There was silence in the room. A bird flew by the window, and the sunlight caused its shadow to flit across the room: an unseen thing, separated from us by glass and brick, by the solidity of the actual, making its presence felt to us.
‘There were flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, or whatever you want to call them,’ I said at last.
‘Severe?’
‘Yes.’
‘Frequent?’
‘Yes.’
‘What would bring them on?’
‘Blood. The sight of a child – a girl – on the street, with her mother or alone. Simple things. A chair. A blade. Advertisements for kitchens. Certain shapes, angled shapes. I don’t know why. As time went on, the images that would cause problems for me became fewer.’
‘And now?’
‘They’re rare. I still have bad dreams, but not so often.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
I was conscious of trying not to pause too long before my replies, of not giving the impression to Saunders that she might have hit on an interesting avenue to explore. The possibility that I believed myself to have been haunted by my wife and child, or some dark version of them that had since been replaced by forms less threatening but equally unknowable, would have qualified as an interesting avenue even if I’d been in group therapy with Hitler, Napoleon, and Jim Jones. Under the circumstances, I was pleased that my reply to her last question was virtually instantaneous.
‘I don’t know. Time?’
‘It doesn’t heal all wounds. That’s a myth.’
‘Maybe you just get used to the pain.’
She nodded. ‘You might even miss it when it’s gone.’
‘You think so?’
‘You might if it gave you purpose.’
If she wanted another response, she wasn’t going to get it. She seemed to realize it, because she moved on.
‘Then there are avoidance symptoms: numbness, detachment, social isolation.’
‘Not leaving the house?’
‘It may not be that literal. It could be just staying away from people or places associated with the incident: family, friends, former colleagues. Sufferers find it hard to care about anything. They may feel that there’s no point, that they have no future.’
‘There was some detachment,’ I admitted. ‘I didn’t feel part of ordinary life. There was no such thing. There was just chaos, waiting to break through.’
‘And colleagues?’
‘I avoided them, and they avoided me.’
‘Friends?’
I thought of Angel and Louis, waiting outside in their car. ‘Some of them didn’t want to be avoided.’
‘Were you angry at them for that?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they were like me. They shared my purpose.’
‘Which was?’
‘To find the man who killed my wife and child. To find him, and to tear him apart.’
The answers were coming more quickly now. I was surprised, even angry at myself for letting this stranger get beneath my skin, but there was a pleasure in it too, a kind of release. Perhaps I was a narcissist, or perhaps I had simply not been so clinically incisive with myself in a very long time, if ever.
‘Did you feel that you had a future?’
‘An immediate one.’
‘That lay in killing this man.’
‘Yes.’
She was leaning forward slightly now, a white light in her eyes. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, until I realized that I was seeing my own face reflected in the depths of her pupils.
‘Arousal symptoms,’ she said. ‘Difficulty concentrating.’
‘No.’
‘Exaggerated responses to startling stimuli.’
‘Like gunshots?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘No, my responses to gunshots weren’t exaggerated.’
‘Anger. Irritability.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sleeping difficulties.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hypervigilance.’
‘Justified. A lot of people seemed to want me dead.’
‘Physical symptoms: fever, headache, dizziness.’
‘No, or not excessively so.’
She sat back. We were nearly done.
‘Survivor guilt,’ she said softly.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Yes, all the time.
Carrie Saunders stepped from her office and came back with two cups of coffee. She took some sachets of sugar and creamer from her pocket and laid them on the desk.
‘You don’t need me to tell you, do you?’ she said as she filled her cup with enough sugar to make the spoon stand upright without a hand to support it.
‘No, but then you’re not the first one to try.’
I sipped the coffee. It was strong, and tasted bitter. I could see why she was adding so much sugar to it.
‘How are you doing now?’ she asked.
‘I’m doing okay.’
‘Without treatment?’
‘I found an outlet for my anger. It’s ongoing, and therapeutic.’
‘You hunt people down. And, sometimes, you kill them.’
I didn’t reply. Instead, I asked: ‘Where did you serve?’
‘In Baghdad. I was a major, initially attached to Task Force Ironhorse at Camp Boom in Ba Qubah.’
‘Camp Boom?’
‘Because there were so many explosions. It’s called Camp Gabe now, after a sapper, Dan Gabrielson, who was killed at Ba Qubah in 2003. It was basic as anything when I got there: no plumbing, no a/c, nothing. By the time I left there were CHEWS, central water for the showers and latrines, a new power grid, and they’d begun training the Iraqi National Guard there.’
‘CHEWS?’ I said. I felt as though I were listening to someone speaking pidgin English.
‘Containerized housing units. Big boxes to you.’
‘Must have been hard, being a female soldier out there.’
‘It was. This is a new war. In the past, female soldiers didn’t live and fight alongside men, not the way they do now. It’s brought its own problems. Technically, we’re barred from joining combat units, so instead we’re “attached” to them. In the end, we still fight, and we still die, just like men. Maybe not in the same numbers, but over a hundred women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds more have been injured. But we’re still called bitches and dykes and sluts. We’re still open to harassment and assault by our own men. We’re still advised to walk in pairs around our own bases to avoid rape. But I don’t regret serving, not for one minute. That’s why I’m here: there are a lot of soldiers who are still owed something.’
‘You said you started at Camp Boom. What about after that?’
‘I was seconded to Camp Warhorse, and then to Abu Ghraib as part of the restructuring of the prison.’
‘You mind if I ask what your duties there involved?’
‘Initially, I dealt with prisoners. We wanted information, and they were naturally hostile to us, especially after what happened in the prison in the early days. We needed to find other ways to get them to talk.’
‘When you say “other ways”…’
‘You saw the photographs: humiliation, torture – simulated and otherwise. That didn’t help our cause. Those idiots on talk radio who laughed about it had no understanding of the impact it had. It gave the Iraqis another reason to hate us, and they took it out on the military. American soldiers died because of Abu Ghraib.’
‘Just a few bad apples getting out of line.’
‘Nothing happened in Abu Ghraib that wasn’t sanctioned from above, in general if not in detail.’
‘And then you arrived with a new approach.’
‘I, and others. Our maxim was simple: don’t torture. Torture a man or woman for long enough, and you’ll be told exactly what you want to hear. In the end, all they want is for the torture to stop.’
She must have seen something in my face, because she stopped talking and eyed me intently over her coffee. ‘You’ve been hurt in that way?’
I didn’t answer.
‘I’ll take that as a “yes”’, she said. ‘Even moderate pressure, and by that I mean physical pain that doesn’t leave one in fear of death, is scarring. In my view, someone who has endured torture is never quite the same again. It removes a part of oneself, excises it entirely. Call it what you will: peace of mind, dignity. Sometimes, I wonder if it even has a name. Anyway, in the short term it has a profoundly destabilizing effect on the personality.’