by Betsy McLaughlin
Bob’s body matches the sag of the VA waiting room chair, yellowed by the years of use. He sat up and hitched his loose-fitting, white-washed jeans. His black wind-breaker with USMC stitched into the breast pocket rustled. What once topped his head with thick black curls, now lay thin wisps of grayish, thinning hair.
He is weaving a pen through his fingers, staring at a page of twenty questions demanding his self-ratings. “Have you had any repeated, disturbing dreams of the stressful experience in the last week? 0 not at all, 4 extremely.” Ripping the paper off the clipboard, he crumples it, balling it into his fist.
Dr. Damon Taylor strides into the waiting room, a dark-haired, middle-aged brick of a guy who Bob always figured for a high school football coach, all youthful and boisterous like he was pumping up a team. “Sorry about that Vikings loss last night! You know I’ve lost some sleep over it, that’s for sure!” he says with a slow smile. Bob snorts, unamused- a die-hard fan, the loss stung him as well. Dr. Taylor points his hand down toward the hallway that leads to his office, “After you, sir.” Once they arrive in his office, he asks “How ya doing today?”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve asking a question like that. How do you think I’m doing?”
Dr. Taylor is silent for a moment, briefly watching a bird out the window. He looks then at Bob, “I’m less interested in what I think and more interested in how my question came off to you. We could start again if you’d like.”
Bob unclenches the balled-up paper, flattens it out, and holds it up to him. “Frankly, I think you lied to me. When I first came to this stupid place, you said that I could”, Bob flings two fingers up to use in air quotes, ‘recover.’ You know what I say, Doc? To heck with recovery! If recovery means that I can’t sit on my back deck in peace, that I can’t sleep more than an hour stretch at night, that I can look back on my entire life with only regret, then absolutely! I’m recovered! You’ve worked your school book magic on me. Ever since I started talking to you, I’ve turned into nothing but a sack of garbage who wanders around like a sick puppy. I think you’re full of sh-”
Shaking, Bob remembers what he confirmed on the first appointment. He had heard of this guy through the rounds of coffee hour he joins weekly in the wreck hall; he hadn’t served a single day in any branch of service. Bob knew this as a fact now after he had come out and asked him. His reply grated Bob, “Why no sir, I’m not a veteran, but I proudly serve those who have served.”
How could he let the comments from his son, Jake, guilt him into talking to some quack who couldn’t have half of a clue about what he had been through?
“Don’t even think about calling me, Dad,” he had said. “You’re not welcome in our home and as far as I’m concerned, you’re not even my kids’ grandfather.” Those words had speared into him, like icicles falling from a gutter.
Bob forces himself to think of his second conversation with Dr. Taylor, where he explained to him what was happening in his brain, his body. Bob felt like Dr. Taylor was giving him a reverse palm reading, explaining to him the last fifty years of his life. The guy wasn’t a complete idiot, he knew. He even liked talking sports with him, as big of a fan as he was.
Bob breathes deep, “Look. You seem like a nice enough guy, and I don’t want to cause a scene. But maybe this just isn’t for me.”
Dr. Taylor nods, “You’re welcome to have a seat, Bob.”
Bob doesn’t move.
“You’re feeling a lot. And though it seems the opposite, it’s actually the best thing that can happen.”
Bob snorts. Still shaking, he wonders what’s wrong with him. Why all of this rage, this sweat, this emotion now and not while holding Nancy as she cried when the doctor called her with the test results? Not when he held her hand through eight months of chemo, watching her shrivel to nothing. Not even through her funeral four years ago, where Jake said he’d be fine if he never saw him again. Maybe he’s a monster, and this is how a monster feels. Maybe a monster who deserves to sit through the misery of this appointment.
“You don’t believe me, right?” Dr. Taylor smiles, his soft brown eyes holding Bob’s. “I won’t lie to you, Bob. It doesn’t serve me or you any purpose to lie. Trauma work is hard, there isn’t any way around that. It’s usually worse before it starts to get better.”
“You can say that again.” Bob replies, his eyes scanning the doorway as he shifts himself into the chair opposite Dr. Taylor, making fleeting eye-contact with him. Bob fumbles with the zipper of his jacket, easing both arms out of it, laying it flat across his lap. He would stay. A monster, after all, doesn’t deserve to leave when he wants to.
“Bob, we’ve been meeting every week for three months now.”
“Wow, this guy’s a genius. He can count, everyone!” he mumbles under his breath, uncertain if Dr. Taylor fully hears him or not, half-caring, half not. Some young chap with no ounce of his service under his belt isn’t going to talk to him like he’s dumb. He isn’t, he knows. He was the Minnesota State Champion Chess Association winner in 2001 and is still as sharp as a tack at the newspaper’s daily Sudoku.
Dr. Taylor looks down at his shoes, then proceeds, “And in those three months, you’ve dug deep, and I commend you for it. But I sense there’s something else. Something holding you back, keeping you from moving forward.”
Bob shifts in his seat, gazing up at the painting behind Dr. Taylor. Blurred lines of green and blue interweave themselves onto a canvas. It makes him dizzy. Silence. Bob is tingly and he swipes at the sweat dripping on his upper lip. The guy has a way of making him uneasy. Or maybe it was the office. Or the topic.
Bob stammers, holding up the paper again. “This stupid form always talks about the stressful event. Like there weren’t a hundred stressful events in one day while I was in Vietnam.”
More silence.
His hands shake, the volume of his voice rising higher, pointing to another question. “Or how about this ridiculous question, “Suddenly feeling or acting as if the stressful event were happening again?”
“That question seems to bother you a lot. Tell me more about what makes it ridiculous to you.”
Silence again. He crosses his legs, fumbling for a peppermint candy in his pocket, hoping for a distraction that will get Dr. Taylor to stop staring at him. After the wrapper is off he glances up. Eyes still on him, he looks away. A USPS postal carrier for thirty-five years, he managed the winding, snowy roads of Northern Minnesota with true commitment to the motto of “neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail” with less stress than he experiences in this room.
“Try me, Bob.”
This guy doesn’t let anything go. He sighs, shifting his feet again, wiping off a smudge he sees on his shoe.
“It’s just that sometimes I’m there, but I’m not really there. It’s Vietnam, but it’s my backyard. It’s not the same thing that happened, it’s just, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it,” Bob shares.
“Take me there, Bob. Take me with you to where you go.”
Bob’s eyes close and open, closing tight again. He takes his glasses off, rubbing at his temple. The words from Jake at the funeral dig into his ribs, reminding him why he’s sitting in this chair. A monster though he was, a man doesn’t let his son slip from his grasp without a fight. He’d tough out this nonsense if it meant Jake would stop shaking his head at him every time he drove down their road, wanting even a tiny glimpse of his grandkids on the swing-set in the backyard. He’d lost Nancy, he’d lost himself, he wasn’t going to lose them forever too.
Shuddering, Jakes’ words drift further into his mind, lulling him back to Dr. Taylor’s question. He takes himself to two nights ago, the vision strong in his own mind, though kept tucked away from the conversation in the office.
Bob sputtered around his half-acre lot, watching the dusk turn into an eerie darkness. “A fire”, he said to no one, and grabbed the gas can and a lighter. Once he got the flames good and hot, he pulled out his worn lawn chair, throwing himself in. The flames ahead of him flicked and danced, rising higher, lowering in, their striped orange quivers calmed him. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, with his nose slightly up. The smell came at him then; diesel, strong and aromatic. He gazed into the fire the flames licked up, he paused, and the wind shifted, swirls of smoke hovered. He heard a rattling, like chains being slunk together, like the crack of his knees when he squats down. A breeze blew the flap of his jacket open and he reached down to zip it up. He saw the smoke climbing, climbing into the trees, swirling and swaying, dancing like it had hips. The cracking got louder, “Snap. Crack. Snap. Crack” and his eyes looked to the left of the fire, the sky a dark navy, and moonless, the stars were out, mocking him. A figure of a skeleton emerged from the woods, the gray bones of the arms bobbing up and down like a wave. Bob shivered, the fire only made him colder, more aware of the image before him. He scanned the skeleton, emptiness in the stomach where flesh and intestines used to be. He found the skull-the orange of the fire became eyes-glowing and staring into him, the cracking became in rhythm with his heart beat, pulsating and shaking him, until it burst through his ears. The diesel smell became strong, mixed with the rusty smell of blood, he tasted it in his mouth, he spat and then gagged, and bit his tongue.
Dr. Taylor fumbles with the worn clipboard laying across his lap, glancing up at Bob every few minutes. “I know this is hard, Bob. Take the time you need. I’m here when you want to continue.”
The skeleton stumbled, it fell, it got up, it fell again, howling and cracking and writhing in pain. Bob threw his keys at it, his wallet, his Coke can. It shrieked louder and stumbled closer. Bob jolted from his seat, his foot tripping on the leg, he fell in the dirt near the fire pit, crashing and sliding. The arms of the skeleton reached out, crawling, and grasping, languishing. Bob heaved, the putrid taste of blood and diesel and salt from his tears mingle in a pool of dirt and he thrashed and screamed, “It was me, it was me, it was me!”
Bob leans his head back, shuts his eyes hard. A deep sigh escapes his mouth and then he quickly tightens his lips shut. He squeezes his hands and then opens them again saying, “It was me. It was me. It was me.”
“Let it out, Bob.”
And he does, now no longer able to stop the free-flowing salty tears from his eyes, they slide like an avalanche down his face. His body shakes, wrapping his arms around his sides, he starts rocking back and forth. It lasts only a minute, then he reaches for the tissue box sitting near him on Dr. Taylor’s desk, blowing his nose loudly, and looks up.
Dr. Taylor nods his head, “You said ‘it was me.’ Tell me about that.”
Bob’s face clouds again, his eyes shutting, like a pain is beginning in his right arm and is now traversing throughout his whole tall and lanky frame.
“Me. It was me. Someone I knew. And it was me, it was me who was responsible for what happened to him.”
“I’d like to hear more.”
The skeleton still in his presence, he lets the words come, “We were out in the jungle; dark as the dickens. I was made a sergeant, you know, the oldest by six months.” He smirked. “But I was dumb and cocky, full of myself, thought I knew what was best. We had been hoofing it for hours, mosquitoes buzzing everywhere, sweat trailing down all our cracks. We hadn’t seen or heard the VC all night but you never knew where those bastards might be.”
“I was starting to think we were in the clear though like the fool I was, so I let my guard down. And that’s when it happened. I heard a snap of a branch and next thing you know Sal is flying straight up in the air, his stomach just ripped open in shreds. Then he was down, and I was up, the ambush came on so strong. Sal is somehow the only one we lost. But I was so focused on fighting, I didn’t go to him. He died alone. He was only 20 years old. That’s a boy. Just a boy. Left alone, dying, in some dark spine of some blasted tree, in some foreign country we had no right to be in. The mosquitoes-they were swarming, they were, they were…already picking at him.”
Bob sinks deep in his chair, his shoulders sagging, his eyes downcast. His eyes dart around the room, his hands moving like the wringing out of a rag made filthy from being scrubbed across a dirt floor. The story is out of him but the memory remains, the smells and the sounds shine back at him like a flashlight in the eyes. He is afraid he will forever be what he felt in that time- a walking, living terror who cannot discern danger like he believed he could, the embarrassment of losing faithfulness.
His voice rises a notch, “I could never trust myself again. How could you trust the guy that let another guy die?”
Dr. Taylor is talking now, though Bob cannot put it all together. Fragmented pieces reach him, “It’s bravery, Bob” “Thank you for sharing” “Let’s look into this more.”
Bob nods, the thoughts still encircling his inner dialogue, his breathing altered, his eyes now glued to the dizzying picture above Dr. Taylor’s head.
He hears, “Only one thing I need from you in the process. You gotta be willing to stay in the room. Can you do that?”
Bob blinks, still staring at the picture, though now the zig-zagged lines of green and blue take the shape of the arms and legs of the skeleton. He sees him rise and slither back to the woods, his blazing eyes never leaving Bob until he buries himself in the root of a tree.
“Yes, I’ll stay in the room.”
–
–
–
Betsy McLaughlin spent many years working as a social worker for the Department of Veterans Affairs and now uses writing as an outlet to continue her passion to support mental health for Veterans. She currently resides in Stuttgart, Germany, living happily with her husband and children.
–
–
–