Walker
Some days are worse than others. Some days I’m not just lying in a coffin hearing someone shoveling dirt on top of the lid, some days I’m buried miles underground and nothing reaches me, not even sound, just the terrifying roar of silence.
I keep having nightmares that wake me, ones where I’m screaming louder even than Dodds, ones that stay painted on the backs of my eyelids for the rest of the day so it feels as if there’s no divide whatsoever between day and night. Everything blends into one. I’m back there, in Helmand, hearing the scream of a bird of prey—a solitary note that hangs in the air and that acts as a catalyst, a starter whistle, for the beginning of the end, for the tearing apart of machine-gun fire.
And then the images fly thick and fast like bullets and there’s no way to dodge a path through them. All I can do is stand there and let them slam into me: a boot lying in the road containing a foot, shorn-off bone gleaming white, a smoldering fragment of twisted-up metal, a bloodied tourniquet . . .
José forced me up out of bed and outside this morning, telling me if I didn’t get some fresh air and some exercise he would have to get the doc to pay me another visit. They’ve already prescribed me antidepressants, but I’m not taking them, and the last thing I wanted was another visit from the doctor.
José parked me on the bench, and that’s where Didi found me.
“You feeling better?” José asks as he leads me back to my room.
“Yeah,” I say to him. And for once it isn’t a lie.
My first reaction when Didi sat down next to me was to ask her to leave me the hell alone, but I bit it back, not wanting to be rude to her again. I didn’t feel like talking at all, but she seemed to sense that.
I wonder how many other people I could sit in silence with. My mother calls me every other day or so and never stops talking, never waits to hear my answers to her questions, just rattles on and on. Maybe it’s nervousness, not being sure what to say to the blind guy. Or maybe it’s the fact that silence is anathema to most people.
I’m constantly surrounded by noise here, by people asking me how I’m doing or handing out diagnoses or trying to get me to open up; by television and radio and the constant chatter of visitors and doctors; by the screams and explosions in my head. And what I mostly crave and can never find is silence. What I don’t want, however, is the savage loneliness that usually accompanies it. It’s good to know you can have company in silence—that you don’t have to be in it alone.
I just wish I hadn’t reacted to that bang. Jesus, Didi must think I’m pathetic. I wish I could explain to her that with the sun on my face and her description of the sky I was already back there on that mountain road, and the bang—whatever might have caused it—to me was the sound of a car exploding.
I wish I could tell her, but how would I find the words? How would I ever describe to her what happened? Why would I want her or anyone else for that matter to have those images in their head? And mostly, why would I ever want her to know how I failed, how all those deaths are my fault?
José takes me to the chair in my room and leaves me. I sit in a slump. I know by now that it’s in front of the window. At least now I can picture the view. I think about the last session I had with Doctor Monroe when he tried to encourage me to think of the future and start planning for it, but I push his words away. What future? What life?
I still haven’t moved from my place when a few hours later I hear a familiar footstep out in the hallway. My heart rate speeds up and I catch myself holding my breath. There’s a quiet knock on my door.
“Hi,” Didi says.
“Hi,” I say, turning my head in her direction.
“I just wanted to see you,” she says. “I mean, see how you were doing.”
“I’m okay,” I say. Better for hearing her voice, but I can’t tell her that.
“I just wanted to put something on the iPod,” she says. “It’s something I thought you might like to listen to.”
I nod, but can’t summon the energy to ask what it is. I’m tired. Everything today seems to take monumental amounts of energy.
I hear her crossing to the bed and then opening her laptop and switching it on. A minute or so later I hear her snap the lid shut and I start trying to think of things to say to make her stay, but I can’t think of anything. My conversation skills are limited, my brain too foggy to come up with anything.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
I nod. Stay. Please stay.
She doesn’t move, and for a moment I think that maybe she’s heard my silent plea and is going to come over and put her hand on my arm or on my back like she did earlier. She takes a step closer, and my whole body is suddenly tuned to her, to her presence in the room.
Her hand falls on my shoulder. Beneath the bandages I squeeze my eyes tightly shut. I will her to stay like that. Her hand feels like an anchor, something holding me, pulling me away from the hard, narrow edge.
I sit there, lips pressed together, words gathering behind them, all jumbled, nonsense, the essence of which is thank you, please stay, please don’t go.
But she doesn’t hear them, can’t hear them, and after thirty seconds her hand drops away and she’s gone.