Trauma

CHAPTER 9

David Hoffman, eyes still closed, stretched out on his futon and sent the stack of papers at his feet fluttering to the hardwood floor. His orange tabby Bosra perched placidly on his chest, undisturbed by the movement. David waited a few seconds, enjoying the special peace of an afternoon nap. Before he drifted back to sleep, David opened his eyes and checked the time on his phone. It was deadline day, which meant Anneke would be calling. He was fine with blowing her off again, but he could not sound half asleep while doing it.

Something about lying on that futon, especially when the fabric was warm from the sun, was like mainlining melatonin. The report he’d been reading was of no help, either. While the Institute of American Medicine was an upstanding organization, their take on PTSD in the military was all jargon and imperiousness. Forty-eight bucks down the drain; Anneke would not be pleased. David could have written in a paragraph what the IAM took sixty pages to convey. Good on you, DOD and VA, for trying to fix this mess. Bad on you, because PTSD in the military is getting worse, and you have no ability to track the outcomes.

David turned his head toward the window and the view, unobstructed by the greenery that would develop with spring. The apartment, though small, felt roomy, and an obtrusive tree branch was a fine tradeoff for cheap rent in Porter Square.

Bosra meowed, and David responded with a gentle scratch between his ears. The cat, a rescue, was named after ancient ruins in Syria. The name reminded David of one of many spectacular sites he had visited as a journalist, and an aspect of his career he missed. Having spent the majority of his professional life chasing political strife, David had become addicted to the rush. Nothing could match the intensity of covering an angry mob, of documenting people’s most visceral passion for freedom and security. For someone who’d smoked marijuana only a couple of times and who was rendered tipsy by a single scotch, political upheaval was a different sort of drug, and David missed the high. While some of David’s classmates from Columbia embedded with a military unit only to up their profile with a newspaper or network, David honestly enjoyed dangerous assignments, though he preferred politics to platoons.

A knock on the door pushed David to get up. Meowing in protest, Bosra leapt off David’s chest and landed noiselessly on the hardwood floor. David ambled over to his front door. “Who is it?” he called, knowing full well.

“David, it’s Emma.”

David opened the door, grinning. He suspected his bushy brown hair was standing up like a Chia pet, and he was dressed abysmally in gray sweats and a blue T-shirt, but he was uninhibited with Emma. She had started out as his landlord, became his friend, and then briefly his lover, until both decided that friends was where they belonged. Now he loved her in a way that would have been difficult had they still been dating. Emma was holding Gabby, a delightful four-year-old, in her arms. Gabby had cheeks to cause a chipmunk envy and two animated, big brown eyes. Her shoulder-length blond hair was tied into pigtails. Gabby’s whole body squirmed excitedly when she saw David.

“Hi, Uncle David!”

David warmed every time she called him that. Emma handed Gabby to him and the little girl squealed and kicked as David tickled under her chin. Whenever Gabby laughed, a sweet high-pitched chuckle, the world stopped turning.

“Who’s gotten so much bigger since the last time I saw you?” He could not resist speaking to her in a high-pitched voice.

“David, you ate breakfast with us this morning.”

“Kids develop quickly these days.”

“Can I play with the toys?” Gabby whirled her legs instead of asking to be put down.

“You know the spot,” David said.

Soon as he set her on the floor, Gabby bounded over to a corner featuring a play mat and a bunch of toys — blocks, Thomas trains, and enough plastic animals to re-create the San Diego Zoo in miniature. Emma did not remove her own brown tweed coat and wool hat, which let David know she would not be staying.

“She sure does like coming up here.”

“And I like having her here,” David said.

Emma got a wistful look as she watched Gabby playing with the toys.

“No offense,” she said, in a quiet, almost conspiratorial tone, “but it would be nice if once in a while she got to visit with her father instead of her surrogate dad.”

“None taken,” David said. “And it would be nice if her father hadn’t moved to California for work.” David put air quotes around the word “work,” in this case a euphemism for “girlfriend” — the real reason Emma’s ex had left them.

“He Skypes with her, just so you know,” Emma said. Emma could not resist the compulsion to defend the father of her only child.

David squeezed Emma’s hand. “I’m sure he loves her,” David said.

Emma and The Ex owned a yellow clapboard two-family home within walking distance of some of the best shopping in Cambridge. They lived on the ground floor, and David rented the apartment above. The Ex had moved out three months after David moved in, and Emma turned to her new upstairs tenant as a lifeline.

With long strawberry blond hair, high cheekbones, and a full, sensuous mouth, Emma O’Donnell was by anybody’s measure a stunning woman. But David was not all about looks, and they knew after a month of romance that the chemistry was not there.

“Could you watch her for an hour while I run to the market?”

“Nothing in life would bring me more joy,” David said.

Emma looked at him with suspicion. “Really, is it inconvenient?”

David’s grin only broadened. “Your needs are my needs, darling. Just pick me up something for dinner. Preferably a food item that won’t make me gassy.”

At thirty-two, David was still tall and lean, close to his high school weight, and could eat just about anything, to the dismay of his many envious friends.

“Too bad,” Emma said. “We’re having burritos.”

David turned Emma around and gave her a playful nudge out. “Gabby and I are going to work on our Middle Eastern geography while you’re gone. Prepare to retrieve a genius upon return.”

Gabby overheard her name and came running.

“Can we look at the pictures, Uncle David?”

“Look, she’s already a genius,” Emma said with more than a dash of pride. “She heard you say geography and thought of your pictures.”

David had read somewhere that kids, especially the young ones, love repetition. In a world where so much was new and varied, seeing the same things over again must feel comforting. His walls were adorned with framed photos he had taken, and showing them to Gabby gave him pleasure as well. The pleasure of revisiting memories. The themes, however, were decidedly adult, and it took great concentration to explain them to the child without inducing nightmares.

“What’s this one?” Gabby asked.

The photograph, taken a month before former president Morsi was forced out of office, showed a sea of people waving Egyptian flags and holding pictures of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate. The Guardian had paid David two thousand dollars for the story, but they went with an AP photo instead of his.

“That’s in Egypt,” David said. “The city of Cairo.” David carried Gabby over to the world map tacked to his wall and pointed to the country.

“Why were they waving flags?” Gabby asked.

“They wanted a new leader.”

“Did they get one?”

“Oh yes,” David said. “They got one, all right.”

Gabby wrapped her arms around David’s neck with python force and pointed to the picture on the wall behind him. She always went in the same order, though David varied his explanations.

“What’s that one?”

It was one of his favorites — a black-and-white image of a riot in Tripoli right after Gaddafi loyalists managed to kill the rebel leader, Abdel Fattah Younes. The New York Times had paid five hundred for the photo and three thousand for his story. It had been a good afternoon.

“That’s a bunch of people acting very excited,” David said.

“Why are they excited? Did they get new toys?”

David loved the way she said “toys” — her enthusiasm was contagious.

“No, not new toys. They just needed to jump around and yell a lot. Sometimes grown-ups do those things.”

“What about that one?”

First, David brought her over to the wall map and pointed to Libya, the location of the last image. She touched the same spot as he did, and then rubbed her hands all over Europe.

“Libya,” David said.

“Libya,” Gabby repeated, then pointed to the image showing thousands of red-shirted populist supporters of Thailand’s ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. “Are they excited about the same things?”

“Well, not exactly,” David said.

“How come they’re all wearing the same color shirt?”

“Because they believe in the same things,” David said. “They’re a group.”

“What group do you belong to?”

“I don’t,” David said. “I work for myself.”

David was a stringer. He had built his career working as a freelancer, forgoing a regular salary in exchange for the opportunity to cover stories that actually interested him. Most of the time that interest took him to places the State Department was advising Americans to avoid. Syria. Iraq. Afghanistan. Yemen. A journalistic tumbleweed, he would probably still be in some red-flagged country had he not been kidnapped.

It was not a terrible ordeal, nor was it an experience he would willingly relive. The opposition forces in Syria had decided that David was part of Assad’s regime and, without judge or jury, took him prisoner. For three weeks David lived in a windowless concrete room and had no contact with the outside world. Eventually, he befriended a guard who was looking to learn English. With the guard’s help, David was able to contact the State Department. A contact at The Current, technically David’s employer, spoke by satellite phone to the opposition forces holding him hostage. The editor managed to convince those in charge that David was in the country on assignment and that David’s reporting could be of help to their cause back in the United States. A few hours later they let David go, and the next day he was on a plane headed home. Somebody else would have to help the rebels’ crusade.

Word of David’s ordeal spread quickly to all the people who regularly hired him for stringer jobs. In just a few weeks, David’s greatest asset — his willingness to put himself in harm’s way to get the story — became his biggest liability. Nobody wanted to bail “Cowboy Dave” out of any more international hot water, and suddenly the only work he could drum up was for local newspapers like the Lowell Observer.

A reporter buddy hooked David up with Anneke, a respected editor who had dialed down her career in exchange for some of her remaining stomach lining. Though he was grateful for the work, a feel-good piece about a marine conquering his PTSD was not his dream assignment.

“Are you going to join a group?” Gabby asked.

David’s cell phone buzzed. Anneke.

“Hmmm, I might be asked to leave another group,” David said, setting Gabby down on the floor. “Go play for a bit. I have to talk on the phone.”

Gabby ran over to the toys.

“Anneke,” David answered, sounding chipper and cheery. “I was just going to call you.”

“Because your e-mail doesn’t work? No worries. I’ve got a pen. You can dictate it to me.”

“Ha, that’s actually kind of funny.”

“I’m a real gas. Where’s the story, David?”

David could picture Anneke’s scowl by the tone of her voice. She was fifty-something, fit and slim from running and Pilates, with shoulder-length blond hair. Poor Anneke walked under a black cloud; everywhere she went, it was raining deadlines. And David was only adding to her misery.

He’d make it up to her. A bottle of Chianti and she’d forget this little lapse. She owed him a pass anyway. His first story for her was supposed to be a puff piece about a bright foster kid from Lowell who won some creative writing contest. The fifteen hundred words she asked for turned into a high-impact story that ran over several days and exposed a huge scandal involving the Department of Children and Families. David could always tell where the real story was, and he knew this particular assignment should not be about one triumphant marine.

“The story is in progress,” David said.

“Have you interviewed Sergeant Thompson yet?”

Sergeant Jesse Thompson was a Billerica native who’d lost an arm to an IED and was helping other vets overcome their PTSD symptoms with some success.

“Almost.”

“How can you almost interview somebody?”

“I’ve thought about calling him, but I’m working on a different angle right now.”

David was more interested in the staggering numbers of vets with PTSD. The problem was approaching epidemic levels, with one out of four servicemen and — women returning from combat significantly different.

“This isn’t The New York Times,” Anneke said. “We’re a local paper. We’ve never won a Pulitzer, and I don’t think my boss really cares if we do.”

“Never say never,” David responded.

Anneke sighed. “How much longer do you need?”

Small community paper or not, he and his boss were still cut from the same stock. Both of them wanted to do good work, important journalism. If a story were here, Anneke would want David to find it.

“Give me a couple weeks. Sergeant Thompson isn’t going anywhere. We can do a flashy piece on him anytime. But I want to explore this a little bit more.”

“You’re thinking series.”

He pursed his lips. “The phone’s not ringing to send me back to Syria.”

“What’s your plan?”

“I’m going to talk to some vets. The guys who haven’t been helped.”

“Give me some names.” Testing to make sure David was actually working.

Luckily, he had his notes handy. “How about I give you three?” David said. “William Bird, Max Soucey, and Adam Bryant.”

Click. Anneke had hung up without a good-bye. It was David’s signal to get to work.