He banged against the wall as he began to climb the stairs.

‘Stop it,’ he said, and she could hear in his voice that he had begun to cry. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’

She slipped back into the bedroom, and pulled the sheets around her seconds before he opened the door and stepped inside. He did it so noisily that she couldn’t help but react, but she did her best to sound sleepy and surprised.

‘Honey,’ she said, lifting her head from the pillow. ‘Are you okay?’

He didn’t answer her.

‘Joel?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

She saw him move toward her, and she was frightened. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and touched his hand to her hair.

‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ he said. ‘But I’d never hurt you bad. Not really.’ She felt her stomach contract so hard that she was sure she’d have to run to the bathroom to avoid soiling herself. It was those last two words. Not really: as if it was somehow okay to hurt someone a little now and again, but only when it was deserved, only when a nosy little bitch asked questions that she shouldn’t, or entertained snoops in the kitchen. Only then. And the punishment would fit the crime, and later she could spread herself for him and they’d make up, and it would be all right because he loved her, and that was what people who loved each other did.

‘When I hit you,’ he continued, ‘that wasn’t me. It was something else. It was like I was a puppet, and someone pulled my string. I don’t want to hurt you. I love you.’

‘I know,’ she replied, trying to keep the tremor from her voice, and only partly succeeding. ‘Honey, what’s wrong?’

He leaned into her, and she felt his tears as he put his cheek against hers. She wrapped her arms around him.

‘I had a bad dream,’ he said, and she heard the child in him. Even as she did so, she looked down and saw him staring up at her, and for an instant his eyes were cold and suspicious and even, she thought, amused, as though they were both playing a game here, but only he knew the rules. Then it was gone, his eyes closing as he nuzzled against her breasts. She held him tightly even as she felt the urge to cast him aside, to run from that house and never, ever return.

Stress damages the mind: that was what they didn’t understand, the people back home, the ones who hadn’t been there. Even the army didn’t understand that, not until it was too late. Take a little R & R, they said. Hang out with the family. Make love to your girlfriend. Occupy yourself. Get a job, find a routine, embrace normality.

But he couldn’t have done that, even if his legs didn’t end halfway down his thighs, because stress is like a poison, a toxin working its way through the system, except that it affects only one vital organ: the brain. He remembered how he’d been in an automobile accident out on Route I when he was thirteen, shortly before his dad died. It hadn’t been a bad smash: a truck had run a red light, and had hit the passenger side of their car. He’d been in the back, on the driver’s side. It was pure dumb luck: there was an automobile dealership on that part of the road, and it always had some cool old cars lined up outside if the weather was good. He liked looking at them, imagining himself behind the wheel of the best of them. At any other time, he’d have been on the passenger side so that he could talk to his dad, and who knows what might have happened then. Instead, they’d both been shaken up pretty badly, and he’d been cut some by the glass. Afterward, when the tow truck had gone and the Scarborough cops had given them a ride home, he’d gone pale and started shaking before puking up his breakfast.

That was what stress did. It made you ill, physically and mentally. And if you kept encountering stressful situations day after day, broken up by periods of tedium, of hanging around playing games, or eating, or catching some rack, or writing the compulsory monthly card home to let your nearest and dearest know that you weren’t dead yet, with no end in sight because your deployment kept being extended, then your neurons became so polluted that they couldn’t recover, and your brain began to rewire itself, altering its modes of operation. The nerve cell extensions in the hippocampus, which deals with learning and long-term memory, started to rot. The response capacity of the amygdala, which governs social behavior and emotional memory, changed. The medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in establishing feelings of fear and remorse, and enables us to interpret what is real and unreal, altered. Similar frazzling of the wiring could be found in schizophrenics, sociopaths, drug addicts, and long-term prisoners. You became like the dregs, and it wasn’t your fault, because you hadn’t done anything wrong. You’d simply done your duty.

During the Civil War, they called it ‘irritable heart.’ For the soldiers of the Great War, it was ‘shell shock,’ and in World War II it was ‘battle fatigue,’ or ‘war neurosis.’ Then it became ‘post-Vietnam syndrome,’ and now it was PTSD. He sometimes wondered if the Romans had a word for it, and the Greeks. He had read the Iliad upon his return, part of his attempt to understand war through its literature, and believed that he saw, in the grief of Achilles for his friend Patroclus, and in the rage that followed, something of his own grief for the comrades that he had lost, Damien most of all.

They left you this way. Your emotions are no longer under control. You are no longer under your own control. You become depressed, paranoid, removed from those who care about you. You believe that you are still at war. You fight your bedclothes at night. You become estranged from your loved ones, and they leave you.

And maybe, just maybe, you start believing that you are haunted, that demons speak to you from boxes, and when you can’t satisfy them, when you can’t do what they want you to do, they turn you against yourself, and they punish you for your failings.

And maybe, just maybe, that moment of obliteration comes as a relief.

18

Herod arrived in Portland by train at 11:30 a.m., carrying only a black garment bag, the leather old but undamaged, a testament to the quality of its manufacture. He was not averse to flying, and rarely felt the necessity to carry anything that might make a bag search at an airport awkward, if not actively unwelcome, but where possible he preferred to travel by train. It reminded him of a more civilized era, when the pace of life was slower and people had more time for small courtesies. In addition, his debilitated condition meant that he found driving for long distances to be uncomfortable and a chore, as well as potentially hazardous, for the medication that he took to control his pain often led to drowsiness. Unfortunately, this was not a particular problem at present: he had reduced the dosage to keep his head clear, and consequently he was suffering. On a train, he could get up and prowl the carriage, or stand in the café car sipping a drink, anything to distract himself from the torments of the body. He had taken a seat in a quiet car at Penn Station, a contented smile on his face as the train emerged from below ground into hazy sunshine. The blue surgical mask hid his mouth, and attracted only one or two glances from those who passed him.

He became aware of the Captain’s presence just as the Manhattan skyline vanished from view. The Captain was sitting in the seat directly across the aisle from Herod, visible only in the window glass, and then only partially: he was a smear, a blur, a moving figure captured by a camera lens when all around him was otherwise still. Herod found it easier to see him when he did not look directly at him.

The Captain was dressed as a clown. Say what you wanted about the Captain, Herod thought, but he had a fondness for the old reliables. The Captain wore a jacket of white and red stripes, and a small bowler hat from beneath which sections of a bedraggled red wig sprouted. There were cobwebs in the artificial hairs, and Herod thought that he could make out the shapes of spiders moving through them. His forearms were extended along the armrests of his seat, and his hands were mostly hidden by stained white gloves, except at the fingertips where sharp, blackened nails had erupted through the material. The forefinger of his right hand tapped rhythmically, slowly raising itself and then falling, like a mechanical device winding and then releasing, over and over. The Captain’s face was painted with white pan stick makeup. The mouth was large and red, and painted as a frown. There were blots of rouge on each cheek, but the eye sockets were empty and black. The Captain stared fixedly ahead, and only his finger moved.