Loose ends

7.

Post-traumatic stress disorder," Alex diagnosed. "That's what you're experiencing, Liz. I'm sure of it."And here I thought I was just going crazy, Liz thought ruefully, sitting in a booth next to Maria, across from Alex and Isabel. The oppressive heat had finally driven them indoors, not long after Max's sister had rejoined them on the surface, to the family-style restaurant attached to the Visitors Center. Liz picked unenthusiastically at a cooling plate of cheese-coated nachos while ignoring the milkshake and tamales her friends had treated her to. At the next booth over, a temperamental infant threw a tantrum, banging a metal spoon against the tray of its highchair while shrieking its lungs out simultaneously. Liz flinched involuntarily every time the spoon noisily struck the tray. The baby's high-pitched screams scraped away at her already raw and hypersensitive nerves. "Post-traumatic?" she repeated, not entirely sure what Alex was getting at.

"Exactly," he said with utter confidence. "I should have realized it earlier." He dipped a nacho into a gooey pool of melted cheese. "I wrote a term paper on the subject for psychology last semester, and you're practically a textbook case, Liz. Well, except for the glowing handprint, that is."Hard to overlook that, Liz thought. Even though the luminous sigil was once again concealed beneath her T-shirt, she was half-convinced she could feel the silver handprint shimmering upon her belly. Her skin tingled where the handprint marked her, exactly where Max had healed her two years ago. He'd left an identical brand upon her on that unforgettable occasion, but the splayed silver fingers had eventually faded after a day or two. Why had the handprint returned after all this time? Max had not needed to heal her down in the murky caverns. He hadn't even touched her stomach.

"Explain," Maria prompted Alex. Tiny vials of therapeutic scents were arrayed like toy soldiers next to her plate. Beneath the molded Formica tabletop, she placed a sympathetic hand on Liz's knee. "Isn't post-traumatic whatcha-macallit something Vietnam vets suffer from?"Alex nodded in agreement. "Soldiers, disaster victims, and anyone who goes through some kind of severe trauma and doesn't get the right kind of psychological counseling afterward. Liz's symptoms fit the profile perfectly: flashbacks, nervousness, heightened sensitivity to sudden noises and surprises, inability to concentrate or make decisions." From the look on his face, he must have suddenly realized what a discouraging litany he had just recited, and he hastened to add, "It's nothing personal, Liz. Nothing you need to be ashamed of. It's a perfectly normal psychological response to getting shot."But that was almost two years ago," Maria objected.

Carefully selecting one of her vials, she inhaled deeply of its supposedly calming aroma. "Why would she be having this reaction now?"Alex stood by his original diagnosis. "Like I said, it's textbook. Sometimes the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can pop up years after the traumatic incident. My guess is that seeing Morton again stirred up Liz's repressed memories of the shooting itself." He scratched his bushy black hair, and Liz remembered that his vocational testing exams, administered by the late Agent Topol-sky, had actually deemed best-suited to a career in psychiatry. "Actually when you think about it, Liz was a prime candidate for P.T.S.D. because she never really had a chance to emotionally deal with, or seek counseling for, the experience of being shot, since she had to pretend, for Max's sake, that it never happened." He gave Liz a playful smile. "Heck, kiddo, I'm amazed you haven't cracked up on us before now."Well, I've been kind of busy, you know." Liz had to admit there might be something to what Alex was saying; she sure felt like all those old memories from the shooting had snuck up and walloped her from behind. "Saving the world and all."No one's saying you haven't been through a lot," Isabel assured her. The aloof young alien princess had already filled them in on what she'd managed to glean from her conversation with Lieutenant Ramirez, even if, for the sake of Alex's feelings, she'd been a bit vague about the nature of that discussion. "We all have."Okay, okay," Maria said, still not entirely satisfied with Alex's explanation, "I'll give you that Liz almost certainly has issues regarding her shooting, but what about that freaky silver handprint?" She squeezed Liz's knee to express her concern for Liz's emotional and physical well-being. "How do you explain that, Dr. Freud?"Alex grimaced and munched on a nacho to buy an extra moment or two. "Well, yeah, that's the tricky part," he admitted eventually. The three women stared at him expectantly, waiting for a more informative response. He sighed and threw up his hands. "Fine. Here's a crazy idea, and I realize I'm going out on a limb here: What if the handprint is simply a psychosomatic manifestation of her post- traumatic stress disorder?"Huh?" Maria laughed. "You're joking? That's the best you can do?"Sitting next to Alex, Isabel looked skeptical as well, although she refrained from contradicting her constant admirer directly. Liz appreciated her restraint. After all, Alex was just trying to help.

"No, no, think about it!" he insisted, caught up in his theories. "Isabel, didn't Nasedo tell Michael that all your alien powers are actually human powers, that you're really just tapping into parts of the human brain that the rest of us haven't figured out how to use yet?"Isabel nodded soberly. "That's right," she said, regarding him with uncertain eyes. "So?"Alex's face lit up as his latest theory came together in his mind. "Don't you see? There's no reason why Liz's unconscious mind couldn't mimic what Max did to her way back when, especially if her cells retained some sort of genetic memory of the original handprint." He gulped down a mouthful of Mountain Dew, fueling his cascading imagination with yet more caffeine. "Or maybe all of Liz's mind- melds with Max have stimulated Liz's own brain enough to fake the shiny handprint on her own."Like with stigmata?" Liz suggested, the budding scientist in her intrigued despite the topic's unsettling personal implications. "All those people who spontaneously develop wounds and marks on their bodies?"The same sort of thing, I'll bet," Alex theorized. "The unconscious mind is capable of all kinds of weird stuff, and Lord knows you've given it plenty of bizarre material to work with lately." He chewed thoughtfully on a soggy nacho. "Yeah, the more I think about it, the more plausible this sounds. I'm pretty sure, Liz, that it's your own brain creating that handprint." He turned to Isabel for confirmation of his genius. "Not a bad job of figuring things out, eh?"Much to his obvious disappointment, however, Isabel still looked dubious. "That could work, I suppose," she said in a less than ringing validation of Alex's hypothesis.

"Says the woman who can listen to CDs without a CD player," Alex pointed out indignantly, "or go traipsing through other people's dreams. After all the wacko garbage we've been through, from skin-shedding alien bodysnatch-ers to time travel, is one little stress-induced handprint too much to accept?"Even through her own agitated emotions, Liz thought she heard an extra touch of irritation in Alex's voice, more than Isabel's admittedly lukewarm endorsement of his theory really warranted. He's probably a little ticked-off and jealous, she speculated, because he knows, just like we all do, exactly how Isabel wormed all that information out of the lieutenant. You didn't have to be Mata Hari to imagine how that scene went down; Isabel could vamp members of the opposite sex like nobody's business.

Liz felt sorry for Alex's bruised feelings, but she was too freaked-out herself to do much more than try to bring the discussion back to where they started. "But even if you're right, Alex, if I'm really suffering from this post- traumatic stress disorder, what am I supposed to do about it? I feel like I'm having a nervous breakdown." One booth and a highchair away, the unhappy baby yowled again, causing Liz to grip the edge of the table with white knuckles. The spoon banged against the tray, and she had to clench her teeth to keep from jumping out of her skin. "How," she asked, after the torturous moment passed, "am I supposed to get over this?"I don't know," Alex confessed quietly, his concern for Liz taking priority over his problems with Isabel. "Ideally, according to the psych textbooks I read, you ought to get special counseling from an expert trained in treating P.T.S.D., but I guess that's not really an option in this case, unless you want to spill the beans about you-know-what to some shrink." He nervously cast a sideways glance at Isabel, acutely aware that she wasn't going to like that idea.

"No," she said immediately, rejecting that notion once and for all. She had already placed Max's secret in danger too many times; no matter how messed-up she was, she wasn't going to let her problems jeopardize anyone else's safety again. "Talking to a psychiatrist is out."Alex nodded. "I figured as much. In that case, all I can recommend, based on what I've read, is that you shouldn't try to repress the traumatic memories again, because you've got to acknowledge the stress before you can work through it." His angular face was full of sympathy and regret. "Somehow or another, you need to confront your repressed fears and anxieties regarding the shooting, and come to terms with them." He shrugged glumly. "Easier said than done, I know."Tell me about it, Hz thought bitterly. I can't even confront a load/firing car- or a crying baby-without falling to pieces.

"You know we're here for you," Maria reminded her gently. She slid one of her tiny translucent vials across the table toward Liz. "We all are."I know," Liz said gratefully, offering a weak smile in return. She dutifully sniffed from the miniature vial, more to please Maria than in any serious expectation of deriving comfort or peace of mind from the bottled scent. Despite the pungent odor, she couldn't help worrying about Max, however, and wondering what had become oi Mm and Michael. They had been gone for a couple of hours now, without checking in. Liz knew that part of her would never be able to relax until she knew that Max was okay. What if Morton had surprised them somehow? What if he was pointing his gun at Max right this very moment? Crash! The irate baby pounded upon his tray like it was a cymbal, the constant rat-a-tat-tat causing Liz to flinch visibly with every beat. The infant's high- pitched squeals climbed into the upper decibels, drowning out the restaurant's overhead Muzak system and pushing Liz close to the breaking point. How was she supposed to think, let alone confront her fears, with that hellish caterwauling going on? She pressed her hands against her ears, desperately trying to hide from the noise. She squeezed her eyes shut, only to see Joe Morton rise up from her tormented imagination, waving his handgun wildly in the middle of the Crash-down. In her mind, the baby's shrill cries merged with Maria's screams of terror as the pistol went off, rat-a-tat-tat, unleashing a hail of bullets that turned a row of stacked water glasses into a rain of broken shards before striking Liz right below her ribs, again and again and again. "Stop it," she whimpered hoarsely, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. "I can't stand it anymore!" It was unclear, even to her, if she was talking about the baby or the flashbacks. "Please, make it stop."Hang on," Isabel said decisively. Without another word, she deftly slipped out of the booth and strolled casually toward the salad bar, passing the screaming baby's highchair on the way. Only those who knew her well, and were privy to her special talents, would have noticed the way her slender fingers brushed the back of the highchair as she sauntered by.

A second later, the baby slammed the rounded bowl of his spoon against the tray again. Instead of producing a sharp knock, however, this time the impact yielded only a soft, gooey splat. Confused and startled, the puzzled infant stopped crying long enough to examine his former noise-maker, an intrigued expression upon its chubby little face. Experimentally, it stuck the spoon in its mouth, and immediately started gurgling happily, almost as if the stainless steel utensil had miraculously changed into some kind of chewy chocolate treat. By then, of course, Isabel was al- ready on her way back from the salad bar with a couple of fresh breadsticks.

"Thank you," Liz said sincerely, drying her eyes on a napkin. It was a small mercy, but one she appreciated immensely. If only all our problems could be solved so easily, she thought, and with so little danger.

Where were Max and Michael?