He shrugged. “If you think it will help.”
“I don’t know what will help, but it can’t hurt to try this. If it’s too upsetting just stop. Anytime you want to stop, be sure to stop.”
“All right.”
So he began to tell the story of how he had first come to his town, and how the heat wave had at first seemed like all the other hot weather they had had. As he spoke he moved his eyes, in tandem of course, as that was the only way he could do it, back and forth, looking as far to the left as he could, vague view of her bookshelves, then in a quick sweep to as far right as he could, catching a vague view of flowers in a vase in front of a window looking out onto a courtyard. This was a voluntary effort that stopped the moment he stopped thinking to do it, so he had to devote some of his attention to it, while at the same time continuing with his story, which as a result was halting and disjointed, unrehearsed and different from what he would have said if he was just telling her the same thing again as before. This he presumed was one benefit of the exercise.
“I got there in the winter so it wasn’t that hot to begin with … but it wasn’t cold, no. In the Himalayas it was cold, you could even see the snow peaks to the north on clear days, but most days … most days weren’t clear. The air was dirty almost all the time. Not that different from anywhere else. So I got settled in and was taking classes in Hindi and working … working at the clinic. Then the heat wave came. It got way hotter than it had been up till then, but everyone … everyone said it was normal, that the time right before the monsoon was the hottest of all. But then it got hotter still. Then it all happened fast, one day it was so hot even the people were scared … and that night some of the older people and the littlest kids died. That sent everyone into shock, but I think they were thinking it was as bad as it could get. Then it got worse, and the power went out, and after that there was no air conditioning … and not much water. People freaked out, and rightfully so. The heat was beyond what the human body can stand. Hyperthermia, that’s just a word. The reality is different. You can’t breathe. Sweating doesn’t work. You’re being roasted, like meat in an oven, and you can feel that. Eventually a lot of them went down to the local lake, but its water was like bath temperature, and not … safe to drink. So that’s where a lot of them died.”
He stopped talking and let his eyes rest. He could feel muscles behind his eyes, pulsing at the unaccustomed efforts. Like any other muscles, they welcomed a rest. That felt odd.
The therapist said, “I noticed that this time you didn’t really put yourself in the story.”
“No? I thought I did.”
“You always talked about them. They did things, things happened to them.”
“Well, I was one of them.”
“At the time, did you think of yourself as one of them?”
“ … No. I mean, they were them, I was me. I watched them, I talked with some of them. The usual stuff.”
“Of course. So, could you tell me your part of the story, moving your eyes like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to try?”
“No.”
“All right. Maybe some other time. And maybe next time we can try to create the bilateral action by having you hold those little buzzers in your hands. Remember I showed you those? They’ll pulse left-right-left-right as you talk it through. It’s easier than moving your eyes.”
“I don’t want to do that now.”
“Next time, maybe.”
“I don’t know when.”
“You don’t want to?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Well, the theory is that if you tell the story, you’re shaping the memory of it to some extent, by putting it into words. And if you do that while making the eye movements, or feeling the hand buzzers, that seems to create a kind of internal distance in you between your memory of the story as you told it, and the, what you might call the reliving of it, the spontaneous reliving of it by way of some trigger setting you off. So that if that were to happen and you wanted some relief from it, you could move your eyes and start maybe thinking of your spoken version of what happened, and it would relieve you from reliving it. If you see what I mean.”
“Yes,” Frank said. “I understand. I’m not sure I believe it, but I understand.”
“That makes sense. But maybe worth a try?”
“Maybe.”
One fall he took a Scottish friend’s offer to work on a project in Antarctica. She was principal investigator of a small scientific team going to the Dry Valleys, to study the stream that ran there briefly every summer, the Onyx River. And she had room on the team for a field assistant, and wanted to help him out. Since he was having trouble handling the heat, she said, Antarctica ought to be a great place for him.
Sounds good, he said. He was running out of money from a small inheritance left to him by his grandmother, and he still didn’t want to contact his parents or his organization, so it would help with that too. And so that fall he flew to Denver and went through the interviews, and altered his résumé to omit his time in India, and then he was hired and off to Auckland, then Christchurch, and from Christchurch south to McMurdo Station on Ross Island, just across McMurdo Sound from the Dry Valleys, which lay between the Royal Society Range and the frozen sea. Even the plane
