Burridge Unbound (13 page)

How marvellous to be a special case.

“You don’t have to decide right now,” she says.

There is a world out there. I sit alone by my window and read an account of a Chinese journalist sentenced to thirteen years of reform through labour for “leaking state secrets” – reporting on Li Peng’s family-planning speech the day before the
official version was printed. He was taken to a dusty, grim facility in Heilongjiang Province and forced to work in a leather factory, barely clad, standing in vats of unknown chemicals, eating dirty rice and spoiled vegetables, meat once a month, letters never, thirty-one prisoners in a room, sleeping like sardines. “The guards sent prisoners to beat me when I failed at self-criticism. I would write:
I
am very bad at understanding the politics of human terror. But now I am learning. I am learning so much.”

It’s like hundreds of accounts I’ve read, from China and Burma, from Indonesia, Guatemala, Chile, Pakistan, from too many countries and too many people. Their names mean nothing, the details blur. So-and-so had his leg muscles crushed, this woman was raped, this boy disappeared coming home from the union office where his father worked. They’re just words on the page, and there’s no reason to cry, but here I am, weeping, stupidly, alone and with no way to stop. I get up and I breathe, I wipe my face and roam the room, but my face is washed with tears whether I’m pacing or still. It isn’t the story. That’s the horrible thing, the story means nothing, less than nothing. Another atrocity in the endless list.

I’m just crying. For nothing, for everything. I wait for it to clear, but it won’t clear. It’s never going to be clear. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop.

“A
shes.” The word hangs between us in this comfortable, professional, insulated air. I can see the garden out back – Maryse would know all those flowers. Purple ones, obscenely lush. The name will come to me in a minute. I should know it.

Irises. And the orange are tiger lilies, and the huge, red, floppy ones are poppies. There. Not such a bad brain. This is the house Maryse and I looked at in our other lifetime. A house just like this, with a ground floor stuck right onto the earth. Solid, brick, big rooms, hardwood, furnishings from around the world. This woman takes trips. A successful professional sitting opposite me in a long black skirt and a silky purple blouse that seems too dressy.

Maryse and I stood in a house just like this looking at oak cupboards with Patrick in her arms asleep.

“What do you mean by ashes?” she asks. Ashes? Slowly the word comes back to me.

“It’s what I felt when I embraced my wife,” I say. “When I got home.”

We’re digging through the shit of my life, which is necessary, somehow, part of my purgatory. I wonder, how long does this last? Not the therapy – I told Joanne I’d only stay an hour. But the churning, that seems to go on forever. In the hood, I thought I was being a hero by hanging on to strands of who I was in my old life. It was a conscious effort, I escaped the present every moment I could summon the energy. But when I got home–

“Bill? Can I call you Bill?”

Yes, of course you can call me Bill. You’re going to bill me anyway. I start to smile and then I realize I didn’t tell her the joke. I never said it. The words stayed in their distant orbit.

“I’m the world’s worst patient,” I say. “I’m really hopeless. I don’t do well any more down on the earth. That sounds strange. But when I was shackled to the wall for nine months – it was a kind of reverse birth. That’s how I thought of it. I felt like I was buried under the earth. I didn’t know why it was happening and I still don’t, but I thought my job was to get smaller and smaller and then die. And I couldn’t even do that right. I was a fuck-up all the way along.”

“So your surviving, that was a fuck-up?”

“Other people died because of me. Marlene, the Australian woman who helped rescue me in the end. The soldiers shot her down in cold blood. She knew too much, I’m sure that was it. And Josef, my keeper. Well, I killed him first, but it was a hallucination. The only time I actually
tried
to help myself, and it was all in my head. So I never tried after that. I was already part ghost.”

“What do you mean?”

I can’t talk about this. Most people don’t understand, that feeling of being half here, half in some other reality. There are
realms and dimensions far beyond what we know ordinarily. Places of refuge and torment, of other ways of being. I look around the room. Most doctors post their credentials. I see instead batiks and traditional cloths from some native group, God knows where. I see her professionally concerned eyes and her jade earrings and her wedding band and the pictures of her children on her desk. Her desk by the door by the garden.

There are tissue boxes everywhere. This quaint little countrified house where carrot juice is served and the windows are so new and clean.

“I’m sorry, I’ve only had time for a quick read of your book,” she says. “It’s very moving. Did you find that writing things out helped you to deal with them?”

“Absolutely.”

She waits for more. She’s very patient. She gets paid by the hour. She crosses her legs and leans in and fixes me with her therapist eyes tractor beam, trying to extract my thoughts. My precious thoughts.

“It helped a lot,” I add, unhelpfully.

She crosses her hands on her crossed legs. Her married, successful, full-life hands. She ordered those windows. She paid for them from sessions like these with other sunken wretches. She paid for the trips and her husband is an architect, I put it together in a flash, their children are in private school, they go to Jamaica on spring holidays and Spain in the summer.

“Bill?”

“I need to focus.” I say it before she does.

“Bill, post-traumatic stress is a tricky thing. It takes many people a lifetime of effort to overcome it. To keep the flashbacks in check, to get beyond the trauma, to generate some forward momentum in their lives. You have to be willing to talk about it, to revisit the worst so it will let you go. Your book
is a powerful expression of what you went through. It must have been rewarding to write it, to get it out on paper. But you have to express it again and again, in many different ways, to really root out these demons. There’s no way around it. If you close the door on these things they fester. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to keep it closed.”

Those big, beautiful, professional eyes. No festering in her closet. Whereas I
did
fester, literally, for nine months I festered. It should be my name, Fester.

“Did I say something funny?”

She says it in an unfunny way, like a schoolteacher who’s being laughed at. Well, children, let’s all share the joke …

“Tell me about your ex-wife,” she says, groping.
Wife
, I think. She’s not my ex yet. Dr. what’s-her-name gets up, a little irritated. I’m not taking this seriously. I’m scared shitless.

“There must be a lot of issues around the break-up,” she says, hopefully. Issues. Yes, there are many issues. But not about the break-up of my marriage. That’s not what I want to discuss.

She pours a glass of carrot juice from the tray on the table between us and offers it to me, but I refuse. In Santa Irene I lived on wood jelly and water. Sometimes I think that’s all that’s left of me.

“Say something,”
she says, but gently; it takes me by surprise. She leans in and caresses my hand. Not a professional thing to do at all. There must be a code of ethics. Or maybe there’s just a bag of tricks. But it works. It gets me going. Goddamn her.

“My wife is not, was never, a really
nurturing
kind of person,” I say. This is not what I want to talk about! That glass of carrot juice. If I won’t have it she won’t either. It’s just going to go to waste. “She’s an artist, she’s a talent, she’s exciting and beautiful and full of life, and I dragged her off to Santa Irene
because of my career with the foreign service. And she stopped painting, you know, because of me, because of what happened. She stopped painting, she went white. Her hair was black as night except for one streak of white when I met her. You know, she had the face of an eighteen-year-old, but there was that streak of white in all that black. Am I babbling? I’m supposed to babble, yes? Babble is good. Then when I came back, from my little … time away, my trip to the dark side … she’d gone all white, her hair was – what do they call it? – a
shock
of white. A shock. It was. And there was one time … well, there were many times. I’ll tell you about one time. I tried to kill myself. Uh, three times. It was really … disappointing for all of us, you know. Our hero survives worse than hell, and then …”

And then the words dry up because of the way she’s looking, so satisfied on a professional level. Here is her famously taciturn patient opening up when other therapists failed to get him to communicate. It’s written all over her face. The opening lines of her paper on treating Bill Burridge, torture survivor.

“Yes?” she says, hopefully. She has the air of – of what? Of an
irrepressible optimist
. But she wouldn’t understand having your body broken, smothered, beaten, buried, forgotten for hopeless months but not giving in because of what’s inside you, the universal force, the seed, the tiny sprout that pushes through asphalt. The pain and terror of that push. No other choice so you do it.

“Is the time up?” I ask.

“No. I don’t want you to be concerned about time.”

“Oh,” I say, disappointed. If I wore a watch I’d be able to tell when the hour was finished.

“One day Maryse and Patrick came home,” I say. Without thinking I pick up the carrot juice. It’s unbelievably rich, it seems immoral somehow, far too much.

“Don’t stop,” she says. But without that look of professional triumph, so I keep going.

“They came home and Patrick saw some blood on the kitchen floor and he started screaming. I’d never heard such a scream. Well, I had, that was the problem, I’d heard it all too often. It was my own scream. The Kartouf used to hook me up to an electric-shock gizmo, a black box. They tried it everywhere on me. I think they were experimenting. Trying to get the hang of it. They’d had it done to them but they weren’t so practised at doing it to others. They’d shock me right to the edge and then shoot me up with drugs to keep me for next time. They were incompetents. They didn’t know what to do with me. That’s why they held me so long and why they fucked me up so badly. They did, literally, they fucked me. And they burned me with cigarettes. Just the smell of the smoke as they approached. It drove me wild with terror. They put me through a mock execution. I knew they would, I’d already figured it out, I just didn’t know when, and it doesn’t matter, because when they do it you’re terrified, every cell in your body screams in panic, nothing can prepare you for that. You see, I don’t really have trouble expressing this stuff. I wrote it in my book, I took my skin off in public, I could talk all day about it. I could talk all night, and all the next day. I could never shut up and I’d never get to the end of it, you see, there’s a Niagara Falls of shit here, an everlasting resource, and if I let it that’s all I’ll ever do with the rest of my life, process my own shit. And that’s not what I want. I want to do something useful for other people. Which is what I do. As you know, with my organization. I’m processing misery for a lot of the world. I don’t need to say any of this personal stuff. You know it and I know it.”

“What about the blood on the floor?”

The blood on the floor. The blood.

“It was chicken blood. I’d tried to get dinner, only the chicken was fatty, I pulled off the skin and dropped some of the chicken on the floor. It was a big mess. In those days I started a lot of things and then lost heart and so there would be these projects in mid- … in mid-whatever. Mid-orbit. All over the house. I had jigsaw puzzles, and a windmill, I was building a windmill. It was a birthday present someone had given to Patrick, a model windmill, one of those hopelessly complicated toys people give to kids knowing their parents are going to have to put it together. Probably while the kid watches television.”

I have the horrible taste of carrot juice in my mouth.

“So there was blood on the floor?”

She keeps bringing me back. Believe me, I can focus. All too well.

“I wasn’t in the kitchen any more. I don’t know what I was doing. Well, if I think of it I can tell you what I was doing. Is that important?”

“If you think it’s important.”

“I was … I was trying to fold socks. Laundry. It’s very ordered and clean and it smells nice. Very satisfying. I’d reached a block with the chicken. You know, I’d started it but then things got bad, my head started to fester–” There’s a good word, that’s the word I’m going to remember from this afternoon. I say it again. “My head was
festering
so I decided to try something else. Just for a break. But that’s when they came home. Patrick ran in first. He was always doing that. He was a running-in-first kind of kid. He saw the blood on the kitchen floor and started to scream. He thought it was me. I’d already tried to kill myself, he’d already seen my blood, all over the living room. He was scared for me and tried to protect me and I don’t know why he ran in first like that. Maybe he
wanted
to see me all bloody. But he just started screaming. And he couldn’t stop. Even when I walked into the kitchen with a clean pair of socks in my hands, normal as I can be. He screamed even more. And it was
my
scream, my scream from the black box, terrifying. He wouldn’t stop. I held him and he wouldn’t stop.”

I have another sip of carrot juice just to quit talking. It’s silly to go over it all again and again. I have better things to do. Not here. Not with this stranger in this fine house we could never have afforded in this life we never got.

“You’re shaking,” she says.

Well, of course I’m shaking. I have earthquakes inside me all the time.

“You say your wife is a not a nurturing person. Is that what you need now? Do you–?”

“I’m sorry, I need to go, is what I need. I’m sorry.” I get up too quickly, nearly bump my head on her pretty, professional, leaning-in chin.