“I’m having dreams,” I told him.
He scribbled on his notepad, which made me want to roll my eyes, but I managed to refrain.
“Bad ones?”
“Not awful,” I said. “Not like I’ve had in the past when they put me on meds. It’s just that I haven’t had any like that in a couple years, and they’re keeping me up at night. I don’t know why they’re coming back.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
“I…uh…”
Fuck.
I should have realized he was going to want me to talk about them. Talking about the dreams meant talking about what happened in the desert, and I didn’t want to go there. All I really wanted to do was get some sleep, and this option seemed to be the most expeditious.
“Just…just about the past,” I finally said. “I just want to know why they’re back. Why now, when I haven’t really thought about any of that crap for a long time?”
“If you don’t tell me what they were about, I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be,” he urged softly.
With my eyes closed, I went through some of the deep breathing shit the first counselor taught me to do when I had panic attacks. I didn’t get those any more – not since the first year – but the breathing still helped sometimes when my brain went into overdrive.
“I’m…I’m in the hole.”
“Where you were kept prisoner?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed a couple of times. “I’m just waking up, like I did every day when it got hot. I kept trying to spit sand out of my mouth, but I never could, you know? There was always more of it.”
I swallowed hard, but the dryness in my throat made it feel like I was swallowing sand again. I could almost feel it scratching my larynx.
“Fuck.”
“Where are you now, Evan?”
“Chicago,” I said quickly. “I’m not there. I know that.”
“Can you go on?”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward, put my head in my hands, and took a minute to center again. “There isn’t much more, really. I’m just in the hole, waking up over and over again, and trying not to eat the fucking dirt. It made me cough, and it would get in my lungs, too.”
“You haven’t told me much about what happened there,” Mark said.
“Not something I like to talk about.” I hoped my succinct words and terse voice would dissuade him, but he was a fucking counselor, so that wasn’t going to happen.
“It was a very significant life event, Evan. You were a prisoner of war for eighteen months. Don’t you think that warrants some discussion?”
“I talked about it with the last guy,” I reminded him. “The one in the hospital – in Virginia. He cleared me.”
“He cleared you from the psychiatric hospital,” Mark clarified.
“Yeah,” I responded as I looked into his eyes, “where I was held for observation only, evaluated, declared unfit for further duty, but otherwise unharmed.”
“And when was the last time you talked to…” he glanced down at the file in his hands, “…Doctor Hartford?”
“Before I moved here.”
“Before you were discharged?”
“Around the same time,” I said. “He’s the guy who discharged me.”