The Ministry for the Future

13

Anytime he broke a sweat his heart would start racing, and soon enough he would be in the throes of a full-on panic attack. Pulse at 150 beats a minute or more. It didn’t matter that he knew he was safe, and that this panic reaction was to something that had happened long before. It didn’t matter that he lived outside Glasgow now, and had a job in a meat-processing plant that gave him access to refrigerated rooms where the temperature was kept just a few degrees above freezing. By the time an attack started it was too late; his body and mind would be plunged instantly into another terrible tornado of biochemicals, pounding through his arteries like crystal meth at its paranoid worst.

This was what people called post-traumatic stress disorder. He knew that, he had been told it many times. PTSD, the great affect of our time. As one of his therapists had once explained to him, one of the identifying characteristics of the disorder was that even when you knew it was happening to you, that didn’t stop it from happening. In that sense, the therapist admitted, the naming of it was useless. Diagnosis was necessary but not sufficient; and what might be sufficient wasn’t at all clear. There were differing opinions, differing outcomes. No treatment had been shown to be fully effective, and most were still largely experimental procedures.

Exposure to events like the event: no.

He had tried this on a visit to Kenya, out every day in temperatures that crept closer and closer to the unlivable. That had resulted in daily panic attacks, and he had curtailed the trip and gone back to Glasgow.

Virtual environments in which to explore aspects of the event: no. He had played video games that made him relive parts of the experience in ways he could control, but these games were as ugly as any M-rated travesty. Panic attacks were frequent, during the games or not.

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 the sole survivor. No one else had seen what he had seen and survived to remember it. For all the people walking on this crowded narrow sidewalk, this sad little pastiche of a corniche, it was only what it was today. No sign of a plaque, much less a memorial in the old martial style.

He walked back to the bus station. After some thought, and a trip to an open-walled store to buy more bottled water, he walked to his old offices. The building was still there. The offices were occupied by lawyers and accountants, and a dentist. Next door was a Nepali restaurant that hadn’t been there before. It was just a building. What had happened up there in those rooms—

He sat on the curb, suddenly too weak to stand. He was quivering, he put his head in his hands. It was all there in his head—every hour of it, every minute of it. The water tank in that closet.

He got up and walked back to the bus station and took the next bus back to Lucknow. There he called a number he had been given. A man answered in Hindi. In his bad Hindi he asked if he could speak in English, then switched over when the man said, “Yes, what?”

“I was there,” Frank said. “I was here, during the heat wave. I’m an American, I was with an aid group, here doing development work. I saw what happened. Now I’m back.”

“Why?”

“I have a friend who told me about your group.”

“What group?”

“I was told it’s called Never Again. Devoted to various kinds of direct action?”

Silence from the other end.

“I want to help,” Frank said. “I need to do something.”

More silence. Finally the man said, “Tell me where you are.”

He sat outside the train station for an hour, miserably hot. When it seemed he would wilt and fall, a car drove up to the curb and two young men jumped out and stood before him. “You are the firangi who called?”

“Yes.”

One of them waved a wand over him while the one who had spoken patted him down.

“All right, get in.”

When he was in the front seat passenger side, the driver took off with a squeal. The men behind him blindfolded him. “We don’t want you to know where we are taking you. We won’t harm you, not if you are what you say you are.”

“I am,” Frank said, accepting the blindfold. “I wish I weren’t, but I am.”

No replies. The car made several turns, fast enough to throw Frank against the door or the restraint of his seatbelt. A little electric car, quietly humming, and quick to speed up or slow down.

Then the car stopped and he was led out and up some steps. Into a building. His blindfold was removed; he was standing in a room filled with young men. There was a woman there too, he saw, alone among a dozen men. All of them regarded him curiously.

He told them his story. They nodded grimly from time to time, their gleaming eyes fixed on him. Never had he been looked at so intently.

When he was done they glanced at each other. Finally the woman spoke:

“What do you want now?”

“I want to join you. I want to do something.”

They spoke in Hindi among themselves, more quickly than he could follow. Possibly it was another language, like Bengali or Marathi. He didn’t recognize a single word.

“You can’t join us,” the woman told him after they were done conferring. “We don’t want you. And if you knew about everything that we did, you might not want us. We are the Children of Kali, and you can’t be one of us, even if you were here during the catastrophe. But you can do something. You can carry a message from us to the world. Maybe that can even help, we don’t know. But you can try. You can tell them that they must change their ways. If they don’t, we will kill them. That’s what they need to know. You can figure out ways to tell them that.”

“I’ll do that,” Frank said. “But I want to do more.”

“Do more then. Just not with us.”

Frank nodded, looked at the floor. He would never be able to explain. Not to these people, not to anyone.

“All right then. I’ll do what I can.”