said, his lips barely moving. “Again.”
“I’m going to let you think things over,” Karp said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
ONE FLOOR ABOVE, Rachel Callar watched Karp at work on twin closed-circuit television screens that ran a live feed from the interrogation room. Hank Poteat had installed the room’s cameras before leaving Poland for Korea. They offered high-quality video, almost high-definition. Callar could see everything. She could see they were losing themselves. They were all id, no superego. She didn’t know anymore why Terreri had brought her here. He didn’t respect her or listen to her. None of them did. Now they were heading for
Callar’s dad was a doctor, an oncologist who specialized in lung cancer. He’dalways wanted her to follow him. Doctorswere respected, he told her. Doctors were educated. Doctors cheated death. He didn’t mention that doctors lived in Beverly Hills and bought new BMWs every year, but then she could see that for herself. She spent her first semester at Berkeley painting and then gave in and went pre-med.
Her second year in med school, the pressure got to her. She stopped sleeping. She lay in bed jamming her brain with beta cells and lipoproteins. She tried to memorize the pages of her textbooks exactly, as though her mind were a hard drive that could store every word. She was afraid to stop studying, afraid she’d flunk out. Or worse, would kill a patient because she hadn’t studied enough.
Anyway, she stopped eating.
An itty-bitty case of anorexia. She’d had one in high school, too, like at least half the senior girls, but she was more serious this time around. She started by skipping dinner. More time to study. Then she decided that lunch would be her only meal. The rest of the day, she restricted herself to water, coffee, and sugarless gum. At lunch she had a green salad, no dressing, a couple of croutons, a cup of yogurt, and berries on the side, maybe eight hundred calories in all. Very healthy.
She lost forty pounds in three months, went from one hundred fifty to one hundred ten. People told her she looked good. Then they told her she looked great. Then they told her maybe she was getting a little thin. Then they stopped talking to her about it, and she knew she was in trouble. But she felt great. In total control.
She finished the year, went back to Los Angeles for the summer. She was sitting in a bikini by the pool of her parents’ house when her mom got home from yoga, saw her, and started to cry. Her parents convinced her to spend six weeks in a “facility” that specialized in the treatment of eating disorders. “It’s called the New Beginnings Center,” her dad said.
“Are there any other kind of beginnings?”
The NBC, as the patients — or “guests,” in the center’s jargon — called it, wasn’t a mental hospital. Not officially, anyway. So it didn’t show up on her medical records, an omission that would come in handy later. The place was more of a spa, really. A spa with a locked front door.
But despite its New Age fripperies, the place did her good. Mainly because of her psychiatrist, Dr. Appel, a small and entirely bald man who wore the same threadbare tweed jacket to every session. He never said so openly, but he seemed to regard the center’s affectations as a joke. Maybe that was why she liked him. Or maybe it was because of the way he listened to her without judging her, without trying to impose his will on her. In his office she could step out of herself, see the connections between her need to control her eating and her fear of being overwhelmed, never measuring up to her father.
“Fear of failure drives my life.”
“You’ve put yourself in an impossible position, then. All of us fail eventually.”
“So what do I do?”
“I must admit I fail to have the answer. Proving my point.” He arched an eyebrow.
“Was that a joke?” He smiled, the first time she’d ever seen any hint of emotion from him. “It was, wasn’t it? Don’t quit your day job, Dr. Appel.”
He nodded gravely, the edges of his lips tipping into a smile, and she felt somehow she’d succeeded.
Day by day she relaxed, opened up to him about her fears and feelings of inadequacy. Just naming the emotions helped her enormously. One morning, about ten days before she was due to leave the center, she came down to the little cafeteria where she and the rest of the “guests” ate their meals under the watchful eye of nurses and dieticians. And as she smelled the eggs cooking in the kitchen behind the double doors at the far end of the room, she realized that she was so very hungry.
By the end of her stay at the center she was eating normally again. Though Dr. Appel warned her that they’d never go away entirely, that in moments of great stress, her twin black dogs — anorexia and the depression that circled it — might come back.
By the time she left New Beginnings, she’d decided to become a psychiatrist. She’d also decided to break from her parents. She stopped seeing them, stopped cashing her dad’s checks, paid for the last two years of medical school herself. Before residency, she joined an army program that gave her a monthly stipend in return for a promise to join the reserves. Part of her knew she’d signed up to piss off her dad, who’d been a lifelong member of the ACLU and burned his draft card during Vietnam. Not the best reason to join, but the decision worked out. She liked being part of the reserves. As a shrink in Southern California, she saw more than her share of borderline personalities, narcissists and drama queens who suffered mainly from boredom and spent their sessions wheedling for Xanax. Talking to soldiers and vets offered a valuable reminder that some twentysomethings faced traumas worse than having nasty stepmoms.
BUT SOMETIME IN 2006, her second tour in Iraq, she started coming unwound. Just as in med school, her problems increased incrementally. She had trouble sleeping, and when she did she dreamed incessantly about the soldiers she was treating, especially the ones who’d been hurt. She exercised more and more, telling herself she’d sleep better if she tired out her body. She started to count calories in the mess line.
Then she lost Travis. He was a good-looking kid. A good-looking man. Broad-shouldered, not too tall, sandy blond hair. When he smiled, which wasn’t often, his eyes crinkled. He could have been Paul Newman’s younger brother. His looks shouldn’t have mattered, but of course they did. And he was funny. In a laconic, Texas way. One time, she’d asked him his favorite food.
He’d smirked and said, “Barbecue, ma’am. Favorite car, an F-150. Black with a number-eight bumper sticker. Favorite activity, drinking beer. Favorite music, well, I like both kinds. Country and western. I mean, ma’am, when you’re born in Fort Worth, and your parents name you Travis, you don’t have much choice in the matter. You can fight it, but why bother? Can you guess my favorite hat?”
It was the longest speech Travis ever gave her.
She liked him. She looked forward to seeing him.
She’d thought sending him home was the right move. He wasn’t ready to go back to his unit. He’d started to get paranoid, as severely depressed patients sometimes did. He complained that some of the other guys in his bunk were making fun of him. For a few weeks, she tried antidepressants, but they didn’t help. She didn’t want to force-feed him an antipsychotic like Zyprexa that would make him gain thirty pounds and sleep fifteen hours a day. He’d be branded as mentally ill for the rest of his life. She knew she was running out of time to help him. Her tour was almost over, and he was pressing every day to go back to the field. And the army was so short on frontline guys that they wouldn’t have said no. But she knew he wasn’t ready. He needed to get away from Iraq, from the heat and the wind and the constant reminders of his dead squadmates. She told him she was sending him stateside, where he could get the help he needed.
But Travis Byrne, private first class, disagreed with her diagnosis. And proved her wrong in the most irreversible way possible. And since the night Travis said good-bye to her and the world with a two-word note, she’d felt herself cramping, obsessing over him. “I failed,” he’d written. She felt the same. And after a few months back in San Diego, she decided she needed another mission.
NOW HERE SHE WAS, in Stare Kiejkuty, watching Kenneth Karp beat on Jawaruddin bin Zari. From what she could see, Karp wasn’t having much luck. Which meant that he and Jack Fisher would be asking to use the punishment box soon enough. After that, maybe, the fifth cell.
She couldn’t stand Karp. With his constant pacing, his tight energy, he reminded her of a monkey. She’d bet
