Fade to Black - Proof (5 page)

They held each
other gently and swore their love, then he clicked off the light. They both
fell asleep before a few minutes had passed. As he slipped into the comfort of
sleep Jack felt content, but unsettled, like something might be waiting for
him, just on the other side of sleep.

Chapter

5

He lay in the dark and felt the
ground begin to tilt. In the distance he heard the sound of gunfire—or maybe it
was close and the distance was an illusion. Battle could do that, he knew. He
felt nauseated and tasted bile mixed with blood in the back of his throat. A
burning pain spread out backwards over his neck, and a tightness extended into
his chest. With each struggling breath he heard a high‐pitched whistling followed
by a gurgling sound. He realized that it was dark because his eyes were closed
and, with great difficulty, he opened them. He looked up into a hazy, purplish
sky, heavy with dust. A shadow passed over him and he heard the familiar
thump,
thump
of a UH-60 Blackhawk as the fast helicopter passed overhead. A darker
shadow enveloped him and someone bent over his face. He tried to force his eyes
to focus on the features of the man looking down on him, but couldn’t.

“Hang in
there, Sergeant. You’re gonna be ok!”

“How is he,
Doc?”

“I don’t know.
He’s lost a shitload of blood. The left side of his neck is swollen tight. I
think he might have gotten his carotid artery.” There was a pause and more
light as the featureless face disappeared from view. “We got to get him the
fuck out of here, Mac, or he ain’t gonna make it. He needs to be in an OR,
like, five mikes ago.”

Doc. That
would be Doc White, the young Navy corpsman from New Orleans, now with his
platoon. They must have joined up with the rest of the guys. And Mac? Who was
Mac? …Wait, Mac! That was McIver from Virginia—wanted to be a high‐school
baseball coach.

“What is that
in his neck? Shrapnel?”

“It’s a
tracheotomy, dipshit. I had to put it in so he could breathe. The bullet tore
his windpipe nearly in half. He was drowning in his own blood.”

There was
movement around him and then another shadow, another featureless face. Casey
felt desperately short of breath. He struggled to suck air into his lungs, and
the burning grew to an unbearable pitch. He tried to raise an arm, to reach out
for Mac, but his arms were dead weight by his sides. He felt a panic grow
inside of him and struggled to stay calm.

Why the fuck
can’t I move?

Casey forced
his mind away from his burning pain, from the feeling that tight bands were
wrapped around his chest, keeping him from getting air into his oxygen-starved
body. He forced his mind to Pam, to thoughts of her body moving against his. He
thought of Claire, lying peaceful on his bare chest, rocking in the glider
beside her crib. His big girl. With all his might he willed himself away from
the nightmare he was living and back home to them, to a place where he could
breathe. A place where he wasn’t so terrified. A place where he didn’t need to
be afraid of death.

He sensed more
movement beside him and he blinked his eyes to clear them. He managed to turn
his head ever so slightly to the left, pain now exploding in his neck to join
the burning in his chest, and he forced his eyes to focus on the dark shape
beside him in the dirt. Slowly the image sharpened, like someone fine-tuned a
pair of binoculars—back and forth, back and forth—and then he focused on the
horror only a foot or so from his face.

He opened his
mouth to scream, but of course no sound came, just that horrible whistling and
bubbling. Then something warm and sticky poured out from the center of his
neck. He felt the blood trickle down both sides of his neck and drip off into
the dirt.

Beside him in
the filthy street, he saw the face of Rich Simmons, the young kid from Albany.
Only it wasn’t really him. Not anymore. The one remaining eye looked off at an
unnatural angle, unfocused, staring out at oblivion. The other eye was gone, as
was half of his face and most of the top of his head. The short strands of
blondish hair stuck to what was left of his forehead, matted with grey mush,
and bits of bone. Casey wanted to turn his head away, but couldn’t. Instead he
squeezed his eyes shut and, in his mind, screamed again.

*   *   *

He sat up in
bed, tears streaming down his face, gasped for air, and then screamed. His
hands clawed desperately at his neck, but found nothing but sweat and smooth
skin. Above him, a hazy purple sky was cut periodically with tracers and orange
light from distant explosions. The light wind swirled dust around him. It
filled his lungs with each heavy breath and burned his eyes. Again, he heard
the familiar thumping as the Blackhawk’s rotors beat the air into submission.
He heard men scream and call out for covering fire. The sounds faded into the
distance, as if he was in a silent rail car pulling rapidly away from the
battle. As he watched in horrified fascination, the purple sky began to swirl
above him like a blackening cyclone. It twisted into tighter and smaller
circles, which spun faster and faster, and the edges filled in with familiar
white stucco, lit yellow from a pale light behind him. Then, when the swirling
black and purple looked no more than the size of a basketball, and the sounds
had faded to nothing but memory, the purple circle exploded with a flash of red
light and was gone, replaced by a slowly turning ceiling fan.

Jack sat bolt
upright, his breathing raspy and fast. Sweat poured off his face and chest. He
heard footsteps approaching rapidly, and then a voice which soothed him.

“Jack? Jack, baby,
are you ok?”

Pam came in
from the hall, the source of the pale, yellow light. She held Claire in her
arms, their little girl’s eyes heavy and her lip set in a pout.

“Pam?” He felt
disoriented and confused. Terrified in fact.

“Jack, what is
it? What happened?” Pam sat on the edge of the bed, Claire balanced on her
thigh. His little girl started sobbing. “Jack, my God, you’re covered in sweat!
Are you sick? Do you have a fever?”

Jack took his
wife’s hand in both of his and kissed it, then held it against his chest, still
panting. He tried to speak but found no words.

“Jack, what
made you scream?” She started to cry. ”Please, say something!”

Jack continued
to hold her hand against his chest and cleared his throat, which felt
incredibly dry and sore. His heart beat nearly out of his chest.

“I…I, uh…”
Jack coughed and tasted the coppery taste of blood in his throat. His tongue
burned and he realized he must have bitten it. He could feel his chest tighten
and thought he might burst into tears himself.

“N…n…nightmare,”
he stammered. Then he laid his head over on his wife’s leg and the tears came.

“Oh, Jack, oh,
baby…” Pam cried harder now, her tears dripping off her chin and into his hair,
but he had no energy to comfort or reassure her. “Oh, baby, what can I do?”

“I don’t
know,” Jack choked out. “I don’t know… I don’t know… What is wrong with me?” He
cried hard now. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to force away the image of
young Simmons, his face blown off, lying in the dirt beside him. It didn’t
help. He could still taste the dust in his mouth, still smell the gunpowder and
blood.

Pam rubbed his
shoulder and kissed his hair. “It’s ok, baby… Everything’s ok.” Claire sniffled
more softly, her head on her mother’s shoulder. “It’s ok, Jack. I’m here. I’ve
got you, baby. We’re gonna get you better.”

Jack stayed
for a long while like that, holding his wife and daughter and crying in the
night.

Chapter

6

Sunday morning started off
quiet and awkward. Jack tried pointlessly to pretend that everything was okay—because,
he supposed, he desperately wanted it to be. He felt terrified by the nagging
thought that he must be going crazy, but was more frightened by thoughts of
what Pam must be thinking about him. A big part of him had lost all doubt that
he was losing his mind. The nightmare seemed so vivid again, so real. In some
ways more real than sipping coffee (vanilla creamer and one sugar) quietly at
the kitchen table, wincing as it stung his bitten tongue.

So it was
Simmons—the third death in the firefight—twenty-year-old Simmons from Albany, with
his dirty blond hair, always a little longer than the rest of the guys (and a
source of constant hazing from his squad leader, Sergeant Casey Stillman). He
could see him in his mind’s eye in better times, sitting back against a sand
berm before the assault on Fallujah, shoveling cold MREs into his mouth with a
plastic spoon (Jambalaya, dry crackers with a packet of jalapeno cheese, and
water from a canteen). He was talking about a girl, Beth maybe, from home. A
girl he wanted to marry at the NCO club when they got back to Pendleton.

Well, Rich
wouldn’t be marrying Beth now, would he? Not in Pendleton or any other goddamn
place. Rich from Upstate was leaving half his grey matter in a dusty street in
Fallujah, thanks-just-the-same, and the other half would be planted in a hole
near the VA in Albany. There would be taps, and flowers, and crying parents.

But he
couldn’t really know that could he? He couldn’t possibly. Any more than he
could know that he, or, no, Sergeant Stillman, was the mortally wounded man in
that same firefight. And then a more terrifying thought occurred to him. What
if he continued to have these nightmares? And what if, as they continued to
unfold the horrible story, he—the Sergeant Casey Stillman “he”—died from the
horrible wounds to his throat? What would that mean for Jack? He remembered as
a kid, turning around with his friends the myth (or was it?) that in those
frightening dreams where you fell and fell, that if you dreamed the part where
your body splattered onto the pavement, instead of waking up with a start, that
you would die in real life. How would that old wives’ tale apply to him now?
The answer felt, for a fleeting moment, to be terribly important for him and
his family.

Jack shuddered
uncontrollably at the kitchen table, an uneaten English muffin cooling on the
paper towel in front of him. He wasn’t sure which frightened him more, the idea
of going crazy or the thought that he wasn’t. That both realities, his and
Casey Stillman’s, could both be true seemed so insane that he couldn’t even
begin to get his head around it. But neither could he shake the feeling that
the answer to all of this lay somewhere in that notion, as inconceivable as it
seemed.

Pam had rented
a movie once. They had sat on the very sofa where they had just a day ago made
love, and watched it together (some of it—she had slept in his lap by halfway
through, of course). It was about a woman who saw things through a killer’s
eyes in her dreams. He couldn’t really remember the story, but as he sat there
now, he vividly remembered its premise. The woman had believed, as he did at
that moment, that she was losing her mind—until stories in the paper (it was
never in the TV news in these stories) started to tell of the murders she had
seen. He thought it ended with her teaming up with the cops and catching the
killer. How could Jack’s story end, if indeed he was able to see a battle in
Fallujah through the eyes of a real Marine sergeant there? How could he make
this mean something, be something other than a personal terror?

Jack picked up
his cup and freshened and diluted away some of the sweetness with coffee from
the pot. Then he walked into the living room, listening as he did for his wife
and daughter. He heard them upstairs, where Pam was changing Claire’s pull-up
from the night into big girl underwear and a pair of farmer’s overalls with
Minnie Mouse on the front pocket (he knew this for sure, for some reason). He
sat on the couch and picked up the remote, clicked it and brought the idiot box
to life. He sat and sipped his coffee (much better now) and flipped through the
channels, looking for the talking heads who might help him sort out what was
going on in his mind. He settled on Fox News when he saw the red banner with
Update
in Iraq,
printed in boldface across it, along the bottom of the screen. A
retired army general critiqued the offensive in Fallujah, rattling off
statistics and military acronyms, as he talked about the battle as if he
himself had led the charge. Jack snickered and shook his head.

You don’t know
shit.

 Jack listened
to the arrogant general praise the troops and in the same breath detail how he
would have done things just a bit differently. Fallujah was a tough battle, the
general told him, against an enemy determined to fight to the death against the
great Devils of the American Marines. He listened to a story, which angered the
shit out of him, about insurgents who had shot from behind a white flag,
wounding a Marine on a rooftop and killing another soldier acting as an
interpreter. Then the anchor cut to a live feed from the streets of Fallujah in
Iraq, and asked the correspondent embedded with the Marines there, for his
impressions of the battle.

Jack leaned
forward, straining to see the scene behind the reporter, wearing a green flak
jacket and a Marine desert cammie Kevlar helmet. Jack paid little attention to
his droning monologue on the fierce firefight that had occurred there. He instead
shifted his head back and forth, as if that would help him see the street
behind the reporter on the two-dimensional television screen. Jack’s pulse
quickened and he could feel his heart beat in his temples and arms as the
reporter shifted left and looked behind him.

…where Marines
engaged a fierce contingent of insurgent combatants recently. The Marines here
were hopelessly outnumbered, and suffered multiple casualties. Three Marines
were killed here yesterday, and several others were wounded…

The street
looked so fucking familiar. A different angle from that which he had
appreciated in his mind’s eye, but it was definitely the street, wasn’t it?
Something wasn’t right, but he felt sure that this was the street. The reporter
turned forward and blocked his view again.

Goddamnit!

“Move your
ass, dickhead!” Jack hollered at the TV. His coffee sloshed in his mug (I Love
My Daddy) and dribbled down his hand onto the carpet.

“Jack!” Pam’s
voice rang harsh, and a little frightened, from behind the couch. She leaned
over, Claire clinging to her arm from her right hip, and viciously snatched the
remote from his hand. She clicked the TV power off, and then dropped the remote
to the floor.

 He could see
tears in her eyes, and he stood up and came around the couch.

“Hey,” he said
and smoothed the hair out of her eyes and then kissed Claire on the cheek.
“It’s ok, baby. Just a little editorial for the news.” He struggled to sound
more together than he felt. Pam pulled away.

“No more news,
Jack. That idiot box is the fucking problem!”

He had only
heard her use that word once since he had known her.

“Baby,” he began
and she turned to face him, her face more scared than angry.

“No, Jack. I’m
serious. You are obsessed with this goddamn war. You have to stop thinking
about it!” She moved closer and looked at him pleadingly. “It’s not healthy
Jack. It’s an obsession with you. It’s giving you horrible nightmares. You’ve
been so absorbed with it!”

“Honey,” he
began again, but didn’t know what to say next. How could he explain? He
didn’t understand himself what was going on. He needed the information from the
news to help make sense of all this, didn’t he? And he hadn’t been obsessed
with all this before the first nightmare the other night. At least he didn’t
remember that he had been. In truth, everything seemed kind of hazy before two
days ago. He looked again at his wife. He had to tell her. To make her
understand that he was losing touch with who he was—that the lines between his
dream and reality were becoming blurred. He had to explain it to her.

“Ok,” he said
instead and squeezed her hand. “You’re right, Pam. We’ll both take a break from
all this for a while.” Pam smiled and hugged him tightly.

“I’m sorry
Jack. I am just so worried about you.”

“I know, honey.
It’s ok. I’m fine.” Jack hoped his wife believed the words more that he did.

They dressed
for church while Claire played on the bed with her talking Elmo doll. Jack made
an attempt at senseless conversation while they dressed. Pam chatted about
Claire’s playgroup, but her voice sounded tense and nervous. Jack struggled to
keep his mind from wandering to the street scene on the TV.

 
It was the
street, wasn’t it—the street where Casey took a bullet to the throat?

The angle seemed
all wrong, like maybe the footage had been shot from the corner down and to the
left, so that left and right looked reversed. If the reporter had just moved
his fucking head Jack felt sure he would have seen a low, tan wall with a hole
ripped in it from an RPG round. In front of it would be a pool of dark blood
where Kindrich had taken a bullet into his head and collapsed in a heap beside
him.

“Jack?” Pam’s
voice sounded worried.

“Yeah?” he
said and shook the vivid image of Kindrich, his helmet in the dirt and the back
of his head an empty black hole, from his mind.

“I said do you
know where my black shoes are? The ones with the little bows?”

“Bathroom,” he
answered fondly.

“Oh, here they
are,” Pam said from behind him as he tied his tie in the mirror behind the
door.

“Elmo!” Claire
said.

Pam’s hands
wrapped around him from behind, and she smiled at him over his shoulder in the
mirror.

“Next to the
bed,” she said.

“Hmmmm?”

“The shoes,
Jack,” she said and kissed him on the neck. “Beside the bed, not in the
bathroom.”

Jack chuckled.
“Sorry.”

He saw a hint
of worry in Pam’s eyes.

“Watcha’
thinkin’ about, Jack?”

Jack turned
around and kissed her cheek.

“Where to go
for brunch,” he answered easily. Then he picked Claire up from the bed. “How
about Drake’s? They make those cool Mickey Mouse pancakes for Claire.”

“Which you
always finish, piggy boy,” Pam laughed. Her voice seemed like hers again and she
grabbed his arm tightly. “Sounds yummy.”

The three of
them walked together down the stairs, Claire pulling on Jack’s ear. They piled
into the green Volvo and headed off to church.

Jack did a
fair job of following along with the service, holding Pam’s hand lightly
throughout. He mouthed the words to all the hymns. Jack hated the sound of his
voice and was sure that others around him would, too. So he did everyone the
courtesy of keeping his singing voice to himself, and enjoyed instead the soft
sound of Pam’s voice as she sang along with the congregation.  It felt strange
when they were all asked to say a special prayer for the troops in Iraq. Pam squeezed
his hand tightly, and he sensed that she looked at him, though he kept his own
eyes closed. He tried to think about school, unable to believe that at this
moment God could possibly understand his prayers.

After a big
brunch Jack was full to bursting, as always, having finished his own eggs
Benedict and Claire’s barely-touched Mickey Mouse pancakes. They stopped
briefly for a swing in the community park, but because of the cold they didn’t
stay long. At home, while Claire napped, they stayed busy straightening the
house. Jack sensed that they were avoiding talking about things, which was fine
with him, actually. Pam mopped the kitchen floor while Jack busied himself
organizing the playroom their living room had become. He found himself glancing
frequently at the TV, his urge to turn it on and surf the news channels almost
more than he could bear. Finally, when the TV’s calling nearly overpowered him
he went upstairs and cleaned the shower with the special cleaner Pam insisted
he always use (he found the “scrubbing bubbles” just made the rinse take
forever, which maybe was the whole idea). He let his mind probe the TV scene
from Fallujah, careful not to think about it directly. Instead he let his brain
sort of wander around and sneak up on the thought casually, like a college kid
trying to strike up a conversation with a pretty girl at a party that he knew
was out of his league. It didn’t shed any new light, however, and he finally forced
his mind away.

The afternoon
was relaxed and comforting in its normalcy. He played with Claire and then the
three of them watched
Elmo Goes to the Firehouse
.

“Elmo! Elmo!”

 By the time
dinner was over Jack felt pretty much himself again, and he sat on the couch
reviewing his lesson plans while Pam got Claire ready for bed and tucked her in.
He was absorbed in his lesson about DNA and RNA, when abruptly he felt the call
of the TV again. The picture of Fallujah leaped back into his consciousness
and, feeling guilty as hell, he listened intently for the sound of his wife
reading a story to his baby girl. Then he picked up the remote and turned on
the TV, madly mashing the volume button until the sound of the Fox News
reporter was little more than a whisper. Feigning indifference (for whom he
didn’t know), he flipped again through his lesson plans while the reporter
droned on about some battle in South America he couldn’t give less of a shit
about. He listened intently though, for the music which would herald another
Update
from Iraq
segment, his eyes unfocused as he shuffled his papers around for
the benefit of the empty room. Another meaningless story—something about a
spending bill which a bunch of suits were arguing about in D.C., but
this
reporter was sure it would pass. Then the music came.