Fool Me Once

“I’ll make an appointment.”

“Why don’t we start right now?”

“I don’t have much time.”

“Oh, this first session won’t last long.”

She thought about it and again figured why not. “It’s similar to what I’ve experienced in the past.”

“More intense?”

“Yes.”

“How often are the episodes coming?”

“You keep calling them that. ‘Episodes.’ Except that’s a polite word for what they are, isn’t it? They are hallucinations.”

“I don’t like that term. I don’t like the connotations-”

She interrupted him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Maya.”

Spur-of-the-moment decision, but she decided to go with it. Might as well make him useful. “I had something else happen to me. Something connected to all this.”

Wu looked at her and nodded. “Tell me.”

“My friend bought me a nanny cam,” she began.

Again Wu listened without interrupting. She told him the story about seeing Joe on the laptop. Wu managed to keep his face from revealing too much.

“Interesting,” he said when she was done. “This happened during the day, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“So not at night,” he said more to himself than her. Then again: “Interesting.”

Enough with the interesting. “My question is,” Maya said, “did I hallucinate it, or is it a hoax or something?”

“Good question.” Ricky Wu sat back down, crossed his leg, even stroked his chin. “The brain is a tricky thing, of course. And in your situation-PTSD, a sister murdered, a husband murdered in front of your eyes, the pressure of being a single parent, ignoring most therapies-the most logical conclusion is that… Well, again I don’t like the connotations. But I think most experts would conclude that you imagined or, yes, hallucinated seeing Joe on that computer screen. The simple diagnosis, which is often the best, is that you wanted to see him so badly, you did.”

“Most experts,” Maya said.

“Pardon?”

“You said, ‘Most experts would conclude.’ I’m not really interested in most. I’m interested in what you think.”

Wu smiled. “I’m almost flattered.”

She said nothing.

“You’d think that I would agree with that diagnosis. You’ve been ducking me. It would serve you right. You left treatment earlier than I wanted. You then faced added pressures. You miss him. You not only lost the career that defined you, but now you are forced into the role of a single mother.”

“Ricky?”

“Yes?”

“Get to the ‘but,’ please.”

“But you don’t suffer from hallucinations. You have vivid flashbacks. That’s common with PTSD. Some believe that those vivid flashbacks can be similar or even the same as hallucinations. The danger then is that those hallucinations can lead to psychosis. But what you have, be they vivid flashbacks or hallucinations, has always been auditory. At night, when you have your episodes, you never see the dead, do you?”

“No.”

“You’re not haunted by those faces. The three men. The mother.” He swallowed. “The child.”

She said nothing.

“You hear the screams. You don’t see the faces.”

“So?”

“So that’s not uncommon. Thirty to forty percent of combat veterans with PTSD report auditory hallucinations. In your case, it has been exclusively auditory. I’m not saying you didn’t”-he made quote marks with his fingers-“‘see’ Joe. You may have. But what I am saying is that it isn’t consistent with your diagnosis or even the disorder. I can’t validate a hypothesis that because of your PTSD you imagined seeing your husband on a silent video tape.”

“In short,” she said, “you don’t think I imagined it.”

“What you call hallucinations, Maya, are flashbacks. They are of things that actually occurred. You don’t see or hear things that never happened.”

She sat back.

“How do you feel right now?” he asked.

“Relief, I guess.”

“I can’t be certain, of course. At night, are you still on that helicopter?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you remember.”

“It’s the same, Ricky.”

“You get the distress call. The soldiers are cornered.”

“I fly in. I fire.” She wanted to move it along. “We’ve been through this.”

“We have. What happens next?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“You always stop here. Five people were killed. Noncombatants. One was a mother of two-”

“I hate that.”

“What?”

“They always say that. ‘One was a woman. A mother.’ It’s such sexist crap, isn’t it? A civilian is a civilian. The men were fathers. No one ever says that. ‘A mother and a woman.’ Like that makes it worse than a father and a man.”

“Semantics,” he said.

“What?”

“You get angry at the semantics because you don’t want to face the truth.”

“God, I hate when you talk like this. What truth don’t I want to face?”

He gave her the sympathetic eyes. She hated the sympathetic eyes. “It was a mistake, Maya. That’s all. You need to forgive yourself. That guilt haunts you and sometimes, yes, it manifests itself into those auditory flashbacks.”

She crossed her arms. “You disappoint me, Dr. Wu.”

“How so?”

“It’s trite, that’s all. I feel guilt about dead civilians; ergo, once I stop blaming myself, I’ll be all better.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not a cure. But it might make your nights a little easier.”