“We are Limbus,” it said, as the shadowed outlines cleared into letters that formed the word. “We stand on the edge. We stare into the abyss. We do not discriminate. We do not forget. We employ. Join us.”
Then there was another flash of light, and in that flash Ryan saw a girl, no older than thirteen or fourteen. In that solitary moment, he watched her, wearing flannel pajamas covered in shooting stars and moons and unicorns. Rough hands grabbed her tightly around the arms and legs. And though she struggled, they did not relent. She screamed, and Ryan awoke, still in his bed.
The next evening he found himself in the bowels of Hendricksville Community College, standing in one of the basement hallways, staring down a corridor to a classroom that contained the support group for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. HCC was housed in an ancient government building of post-War vintage. If it were one of the new lofts in the warehouse district, the exposed pipes and naked brick would no doubt have added hundreds of dollars to the cost of rent, and young couples and hip singles would call the place home. It just made Ryan feel dirty and worn down.
He had known for a while that someday, somehow, he would find himself in a place like this. It was hard enough holding down a job in the civilian world anyway, and bosses didn’t like employees who at any moment might find themselves back in the middle of a firefight or a roadside bombing outside some dusty town in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The dream of the night before had been the final straw. Somehow, he’d grown accustomed to the other nightmares, as horrible as they were. But there was something about this one, something sinister and disturbing, that he could not shake. He needed to get help, even if that help was only the kind ear of someone who had suffered the same pain.
That had been the plan, but like all plans this one was laid waste by the unexpected. His started to unravel the moment he saw Katya.
He would always remember that moment, the one when he caught a glimpse of her for the first time. It had been a revelation. She had been walking from one open classroom to another, probably finishing one meeting before his own was set to begin. It was a passing glance, but in that instant she cast a singular look down the hallway, and Ryan froze.
Maybe it was her eyes, pale green flashes that grabbed him even from that distance. Or the hair, a bright, crashing red all the wilder above the tight cut of her black jacket, one that covered a matching skirt that somehow seemed incongruous with the rest of her. Whatever the answer, it lasted only a second before that locked gaze was broken as she passed into the next room.
The session had not gone as Ryan expected. Sure, there were the obligatory introductions, the stories, the heartbreak. In a way, everything about that hour had made Ryan feel worse. At least his problems didn’t include lost limbs and shattered bodies. But he couldn’t brood on it, because he barely noticed it. He had something to distract him. Those eyes and their flashes of green were always upon him.
She didn’t make it obvious. She nodded at the right times during the others’ stories. She said the right things, and some of it probably even helped the poor souls that surrounded him. But he was the only one she really saw.
“So,” she said, leaning over the table, swirling with her straw the last remnants of cracked ice cubes around the bottom of an empty glass, “why did you come tonight?”
She had found him, after the meeting. He had pondered, as the last of the men’s stories drew to a close, how he would approach her. For that had been the one conclusion he had reached during that interminable sixty minutes — that approach her, he would. But in the end, he didn’t have to figure out an angle; she found him leaning against the refreshments table, pondering his next move, half-eaten stale cookie in one hand, watered-down Coke in the other.
What had followed had almost been too easy, one thing leading to another, tumblers falling into place in a lock. There was an Asian bistro down the road. Sushi place. He had never eaten there and he didn’t care for raw fish. But the local scuttlebutt had been that it was good, and he judged, unfairly no doubt, that it was the kind of place someone like her would like. She just seemed the type.
Things were cautious at first. They made small talk over drinks and edamame. The alcohol helped to smooth the introductions. Asahi for him. Something more tropical, a Mai Tai to be exact, was her preference. When the drinks were drained and there was nothing left but the clinking of ice, she had finally broached the question.
“So, why did you come tonight?”
It had been one, in all honesty, that he had not expected. “You heard my story,” he said, suddenly feeling uncomfortable.
“Oh, I heard your story. It’s just, it’s never the story, you know? Not the story by itself, at least. Everybody who comes to my meetings has a problem, but it’s a problem they keep to themselves. Problems they don’t deal with until something happens. Something bad. Guys like you, they come back damaged, but still unbroken. Usually it takes something that goes wrong here, in the States, to finally break them. PTSD is a lot like addiction. You can’t even start to cure it until you admit that you have a problem, and most people can’t admit that they have a problem until they hit rock bottom. What was rock bottom for you?”
Ryan leaned back in his chair until it creaked beneath him. Nervous laughter had never been his style, but it was the only thing he felt like doing in that moment. He rubbed his hand across his mouth and stared at the ceiling. Now he remembered why he never went to a shrink.
“I think it was the loneliness,” he said finally. “Day after day, sitting in my apartment. No job, no family, no one to talk to. My parents died a few years ago. Car wreck. I always meant to settle down but I never quite made it. My buddies, such that they are, they’re either still in or dealing with the same thing. Either way, I don’t want to bother them with it.”
“So you kept it in,” she said, “simmering, just below the surface?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“And what else?”
Ryan frowned and looked down at his empty plate. It didn’t matter. Suddenly, he wasn’t very hungry. “Well, the dreams. You know what I mean? I guess you hear that a lot,” he said with a sigh. “It was fine, and then I started having them. I don’t know. Dreams, nightmares, memories. Like I was there. Again. Like it was happening all over.”
“And you had those every night?”
“Not every night. But more and more. And then…“ Ryan trailed off. How to explain what he didn’t quite understand himself? “I don’t know. It’s just…” He could feel the sweat beading around his forehead. He wished she would speak. He wished she would say anything that would let him off the hook. Instead, she just stared. “It’s just, they seemed to reach a crescendo, I guess.”
“They got worse?”
“No. It’s hard to say. They got different.”
At some point in the conversation, her friendly, almost flirty, demeanor had dropped away and the clinician had taken over. Now he was very much a patient with a doctor, and as she sat there, fixing him with her eyes, staring across that distance, he felt uneasy. Almost frightened for the first time in years, like she was peeling away the layers that he hid beneath, one by one. Uncovering something below the surface, and maybe even deeper, that he had tried to hide. But when she smiled, the magic was broken.
“I don’t normally say this,” she said, “’cause there are too many guys trying not to deal with it, trying to just cover up the problem. But you, I think your issue is a little different. I think maybe you focus on it too much. You don’t bury it deep; you dwell on it. So what you might need,” she said, “is a distraction. A diversion. Something to change things up.”