Rehearsal therapy: he had written accounts of the event while on beta-blockers, repeating this exercise over and over. Sleepy all the time because of the beta-blockers, memoir as automatic writing: I tried to get people inside. I had a water tank in the closet. I hid what I had. The pistol barrel was a little black circle. Everybody was dead.
No good. Just more blurry sick gasping panic attacks, more nightmares.
About half the time he fell asleep, he had nightmares that woke him in a cold sweat. Sometimes the images were sadistically cruel. After waking from one of these dreams he had to try to warm back up, so he would wiggle his cold toes, toss and turn, try to forget the dream, try to get back to sleep; but it took hours, and sometimes it didn’t work. The next day he would operate like a slow zombie, get through the day by working mindlessly, or by playing video games, mostly games in which he bounced from point to point in a low-g environment. Asteroid hopping.
His therapists talked about trigger events. About avoiding triggers. What they were glossing over with this too-convenient metaphor was that life itself was just a long series of trigger events. That consciousness was the trigger. He woke up, he remembered who he was, he had a panic attack. He got over it and got on with his day as best he could. The command not to think about certain things was precisely a mode of thinking about that thing. Repression, forgetting; he had to learn to forget. Perpetual distraction was impossible. He wanted to get better but he couldn’t.
Cognitive behavioral therapy was accepted by many as the best way to deal with PTSD. But CBT was hard. He pursued it like a religious calling, like a sidewalk over the abyss. One therapist said to him, when he used that phrase, everyone walks that sidewalk over the abyss, that’s life. Mine’s a tightrope, he replied. Focusing on balance was necessary at all times. In that sense, distractions were actually contra-indicated. If you were distracted enough, then a single misstep could send you plunging into the abyss. Constant vigilance— but this too was bad, as just another way of thinking about it, of paying attention to it. No. Hypervigilance was part of the disorder. So there was no way out. No way out but dreamless sleep. Or death.
Or certain drugs. Anti-anxiety drugs were not the same as anti-depressants. They were meant to foil the brain’s uptake of fight-or-flight stimulants. To give consciousness a bit of time to calm the system down by realizing there was no real danger. These drugs had unwanted side effects, sure. Flatness of affect, yes. It was even part of what you wanted. If you killed all feelings, the bad feelings would necessarily be among them and therefore less likely to appear, even if they were the first ones in line, ready to pop. But if you did accomplish that flattening of all feeling, then what? March through life like an automaton, that’s what. Eat like fueling an old car. Exercise hoping to get so tired you could fall asleep and make it through the night. Try not to think. Try not to feel.
So, after many months of that, after years of that, he went back to India.
He needed to try it to see if it would help. Until he tried it, he wouldn’t know. It would be something like aversion therapy, or rather immersion therapy. Go right back to the scene of the crime. Plus he had an idea that had begun to obsess him. He had a plan.
He landed at Delhi, took the train to Lucknow, got off at the station and got on a crowded bus out to his town. The sights and smells, the heat and humidity— they were all triggers, yes. But since consciousness was the real trigger, he steeled himself and looked out the bus’s dusty window and felt the sweat pouring out of his skin, felt the air pulsing in and out of his lungs, felt his heart pound inside him like a child trying to escape. Take it! Live on!
He got off at the bus stop in the town’s central square. He stood there looking around. People were everywhere, all ages, Hindu and Muslim as before, the differences subtle and sometimes not there at all, but his eye had been trained to note the signs— a tikka, a particular rounded cap. The usual mix that this town had always had, back to Akbar and before. All appeared to him as it had been four years earlier. There was no sign that what had happened had ever happened.
Surely there must be a memorial at least. He walked toward the lake, feeling his heart hammer, his skin burn. His clothes were soaked with his sweat, he drank from the water bottle he had in his daypack, just a sip each time, and yet soon it was empty. Everything pulsed, his eyes stung with sweat, behind his wrap-around sunglasses he was weeping furiously. The polarization of the glasses was not enough to keep bursts of light from shattering in his retinas. Sights incoming like needles in the eyeball, everywhere he looked.
The lake was the same. How could it be the same, how could they not have drained it, built over the site with some mausoleum or temple or just an apartment block or a bazaar?
Then again, who was there to remember what had happened here, or what it had been like that week? There were no survivors to be haunted by this place. As for those who had come in and cleaned it up, disposed of the bodies, well, it had been just one town of many, all of them the same. There was no reason to fixate on this one. No— he was
