The Ministry for the Future

18

The PTSD model uses the word “trigger” as both noun and verb, to suggest the speed of a PTSD reaction, and the way it can be switched on by some incident that should be the equivalent of a small curved piece of metal, innocuous except when placed in a gun. One must learn not to pull these things.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a hard thing to learn. One of the main strategies involved asks you to label the type of thought you are having, identify it as unhelpful or painful, and then switch tracks to a more positive train of thought. Often this strategy fails. You know what’s happening, you know it’s inappropriate—on it goes anyway. Your palms sweat, your heart pounds in your chest like a child trying to escape, and over that throbbing animal reality, you can be thinking to yourself, Wait, no danger here now—this isn’t a situation to be frightened in, you’re just sitting at a café table, midday, light wind, low clouds, all well, please don’t do this, don’t start crying, don’t leap up and run away—just still your shaking hands, just pick up your coffee cup—

But the trigger is pulled, and you are looking right down the barrel of the gun.

Enough times like that, and looking down the actual barrel of an actual gun, its trigger under your actual thumb—not your forefinger, because you have the gun pointed at yourself, resting against your sternum, and it’s the thumb that can best pull (or in this case push) the trigger—this can be seen as a huge relief, as a promise that the fear will finally stop. This happens all the time. It happens so often that one form of PTSD therapy goes like this—you don’t have to worry so much, because if it stays this bad you can always kill yourself. And for some sufferers this thought is a real comfort, sometimes even the anchor point of a way back to sanity. You can always end this misery by killing yourself; so give it another day and see how it goes.

It’s not easy to stay unafraid. It can’t always be done. Try as you might, want it ever so much, things are out of your control, even when they are in your mind, or especially because they are in your mind. The mind is a funny animal. If it were just conscious thought; or if conscious thought was something we could control; or if unconscious thoughts were conscious; or if moods were amenable to our desires… then maybe things could work. Things like cognitive behavioral therapy, or the project of sanity itself. Just make it happen!

But no. You’re swimming in a river. You can get carried out to sea on riptides not of your making, or at least not under your control. You can find yourself swimming against a current much stronger than you. You can drown.

Frank was drowning. He had that same shortness of breath. Therapy had mostly made it crystal clear to him that he would never be cured.

In a sense, maybe that was progress. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. What did that mean? Could you live without hope? There was a Japanese saying he read in a book: live as if you were already dead. But what did that mean, why would that be encouraging? Was it encouraging? It was enigmatic at best, a kind of double bind—first an injunction to live; but second, “as if you were already dead.” How would one do that? Was it part of the samurai code, were you to be careless of your own life in defense of whomever you were charged with protecting? So, a kind of servant’s stoicism? To let yourself be used like a shield, to become a human tool? Maybe so. In which case it was a matter of crushing your hopes into the proper channel.

Thus, in his case, no more hoping that he would become normal again. That he would live a normal life. That what had happened would not have happened. Forget all that. Therapy taught him to give up those hopes. Hope would have to reside in something like this: hope to do some good, no matter how fucked up you are.

This was worth writing down on a piece of paper, in shaky block letters, and then pinning the paper onto the mirror in his bathroom, along with various other encouragements in the form of phrases or images; probably it looked like a madman’s mirror, but he wanted to put things up there.

Every time he remembered to brush his teeth or shave, which was getting less and less often, he would see that sign and ponder what he might do. This mainly made him feel confused. But it did seem like the urge to do something was there in him, sometimes so strong it was like a bad case of heartburn. When he was exhausted by sleeplessness, or groggy with too much sleep, that burn still sometimes struck him, radiating outward from his middle. He had to do something. Maybe he wasn’t going to get to be a Child of Kali, clearly not, but something like that. A fellow traveler. A warrior for the cause. A lone assailant.

Over breakfast, soothing his stomach with a little plastic tub of yogurt, he pondered what he might do. One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking. One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.

He wandered the streets of Glasgow, thinking it over. Up and down the hills to the east and north, enjoying the sidewalks so steep they had staircases incised into them. You could work off a lot of stress walking the streets of Glasgow, and the views kept changing their perspectives under the changing weather, reflecting the storms within, the fear, the sudden bursts of exhilaration, the black depths of ocean-floor grief. Or beautiful dreams, the world gone right. How to share that? How give? Saint Francis of Assisi: give yourself away, give up on yourself and all you thought you had. Feed the birds, help people. The positive of that was so obvious. Do like Saint Francis. Help people.

But he wanted more. He could feel it burning him up: he wanted to kill. Well, he wanted to punish. People had caused the heat wave, and not all people—the prosperous nations, sure, the old empires, sure; they all deserved to be punished. But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. That evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak, crushing them underfoot.

He wanted to kill all those people. In the absence of that, some of them would do. He felt the urge burning him from the inside out. He wouldn’t live long with that kind of internal stress, he could feel that as surely as he could feel his triphammer heart pumping over-pressured blood through his carotids. Oh yes, high blood pressure. He could feel it trying to burst him from inside. Something in there would break. But first, some kind of action. Vengeance, yes; but also, preemption. A preemptive strike. This might stop some bigger bad from happening.

Twice a week he visited his therapist. A nice middle-aged woman, intelligent and experienced, calm and attentive. Sympathetic. She was interested in him, he could see that. Probably she was interested in all her clients. But for sure she was interested in him.

She asked him what he was doing, how he was feeling. He didn’t tell her about his dreams of vengeance, but what he did tell her was honest enough. Earlier that week, he told her, a hot waft of steam from a giant espresso machine in a coffee emporium had caused him to freak out. Panic attack; he had had to sit down and try to calm his beating heart.

She nodded. “Did you try the eye movements we talked about?”

“No.” He was pretty sure this was a bullshit therapy, but the truth was that in the heat of the moment, so to speak, he had forgotten about it. “I forgot. I’ll try it next time.”

“It might help,” she said. “It might not. But nothing lost in trying it.”

He nodded.

“Do you want to try it now?”

“Just move my eyes?”

“Well, no. You need to do it when you’re dealing with what happened. I don’t want you to re-experience anything in a way that feels too bad, but you know we’ve tried having you tell me what happened from various perspectives, and maybe, if you’re up for it, we could try that again, and while you tell me about it you could try the eye movements. It would help build the association.”

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 flight to McMurdo was cold, its interior a long open room like a warehouse floor. Same with all the old junky buildings of McMurdo, and the newer buildings too—like warehouses, institutional buildings, and never heated to much more than 60 degrees. Even the line that ran through the buffet in the kitchen was a cool experience. All very congenial.

Then, out in the Dry Valleys, the hut they ate their meals in was kept warm, but not exceptionally so; really it was only warm relative to the outside. The dorm huts were a little hot and stuffy, but it was possible to sleep out in a tent of his own. That was really cold, so cold that the sleeping bag he slept in weighed about ten pounds; it took that much goose down to hold in enough of his own heat to keep him warm. He stuck his nose out of this bag to breathe, and that repeating injection of frigid air reminded him that it was really cold out, even though it was sunny all the time. The continuous light was strange but he soon got used to it.

The problem was that extreme cold somehow led to thoughts of temperature itself, and to warm up their freezing hands after a session of field work, they would heat the dining hut to quite a high temperature, which would make for a stuffy steamy room, and Frank found himself slipping down the slippery slope. Out at this remove from any possibility of relief, freak-outs would be at best inconvenient, at worst a disaster. Medevacs by helo were rare and expensive, he had heard them say. So he had to stay cool. But sometimes he could only hide a freak-out and hope it would go away soon and not come back. Sometimes he torqued his eyes like he was watching a Ping-Pong match.

And they had a sauna hut there. He stayed away from it, of course, but one night, going out to his tent in the bright daylight, he passed it just as a group of scientists burst out of it half naked in bathing suits, shrieking in delighted agony at the instantaneous extreme shift of temperature, evaporative steam bursting off their bodies like they were big pink firecrackers. That sight, which ought to have been beautiful, and their shrieking, which sounded like pain though it was ecstasy, set him off instantly. His heart pounded so fast and hard that he went light-headed, then suddenly fell to his knees and pitched face first onto the snow. No warning, just the sight of the pink firecracker people, a racing heart, then he found himself laid out on the hard cold snow. He had fainted right in front of them. The sauna-goers naturally helped him up, and someone took his pulse as they lifted him and cried out in a panic, Hey feel this tachycardia, my God! Feel it! They said it was 240 beats a minute. Within two hours a helo was thwacking down to medevac him out of there. And once medevacked to McMurdo, and his condition and past experiences made fully known to the NSF brass on site, he was accused of lying on his application form and shipped back home.