Triggers

Chapter 5

Kadeem Adams desperately wanted the flashbacks to end. They came all the time: when he was out for a walk, when he was in the grocery store, when he was trying to make love to his girlfriend. Yes, Professor Singh, and Dr. Fairfax at the DCOE before him, had told him to avoid triggers—things that might set off a flashback. But anything—everything!—could provoke one. A chirping bird morphed into a baby crying. A car horn became a wailing alarm. A plate falling to the floor turned into the rat-a-tat of gunfire.

Kadeem knew better than to hope for the best. If things had worked out for him in the past, he wouldn’t have failed to get that scholarship, he wouldn’t have been working at a McDonald’s, he wouldn’t have enlisted because it was the only halfway-decent-paying job he could get, he wouldn’t have ended up on the front line in Iraq.

Still, he was grateful for Professor Singh’s attention. Kadeem had never met a Sikh before—there’d been none in the ’hood—and he hadn’t known what to expect. At first, they’d had trouble communicating; Singh’s accent was thick, and his speech was rapid-fire, at least to Kadeem’s ears. But slowly he’d gotten used to Singh’s voice, and Singh had gotten used to his, and the seemingly endless alternation of him saying “What?” and Singh saying “Pardon?” had fallen by the wayside.

“Okay, guru,” Kadeem said. He knew it amused Singh when he called him that, and Singh’s beard lifted a bit as he smiled. “Let’s do this.”

Kadeem walked over to the low-back padded chair and sat down. Next to it, on an articulated arm, was the latticework sphere. Kadeem had once quipped that it looked like the skeleton of God’s soccer ball, but he knew that wasn’t quite right. It was about two feet in diameter, and it was, as Singh had told him, an open geodesic, made up of triangles fashioned from lengths of steel tubing. Singh unclipped its two halves and opened it. The hemispheres, joined by a hinge, swung apart.

There was an open section at the south pole of the sphere. As Singh jockeyed the articulated arm to move the hemispheres closer to Kadeem’s head, that opening allowed for his neck. Singh rejoined the two halves, enclosing Kadeem’s head. There were about eight inches of clearance on all sides, and Kadeem could easily see through the open triangles. Still, it was unnerving, as if his head were now in some bizarre jail cell. He took a deep, calming breath.

Singh loomed close—like an optician adjusting glasses even Elton John wouldn’t wear. He moved the sphere on its arm a bit to the left, and a bit up, and then, apparently deciding he’d gone too far up, a bit down. And then he nodded in satisfaction and stepped away.

“All right,” Singh said. “Relax.”

“Easier said than done, guru,” replied Kadeem.

Singh’s back was to him, his turban piled high. But his voice was warm. “It will be fine, my friend. Let me just calibrate a few things, and—yes, yes, okay. Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“All right, then. Here we go. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

Singh pushed a button; it made a loud click. At the vertices of each triangle in Kadeem’s vision, blue-green lights appeared, like laser pointers. In the demos Singh had done for him, colored dots had shown up on the dummy head. They’d stood out brightly against the white Styrofoam, but were doubtless hard to see against Kadeem’s dark skin. He’d thought there might be some sensation associated with them: heat, maybe, or a tingling. But he felt nothing at all. The lights weren’t strong enough to blind him, but he did nonetheless shift slightly to stop one of them from hitting his left eye.

Singh moved around, looking at Kadeem again. He seemed satisfied, and said, “Okay. I’m going to run the program now. Remember, if you feel any discomfort, tell me and we can abort.”

Kadeem nodded. Since the sphere was supported by the articulated arm, it didn’t bob at all as he did so. Singh reached over to a laptop computer sitting on a surgical-instrument stand, moved the cursor with the trackpad, and finished off with a rapping of his forefinger.

The program started executing. The blue-green lights began to dance; they were on tiny gimbals and moved in patterns Singh had programmed. It was impossible to keep the teal points from hitting his pupils every few seconds, and rather than fight that, Kadeem just closed his eyes. The beams were bright enough that he could still tell when one was touching his eyelid, but it wasn’t irritating, and the darkness helped him clear his mind.

This was going to be hard, he knew. He’d spent years trying to avoid triggering flashbacks—and now Singh was going to find whatever switch in his brain caused them and throw it, hopefully for the final time. The only small mercy there’d been with the previous flashbacks was never expecting them—they just hit him upside the head, with no warning. But now Kadeem felt dread, knowing one was coming. He was hooked up to a vital-signs monitor, and he could hear the soft ping of his pulse accelerating.

The intersecting lasers were specially tuned to pass through bone and flesh; the teal dots were mere markers for invisible beams that coincided with them. The beams entered his skull without having an effect, but when two or more beams crisscrossed inside his brain, they stimulated the neural net at the intersection and caused it to fire, providing, as Singh had explained to him, the equivalent of an action potential. First one net was brought to life, then another, then another. Singh’s equipment bypassed the usual excitatory disinhibition that frustrated other brain researchers: normally, if a neural net had fired once recently, it was disinclined to fire again. But Singh could make the same net fire as often as possible, until it had, at least temporarily, exhausted its supply of neurotransmitters.

Singh was doing that just now, and—

A picnic, one of the few happy moments of Kadeem’s childhood.

Five big kids taking his lunch from him on the way to school.

His mama, trying to hide her bruised eye from him, and his rage at knowing she was going to let that man back in their home.

His first car.

His first blowjob.

A sharp pain but—but no, only a memory of a sharp pain. Ah, it was when he broke his arm playing football.

More pain, but of a good kind: the short, sharp shock of Kristah playfully biting his nipple.

A flock of birds blocking the sun.

The sun—

The sun.

Hot, beating down. The desert sun.

Iraq.

Yes, Iraq.

His heart pounded; the sound from the monitor had the tempo of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.”

Singh was homing in, getting close, circling his prey.

Kadeem gripped the padded arms of the chair.

Sand. Tanks. Troops. And, in the distance, the village.

Shouts. Orders. The roar of vehicle engines fighting against the drifting sand and the heat.

Kadeem’s breathing was ragged. The air he was taking in was cool, but his memory was of searing hotness. He wanted to shout for Singh to abort, abort, abort! But he bit his lower lip and endured it.

The village was growing closer. Iraqi men in desert gear, women who must have been sweltering in their robe-like black abayas, children in tattered clothes, all coming to see the approaching convoy. Greeting it. Welcoming it.

Kadeem tasted vomit at the back of his throat. He fought it down and let the memory wash over him—all the screams, all the pain, all the evil—one last time.

Sharpshooter Rory Proctor continued to watch the activity on the roof of the White House from what he hoped was a safe distance. He was angry and worried: the nation had been pounded for months now by al-Sajada. How much more was yet to come? How much more could this great country take?

He’d tuned his headset to pick up the appropriate police channel and was listening to the running commentary from the man operating the bomb-disposal robot: “I’m going to try cutting into the side of the enclosure so that we can get at the device. In five, four, three, two…”

Agent Susan Dawson kept flashing back to an episode of Columbo she’d seen years ago, in which Leonard Nimoy had guest-starred as a surgeon who’d tried to arrange the death of someone while supposedly saving his life: when installing an artificial heart valve, Nimoy’s character had used dissolving instead of permanent suture. But as far as she could tell, Eric Redekop and his team had worked fervently to save Seth Jerrison.

“Central to Dawson,” said the voice in her ear. “Justice Horvath is en route to Andrews, but says he can’t proceed without an official death notice. Has the president actually—”

Screeeeech!

Susan yanked her earpiece out; the wail from it was unbearable. The lights in the observation gallery flickered, then died, as did the ones down in the operating room. A few seconds later, emergency lighting kicked in below. Mark Griffin bounded up the steps in the small gallery and opened the door at the back. More emergency lighting spilled in from a ceiling-mounted unit containing what looked like two automobile headlamps.

“Those are battery-operated lights,” said Griffin. “The main power is off—meaning so is that defibrillator, as well as the perfusion pump.” Susan saw someone run out of the O.R., presumably to get a crash cart with a portable defibrillator.

Eric Redekop, starkly illuminated from the upper left by the harsh emergency lights in the O.R., reached his gloved hand into the president’s chest and began squeezing Jerrison’s heart. The surgeon glanced at the paired digital wall clocks—the actual time and the event timer—but their faces had gone dark.

After a moment, the regular lighting flickered back to life. Susan looked down at the surgical bed. Redekop continued to squeeze the heart once per second. Other doctors were frantically trying to reboot or readjust equipment. She turned to Griffin. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The emergency power is supposed to kick in automatically. An operating room should never go dark like that.”

Susan picked up her earpiece and, after making sure it wasn’t still wailing, put it back in her ear. “Dawson,” she said into her sleeve. “Whiskey tango foxtrot?”

A deep male voice: Secret Service agent Darryl Hudkins, looking up at her from down in the operating room. “Could it be an electromagnetic pulse?”

“Christ,” said Susan. “The bomb.”

“Agent Schofield cutting in,” said another voice in Susan’s ear. “Affirmative. The bomb at the White House has gone off.”

“Copy that,” replied Susan, stunned.

“How are they managing with Prospector?” asked Schofield.

Susan looked through the angled glass at the chaos below. Redekop was still squeezing the president’s heart, but the vital-signs monitor continued to show a flat line. “I think we’ve lost him.”

Rory Proctor had been using his binoculars when the bomb went off. As soon as he saw the flare of light, he lowered them—just in time to see the entire curved back of the White House blow out toward him. A plume of smoke started rising into the gray sky, and gouts of fire shot out of the shattered windows of the east and west wings. Screams went up all around him.

Seth Jerrison’s deep, dark secret was that he was an atheist. He’d managed to secure the Republican nomination by lying through his teeth about it, by periodically attending church, by bowing his head when appropriate in public, and—after numerous reprimands from his wife and campaign director—finally breaking himself of the habit of using “Jesus” and “Christ” as swearwords, even in private.

He believed in fiscal conservatism, he believed in small government, he believed in taking a strong stand against America’s enemies whether nations or individuals, he believed in capitalism, and he believed English should be the official language of the United States.

But he did not believe in God.

The handful of RNC members who knew this sometimes chided him for it. Rusty, his campaign manager, had once looked at him with a kindly smile—the sort one might bestow on a silly child who had claimed that when he grew up he was going to be president—and said, “Sure, you might be an atheist now, but just wait until you’re dying—you’ll see.”

But Seth was dying right now. He could feel his strength fading, feel his life draining away.

And still he felt secure in his atheism. Even as his vision contracted into a tunnel, the thoughts that came to him were of the scientific explanation for that phenomenon. It was caused by anoxia, and was, after all, commonly experienced even in situations that weren’t immediately life-threatening.

He was momentarily surprised not to be feeling any panic or pain. But, then again, that was normal, too, he knew: a sense of euphoria also went with oxygen deprivation. And so he managed a certain detachment. He was surprised to be conscious at all; he knew he’d been shot in the torso. Surely they’d given him a general anesthetic before performing surgery, and he must be in surgery by now, but…

But there was no doubt his mind was active. He tried, and failed, to open his eyes; tried, and failed, to sit up; tried, and failed, to speak. And, unlike some horror stories he’d heard about patients feeling every scalpel cut and stitch while supposedly knocked out, he was experiencing no pain at all, thank—well, thank biochemistry!

Ah, and now the white light had begun to appear: pure, brilliant, but not at all painful to…well, not to look at; he wasn’t seeing with his eyes, after all. But to contemplate.

A pristine, bright, soothing, inviting light…

And then, just as those who’d come back from the brink said it sometimes does, his life began to flash in front of his eyes.

A kindly female face.

A playground.

Childhood friends.

A public school.

But he didn’t remember all the graffiti, all the litter, the broken stonework, and—

No, no, that was ridiculous. Of course he remembered it—or he wouldn’t be seeing it now.

But…

A knife. Blood.

Tattered clothes.

The air shimmering. Unbearable heat. Screams. The stench of…yes, of burning flesh.

No, no, he’d been a good person! He had. He’d done his best always. And even with him agreeing to Counterpunch, he couldn’t be going to hell!

A metaphoric deep breath; he had no control over his body, but it felt like he was inhaling.

There is no hell. No heaven, either.

But the heat. The flames. The screams.

There is no hell!

All of it was explicable, a natural phenomenon: just the way the brain responded to oxygen starvation.

The images changed, the smells changed, the sounds changed. The hellish vista was replaced by a city street at night.

Another woman’s face.

And much more, in rapid succession: people, incidents, events.

It was a life review flashing before him.

But it wasn’t his life that he saw.