Fade to Black - Proof (2 page)

Chapter

2

He sat up screaming, his hands
clutching his throat and his body drenched in sweat.

“Help me! Oh,
God, I’m shot! Oh! Oh, fuck!”

A light
clicked on and soft, warm hands grabbed his shoulders. He pushed backwards with
his feet reflexively at the strange but gentle touch, and then the soft ground
disappeared from beneath him and he felt himself fall. He landed with a sharp
pain on his left hip and then pitched backwards, the back of his head striking
hard on the corner of a wooden box. Stars again. Then he lay there gasping and
confused.

“Jack? Omigod!
Jack, baby, what is it?” A beautiful angel, ringed from behind by light, peered
down at him from—a bed?

 No, not an angel,
though just as beautiful.

“Pam?” he
croaked.

“Baby, it’s
me. What is it? What’s wrong?” His angel slid off their bed onto the floor
beside him, her legs across his, her hands cupping his face. Her brown eyes had
tears in them, her face full of fear and concern. “Jack, what is it? What
happened?” Her soft fingers went through his thick, black hair. At the back of
his head they brought a burst of pain. He watched her pull her hand away and
she looked at two fingers, wet with blood.

“Jack! Holy
shit, baby you’re bleeding! Are you all right? Honey, what is it?” She looked
pleadingly into his eyes.

Pam…right? Who
the fuck was Jack? Wait—just wait a goddamn minute.

Jack pushed
himself up on unsteady arms. He swallowed the burning bile down hard.

I just need a
minute.

He
instinctively wrapped his arms around his crying wife.

Right?

He held her
tightly and the images of the wall in Fallujah faded away, but slowly. He
rocked his wife in his arms and his eyes swept the now more familiar room. His
bedroom. Their bedroom.

A nightmare?

But the most
vicious, realistic nightmare he had ever had. The feel of sand and the smell of
dust and gunpowder still clung to him. Jack’s breath stuck for a moment in his
throat when he saw a darkening sky. But the hazy dusk faded rapidly away,
replaced by a swirled stucco ceiling and a slowly turning ceiling fan. In the
distance he thought he heard the fading sounds of a helicopter and gunfire;
then they were gone. He breathed again.

“It’s ok, baby.
I’m all right.” He rocked his wife. “I’m ok, Pam, just an unbelievably horrible
nightmare.”

I’m home. I’m
home with my girls.

“Baby, your
head.” Pam held up two fingers, still wet with fresh blood—his blood, but at
least not from a seven-six-two round tearing out his throat. Jack dragged
fingertips across his perfectly intact throat and then felt the back of his
head. A small gash bled lightly under his fingers. He steadied himself against
the box on the floor, which turned out to be a nightstand when he looked at it.

“I’m ok, honey.
Just hit my head on the nightstand. My God, what a horrible dream.”

Pam looked at
him tentatively and touched his face. Her eyes softened, and she took a deep
breath.

Jack closed
his eyes tightly and forced the lingering images from his mind as his breathing
slowed. His body ached, and he felt a chill as the last of the sweat dried on
his skin. Then he slowly pulled himself to his feet and helped Pam up off the
floor. Far away he heard a soft sobbing voice.

“Mama!”

The sound of
his baby girl’s voice filled Jack with warmth, and a calm flooded over him. He
was ok. He was home.

Pam wiped the
tears from her eyes. “We woke Claire,” she said, and then, “I’ll go.” She
kissed Jack on the cheek. “Get some ice from the kitchen for your head. I’ll
meet you there.”

Jack headed
down the weirdly unfamiliar stairs, but as he reached the bottom, things
started to feel more recognizable. He reached his hand out and touched a large,
framed picture—the one of Pam with her head on his shoulder and Claire in her
arms. The picture comforted him, but at the same time its image of him, his
thick dark hair a bit longer than now, felt out of place. Jack shook his head,
the motion causing a slight wave of recurrent nausea, and entered the kitchen.

Fifteen
minutes later, Jack sat at the kitchen table, an ice pack held gingerly on his
contusion, a glass of milk in his other hand. The confusion was clearing, but
there remained a lingering sense that something wasn’t right. His hand trembled
as he raised his glass to his lips and drank. He was so goddamn thirsty. His
throat was on fire, and he was sure he could smell the persistent and
distinctive odor of fine powdery sand on his skin—a familiar smell. Jack
coughed gently, pushing past a burning low in his throat. He tasted the coppery
twinge of blood.  Pam came in, wrapped in a blue terry robe, and kissed his
cheek again.

“You ok, baby?”
She sat beside him at the table and caressed his arm.

“I think so,”
he replied.

“Jack, my God!
I mean what in the hell was that all about?” Pam leaned her head softly on his
arm. “Jesus, Jack, you scared the hell out of me.”

Jack squeezed
his wife’s arm and thought a moment.

“I don’t know,
baby. I’ve never dreamed anything like that before. God, it was so real.”

Pam gazed
lovingly at him and her look made his reality more focused.

“You want to
tell me about it?”

“Well,” Jack
began slowly, “I was in the war. In Iraq, you know? I guess I was like a
Marine, but it wasn’t me. I was, sort of like someone else…” Slowly Jack
recounted the details of his dream to Pam as best he could. When he got to the
end, the part where he, or Casey or whoever, was shot, he felt a lump in his
throat and was surprised when his eyes filled with tears. He looked up at his
wife, comforted again by the beautiful gaze which drove deeply into his.

“I just wanted
to get home to my girls,” he said and his voice cracked.

Pam held his
stare a moment and then stood up. She took the ice pack gently away from his
head and examined his wound. Jack could picture her wrinkled brow and pursed
lips in his mind and smiled.

“No more
bleeding,” she announced.

Then she took
both of his hands in hers and pulled him to his feet. She wrapped her arms
around him and hugged him tightly, her face soft and warm on his chest. Her
hair tickled his chin.

“Come on, my
war hero. Let’s get back to bed.”

Pam turned and
led him by the hand to the stairs. “God, Jack. No more CNN headline news for
you for a while, ok?”

Jack chuckled,
squeezed his wife’s hand, and then slipped back under the covers of their bed.
“Yeah, I guess so.”

Pam curled up
beside him under the sheets, her head on his shoulder. Her long hair lay across
his chest, which she stroked gently and soothingly. Her touch was like magic.

“Teaching
biology too boring for you, Jack?”

Jack hugged
his wife and said nothing. As Pam drifted off to sleep, he lay thinking over
and over about the images that remained. He was also haunted by a surreal
feeling. In the dark he tried to imagine the rest of the room—what color the
curtains were, where the closet was. He was dismayed to find the answers that
came to him were hesitant and unsure. Unreal was the right word, he thought. He
reached out his hand and fumbled for a light on the nightstand. It felt
unfamiliar, but he finally found a switch on the base. He clicked it on.

The curtains
across the room were blue and yellow, just as he’d guessed—or known, of course.
And the closet door, though still uneasily unfamiliar, was right where he had
thought it would be.

Pam squeezed
her eyes tight and mumbled, “Y’ok?” sleepily.

Jack clicked
the light back off and rubbed his wife’s arm.

“Sorry.”

As he drifted
off to sleep, Jack was haunted by two things. First was the names of his dead
Marine buddies, which ran through his brain again and again, almost like a
ringing—Kindrich from Tennessee and Bennet from Texas. The other was the
disturbing realization that had Pam not said he was a teacher, which now of
course felt right in an unsettled way, he wasn’t sure he could have come up
with his job on his own.

Other than leader
of Marines.

Hoorah.

Then he
drifted away to nowhere, away from his bed, away from Fallujah, to a deep and
dark sleep.

A dreamless
sleep.

*   *   *

The unreal
feeling quieted but never really left. Jack woke to Pam’s gentle prodding, but
he didn’t feel at all rested. He showered and dressed absently, his mind
drifting back to his dream over and over again. Though it lacked the intense
reality of last night, it still had a quality to it, a rightness that was
disturbing. The dream itself and the terror it brought seemed much less
intense, but it bothered him how real and vivid his memory of his Marines had
been—his friends, as if he really knew them.

Jack wondered
if he had somehow incorporated real people into his dream, like Dorothy had in
The
Wizard of Oz
. Not only could he picture them as they had been in battle
together, but he found he could picture them in other settings as well. He had
a vivid image of Simmons laughing, eating brown rice out of a brown plastic
bag, and leaning against a sand berm. He had what felt like a memory of
dragging a shit-faced Chuck Bennet, out of a bar near Twentynine Palms Marine
Corps Base in California. He had fallen down beside Kindrich’s Mustang and then
started laughing uncontrollably. The clarity of these “memories” bothered Jack
even more than the images from his nightmare. Where in the hell had those
thoughts come from? He knew Simmons had a girlfriend, but he couldn’t remember
her name.

Jack realized
the water running down on him from the shower head had turned lukewarm. He
pushed the thoughts from his mind again and escaped the now chilly shower. As
he toweled himself off, he forced his mind instead to his girls. That was the
only reality he needed. The thought of them and his life with them made any
attachment to the characters from some crazy dream seem ludicrous.

Pam and Claire
are my reality.

Jack looked at
himself in the foggy mirror, squinting to somehow see behind his own eyes. He
saw nothing but his own face. Why did these “memories” seem so goddamn real? 

In contrast,
as he walked around his house, kissed his wife, and sipped his coffee, he felt
unnatural. Or staged, maybe. Yeah, that was more it. He felt like he was role‐playing,
almost. The undertone really bothered him and he couldn’t shake it. The only thing
that felt completely real and natural about the whole morning was Claire. He
picked her up from her high chair to kiss her good-bye, and she grabbed his
nose, burped, and then smiled a giggly smile.

“Daaa-dy,” she
cooed.

Jack felt
overwhelmed for a moment by his love for his little girl—by her look, and
touch, and smell. The feeling seemed to push his uneasiness into the
background. By the time he slid into the driver’s seat of his green Volvo, the
feeling was just noise, barely available to his senses, and easily drowned out
by Toby Keith singing about his “Whiskey Girl” on the radio.

The school day
passed by smoothly at first. As Jack got into his role of teacher, the
dreamlike quality dissipated. He taught his third‐period class a review of the
cell cycle, and answered his students’ questions without thinking. That was
good, because on the few occasions when he did think about the questions, he
would feel a momentary panic, as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. Then
the answers would just pour out as soon as he opened his mouth.

A few times he
felt the nagging sensation of getting away with a charade. The ten minute
breaks between classes, when the room was quiet and he had nothing to focus on,
brought the anxiety back and the surreal memories with it. He could almost
smell the distinctive odor of Iraqi dust. Then the next class would begin and
the images would fade away again. By lunch period the dreamlike feeling again
seemed only background noise, and he headed out of his classroom to get
something to eat.

“Hey, Jack!”

Jack turned
around and saw a man about his age looking at him with curiosity. He was
dressed in chinos and a black T-shirt under a blazer. Jack felt his heart
quicken, but he didn’t know why.

“Yeah?” he
answered uneasily.

“You may have
the others fooled, but I know what’s really going on here,” the man said in a
thick Chicago accent, his hands on his hips.