth brow began to furrow, one wrinkle after another. Vin tensed, everything in him prickling with that sensory awareness that had been trained into him, that whisper that said to be ready for combat even on a quiet, clear day. Dr. Siebel tapped his pen against his lower lip, then said,
“I’d like to talk to you about something we haven’t spoken of yet.”
It took everything in Vin not to press himself back against the couch and into a defensive position; his fists clenched against his knees. “And what is that?”
“What happened, during your capture in Sangin.”
Vin’s entire body pulsed like one last violent, angry heartbeat before his heart just stopped. “I have told you—”
“I know—I know.” Siebel raised both hands—apologetic, soothing, a sign of surrender, a sign of peace that something in the back of Vin’s mind recognized. “Reliving it is…painful. But you’re still there, Vincent.” He slowly lowered his hands. The fluid cadence of his voice deepened, metered out until Vin felt like an animal he was trying to calm with soft, careful words. “You aren’t here with me. You’re there. And it only takes a moment to send you back there. One trigger, to take you out of the now.”
Vin wanted to call it a lie. He wanted to call it a lie, to say he wasn’t that broken, his pride a swelling thing, puffing up to bursting—but he could smell blood, and feel desert sand shifting under his feet, sand and unstable gravel like the ground was too loose to hold him and would slide apart underneath him at any moment, swallowing him into a swirling nothing.
And so he only bowed his head, but there was no priest here to touch his shoulders, whisper a prayer, give him absolution.
Dr. Siebel’s gaze was a heavy weight, his voice an insidious serpent trying to find any crevice it could worm through to crawl inside. “I understand that while you were captured by a group of insurgents, it was one man in particular who focused his attentions on you.”
Vin swallowed thickly. “Si.”
“Do you remember his face?”
…pockmarked skin, the whites of his eyes yellowed and that one crooked tooth, that one tooth that looked like it was trying to crawl back up into his gums and every time he laughed, every time he demanded answers Vin would not give, every time he leered—and oh did he leer—all Vin could see was that tooth, that tooth…
He closed his eyes, shuddering. “With every waking and sleeping moment.”
“He was the one you killed, to escape.”
One of them. “Si.”
“Tell me what you did to him.”
Vin shook his head. “No.”
The pen skittered over the page. “One-word answers. I’ve pricked a nerve.”
“Are you enjoying this, Doctor?” Vin bit off. “Poking a stick into the animal’s cage?’
“No. But sometimes we must push past the point of pain to ever find our way to recovery, and that can mean putting uncomfortable pressure on ourselves.” There was no escaping that penetrating look; that cold, clinical curiosity that made Vin feel like a lab rat, for all that Dr. Siebel remained so mild, so calm. “Do you see him, when you begin to have these…as you called them, ‘blood-drenched fantasias?’”
In the bar—every face around him sallow and pockmarked, dark eyes floating against yellow, that leer, that hanging tooth, that tooth he just wanted to knock out of his cruel sneering face—
—in the grocery store, a man lifts his head and there he is, blood dripping down his ruined face, mouth smashed in and eyes filmed over with red, one bulging out of its socket, hanging on by a thread, and he’s screaming, screaming in the middle of the grocery store, screaming the way he did when Vin caught his head and pushed his thumbs into his eye sockets and squeezed—
He looked at Dr. Siebel. And in that smooth white face he tried not to see it, tried not to see him, but if Vin went one second too long without blinking suddenly Siebel’s skin turned sallow and pitted and there was a line right down the middle of his brows, a line that would pinch and make big furrows until his brow ridges looked like squirming humps of meat, and when he parted his lips on a soft, inquisitive sound, prompting without words…his right front tooth twisted to the side, like some kind of puzzle box piece on a hinge, moving on its own.
Vin jerked his gaze away, lowering his eyes, counting several breaths and reminding himself it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. “…si,” he choked out.
“And do you ever get the urge to act on them? Your thoughts. Your fantasies.”
Low words, pushing inside his brain, asking him to remember how it felt to gouge his thumbs into that man’s eye sockets. Asking if he took pleasure in it, if he was unholy and ungodly and sick, sick enough inside that there had been satisfaction in vengeance, satisfaction in giving back the pain that had been given to him, the pain that had made him feel every ounce of his mortality and know that no matter what happened to him when he died, Hell awaited.
There could only be Hell, for a sinner such as him.
For all his blindness, that he had not known what it was to feel small and afraid; had not known what it meant to be vulnerable, at the mercy of someone else.
He hadn’t understood. Not then. Hadn’t understood how a child felt, when a parent stood over them with the belt and the whip; hadn’t understood how a woman felt, when the dark figure followed too close in the alley, shadowing her to her car and making her heart beat fast as she wondered if he would turn off and move to his own car, or corner her and remind her that in this world anyone could take anything from her at any time, and even if she fought it wouldn’t change that he and every man around him felt it was his right to touch her, hurt her, take her because she was property, she was small, she was vulnerable in ways the people who would hurt her, hurt that child, hurt the weak could never understand.
He understood now.
And that was why everywhere he looked, he saw the face of the man who had bound him to that blood-soaked table that smelled of death and shit…and taught him what vulnerability truly meant.
“Vincent?” Dr. Siebel said, then “Vincent.”
He lifted his eyes, meeting Dr. Siebel’s searching gaze. He saw nothing there; not even his own reflection. As if to Dr. Siebel, he didn’t exist. Not as a person; just a collection of data, observations on that notepad propped on his knee. Dr. Siebel waited for long moments, but when Vin said nothing—he had nothing to say—continued,
“I’d like to start you on hypnosis next week as an alternative fo
rm of treatment.”
“No,” Vin answered firmly. No. He spent enough time out of control of his thoughts, drifting into a half-mesmerized space where his memories took control. He couldn’t put that control in someone else’s hands.
Never again.
For the first time, Siebel showed a touch of emotion: scorn, making a grimace of distaste wrinkle around his nose. “You think faith will heal you, but place no stock in alternative methods?”
“What makes you think I believe faith will heal me?” And yet Vin couldn’t help but curl his fingers against his rosary: habit, comfort, even if he was beginning to think he had no faith left. He wondered, now, if he had ever been a child of God, when all it took was destroying his faith in himself to shatter his faith in his maker. “What makes you think I believe anything will heal me?”
“I’m not certain—”
“I am.” Vin stood. “And I believe these sessions have reached the extent of their usefulness.”
Dr. Siebel stared at him, but Vin turned away. Turned his back on him—on the cold salvation the doctor offered that wasn’t salvation at all, but merely the numbing drug of denial that would only let Vin pretend the problem wasn’t there, let him pretend the wound didn’t still bleed.
Willful ignorance wasn’t for him. Salvation was nothing but a lie.
And while Dr. Siebel called his name, he walked out. There was nothing for him here.
Perhaps there was nothing for him anywhere.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ARMED FORCES, AT LEAST, paid for a very nice hotel.
Not quite the Four Seasons, but one of the West properties in Blackwing Downs—surrounded by high-rise corporate buildings and looking out over a gated community of glittering, sprawling mansions, each a kingdom unto itself, lit so that even at night those looking down from on high could pick out the details of every Olympic swimming pool and sprawling hundred-jet fountain and private golf course.