04: IMMERSION
Everything I knew about the psychologist came from my observations during training. She had served both as a kind of distant overseer and in a more personal role as our confessor. Except, I had nothing to confess. Perhaps I confessed more under hypnosis, but during our regular sessions, which I had agreed to as a condition of being accepted for the expedition, I volunteered little.
“Tell me about your parents. What are they like?” she would ask, a classic opening gambit.
“Normal,” I replied, trying to smile while thinking distant, impractical, irrelevant, moody, useless.
“Your mother is an alcoholic, correct? And your father is a kind of … con man?”
I almost exhibited a lack of control at what seemed like an insult, not an insight. I almost protested, defiantly, “My mother is an artist and my father is an entrepreneur.”
“What are your earliest memories?”
“Breakfast.” A stuffed puppy toy I still have today. Putting a magnifying glass up to an ant lion’s sinkhole. Kissing a boy and making him strip for me because I didn’t know any better. Falling into a fountain and banging my head; the result, five stitches in the emergency room and an abiding fear of drowning. In the emergency room again when Mom drank too much, followed by the relief of almost a year of sobriety.
Of all of my answers, “Breakfast” annoyed her the most. I could see it in the corners of her mouth fighting a downward turn, her rigid stance, the coldness in her eyes. But she kept her control.
“Did you have a happy childhood?”
“Normal,” I replied. My mom once so out of it that she poured orange juice into my cereal instead of milk. My dad’s incessant, nervous chatter, which made him seem perpetually guilty of something. Cheap motels for vacations by the beach where Mom would cry at the end because we had to go back to the normal strapped-for-cash life, even though we’d never really left it. That sense of impending doom occupying the car.
“How close were you to your extended family?”
“Close enough.” Birthday cards suitable for a five-year-old even when I was twenty. Visits once every couple of years. A kindly grandfather with long yellow fingernails and the voice of a bear. A grandmother who lectured on the value of religion and saving your pennies. What were their names?
“How do you feel about being part of a team?”
“Just fine. I’ve often been part of teams.” And by “part of,” I mean off to the side.
“You were let go from a number of your field jobs. Do you want to tell me why?”
She knew why, so, again, I shrugged and said nothing.
“Are you only agreeing to join this expedition because of your husband?”
“How close were you and your husband?”
“How often did you fight? Why did you fight?”
“Why didn’t you call the authorities the moment he returned to your house?”
These sessions clearly frustrated the psychologist on a professional level, on the level of her ingrained training, which was predicated on drawing personal information out of patients in order to establish trust and then delve into deeper issues. But on another level I could never quite grasp, she seemed to approve of my answers. “You’re very self-contained,” she said once, but not as a pejorative. It was only as we walked for a second day from the border toward base camp that it struck me that perhaps the very qualities she might disapprove of from a psychiatric point of view made me suitable for the expedition.
Now she sat propped up against a mound of sand, sheltered by the shadow of the wall, in a kind of broken pile, one leg straight out, the other trapped beneath her. She was alone. I could see from her condition and the shape of the impact that she had jumped or been pushed from the top of the lighthouse. She probably hadn’t quite cleared the wall, been hurt by it on the way down. While I, in my methodical way, had spent hours going through the journals, she had been lying here the whole time. What I couldn’t understand was why she was still alive.
Her jacket and shirt were covered in blood, but she was breathing and her eyes were open, looking out toward the ocean as I knelt beside her. She had a gun in her left hand, left arm outstretched, and I gently took the weapon from her, tossed it to the side, just in case.
The psychologist did not seem to register my presence. I touched her gently on one broad shoulder, and then she screamed, lunged away, falling over as I recoiled.
“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.
“It’s just me, the biologist,” I said in a calm voice, even though she had rattled me.
“Just you,” she said with a wheezing chuckle, as if I’d said something funny. “Just you.”
As I propped her up again, I heard a kind of creaking groan and realized she had probably broken most of her ribs. Her left arm and shoulder felt spongy under her jacket. Dark blood was seeping out around her stomach, beneath the hand she had instinctively pressed down on that spot. I could smell that she had pissed herself.
“You’re still here,” she said, surprise in her voice. “But I killed you, didn’t I?” The voice of someone waking from dream or falling into dream.
“Not even a little bit.”
A rough wheeze again, and the film of confusion leaving her eyes. “Did you bring water? I’m thirsty.”
“I did,” and I pressed my canteen to her mouth so she could swallow a few gulps. Drops of blood glistened on her chin.
“Where is the surveyor?” the psychologist asked in a gasp.
“Back at the base camp.”
“Wouldn’t come with you?”
“No.” The wind was blowing back the curls of her hair, revealing a slashing wound on her forehead, possibly from impact with the wall above.
“Didn’t like your company?” the psychologist asked. “Didn’t like what you’ve become?”
A chill came over me. “I’m the same as always.”