The Deep Cold

The nightmare jerked me out of a restless sleep as though a demon had twisted a corkscrew into my soul and pulled hard. I woke up shaken, breathing hard, cutting off a scream.

It had started like it always did. Wearing a combat suit I exited the ship into the darkness of space with a pop of compressed air. That blast in the back would fire us at a Transie ship like a sentient bullet; hands full of weapons and veins boiling with angry pharmaceuticals. We attacked the shells of their ships like hordes of lethal ants using anything and everything that would burn, puncture, or corrode.

The Transies never came out man-to-man because they were big, slow things; evolved to the point that pretty much everything other than brain and digestive system had been made vestigial by technology. But they had great technology, and they used it to kill us.

And that's what happened in the nightmares. Sometimes I slammed into Transie rock missiles -- "cheap-and-cheerfuls" we called them -- like Paolo did, and spent the last moments of my life as a human billiard ball while my suit turned into a bag full of hamburger. Sometimes those black Transie snowflakes with the Mandelbrot edges slipped past my suit defenses and started slicing chunks off of me. Sometimes one of those black Transie darts would rifle in slow motion towards me as I tried to get away from it. But the one I just had was the worst one. And it was also the most frequent.

I exit the ship and suddenly I'm spinning through darkness straight toward the picture window in the living room. It's bright and warm and welcoming; the symbol of everything that I -- we -- dreamed of and everything that kept us going Out There. Carol is there looking out with the kids and they smile and wave. I get a lump in my throat and I can feel my heart is ready to burst.

Then I see one of those black Transie darts rifling towards the house--towards that window. So I try to run and save them, but screams are soundless in a vacuum and feet flail uselessly in zero gee. The dart hits the window which explodes outwards into the vacuum -- and those faces explode with it. That's when I wake up screaming.

I rubbed my eyes then stared at Carol who looked like a frumpy angel in her nightshirt and frizzy blonde hair. Still shaken, I got out of bed and walked down the hall to the kitchen. The light gray wall-to-wall carpet was cheap but it felt good under bare feet. I fixed myself a big shot of bourbon and leaned on the white tile counter, staring across the breakfast bar into the living room. I shifted my position a little so that the picture window was out of my line of sight. I could still smell the garlic from the chicken we'd eaten for dinner. A couple of sips of bourbon helped settle my nerves and I spoke in a sleep-roughened voice.

"Phone, call Wally. See if he's up."

He was. We all are, the vets, with the nightmares we have. At least the ones that are still alive are up, anyway.

He was leaning back in his overstuffed black recliner, using the camera in the armrest to talk to me. There were a couple of little screens sticking out and a cup rest as well; Wally's recliner looked like it had enough gadgets to run the free world. Behind him I could see brown carpet and the tiled stairs up to the front door.

"'Ssup, war hero?" he asked in a blurred and tired voice.

"Me, as usual. What are you doing?"

"Drinkin' 'n watchin' d' TV," he slurred.

"Jesus, Wally, how much have you had? I can barely understand what you're saying?"

"Dunno. Lots. 'N some pills." His head wobbled a little. "Got some good pills fr' the doc."

It was cool in the kitchen but I felt my neck and face get hot. "Hold on, Wally. Look at me. Talk to me. What kind of pills? What did you take?"

He fumbled for a while in the cushion next to him and pulled out a little orange bottle with a white cap. I pounded the 'Record' button on the phone. "These," he said. "Great shsstuff."

"What are they? What are they called? Goddamn it Wally, don't pull the plug!"

"'S okay, man. Feelsh great. Fuckin' great." His head lolled and he had a big stupid smile on. "Peace, man. 'S quiet. Inside my head 's quiet." He was going.

"Dammit, Wally, listen to me." I yelled. I didn't care if I woke the family up, because Wally and I were the last survivors of the platoon. "You got to hold on! We're the only ones left, man. Goddam it, we swore we'd tough it out. We swore we'd make it through. Don't give up! C'mon, don't-"

I stopped yelling when I realized he couldn't hear. His eyes were rolled back into his head and his breath was coming in soft snorts.

His head snapped up for a second and he said something. I think it was, "Just a little tired," and then his head fell again. The bottle of pills dropped to the armrest and then the floor and I heard them rattling; knucklebones in the dice cups of the gods.

And then I didn't really hear or feel anything. There was a sort of vague background roaring noise as I split the screen and called for emergency services.
Upper half: chipper young lad in a blue uniform asking me the nature of the emergency.
Bottom half: Wally, my last and best friend, wetting his pants as his body lost control of its involuntary muscles.
Background noise: The distant whitewater roar of blood in my ears.

The emergency call ended but I waited with the screen on, tears tracing the shape of my mouth, until they arrived. I saw the white pants and shirts banging a stretcher down the stairs to Wally's TV room; I saw them check this and that and read the label on the bottle and try to pump his stomach and swear a lot. I saw needles and electrodes and all kinds of stuff and Wally just laid there, everything flaccid, his arms going wherever a paramedic put them until gravity decided it wanted them elsewhere.

A cop showed up, and he noticed that the call was still active. I gave him my name and address in a monotone. Behind him I saw the stretcher bump back up and away and I knew that was the last I would see of Wally--he had requested cremation. He had once told me he that wanted his ashes dropped in the Marianas Trench--the deepest part of the ocean and as far away from the star-filled heavens as you could get.

"You going to be okay?" asked the cop.

I nodded. "Yeah, just a little tired."

He looked unconvinced but he nodded and left. I toyed with a pad of paper, then stopped 'Record' and rewound the call. I froze the picture of the orange bottle, zoomed in, and copied the stuff on the label. You never know when information like this might come in handy.

I wandered around the kitchen in little circles, unable to think. Once I got over the shock I was angry, really Old-Testament-vengeance angry at Wally. He had pulled the plug and left me here alone; left me with a family that needed me and loved me but with nowhere to go and no one to talk to that understood. No one who had been with me at Kubokawa's Star or the Barnhurst Cluster; no one who had braved the endless nightmares of the deep cold and lived to tell about it.

I pulled a paring knife out of the wooden block of knives and tapped it on the counter, making little padiddles with the blade. D-d-d-ding, d-d-d-d-ding. I wandered down the corridor to the kids' room, staring at nothing, tapping the knife blade on the wall and feeling every imperfection in the paint with it.

I sat down with my back against their closet door and watched them sleep. Leslie lay on his back, his legs and arms going in different directions, deeply asleep in a position that could only be comfortable for a three-year old. His left hand was curled tightly around Doo, a little brown bear with a red vest -- or what remained of it after a lifetime of non-stop affection. Ilona lay on her side, curled into a ball, one hand moving fitfully to wipe hair out of her mouth. Her first Barbie, received two months ago for her fifth birthday, sat on the headboard like a proud trophy. They weren't my biological kids but I loved them like I loved their mother, and they loved finally having a Daddy.

Those two kids were hope embodied yet in a way I hated them -- if they hadn't been there to need me and to be loved by me and to keep me going, a long time ago I would have found peace the way Wally found peace...

I sat and watched them. The tears came again. Carol found me that way, and grabbed my hand and pulled me back out to the kitchen. I didn't realize I was still holding the knife until she pulled it carefully out of my hand and put it back in the block. She sat me on one of the stools and she sat on another and we held each other while I got my breathing under control.

"A bad one?" she finally asked.

I had to clear my throat to get it out but I finally managed to say, "Wally's gone. I ... I called. We were talking. He had some pills and a bottle."

She gripped me tight enough that my neck hurt.

"Promise me one thing, Tom. Please. One thing," she said.

I felt her hair tickling my eyelashes as I held her; the smell of her neck; the warmth of her breath on my ear. Holding her was like hanging onto a rock in a raging river while your boat beat itself to splinters around you.

"Anything. Anything at all. Oh my God please anything at all."

"Don't go," she whispered. "Me, the kids." She snuggled closer. "We love you. We need you. I know this is bad and you don't see any hope, but you have to keep fighting. Don't leave us. Don't go."

I'm not sure she understood what she was asking for but that might not have mattered; I had married a real hardass.

We returned to bed and when she fell asleep I went back out to the living room. I turned on the TV, projected it in 'surround' on the wall, and surfed through the channels as I could only do when I was alone.

I checked out some of the chat rooms and left a note that Wally had pulled the plug. We're all insomniacs--within twenty minutes I had a dozen notes of condolence and exhortations to keep fighting.

But I was tired of fighting; as a matter of fact I didn't think that I had had anything left in me after fighting the Transies out there in the deep cold for two years. Then I had come home and had to fight this. It was bad enough to have to do it, but not knowing how long it would go on was worse. We all kept thinking we just needed a little time to get our heads together, but that little time kept stretching out.

I was watching some music around six AM when an e-mail came. I guess the cop had been busy; I had an appointment at four PM that day with a shrink at the VA. The shakes started again. How the hell was I going to explain this to a doctor? If he hadn't jumped into the Deep Cold, all he could do was apply theory.

The hell with it. Another day; another blast of sunshine and hope before the night fell again and the flashbacks and the nightmares started. Wally and I had made that our unofficial motto; One Night at a Time. Except that there had been one night too many for Wally. Somewhere, deep down, I had a gut feel that some day there would be one night too many for me as well.

I showered and shaved and had a bowl of cereal and was gone before anyone else was even awake. I drove to work and got there early. You can tell who the vets are in any given company; they get there just after dawn and leave so that they aren't driving home after dark.

The company was razing and rebuilding a shoddy old townhouse development in Gaithersburg. My part of it was just fine--pulling down old walls, putting up new ones. Driving sixteen-penny nails through two-by-fours and eight-penny nails through sheetrock was good, simple repetitive work. I didn't need my college degree to do it, but the last thing I wanted was jobs where I had to think a lot. I concentrated on the work and felt the sun on my back. I liked doing it and I liked the calm that came with the concentration.

Except that I kept looking at my watch all the time because the day went too fast. At 15:00 I said goodbye to the foreman and drove back down into town. I watched a fishing and hunting channel to keep my mind off the shrink. But it was there, regardless, in the back of my mind. What the hell does it mean to get your head together? We all used the phrase, but I had an uneasy feeling that it was just words.

The sun was fading behind heavy clouds, and by the time I got to the VA it was drizzling. I was about fifteen minutes early, traffic in the DC area for once moving normally. That meant I had to sit in the waiting room, and the waiting room lacked distractions. I walked around, read the magazines, avoiding the window with its too-open view of the sky. I tried to think of anything but Wally, but away from the rhythms of work that's all that came to me.

I sat in a chair and held my head in my hands, breathing deeply. Christ almighty in an office waiting room I can't even maintain control. Get my head together? Who was I kidding? I didn't even know where my head was or how to find it. I stayed that way until I heard over the sound of muffled waterfalls a quiet voice that kept repeating, "Mr. Vance? Mr. Vance?"

I looked up slowly, tensely, and saw The Shrink.

He was young; probably just out of his PhD program or else he would have been too expensive for the VA. He was wearing slacks and a button-down shirt and a navy blazer and looked scholarly and inoffensive in his gold-rimmed glasses and thinning curly brown hair.

"Is everything okay?" he asked.

I tried to shrug but you can't with tight shoulders. "A little agoraphobia." I tried to say it casually, waving at the window, like it was nothing I couldn't handle; like it was getting better already.

He looked over at the window and grimaced. "I'm sorry, I should have thought of that. I've only been here a couple of weeks-" He cut himself off, looking sheepish. Maybe at the window thing, maybe at the admission of his youth.

"Great," I thought. "He's unsure of himself, just say as little as necessary to get through the appointment."

I stood, apologized, shook his hand, and followed him into his office. It was small but tidy and furnished as neutrally as possible. The only thing that wasn't a pastel olive or yellowish beige color was the black frame around the diploma--which probably still had wet ink. Even his slacks were beige.

He went around his desk to sit down and offered me the only other chair in the office-- a comfortable swiveler with arms. We fenced conversationally a bit; Q&A about me and my time in the service and my family.

Finally I saw him take a deep breath and he asked, "Can you tell me about the nightmares? Slowly, in your own time, in your own words. Don't worry about what things may or may not mean and try not to be embarrassed. There is no right or wrong or good or bad here. But I need to know what you see, and how you see it. Then we'll take it from there." He spoke in a soft and pleasant baritone, with little inflection, almost monotonous.

I sat and nodded my head. About twenty times. Okay, Tommy. Okay. You really want to get your head back together? You want to try to make things with Carol the way they were a few months ago before the transit drugs wore off? You have -- maybe -- a chance. So I took a deep breath, too.

"The nightmares always start the same way, exiting the ship. There's different ones, but they always start like that."

I shook my head, staring at my thumbs which I had carefully aligned atop my clasped hands. This was not going to be easy. I remember Wally once told me that one of the Founding Fathers had said something like, "If it is easy, it isn't worth doing." Smart men.

The shrink made a non-committal noises that probably meant, "Yes, good, let's see where this goes."

"The worst one-" Why the hell did I have to start there? "-is when the Transie ship disappears and I'm headed toward the picture window in the living room," I said, clearing my throat. I tried to think of a way to change the subject. "I didn't think of it when I bought the place. I guess it's because I was just discharged and all the drugs they gave us for the voyage and the debrief were still pretty strong. Also, you know, we were so happy to be back that the nightmares were just restless sleep. But now I see it every night."

I took another deep breath and looked around the office. I looked at the light bulb of his desk lamp and thought about sunlight; that helped. I wanted to think of something else or say something else but I couldn't. Driven by something inside I recounted shot for shot what I had seen in last night's dream.

He made his shrink noise again. I focused on my thumbs, now circling each other in an endless dance, and forced the words out. I felt time slow down. My tongue felt like a wad of cloth in my mouth. Jesus, would I rather have been back at the site putting up sheetrock than sitting there doing that.

"So I try to run and save them, but in zero gee you flop like a fish." I cleared my throat again and my voice dropped further.

I cleared my throat again, not wanting to go on. I had grown up believing that there are some things that a guy just didn't talk about.

"So I can't do anything and the dart hits the window-"

I could feel my cheeks heating and my eyes burning and I knew my voice was about to crack. The only way I could keep going was to speak more quietly. It was impossible to do this in a normal conversational tone.

"-and I see my family do The Big Sploof right before my eyes."

He was saying something or making encouraging shrink noises but I was too busy fighting for control to listen. I watched my thumbs orbit each other. It helped.

After a couple more breaths I kept going. Each word was like a tired step up a steep hill. "And then I wake up screaming. Carol wakes up and hugs me, and I go down the hall and look in to see if the kids are okay.

"Then I go to the kitchen and try to drink something--if I can hold a glass. When the shakes let up I watch some TV and chat with other vets. Usually I lie awake the rest of the night."

I stopped when I maybe should have kept going but if he had seen other vets he knew the rest of it: "The cold, dark, night. The black, still, frigid night when all of God's good earth looks like the deep cold that was our real enemy out there." Sure, the Transies were what we aimed the guns at, but the deep cold was what scared us.

He nodded, as if he was guessing my unvoiced thoughts. "I understand where you're coming from, Mr. Vance. Many of your shipmates feel the same way. You understand that this is a normal reaction; that there is nothing strange or unusual that is wrong with you. It is a completely normal response to an abnormal experience."

I nodded, looking back at my thumbs. We probably knew more about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than the psychiatrists. We had read all the books we could find on it; we discussed it in the chat rooms in the wee hours when we couldn't sleep.

Anyway the hard part was over and my voice was back. "Yeah, yeah. We're all going through it. We've all tried the group therapy and we've all tried the prescriptions and we all know none of it helps."

I was looking at him when I said it because I knew that he knew that, too.

"And how does that make you feel?"

"Oh, gosh, just great. Chipper. Full of warm happy feelings." I could see his face flush and I leaned closer.

"How the fuck do you think that makes me feel!" I yelled at him. "How about cheated? Used? Angry with no one to be angry at! Frustrated. How about full of hate and nobody to hate?" I said with vehemence. Stupid shrink.

I moved my chair, stood up, and walked over to the window. I could see people dressed in olive drab or labcoat white wandering on the landscaped grounds. There was a beautiful old copper beech tree with purple-red leaves that was central on the lawn, and every room in the place had a view on it. Neither of us said anything for a long time until I turned back, my anger under control.

"No one figured the nightmares would come -- how bad it would be. We were home. It was supposed to be all over. Like the end of the movie when everything is okay again.

"But the night comes and you see the stars, just like we saw them every time we got suited up and sortied. The war is over and we're back but the night always comes ... and it always brings back memories of the deep cold."

The good doctor was listening quietly--or maybe tiredly.

"Tell me more about how you felt when you were suited up, waiting in the Ready Room," he said. "Is that when you started twiddling your thumbs?"

I stopped moving my hands. Maybe the doctor was smarter than I thought.

"The Ready Room. Okay. If you want to know what it was like the Ready Room just try to imagine it. Go ahead. Try to imagine it. It was full of terrified men and women facing up to their next triple dose of acrophobia, claustrophobia, and agoraphobia because that's what hit you every single time you put the suit on." I leaned towards him again, the comfortable happy doctor, trying to transmit the horrors of the war we lived.

"You can't imagine what it's like when something deep inside you clicks and you realize that the distance you can fall or the space into which you could disappear was infinite." I dropped my voice.

"And there was always this feeling of malevolent spider-like patience. That it was cold and deep out there today and it would be cold and deep out there tomorrow and the day after that and every single day you had to go. No matter how perfectly you did it the first one hundred times it did not matter because the deep cold would still be there, it would always be there, waiting. Waiting for you to do just one thing wrong and lose it time number one-oh-one. That's what we used to call it -- pulling a one-oh-one. 'Hey, where's Jasper?' 'Smeared across the inside of his faceplate. Ripped his suit exiting.' 'Pulled a one-oh-one, eh?' 'Ha ha ha.'"

I gave a nasty laugh.

"And every time you went out, locked up in this little closet of air, you knew Father Death was outside, poking your suit, testing for weak spots-" I stopped abruptly because some memories came back and instead of scaring the doctor I was starting to scare myself.

After another pause he went on. "What about the officers, the DoD, the government. How do you feel about them?"

I shrugged. "They were told to go win a war and they went out and they did. Everybody got medals by the truckload and as far as I can tell they deserved them. It was either us or the Transies."

"But don't you resent them? The decisions they made?"

I shook my head. "How can we? We were cannon fodder. Every guy who has ever put on a uniform knows at some point he may be expendable. Hell, we were all volunteers."

"So you're not angry at yourself for having volunteered?"

"We had to. Everything we saw or learned showed that it had to be us or them." My thumbs were going again and I stopped them by jamming one hand up under each armpit. "I guess we just never figured we would end up fighting that same war over and over every night for the rest of our lives."

#

The shrink was rubbing his tired-looking eyes as I looked at him. He took off his glasses and I wished he hadn't. Behind them were the red, tired eyes of someone who spent all day storing up other people's nightmares.

"You look older than you are," I said as I sat down again, and he didn't respond. I felt a little hot surge in my chest--pity for the shrink that had to put up with that, and anger directed at nobody and at everybody for what had been done to us.

He was talking again but I didn't listen. I was angry with myself because it was childish to hassle the shrink when the guy only wanted to help me. It was just that this unexpressed rage boiled inside all of us, and sometimes it leaked out.

I cut him off. "So how about it, Doc. Let's cut to the chase. You know the disease, you know the symptoms. Can you fix it? Am I going to get better?"

He didn't want to meet my eyes so he stared at the flexible screen in his lap, running his finger up and down to scroll through his notes.

"Mr. Vance, treating your condition is like treating any other serious battlefield wound. Instead of months or years of physical therapy, it is months or years of emotional therapy. You don't seem to show evidence of hyperarousal, other than the dreams and your phobic reactions to the night. I think we should schedule you and your spouse for family counseling, to help work out the problems of emotional numbing and what we call-"

I nodded and mouthed the word 'constriction' at the same time he said it.

"We will have to work on going over the causes of the trauma, and to develop more healthy responses to the fact that you relive it and the way that you relive it." He looked up at me.

"Is it easy? No. Can I guarantee success? No. Can I guarantee improvement? That depends on you. We have to work on changing you, changing the way you deal with stress, with threats. With nightfall."

I stood up again and went to look at the purple-leafed tree out the window. I knew why so many guys killed themselves -- it just seemed so much easier than trying to keep your head together every night.

He discussed this and that and made some observations and said my potential was encouraging. He gave me a prescription--something new that would supposedly help me sleep after the nightmares--and said that he'd see me next week. I wanted to ask him why he thought I would have no problem surviving another week when every single day took so much out of me.

I left his office and trudged down the linoleum hallway under anaemic fluorescent bulbs. I leaned against the wall by the stairs (none of us took elevators). I was toast.

Deep down inside I felt like I had failed miserably with the shrink. Instead of keeping control and keeping it inside and trying to deal with it myself I had opened up and now all those nightmares and memories were running loose in my head. I didn't know which way to fight it was better; all I knew is that I was more vulnerable than I had been before.

But there was something else as well; maybe a little bit of hope. I tried not to think about it too much as I drove home, because in a situation like this hope will kill you. You start thinking that maybe you'll be OK and that maybe it's over. Then, when the house of card tumbles and you realize that it's never going to stop, the shakes are worse than ever.

I came home and opened the door, steeling myself for the explosion of laughter and screams from the kids. It didn't happen. I didn't hear anything and the house had that dead silent feel of a house where there are no machines running and no people talking.

"Carol? Les? Ilo-ilo?" I called. There was no reply. I walked around and confirmed it; my family was not there. I shrugged, closed the curtains, and turned on the TV. It was about six o'clock and they were probably out shopping or at Carol's brother's place, playing with their cousins.

By eight o'clock I was worried. At ten o'clock I called her brother, Pete. It rang for a while before he answered, using the phone in their upstairs bedroom. That was unusual; they were usually in the family room like us.

"Hey, guy," he said, with a strained smile.

"What's up, Pete?" I asked, a little edgy. I could see something in his eyes.

"Uh, not much. I, uh-"

"Is Carol there?"

"Huh? Who? Carol?" His eyes darted to the end of the room that I couldn't see. "Why would she be here?"

"Look, Pete, she's not here. Neither are the kids. Either she's with you and I'm going to talk to her or something serious has happened and I'm going to call the police."

"Whoa, the police? I'm sure she's just, uh, just ..."

"Come on, Pete!" I was close to yelling; it had not been a pretty day. "Put her on the phone."

"Yeah, look." I felt a little sorry for him because he was a pretty good guy and we got along well. "Look, Tom," he said, "could you call back tomorrow, maybe? She's pretty tired and stressed and all-"

"Now, Pete. I want to talk to her now or it's the cops or maybe I'll come over myself and put a foot through your door." I slammed my hand on the kitchen counter. "I am not in a good mood."

I heard bumping and muffled voices and movement and suddenly Carol was there, her cheerful face full of tears and pain.

"I'm sorry, Tom," she said, weeping quietly. "It's not that we don't love you, we do. The kids, me too, we love you. But when I saw you in there with the knife this morning ..."

I was stunned. Literally speechless. She had actually thought that I might do that? I couldn't talk but it didn't matter because her words came tumbling out.

She was scared for herself; scared for the kids. Scared what would happen now that Wally was gone; scared that I was angry and scared that I would be angry at them. She had been scared of everything for a long time and was just so goddam tired of being scared. Poor Pete was trying to comfort her and I was trying to calm her down but at the same time I was yelling at her for thinking I was that crazy.

I don't want to remember the conversation. We both cried a lot and we both yelled a lot and after we hung up I drank a few quick shots. Then I stared at the wall for a long time while I drank a few slow shots. I looked at the clock. Almost midnight. Six more hours of darkness. I wanted to call Carol back and yell at her all night so that I wouldn't think of the stars and the black, black sky.

I remembered the prescription. I took it out and read it and my heart beat a little faster. Just to make sure I scrambled back to the pad by the phone and, yes, it was the same thing that Wally had had.

Triumphant despair raged through me. I called an all-night pharmacy and half an hour later it was in my trembling hands.

I closed the door, turned slowly, and walked past the flowerpot on the ledge in the entry around the corner and into the kitchen. I sat on a stool and turned the bottle around in my hands and looked at it; looked at it like you would look at the Holy Grail or the Turin Shroud. Salvation in a bottle. Twenty gel-encapsulated chances for deliverance.

I grabbed a glass and the remains of my bottle from the kitchen and took them and the pills to the couch. I felt the weave of the cloth on the cushions; I marveled at the softness of the pillows. The patterns in the fake wood coffee table seemed to reach out and present themselves as if for the first time. Everything seemed to be clear and crisp as if it was new; like new snow on a clear day or like freshly cut wood.

I poured myself a drink slowly and carefully, pausing and continuing twice to get the exact amount in the glass. I took a sip. I opened the bottle of pills and put them on the coffee table. I ran my feet back and forth in the rug; luxuriating in the sensation on my toes in the threads.

I turned the TV on, surfing casually, feeling calmer and more in control than I had in a while; maybe the calmest I had felt since I had come back from the war.

Some lame Transie war movie caught my eye. I stopped and put down the remote. The soldiers dressed the way I had and the ship looked just like the old Nobunaga or the Marechal Ney, but the dialog was incredibly sappy. They were all suited up and some guy with captain's bars was going on about righteous causes and the future of civilization. In reality, the last thing you usually heard before exiting was more like: "Oh my God they're right on top of us go! Go! GO!"

I snorted at the staginess of the script. And that's when I should have changed channels. When I could still make fun of it; when it wasn't real.

The next scene cut to the exterior. By God if they didn't use little guns just like our 'hair dryers' and get spit out of hatches and go man-to-ship. Wearing a suit just like I used to wear and holding a gleaming white weapon in either hand, the hero bounced out of a breached hull and started ripping up the Transie ship pop! pop! pop! just like that.

The scene was too accurate; it brought back too many memories too quickly. I grabbed for the remote but I missed it because it was crap but it was still real enough to send me back and I heard the screams in my head all over again ...

... The shrieks across the comm link when someone felt their lungs and sinuses emptying ...

... Lee crying for his mother as the darts pierced his suit...

... Kimi spinning slowly past me, her eyes bulged out of their sockets and the inside of her helmet glazed with blood...

... The weeping laughter as Samir dove right into their broadside...

I fumbled for the remote as the pressure built up in my chest and I tried to breathe but I couldn't. On the screen a cheap-and-cheerful ripped a suit open and a bloody face drifted by. I could hear myself make a roaring noise as I dropped the remote. My vision was gone and I knew that my fingers had lost coordination as I batted it around on the floor. I leaned forward and made a desperate grab for the pills and booze but they both fell. I was hyperventilating and still the scene on the TV wouldn't stop. I curled up screaming with all of my muscles and tendons straining and finally I just blacked out.

Sometime later I heard noises and half awoke. My face and head seemed to be wet and I couldn't unlock the muscles of my arms. There were guys in white clothes around murmuring something through the sound of a running shower. Then I felt hands lifting me and movement and needles and there was dreamless darkness.

Sometime later in my hazy gray dream world I thought I smelled Carol. There was sunlight, somewhere. A meal came that I ate detachedly, as if my mind was off reading a book and only my hand and teeth were functioning. Somewhere on the far side of a fog-shrouded hill I heard "Daddy! Daddy!" I reached out and stroked two small heads; I felt four tiny hands grasping mine. I was pretty sure I was crying. There was another meal and then more needles.

Another dreamless darkness descended.

I woke up, but laboriously, like wakefulness was the prey and my brain was circling slowly before it pounced.

After an endless time I was more or less conscious. I guessed that I had lost two days. There was a warm daytime glow coming in through the window. I gave my eyes time to rest and to focus, and when my sight was finally clear I saw the branch of a huge copper beech tree outside.

There was no hope. Just no fucking hope.

I tried to remember everything that had happened, with the pills and the movie and the breakdown. The only things that came through, that really seemed to be of substance, were the voices that called "Daddy! Daddy!" That and the smell of Carol.

I thought of myself lying in a bed in the VA hospital, staring at the wall tiles. A broken man who would have killed himself, except he was too broken to do it.

There was a certain grim humor in that.

And they all think we're heroes. But we spend every single night hiding from our own minds like frightened puppies; shaking with fears and nightmares while we prayed for daylight and warmth; trying to put enough pieces of our crippled minds together to lead a normal life for just one more day.

I thought of Leslie and Ilona and Carol and I knew that I couldn't do it. I couldn't bear the thought of not seeing them again.

"Okay," I said aloud. "I'll do it, goddamit, I'll do it. I'll see the shrink, and I'll do the counseling, and I'll handle the nightmares. I'll do whatever it takes for me to hold Carol and kiss my kids and not lose it. One night at a time." I felt tears running down my face. "With all the strength I have and all the hope I can find I'll fight every single day, all day, and hang in there every single night. I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to give up, not now, not ever."

I was punching the wall, yelling.

"You fucked up, Wally, but not me. I won't. I can't. I'm not pulling a one-oh-one!"

I was standing by the time I finished. I stared out at the copper beech. Beautiful tree. Beautiful world. It was too soon to leave it.

Grimly hopeless, I got myself dressed.

Yeah, you bet your ass we're heroes.

THE END

The Deep Cold by Jeff Spock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 France License