Abuse, Trauma, and Torture - Their Consequences and Effects (23 page)

Her bags are packed, my scarlet fingerprints
blemish the whiteness of her skin, she is crying. I reach for her
but she retreats in horror, nostrils flared, eyes moist, a nervous
tic above her clenched jaw.

"I am afraid of you." - She says, voice
flat.

"I didn't mean to." - I feebly protest and she
shrugs:

"Yesterday, I thought I'd die."

Her hand shoots to her neck involuntarily,
caressing the sore bruises, where I attempted to strangle her at
night.

"It's him, you know, the doctor."

She shudders.

"I saw him yesterday again; manicured,
besuited, coiffed, as elegant as ever. He was injecting me with
something that burned, it was not phenol, I would have died. It was
something else."

"It's over." - Says Sarah, her eyes downcast,
she sounds unconvinced.

"He's still alive." - I reason - "They haven't
caught him, you know. They say he is in Argentina."

"Wherever he may be, there's nothing he can do
to you."

She steps forward, palm extended towards my
cheek, and then thinks better of it, picks up her tattered suitcase
and leaves.

3. Again, the Doctor

A rigid plastic pipe, through the large vein
in my leg, towards my ovaries. I am a woman. I am to be sterilized.
The doctor crouches at the foot of my bed, inspecting with mounting
interest my private parts.

There is a greenish liquid in a giant plunger
connected to an IV stand. He nods with satisfaction. He brandishes
a glinting surgical knife and slices my abdomen. He takes out a
squarish organ mired in gory slime, my womb, and inspects it
thoroughly.

There's blood everywhere. I can see my
intestines curled in the cavity, wrapped tight in an opaque and
pulsating sheet. Two ribs are visible and underneath them, my
oversized heart. My breathing sears.

I chose tonight to be a woman. I want him to
be at ease, not on the alert. I want him to be immersed in
rearranging my organs, tearing them apart, sowing them back
reversed. I want him to forget himself in the sandbox that is my
body.

He leans over me, to study whether my left
breast is lactating.

It is not.

I reach for the hypodermic and detach it in
one swift motion.

I stick it in his jugular.

I press the plunger.

The doctor gurgles.

He whimpers and mewls.

He watches me intently as his senses dull and
his body grows limp.

There is blood everywhere. The doctor drowns
in it, my blood and his, a forbidden mixture.

4. The Police

"Was he a medical doctor?"

"Not that I am aware of."

The burly policeman scrawled in his threadbare
pad.

The psychiatrist shifted in her overstuffed
armchair:

"Why are you asking?"

She was a scrawny, bleached blonde and wore
high heels and a plate-sized pendant to work. The cop sighed and
slid a crime scene photograph across the burrowed surface of the
desk.

"It's tough viewing. I hope you didn't have
breakfast." - He quipped.

She covered her mouth with a dainty, wrinkled
hand as she absorbed the details.

"I can explain that." - She literally threw
the photo back at her interlocutor.

He grimaced: "Go ahead, then."

"My patient is wearing the white doctor's robe
because one of his alters was a Nazi camp doctor."

The policeman blinked:

"Beg your pardon?"

"My patient was a Polish Jew. He spent three
years in various concentration camps, including
Auschwitz."

"I heard of Auschwitz." - Said the policeman
smugly.

"There, he and his young wife, Sarah, were
subjected to medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors in white
robes."

"Medical experiments?"

"You don't want to know the details, believe
me." - It was the psychiatrist's turn at one-upmanship.

But the officer was insistent.

"They sterilized his wife. At first, they
injected some substance to her ovaries through a vein in her leg.
Then they extracted her womb and what was left of her reproductive
system. She was awake the entire time. They did not bother with
antiseptics. She died of infection in excruciating
pain."

The policeman coughed nervously.

"When my patient was liberated, at the
beginning of 1945, he developed a host of mental health problems.
One of them was Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as
Multiple Personality Disorder."

The cop scribbled something and mumbled to
himself.

"He had three alters. In other words, his
original personality fractured to at least three parts: the
original He, another part that assumed the identity of his dead
wife, and a part that became the doctor that tortured them. In the
last few years, every night, he enacted scenes from their
incarceration. The doctor would come to him, an hour or so after he
fell asleep, and conduct various procedures on his
body."

"Jesus!" - Blurted the policeman and went
visibly pale.

"This is called 'night terror'. The subject is
asleep. You cannot wake him up. But he believes himself to be wide
awake and experiences extremes of terror. Usually, he cannot even
respond because he is momentarily paralyzed. We call it 'sleep
paralysis'"

"But then, if he cannot move, how did he kill
himself? It was clearly suicide. We found the syringe. Only his
fingerprints are on it. We were able to trace down the pharmacy
where he bought it. He injected himself with some kind of acidic
home detergent."

"Yes, it was suicide." - Agreed the
psychiatrist, shut her eyes, and rubbed her temples - "As he grew
older, he also developed Rapid Eye Movement Behavioral Disorder.
This meant that after he was paralyzed by the night terror, he was
actually able to enact it at a later stage of his sleep. He played
the doctor, he played himself resisting the doctor, he played his
wife being mutilated by the doctor. He wielded knives, syringes,
wounded himself numerous times. You can find all the hospital
admission forms in his file. I gave him anti-depressants. We
talked. Nothing helped. He was beyond help. Some patients are
beyond help." - Her voice quivered.

5. Help

"I killed him, Sarah, he's dead."

"I am glad."

"He will no longer bother us. We can be
together again. I won't be having the dreams. I won't be attacking
you anymore."

"That's good, Max."

"I peeled his face back, as he did to me. I
injected him with the green liquid as he did to you. Revenge is
sweet. I know it now."

"I love you, Max."

"And I never stopped loving you, Sarah. Not
for a single moment."

Return

A Dream Come
True

"They call it: 'sleep
deprivation'. I call it: hell. I can't remember the last time I
have slept well, dreamlessly. You may say that it is to be expected
when one is cooped up in a 4-by-4 cell, awaiting one's execution.
But, I found myself engulfed by insomnia long before that. Indeed,
as I kept telling my incompetent lawyer, one thing led to another.
I hacked my wife to tiny pieces because of my phantasmagoric
visions, not the other way around.

But, I am jumping the queue. Allow me to retrace.
Ever since I was apprehended and detained, fourteen months ago, I
have embarked on this prolonged nocturnal time travel. The minute I
started to doze off, I was catapulted into the past: I relived the
first encounter with my wife to be, the courtship, the trip to
Europe, our marriage, the house we bought, the birth of our son -
all seemingly in real time, as protracted episodes.
Those were no ordinary hallucinations either. They were so vivid,
so tangible, catering to my every sense, that, when I woke up,
startled by the proximity of the damp walls, the rigidity of my
bunk, and the coarseness of my uniform, I would lay awake for hours
on end, disoriented and depleted by the experience.

Gradually, I came to dread the night. It was as though my past
rushed forth, aiming to converge with my hideous and hopeless
present. The dreams that hounded me viciously were excruciatingly
detailed, self-consistent, and their narrative - my autobiography -
was congruent and continuous: I could smell Mary, feel the humid
warmth of her breath, play with her hair, listen to her halting
sentences. These specters progressed in an inevitable chronology:
her adulterous affair, my consuming jealousy, our confrontations. I
could predict the content of each and every ephemeral chapter in
this hypnopompic saga simply because I had experienced them all
beforehand as my very life.

I found the dreams' meticulous omniscience unnerving. I could not
accept the perfection and impeccability thus imputed to my
recollections. It all felt so real: when I wiped Mary's tears, my
hand went wet; when I attended to our oft-neglected newborn, his
smile was captivating, not a microsecond longer than it would have
been in vivo; I bumped into furniture and bled as a result. Come
morning, I was bruised.

Sometimes, when I woke up from such a trance, my heart expanded
with insane anticipation: the cell, the moldy paraphernalia of the
penitentiary, the solid bars, the vulgar images etched into the
walls by countless predecessors - all these looked so ethereal
compared to my nightly visitations! I would touch them
disbelievingly until reality sank in and, heavyhearted, I would
recline and stare at the murk that marked the ceiling, waiting for
the sun to referee between my two existences.
Inexorably, my autolytic nightmares proceeded. When I confronted
Mary with her infidelity, her dream-state wraith reacted exactly as
its corporeal inspiration did in truth: contemning me, disparaging,
mocking. I woke up perspiring and short of breath, cognizant of
what would undoubtedly unfold next time I succumb to my
overwhelming fatigue. I did not want to go through it again. I
tortured my flesh into a full state of awakening, to no avail.
Soon, I was aslumber and in the throes of yet another heinous
segment.

This time, I found myself contemplating a kitchen knife embedded in
a pool of darkening blood on the linoleum-covered floor. Mary was
sprawled across the dining table in precarious acclivity, about to
slip onto the abattoir. Her hair was matted, her eyes glazed, her
skin a waxy tautness, and her finger pointed at me accusingly. I
felt surprisingly composed, dimly aware that this is but a dream,
that it had already happened.

Still, there was a sense of urgency and an inner dialog that
prompted me to act. I picked up the gory implement and plunged it
into Mary's neck. Dismemberment in the service of disposal occupied
my mind in the next few hours as I separated limb from limb,
sometimes sliding as I stepped onto the viscous muck. Finally, the
work was done. Mary was no more.

I then stirred, glaring with lachrymose eyes at the glimmerings of
incipient sunshine across the hall. The wardens in their first
rounds bellowed our names ominously during the morning call. I
examined myself guiltily and apprehensively, but fourteen months of
scrubbing had left no trace of Mary. My hands were clean.
I realized that the only way to put an end to this tormenting
playback of my crime was to sleep at once and to intentionally
traverse the time between my display of butchery and my current
incarceration. Having barely digested the meager and rancid
breakfast, I alternately cajoled and coerced myself into embracing
the horror that awaited me. Throughout the next few days, I nodded
off fitfully, recreating in my visions my blood-splattered effort
to hack Mary's lifeless corpse to pieces; my ill-conceived attempt
to flee; my capture; my trial and the verdict.

Finally, the night came that I feared most. I meditated, drawing
deep breaths as I sought the arms of Morpheus. As I drifted away, I
became vaguely aware of an odd convergence between my dream and my
surroundings. In my fantasy, I was leg-fettered and manacled. Two
beefy policemen unloaded me from the ramp of a truck and handed me
over to the prison guards who led me, in turn, to my
cell.

My dreams and reality having thus merged, I strove to wake up. In
my nightmare, everything was in its place: the rusty bucket, the
stone bunk, the fetid mattress, the infested blanket, the overhead
naked bulb, way out of reach. I watched myself lying on the frigid
slab. Startled and profoundly perturbed I asked myself: how could I
occupy the same spot twice over? Wasn't I already recumbent there,
dreaming this, dreaming that I am posing these questions? But, if
this were a dream, where is the real me? Why haven't I woken up, as
I have done countless times before?

As the answers eluded me, I panicked. I shook the bars violently,
banging my head against them. I was trapped in a delusion, but
everyone around me seemed to think me real. The wardens rushed o
restrain me, their faces contorted with disdain and rage. A
block-mate yelled: "Hold on, buddy! It ain't so bad after a
while!". A medic was summoned to look at my wounds.