Fade to Black - Proof (6 page)

And now
another update from Iraq.

Jack dropped
his papers, some of them fluttering unnoticed to the floor, and sat forward on
the couch, ready.

...in a
roadside bomb just outside Al Najaf. There was no official information on
casualties in that attack, but confidential and reliable Fox News sources
inside Iraq tell us that two Iraqi security officers were killed and one
American soldier was wounded...

 Come on, come
on. Get to Fallujah.

Jack stole a
guilty look over his shoulder towards the stairs and then leaned farther
forward, the remote in his hand, thumb at the ready to tickle the volume up a
bit, should he need. The scene shifted, but not to Fallujah. Some other idiot
was talking nonsense from a street in Baghdad.

“Come on, for
Christ’s sake,” Jack muttered.

Suddenly the
remote was torn from his hands. He spun around on the couch, his remaining
papers hitting the deck, and turned to face his wife, a kid caught flipping
through his dad’s
Penthouse
, shorts around his ankles.

“P…Pam,” he
stammered.

“Enough, Jack!
Jesus, what are you doing!” Her lip quivered. She clicked the TV off with an
angry flourish, then sagged her shoulders and dropped her head. “Enough,” she
whispered again, then turned on her heel and walked out of the room into the
kitchen. She sobbed, her face in her free hand. Her other hand continued to
grip the remote.

Jack set his pencil,
a remnant of his illusion of indifference to Fox News—apparently now his own
personal heroin—gently on the table in front of him and leaned forward, elbows
on his knees, face in his hands. He felt tears of frustration in his eyes. He
had to have some answers.

Didn’t she
fucking get it?

He had to know
what had happened to his men. He had to know whether he was having some
bullshit, armchair posttraumatic stress, like the psychiatrist on
The Today
Show
had warned Katie Couric of (“
So much violence and death coming into
our living rooms, Katie.”
) or if he were losing his mind, or if…well, if it
were something more frightening. He didn’t know how he thought Fox News would
help him find those answers (hearing familiar names wouldn’t really answer that
question, would it?), but goddamnit he had to find answers somewhere.

He rose slowly
to follow his wife into the kitchen, knowing somehow the way Pam would suggest
he find his answers. He didn’t know why it made him feel angry, but it did. He
stopped in the doorway to the kitchen and watched his beautiful wife slapping left
over fruit cocktail from a Thomas the Train kiddie plate into a clean margarine
tub (poor man’s Tupperware, she called it). Her body shook, with fear or anger—maybe
a little of both. He knew even from behind her that tears streamed down her
cheeks, and he felt guilty as hell.

“Pam?”

His wife
stopped punishing the fruit chunks and leaned her hands on the counter, her
shoulders sagged and her head dropped, a blue plastic spoon clutched in her
right hand so tightly that her knuckles were white. She said nothing. Jack
didn’t see where the remote had ended up, but saw that the tall plastic trash
can’s lid was up and had a pretty good guess. From upstairs, he could hear
Claire talking to herself as she often did before she drifted off to sleep,
happily oblivious that Pop was losing his marbles. Her voice was soft and far
away, and held an innocence that could only mean she didn’t know that daddy should
soon be wrapped giggling in a sheet on his way to a padded room somewhere and
the peace of mind dulling, psychiatric drug therapy. Jack waited a moment then
cleared his throat nervously.

“Baby?”

Pam turned around
slowly, the blue spoon still clutched in her hand, fruit syrup dripping onto
the linoleum floor. Jack shifted his weight nervously and looked at his feet.
How could he make her understand? Pam sighed heavily, her eyes red and her
cheeks wet with tears.

Jack’s chest
tightened when she dropped the plastic spoon to the floor and covered her face
with her hands, fruit cocktail syrup smearing on her cheeks. Her body shook and
so he walked heavily across the kitchen towards his crying wife and took her
into his arms. Pam pressed tightly against him and laid her head against his
chest, still crying. Not sure what to say or what else to do, he just rocked
her gently. After a moment she pushed softly away from him and turned her anxious
eyes up to meet his. Her beautiful face looked frightened and eager for
comfort. Jack kissed her forehead and she closed her red eyes again.

“It’s gonna be
okay, Pam,” he said and closed his own eyes, hoping he sounded more convincing
than he felt. He opened his eyes and saw she watched him expectantly.

“I’m sorry, baby,”
she said, her voice full of anguish and fear. “I’m so sorry, Jack. I’m just
very scared and confused.” Pam gripped Jack’s hands tightly in her own. She
blinked the tears from her eyes.

Here it comes
.

“Baby,” she
said, then paused and sighed heavily. “Jack, I need you to do something for
me.” Her eyes held his.

“Anything,”
Jack said as he stroked her cheek, reading his lines and playing his role
perfectly.

“Please,
Jack,” she sobbed a little again. “I want you to see someone, a counselor or something.
Please, baby. I‘m so scared for you. Please, let’s go and see someone. Someone
you can talk to.” Pam leaned against her husband, not able to look him in the
eyes anymore.

“Ok,” Jack
sighed heavily. “Ok, Pam. I will. I promise I will.”

He knew it wouldn’t
help. What in the hell would he say? How could he possibly explain to a
stranger how he felt, the awful things he saw in his sleep, and sometimes even
when he was awake. How he could tell them things he couldn’t even tell his
wife? He realized Pam was still talking.

“…therapist.
Or maybe a psychiatrist. I heard about this on
Good Morning America
.
Post stress, or something, it was called. It’s from all the shit on the TV. All
the horrible things right in our living room.” She held his face in both her
hands now, looking at him, her eyes pleading.

“No,” Jack
said and pulled away a bit.  Pam’s eyes filled with tears again. “Not a shrink.
I…I…Pam, I couldn’t tell this to a stranger. I need…” he sighed heavily. “Maybe
the battalion surgeon.”

Pam’s face
wrinkled in confusion.

“The
battalion…” Jack realized his mistake. “Our doctor,” he corrected. “Our primary
care guy?”

“Oh,” she said
leaning back against the counter. She unconsciously wiped syrup from her sticky
hands onto her jeans. “Doctor Barton,” she said and her eyes locked on his
again. “Soon, Jack?” she asked, her voice unsure.

“I’ll call
tomorrow,” Jack said and turned away, leaning an arm against the wall. Pam came
up from behind him and wrapped her arms around him again, hugging her head
against his back.

“Thank you,
Jack,” she said. “I love you so much.”

“I love you,
too, baby,” he answered without turning around. He thought of Claire, by now
asleep in her bed. “I love you both so much.”  

Chapter

7

He slept soundly—or at least he
had no memories of dreams—but he woke up tired and achy, his muscles tense like
he had slept curled up in a knot. His hands, in particular, were sore and he
saw that he had deep purple, crescent-shaped bruises in his palms from where
his nails must have dug into his flesh. He dumped his pale, sweet coffee into
the sink and filled a travel mug to the brim with steaming black coffee before he
headed out to his car, kissing his daughter and wife on his way out.

“I love you,”
Pam said, her voice tense with worry. Jack felt her eyes studying his face from
her seat beside Claire, a spoonful of oatmeal in her hand.

“I know,” he
answered tightly. “Me, too.” He wanted to give her more, to say something magic
to erase her anxious look, but he had nothing.

He drove to
work listening to a Dierks Bentley CD, trying to think about the words to the
songs—anything other than the images of Fallujah that flashed in his tortured
mind. Instead the images became a slide show set to country music.

Bentley sang
about a hot girl in a tank top…

Click.

Kindrich, his
brain blown out the back of his head, his face frozen in surprise.

Bentley wanted
to kiss the hot chick…

Click.

Simmons lying
in the dirt beside him, his face a gory mess of missing skin and bone. That
horrible, one remaining eye staring at nothing, the other socket a ragged oversized
black hole.

Bentley
wondered what the hell he had been thinking…

Jack knew what
the fuck he was thinking. He was thinking about how it felt to be starved for
air, sucking too little air through a bloody hole in his neck. The terror of not
being able to lift his arms, the feel of dust on his face and in his lungs, and
the sound of a Blackhawk, kicking up dirt around him.

Thump thump
thump thump…

The sound of a
horn made him open his eyes. Green light. His hands were tight and white
knuckled on the steering wheel and his palms ached. He pulled through the
intersection and ignored the angry face of the driver pulling around him,
mouthing the word “asshole” as he sped by, his middle finger up in an irritated
salute.

Jack mashed
the forward button on the CD player, tired of thinking about what he was
thinking and where the night might lead. Dierks slowed it down with an angry
tune about throwing his girlfriend’s love letters into the river and flipping
over his mattress. He wanted to be able to burn the pictures in his head and
get on with his life, too.

I hear ya’
Dierks. I hear ya’, buddy.

His first two
periods went by in a blur. He felt distracted, but able to keep a train of
thought loosely focused on his lesson plans. His students seemed unusually
sedate and asked few questions, doubtless reading the heavy mood of one of
their favorite teachers. Chad came by in between to make sure his friend was
ok, and seemed somewhat satisfied with Jack’s reassurances that he felt much
better. Jack told him he was heading to the doctor later “just to be sure.”
Chad said he would check on a sub for his last class so Jack wouldn’t have to
come back after his free period.

Third period
started out normal enough. Jack was talking away about how DNA wrote out recipes for the cell to make things they needed, and how RNA carried the recipes in
code to the “kitchen” workers, so that they would make the right stuff. He
enjoyed his lesson, actually, and relaxed just a bit as he let his mind focus
on cell biology, a nice break from the war in Iraq.

Halfway
through, Jack felt a growing sense of dread that he couldn’t explain. Something
was going to happen, something bad. His mouth became suddenly dry and he couldn’t
stop his eyes from frequently scanning the back of the room. He pushed on with
his lesson and forced his eyes to his notes and his mind to the cycles of the
cell.

Something is
coming. Something bad.

“We’re coming
for you, Sar’n,”
Simmons’
boyish voice told him, clear as a bell. In his head, right? Jack scanned the
room again, his eyes full of terror. He had stopped in midsentence. His students
shifted uncomfortably, looking around the room to see what had taken their
teacher’s attention and, from the look in his eyes, filled him with fear. They
saw nothing and so they looked at each other with growing discomfort.

Sar’n?
a sleepy
voice asked.

“Yes?” Jack
answered to no one, his voice cracking.

Come back,
Sar’n. You belong here with us. Don’t leave us, Casey.

The voice came
from nowhere and everywhere. Jack dropped his hands to his sides, his lesson
plans fluttering to the floor. He stared intently at the door in back of the
room. Was there movement?

As he watched
in horror, his pulse pounding in his temples, a figure passed by the doorway in
slow motion. He was dressed in filthy Marine digital desert cammie pants and a
torn green T-shirt. Dog tags danced on his thin chest as he walked, limping slightly.
He paused briefly in the doorway and turned to Jack, smiling. As he turned,
Jack saw that the other side of his face was gone; a black bloody hole gaped at
him where the eye and cheek should have been. The smile ended halfway across
his face in a twisted mass of scattered teeth and bone. Simmons winked with his
one remaining eye and raised a thumb in greeting.

“Hey, Sarge
,
”
he croaked with a thick, black tongue, his missing lips turning “Sarge” into
“Sarze.” When he did, dark blood spilled out over his dirty chin and spattered
onto his T-shirt. Two teeth twisted loose and fell out of his deformed mouth,
which he caught easily in the palm of his dirty hand. He shrugged, embarrassed,
popped them back into his mouth like hard candy, and then shuffled on,
disappearing past the doorway. Jack felt a dusty wind swirl around him, and
coughed as the dirt filled his mouth. He looked up towards the sound of the
Blackhawk passing overhead and saw, without much surprise, that the ceiling had
swirled its way into a purple sky. He heard the
whump
of an outbound mortar
shell, and then seconds later the loud explosion of the shell as it found its
mark. Jack dropped instinctively to the ground, balanced on one knee, an arm
over his head.

The room tilted
nauseatingly to the left, and Jack struggled back to his feet and steadied
himself on the desk in front of him. Then he pushed back, stumbled, and fell
painfully to his knees again. He scrambled back to his feet and bolted to the
door. As he passed the first row of students, his hip slammed into the corner
of a desk, sending a textbook and sheets of handwritten notes to the floor and nearly
knocking the young girl there out of her seat. Jack continued on, oblivious to
the muted scream of the student, and gripped the doorframe with a hand as he
skidded past it into the hallway. His eyes darted back and forth as he looked
for the dead Marine he knew would be there.

Empty.

But he heard a
click as the door at the end of the hall snapped shut. Jack sprinted full speed
down the hall and slammed his full weight into the horizontal bar across the
door, twisting his right wrist painfully as he did. The door exploded open and
Jack found himself outside in the cold air. He panted and his eyes darted
around, searching in all directions for the corpse of his friend.

“Simmons,” he
hollered.

But there was
nothing there. No one. The sounds of gunfire and yelling faded quickly away,
and he heard only the sounds of traffic on the street beyond the thin tree line
around the school. Jack dropped in a heap to the sidewalk, sitting Indian‐style
on the cold concrete, and began to sob.

He had no idea
how long he sat there. A fairly long time, he thought, long enough for him to
begin shivering from the cold, and for his tailbone to start aching from the
hard concrete. He didn’t have a single linear thought. Instead he had a series
of disjointed and emotional thoughts, which alternated between the terror of
what had just happened, guilt over how all of this was affecting Pam—and
doubtless soon Claire—and extreme anxiety over what it all meant. He was
vaguely aware that the school door opened twice; he heard the hushed murmur of
voices, and then it closed again.

His most
consuming thought was the debate over what was real. He felt most terrified by
the way his mind kept insisting that it was Casey—and Kindrich, and Simmons—who
were real. That would make him the lie, right?  His life here, his job, and his
home were the fantasy. His brain whispered to him that the horror of his
nightmares, that Simmons walking past with his face blown off, that his dying
as Casey Stillman, in the dirt in a street in Iraq, were all real. That thought
instilled in him the most horrifying fear he could imagine.

Worse than
being fucking insane?

That was a
close contest, actually.

When his
shivering became uncontrollable and his ass ached past the point of being
ignored, he struggled slowly to his feet, wrapped his arms tightly around
himself for warmth, and sighed. Then he turned to the door, opened it slowly,
and went back inside.

Time to face
the music.

His classroom
was empty except for Chad, the school nurse (a gigantic, sweaty woman who
always looked pissed off about something) and, of course, Stuart Anderson, the
John F. Kennedy High School principal. They clearly argued about something, but
fell silent immediately when Jack walked in. Chad rose at once and came to the
door, wrapping his arm around Jack’s shoulders.

“How are you, buddy?”
Chad spoke slowly, like you might to an Alzheimer’s patient who has just had
yet another stroke, or a child who you knew was destined for long rides on a
short bus to the special classes in the trailer behind the school.

“I’m fine,
Chad,” Jack said patiently, fighting the urge to shove him violently to the
ground. “Where’s my class?”

“Well,”
Anderson began, and then cleared his throat. “We had to send them down to join
Ms. Gillespie’s class, Jack. But that was quite a while ago. It’s well into the
lunch period now.”

Jack pursed
his lips and nodded his head slowly. Of course, his look said. That would be
the prudent thing when the biology teacher totally loses his shit in front of
35 teenagers.

Off to Ms.
Gillespie’s class, kids. We’ll come get you after we are done picking up your
teacher’s marbles and packing them in a ziplock baggie for the trip to the loony
bin. Hurry up now! And don’t step on Simmons’ bloody tooth, there.

Chad led him
gently to a chair, flipped up the half desk, and helped Jack slide into the
seat. One more helpful hand from his friend and Jack decided he might break his
jaw.

Mr. Anderson watched
him uncomfortably, arms crossed as he leaned back against Jack’s desk. Nurse
Cratchett (Jack had no idea of her real name, and couldn’t have cared less)
stood sweating the chronic perspiration of the morbidly obese and looked
disinterestedly at her fingernails. Her face said she had seen it all before in
her long career in health care.

Doubt it,
Jack thought.
If you knew what the hell you were doing you’d be able to get a real job
instead of pushing thermometers into kids’ rectums with your fat sausage
fingers
.

Mr. Anderson
cleared his throat nervously.

“Jack,” he
began and then paused. He shook his head and uncrossed his arms, apparently
preferring to pace. “What’s been going on, Jack?”

Not much. Just
a little unnerved by the dead kid who dropped by for a visit. And how the fuck
are you?

“I’ve been
pretty sick, Mr. Anderson.” Jack began. No problem convincing them of that.
Jack knew his face must be pale, his hands trembled, and he figured he looked
like he might pass out at any minute. “I apologize for the little problem here.
I think I spiked a fever,” he shot a glance at Nurse Cratchett.

 
Don’t get
your hopes up, Nightingale.

“And I felt
like I was going to pass out. The whole room was coming in on me, and I guess I
just needed to get out.” Jack sighed heavily and gave Anderson his best ‘I’m
way too sick to go to school today, Mom‘look.

Anderson
looked skeptical and stopped his stroll across the room. He put a hand to his
chin and looked at Jack critically, dissecting him with his eyes.

“Everything okay
at home, Jack?”

Jack started
at that, and looked indignant, which wasn’t hard. Still he had to be careful
here.

“Everything is
fine with Pam and Claire, sir. I truly have been very sick. I actually have an
appointment with my doctor today.” Jack looked at Chad, hoping for
confirmation.

“We already
arranged a sub for his afternoon periods, Stu,” Chad chimed in on cue.

“Look,” Jack
said as he wiped perspiration from his forehead. “I really am sorry. It was a
mistake to come to work feeling as shitty as I do. I just didn’t want the class
to get behind.” He held Anderson’s doubtful look. The principal’s gaze softened.
In fact, he looked relieved.