Page 32 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

Silence.

Okay! So first, I need to find a place to rest for the night.

I’m almost at the cab when her voice stops me.

“Why me?” It’s only a whisper, but it hits me with unbridled force.

What should I tell her? Because you’re my Little Miss Sunshine? Because you made me smile? Because you saved my life on a day I wanted to die?

My heart is pounding hard in my chest. I could give her hundreds of reasons.

“Because you’re so full of life,” I simply say. It’s the truth. A simple fact. Life gushes out of Lou like she’s had too much of it.

For a moment, I am terrified and wonder if I can swallow up all her life like nature swallowed me up when it was only us. Maybe I’ll suck up Lou and then there’ll be nothing left of her.

I drive deeper and deeper into the forest on the unpaved road and simply park the RV alongside the ditch.

Briefly, I check on Lou, but she’s dozed off again. That’s probably best for her in the current situation. As I carefully take her pulse, I realize how long it’s been since I’ve had a flash despite being constantly under stress these past few days. It’s probably thanks to Lou. Having her with me is good for me.

We’re already far up north and the sun is still high even though it’s already late afternoon. I sit cross-legged by the road, amid deep blue lupines, poppies, and feathery foxtail grass swaying silently in the wind.

I don’t know what to do for Lou so she’ll be less scared. In the past, I have never had contact with girls. At least not with the likes of Lou. Never has a girl or woman touched me as tenderly and innocently as she did when she wrapped her arms around me.

My gaze falls on a brimstone butterfly fluttering frantically around the lupine flower clusters. Lou is like that butterfly. I have to be careful not to crush her. To be honest, I don’t even know how I would have acted toward her if she had volunteered to come with me. I have no idea how normal relationships work. In the slums, you had to abide by strict rules and hierarchies. With the monster anyway. And I don’t recall anything of the time before that. It seems to me that since I was born, there has only been me and the man. I don’t even know how long I was imprisoned with him, but it must have been at least eight years.

It is not until the age of three or four that a child has clear memories of what has happened. At least that’s what the psychologist I saw about the flashes told me.

Lost in thought, I pluck at a few blades of grass.

The attacks came unexpectedly. Actually, at the time, I thought I was done with the past because the nightmares had stopped. I had started to partake in fights and finally found an outlet for my anger. Then came the first flash, which was short. The second, however, lasted several minutes. I experienced more and more and they lasted longer and longer. They became increasingly worse. In one particularly violent attack, I dove out of the second-floor window. The Bones were under the impression I was popping pills.

Since I was only 16 and had no guardian, I went to see a Mexican doctor who treated migrants with no health insurance. He referred me to his friend, Dr. Watts, a psychologist.

“The way you describe it, it sounds like a flashback,” Dr. Watts shared at the time. She looked like a typical doctor, with a neat bun and horn-rimmed glasses, sitting in the middle of a cream-colored room—I was in the corner, a spot I had chosen myself. She was wearing a cornflower-blue suit—I, my new jeans and a decent black shirt. I had bought the clothes with the money I had earned from my first job. Finally, something that was mine, smelled like me, was clean, and wasn’t torn. Yet, in her presence, I still felt like I was wearing my stinky gray clothes from Thorson Ave.

“A what?” I asked because I didn’t know the word.

“A flashback is reliving a traumatic memory. Do you remember a traumatic event in your childhood, Brendan?” She spoke as softly and quietly as I had imagined a psychologist’s voice would be.

I remained silent.

“You know trauma is an emotional injury that you fail to cope with. So far, we have not learned anything that works to deal with such a situation. There are states of extreme helplessness, a loss of control, which leads to questioning one’s own understanding of the world. And of course also to a change of one’s self-image.”

Dr. Watts must have assumed I didn’t know this, but that was not the case. I would have just expressed it with much simpler words.

“Sometimes a smell is enough to be catapulted back in time. Trauma knows no time. Because all possibilities of coping have failed, it is not stored in the brain as a past experience. So it’s always present, in a state of limbo, and activated by a trigger as if it were happening again.”

“So a trigger would be an odor?”

“A trigger can be anything, even a speck of dust on your boot if it’s connected in some way to what happened.” She thought for a moment. “It’s unusual for you to have amnesia afterwards…meaning a lapse in memory from the time of the flashback. That would suggest a split personality, but it’s too early to speculate.”

“All I really want to know is when and how it will stop.” That’s all I was interested in.

“That’s entirely up to you, Brendan. You have to try to work through the trauma and integrate it into your personality. Maybe under hypnosis. That would be one of several possibilities.”

“I can’t do that.” I’d rather be beaten with a bullwhip like a loser in a fight. I would never go back. Physically, mentally, or otherwise. The way Dr. Watts said trigger and trauma pissed me off, as if she knew about me and could see inside me. All the hatred and anger, the feeling of having to destroy something in order to be able to think at all. Sometimes, it felt as if all of my being was only anger. And then I felt nothing at all again like my soul had been evacuated. After escaping Thorson Ave, I thought every human would feel this way. It took me a long time to realize that I was the only one who somehow functioned differently.

“Why isn’t it possible? What reason do you have for not trying it?” she asked after a moment of silence.

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