Page 105 of To Save Him

“Here?”

“Yeah, in the hospital, but…”  He started to move again, one slow step at a time, his grip on my wrist as tight as ever.  “It didn’t look like this.  Not at all.”  I wasn’t sure what he was saying—I just couldn’t keep up in my frightened, panicked state.  Before I could ask a question to clarify, he said, “This place used to be wide open, except for the back.  And there were lots of beds along the wall.  They’d—”  His voice cracked and he bent his head before bringing his hand up and covering his brow.  “They usually hooked us up to IVs to give us some shit and then sometimes they’d shoot us with radiation or whatever but…this place looked so different.”

I found my voice but I kept it low.  “Are you sure this is the place?”

“If you were fucking tortured day after day for months on end and—when they were letting you rest—you had to hear the screams of your comrades, don’t you think you’d remember the place?  Never forget it?”

“Yes, but…maybe, with time and if they tormented you that much, maybe—”

“No, this is it, Kimberly.  I’m telling you.”  A fresh, painful yank on my wrist had me moving forward again.  We flew a few feet and then he stopped.  “Like right here. Here.  This is where we were injected, where we were tested—over and over.”  The tone of his voice and his insistence sounded sincere…soundedreal.  It was in that moment that I wanted to believe him.

Except…this room.  It seemed so innocuous.  Well, not completely, but it certainly didn’t have the feel of a torturous space.  Instead, it felt like it was created to discover diseases and, with that knowledge, to help sufferers heal or recover.  This didn’t seem like a space of torment.

But being near Brandon helped me feel that maybe there was a psychic remnant of what might have happened here.  I was letting my imagination run wild, though, and I knew it.  Any psychic reverberations were likely caused by the fact that hospitals hold people already in pain, already hurting from something happening to them.

As though he were in a daze, Brandon kept moving, looking inside each enclosed space, fresh pain contorting his face.  But after walking a little farther, his grip loosened and he stumbled toward a chair and sat.  I rubbed my wrist but stayed close.  Brandon cradled his face in his hands, his elbows digging into his thighs.

I squatted near where he sat and placed a hand on his knee.  There was now no doubt in my mind that this man was suffering—and then I felt guilty.

Yet still cautious.

I didn’t want to say a word, didn’t want to add to what he was going through.  I simply squeezed his knee, letting him know I was there and listening if he needed to talk.

But he was quiet for a long while, sobbing silently, before his voice finally cracked.  “I didn’t want to do it, Kimberly.  I swear.”

“Do what?”

“Order him to test the wires.”

I couldn’t even pretend to know what Brandon was talking about, but I was curious.  My need to nurture and support was overruled by my urge to understand.  “I believe you, Brandon, but tell me what you mean.”

He pulled in a long, slow breath and then removed his hands from his eyes, wiping his face with his sleeve.  His eyes were diverted from mine, though, staring at some spot on the floor.  “Gabe.  I told you I talked him into signing up for the program.  I might have told you that decision led to his death.  But…I didn’t tell you about the wires.”  Jesus.  He was talking about my son here.  I wanted to prod him, to demand that he spit it out right now, but I kept my jaw clamped shut.  I knew he was trying to make his way there, and I needed to say nothing.  “It’s been kind of fuzzy, but being here brought it all back like a dam breaking.”  The silence once more engulfed us like fog until he spoke again.  And then I had to strain to hear.  “It was a day like any other in the program, a day where we probably all were praying for death or release.  And Gabe didn’t know that he was going to be the reason why we were liberated from a fate worse than dying.  At that point, they were injecting us all with different shit, trying to see what our bodies could handle, ‘cause being a perfect soldier wasn’t just becoming a killing machine, and it also wasn’t what they’d told us we’d signed up for.  Being the perfect soldier wasn’t just having the ability to sneak into hostile territory and completing a mission.  It was also withstanding torture when you got caught.”

A chill charged up my spine but I had to resist the impulse to speak.  Brandon seemed to be half in another world and I was afraid that asking anything would pull him out of his trance.  And I needed to know.

“So the wires.  I’d…”  He let out a long breath and I noticed his hands shaking again.  “I’d survived waterboarding the day before.  Yeah, that’s no superhero move.  I wasn’t the first guy in the world to undergo that shit and survive.  I know.  And there was something in the back of my mind that made me start to wonder if any of the treatments they’d given us worked.  You know—were we stronger and able to handle this stuff better or were we just stupid enough to sign up to be tortured voluntarily?

“Anyway…most of the guys had already done shit.  A couple of them had been transported to medical—apparently just upstairs, but I didn’t know that then—but no one had died from anything they’d done to us.  We already knew about the suffering because even if we didn’t see it or talk about it, we had to hear the screams.  We couldn’t get away from it.  And when wecouldspend a couple minutes alone, we’d talk.  It didn’t happen often, but we knew.  We knew one guy had been whipped nearly to death; another had undergone reverse hanging; another guy had all his finger bones broken.  And Gabe—the night before, he’d told me he wanted me to find you if something happened to him.”  Brandon squeezed his eyes shut and his voice became strained.  “It’s like he knew.  So the next day…he was wavering, you know?  He was resisting—and if I’d been any kind of friend, I would have instead helped him revolt.  Gabe was that kind of guy.  He fought when things weren’t right.  And me…I was a good old soldier boy.  Do what I’m told.  Don’t question it.  They ask me to jump?  I ask how high.  They tell me to drop and give them twenty?  I’ll give ‘em thirty for good measure.  So Gabe’s turn was next.  We all knew what was coming.  It was on the wires—and they were right over there.”  He pointed toward the wall lined with cabinets not two yards away.  “They looked almost like coils of razor wire—but they weren’t sharp.

“They were for electrocution.”

I swallowed then, somehow knowing what was coming.  Part of me wanted to hear every single detail, because it felt like it was my duty as a mother to do so, to hear everything that had happened, to suffer what my son had.  The other part of me knew it would do no good.  Gabriel had already passed, was already in a better place, and I didn’t know that I could stomach what Brandon had to say, and yet I knew he needed to talk about it—and a little piece of me believed I needed to listen.  I was beginning to believe it was this particular event—Gabriel’s death—that had traumatized Brandon.

No, obviously his whole experience in “the program” had disturbed him, but it seemed that Gabriel’s death had pushed him over the edge.  I realized as I focused on the heavy silence awaiting his words that I was squeezing his knee too hard, gripping it as though my life depended on it.  I loosened my fingers so they would be less a vice and more a comfort.  Then I nodded, hoping it would encourage Brandon to continue talking.

It did.

“He didn’t want to do it.  Not because of the pain he knew it would cause but because he was fed up with the program.  ‘This isn’t what we signed up for,’ he kept saying, and I’d tell him, ‘You don’tknowwhat we signed up for.  This isexactlyit.’  But I didn’t really feel that way.  For some reason, I was justifying in my mind and even out loud the shit they were doing.  It had to be for some noble, greater good, right?  It had to be.  Why else would those people willingly hurt all of us on a daily basis?”  He let out a shaky breath.  “But the next day, he did it.  He screamed, yeah, but he never gave in.  We could hear them yelling at him, asking him to tell them his pain level.  That was something they did.  They wanted to know the intensity of the pain we felt.  And then they’d sometimes inject us with more stuff and do it again, asking us if the intensity changed.  But he just kept telling themone.  They’d shock him—and we could hear the wires charging and, later, even the lights would flicker—and after they’d turn it off, they’d ask, ‘Pain level?’  After he kept saying ‘One’ no matter what they did, they explained to him thatonemeant minor pain andtenmeantunspeakable.  At first, I think they thought their experiment was finally working, and you could tell they were thinking that.  Maybe Gabe was sayingonebecause his pain was so intense that he couldn’t think straight.  But then the next time, Gabe told them his pain level waszero…when it was clear from his screams that his pain level had to be at least a seven or eight.  There was no way it was nothing.”  Brandon clenched his jaw then and balled his hands up into fists.  When he spoke, it was through his teeth, as if he was an angry dog.  “But the fuckers kept doing it—more and more with less time in between.  It was as if they were challenging him.  ‘Oh, yeah?  A zero?  How aboutthis?’”

Brandon dropped his head again in his hands and began weeping.  I realized then that the tears had started to fall from my eyes as well as I’d been imagining the horrible death my dear, sweet boy had suffered.  Brandon kept talking through it, though.  “And then it stopped.  And it was like a cloud descended on this fucking cave.  We could feel it.  Something had gone horribly wrong.  We knew.  We just knew.  They never said a word to us about it, but when Gabe never came back to his bunk…and they didn’t tell us he was being treated by medical…we knew.  They’d killed him.  They’d killed the best one of us.  He’d protested by not giving them what they wanted—a true measure of the pain they were putting him through—and they killed him for it.”  His shoulders slumped farther as he grappled with the memories engulfing his mind.

I took a deep breath and wiped a tear away, finding my voice.  “Brandon, it sounds to me like, even though you talked him into doing it, it was his choice.  And that sounds like Gabriel—fighting against what he knew was wrong.”

A sob escaped Brandon’s mouth and then he looked at me through red-rimmed eyes.  “You don’t understand, Kimberly.  Itoldhim to do it.  He was going to refuse.  He was going to demand to talk to someone in charge and not eat or do anything until that happened.  He was going to protest.  Instead, I lectured him.  I pulled rank.  ‘As your commanding officer, I order you to do as you’re told.  Get in there, Marine, and do what they tell you to.’  It was after that…when he talked to me about you and Annabel and JR… he asked me to find you and tell you he loved you.”  Brandon sobbed again, once more burying his face in his hands.  “I think—no, Iknow.  Telling them he felt no pain was his way of protesting.  Since I’d ordered him to go through with it…he was just doing it a different way.”  He completely broke down then, his sobs filling the cavernous space.

At first, a numbness washed over me, a feeling I was completely familiar with, almost like an old friend.  I knew what that meant.  I was trying to push out the thoughts of my son suffering so horribly—of the idea that he’d been harmed intentionally and then killed, all for a stupid experiment.  And that he’d been prodded by Brandon, a man I’d grown to love, made it all the worse.

But then…it was as if my son touched my heart.  I knew the kind of boy he’d been and the man he’d become.  He’d always been giving, self-sacrificing, and an independent leader.  He’d left this earth the way he’d lived his life—without compromise, without apology.  Knowing that he’d asked Brandon to find meafterhis friend ordered him to go through with it told me that, orders or not, he’d done it willingly.  He’d made his decision.

And then the numbness left me.  As if Gabriel’s spirit were there and flowing through the air, he filled my soul.  I cried then, mourning his loss but feeling gratitude for his release.  I didn’t know if his protest had done any good—if he’d maybe saved other lives or brought attention to the deplorable conditions of the experiment from someone higher up, considering he’d died under their hands—but I had to believe that his death had some kind of impact.

I heard the sobs of the tortured soul beside me and realized that, if nothing else, Gabriel had pushed Brandon to me.  And in spite of the doubts and the fear over the past few months, buried underneath that was a steady, burning love and a desire to care for him, nurture him, help him find himself again.

I got up from the squatting position I was in and grabbed a chair, placing it beside Brandon’s, and I pulled him into my arms, allowing him to let it all out.  He resisted at first—and I could feel waves of guilt flowing off him—but he finally gave in and clung to me like a lifesaver.  When his sobs finally died down, I said, “I know Gabriel wouldn’t have wanted you to carry this albatross, Brandon.  You might have ordered him, but he still chose to do what he did.  I think you know that in your heart.”

He lifted his head from my shoulder then and scanned my eyes, blinking as though trying to understand.  He cradled my head in his hands and I leaned forward to give him a small kiss.  It was, from this moment, a symbol for both of us.

A symbol that it was time to heal.

 

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