7.
Post-traumatic stress disorder," Alex diagnosed. "That's what you're experiencing, Liz. I'm sure of it."And here I thought I was just going crazy, Liz thought ruefully, sitting in a booth next to Maria, across from Alex and Isabel. The oppressive heat had finally driven them indoors, not long after Max's sister had rejoined them on the surface, to the family-style restaurant attached to the Visitors Center. Liz picked unenthusiastically at a cooling plate of cheese-coated nachos while ignoring the milkshake and tamales her friends had treated her to. At the next booth over, a temperamental infant threw a tantrum, banging a metal spoon against the tray of its highchair while shrieking its lungs out simultaneously. Liz flinched involuntarily every time the spoon noisily struck the tray. The baby's high-pitched screams scraped away at her already raw and hypersensitive nerves. "Post-traumatic?" she repeated, not entirely sure what Alex was getting at.
"Exactly," he said with utter confidence. "I should have realized it earlier." He dipped a nacho into a gooey pool of melted cheese. "I wrote a term paper on the subject for psychology last semester, and you're practically a textbook case, Liz. Well, except for the glowing handprint, that is."Hard to overlook that, Liz thought. Even though the luminous sigil was once again concealed beneath her T-shirt, she was half-convinced she could feel the silver handprint shimmering upon her belly. Her skin tingled where the handprint marked her, exactly where Max had healed her two years ago. He'd left an identical brand upon her on that unforgettable occasion, but the splayed silver fingers had eventually faded after a day or two. Why had the handprint returned after all this time? Max had not needed to heal her down in the murky caverns. He hadn't even touched her stomach.
"Explain," Maria prompted Alex. Tiny vials of therapeutic scents were arrayed like toy soldiers next to her plate. Beneath the molded Formica tabletop, she placed a sympathetic hand on Liz's knee. "Isn't post-traumatic whatcha-macallit something Vietnam vets suffer from?"Alex nodded in agreement. "Soldiers, disaster victims, and anyone who goes through some kind of severe trauma and doesn't get the right kind of psychological counseling afterward. Liz's symptoms fit the profile perfectly: flashbacks, nervousness, heightened sensitivity to sudden noises and surprises, inability to concentrate or make decisions." From the look on his face, he must have suddenly realized what a discouraging litany he had just recited, and he hastened to add, "It's nothing personal, Liz. Nothing you need to be ashamed of. It's a perfectly normal psychological response to getting shot."But that was almost two years ago," Maria objected.
Carefully selecting one of her vials, she inhaled deeply of its supposedly calming aroma. "Why would she be having this reaction now?"Alex stood by his original diagnosis. "Like I said, it's textbook. Sometimes the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can pop up years after the traumatic incident. My guess is that seeing Morton again stirred up Liz's repressed memories of the shooting itself." He scratched his bushy black hair, and Liz remembered that his vocational testing exams, administered by the late Agent Topol-sky, had actually deemed best-suited to a career in psychiatry. "Actually when you think about it, Liz was a prime candidate for P.T.S.D. because she never really had a chance to emotionally deal with, or seek counseling for, the experience of being shot, since she had to pretend, for Max's sake, that it never happened." He gave Liz a playful smile. "Heck, kiddo, I'm amazed you haven't cracked up on us before now."Well, I've been kind of busy, you know." Liz had to admit there might be something to what Alex was saying; she sure felt like all those old memories from the shooting had snuck up and walloped her from behind. "Saving the world and all."No one's saying you haven't been through a lot," Isabel assured her. The aloof young alien princess had already filled them in on what she'd managed to glean from her conversation with Lieutenant Ramirez, even if, for the sake of Alex's feelings, she'd been a bit vague about the nature of that discussion. "We all have."Okay, okay," Maria said, still not entirely satisfied with Alex's explanation, "I'll give you that Liz almost certainly has issues regarding her shooting, but what about that freaky silver handprint?" She squeezed Liz's knee to express her concern for Liz's emotional and physical well-being. "How do you explain that, Dr. Freud?"Alex grimaced and munched on a nacho to buy an extra moment or two. "Well, yeah, that's the tricky part," he admitted eventually. The three women stared at him expectantly, waiting for a more informative response. He sighed and threw up his hands. "Fine. Here's a crazy idea, and I realize I'm going out on a limb here: What if the handprint is simply a psychosomatic manifestation of her post- traumatic stress disorder?"Huh?" Maria laughed. "You're joking? That's the best you can do?"Sitting next to Alex, Isabel looked skeptical as well, although she refrained from contradicting her constant admirer directly. Liz appreciated her restraint. After all, Alex was just trying to help.
"No, no, think about it!" he insisted, caught up in his theories. "Isabel, didn't Nasedo tell Michael that all your alien powers are actually human powers, that you're really just tapping into parts of the human brain that the rest of us haven't figured out how to use yet?"Isabel nodded soberly. "That's right," she said, regarding him with uncertain eyes. "So?"Alex's face lit up as his latest theory came together in his mind. "Don't you see? There's no reason why Liz's unconscious mind couldn't mimic what Max did to her way back when, especially if her cells retained some sort of genetic memory of the original handprint." He gulped down a mouthful of Mountain Dew, fueling his cascading imagination with yet more caffeine. "Or maybe all of Liz's mind- melds with Max have stimulated Liz's own brain enough to fake the shiny handprint on her own."Like with stigmata?" Liz suggested, the budding scientist in her intrigued despite the topic's unsettling personal implications. "All those people who spontaneously develop wounds and marks on their bodies?"The same sort of thing, I'll bet," Alex theorized. "The unconscious mind is capable of all kinds of weird stuff, and Lord knows you've given it plenty of bizarre material to work with lately." He chewed thoughtfully on a soggy nacho. "Yeah, the more I think about it, the more plausible this sounds. I'm pretty sure, Liz, that it's your own brain creating that handprint." He turned to Isabel for confirmation of his genius. "Not a bad job of figuring things out, eh?"Much to his obvious disappointment, however, Isabel still looked dubious. "That could work, I suppose," she said in a less than ringing validation of Alex's hypothesis.
"Says the woman who can listen to CDs without a CD player," Alex pointed out indignantly, "or go traipsing through other people's dreams. After all the wacko garbage we've been through, from skin-shedding alien bodysnatch-ers to time travel, is one little stress-induced handprint too much to accept?"Even through her own agitated emotions, Liz thought she heard an extra touch of irritation in Alex's voice, more than Isabel's admittedly lukewarm endorsement of his theory really warranted. He's probably a little ticked-off and jealous, she speculated, because he knows, just like we all do, exactly how Isabel wormed all that information out of the lieutenant. You didn't have to be Mata Hari to imagine how that scene went down; Isabel could vamp members of the opposite sex like nobody's business.