“Yes. Sorry about that. I’m on the road. I thank you for your time. I should call the Kramers now.”
Parsons said good-bye and hung up. I cleared his number, then made a call. It was not to the Kramers.
The phone rang. A woman answered.
“Law office of Mark Brandino. Can I help you?”
I almost hung up. My heart was pounding. The thoughts were absurd. The fears irrational. None of that mattered. This was my child.
Chapter Fifteen
You want to know what happens with my son. But you would not understand anything that happened without knowing about Jenny’s therapy. And for that we must start again with Sean Logan.
I began working with Sean a few months before Jenny’s rape. It was toward the end of winter. Sean never wore a coat. He said he was always hot. Yet when he came through my door the first time we met, he was shivering. I remember this with exceptional clarity.
Sean had come to me out of desperation. As you already know, Sean had lost his right arm in a bomb explosion in Iraq. His comrade died beside him. He was given the treatment, and he now had almost no memory of the event. He suffered from severe depression and anxiety, which were exacerbated by his underlying anxiety condition. He did not have the traditional PTSD pathology that most people have been made aware of through movies and magazine articles—the overreacting to stimuli reminiscent of combat. Do you recall how I explained to you the brain’s filing system? How emotional responses to events cause the brain to categorize memories? Simply put, the extreme emotional experience of combat causes the memories from that event to be filed in the metal cabinet—with neon lights and alarm bells. It’s the brain’s way of telling you, Do not forget that when these things happen, you could die! And so any stimuli that enter the brain that remotely resemble combat trigger the fight-or-flight chemical response, the flood of cortisol and adrenaline that make you react, or overreact. And when you are placed in a constant state of chemical panic, your “nerves fray.” That’s the colloquial expression. Your body is physically altered—heart pounds faster to get blood to muscles, pupils dilate to focus attention, sugar is produced for immediate energy consumption. It is physical stress. We need not get more complicated than that.
The course of therapy is not a walk in the park, but it has a methodology and a path involving desensitization—in a sense, refiling the memory. Every time we recall a memory, it is altered and then returned to storage in the altered state. This is called reconsolidation. Soldiers are exposed to combat stimuli in a setting that is safe and comfortable. Over time, they can make their brains take down the neon lights and alarm bells and recognize the difference between a balloon popping and sniper fire. The patient’s brain actually begins to recall the memory in a different way that does not associate the facts of the memory with pain or fear.
This was not possible for Sean, because he was not dealing with a response to a filed factual memory. He was dealing with a physical and emotional response that had no “remembered” facts. I have had clients who believe in reincarnation. They tell me that they feel things that they should not feel, given the course of their lives. They tell me the only explanation is that they experienced things in their prior lives that left these feelings in place.
I will not go further afield to comment on my views of the supernatural. I have developed a tolerance for the views of others so that I do not inadvertently disparage them. It takes tremendous effort. However, I think these clients serve as a fine comparison to what Sean and Jenny experienced. Powerful feelings that do not have a file. Why am I so afraid of the water? Why do I gag when I smell grass? Why did I feel déjà vu when I went to New York City for the first time? These are some of the questions from my clients. Of course, I usually get to the answer without resorting to the absurd, but we do not need to concern ourselves with that.
Sean had different questions: Why do I want to pound my fist into the wall when I’m holding my son? Why do I want to throw my wife across the room when she touches me? Why do I feel like screaming all the time, for no reason and at no one? The triggers were benign and held no resemblance to anything he would have seen on his mission. He called them ghosts—the feelings that roamed inside him, looking for a place to rest.