Triggers

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.