The Saint Of Baghdad Read online

  He was crawling out of bed, his limbs tangling in tubes and wires. She grabbed him and pushed him back down and they struggled until he fell back exhausted.

  “My poor darling,” she comforted him, stroking his forehead. “Your friend Alex died in that room with my brother. And so did everyone else.”

  More fragments of meaning. Pieces of a jigsaw. But still no box top to make sense of it. CJ’s body melted into the sheets and his eyes blanked over. Enya stepped back. Nothing else to do now but call the doctor. She dropped her phone in her satchel and was about to do just that when the bed jolted. It actually moved, shaken by his body, rattled as if in some invisible hand. She reached out to touch him, to calm him. But he knocked her aside, his tremors morphing into spasms and foam streaming from his nose and mouth. The bed frame groaned and shook as the cables and tubes that had nurtured his life snapped out and whirled above him like angry snakes. Enya screamed, a wailing summons for doctors, nurses, someone, anyone. Then she pinned herself against the wall and fumbled for the call button, locking it down tight and closing her eyes.

  Two

  Six Months Later

  The door was open, so CJ walked right in. Not so easy for a big man on crutches. More like right side first, swinging one crutch through the doorway, then sidestepping like a crab.

  Doctor Sam was studying a computer screen, her face loaded with concentration. “Hey.” She looked up and broke out a smile, studying his movement as he shunted across the room and eased into the patient’s chair. “Good job,” she said, settling back and waiting while he arranged the crutches on the floor. “I got your request.”

  “And?”

  “Do you think you’re ready for the street?”

  “In a few weeks. When I get my legs back. Why not?”

  She nodded as if he’d made a good point, but followed it up with a sigh that said something else.

  “Tests okay?” He was dreading the answer. Blood, scans, samples—there’d been months of them. He was desperate to get the update even though it was certain to be a good-news-bad-news bulletin.

  She checked her computer while his eyes roamed her cluttered desktop, landing with a thump on the plastic brain at its center. The brain was mounted on a stand, modular, with different-colored sections numbered with black digits in white circles. It was a brain built for teaching, a perfect brain—unlike his own—easy to pull apart and slot back together. It was the sort of brain she could use to explain things like why he couldn’t feel anything he touched.

  “Excellent,” she said. “The physio is off the charts.”

  That was ducking the question. He already knew the physio was working. He could see the results in the mirror. His muscles were bulking back to normal and his face was filling out.

  “What about the psych stuff?”

  “Encouraging,” she said.

  Nicely put. The E-word. All by the book.

  “Off the charts the wrong way,” he said, thinking out loud on purpose, dangling half a question like a baited hook.

  Doctor Sam was lost in the computer screen, but she didn’t miss the hook.

  “Physio is easier to measure. That’s all.” She pointed at the screen. “All I see here is progress. Trust me.”

  No question about that. He trusted her. It was Project CJ that made him wary. Ever since he’d come back from the dead, he’d been a guinea pig with a team of stakeholders that read like the expert speaker list at a neuroscience convention.

  She turned to the brain on the table, and he edged forward as she disassembled it piece by piece. “You have no unilateral neglect. No apraxia. That’s trouble organizing your movements. No agnosia. No trouble recognizing familiar things. Like a toothbrush. I hear you’re even shaving yourself now.”

  “I have been for weeks,” he said. “And I’m wiping my own arse too.”

  She stopped in a freeze frame, red number two suspended in space. “I’m sure the nursing staff are so disappointed.”

  She stifled a giggle, leaving CJ to figure out why. He hadn’t meant it as a joke. Humor was one of the many social interactions he was still struggling with. He’d meant it as a point of information and her repartee caught him off balance. He stared at her, disoriented. Then it came to him. He’d made a joke, albeit unwittingly, and they shared a welcome laugh.

  “So here’s where we are and how we got here,” she said. “Bullet fragments and splinters of steel. Some of it couldn’t be removed. So your brain healed around it. Vision, hearing, touch.” She held up the relevant bits. “Each of the five senses links to a zone, and these multisensory areas blend all the data together with balance, time, and proprioception—that’s how we orient ourselves in space. We call the result a percept. We use it to figure out the who, what, and where of our situation.”

  “I know who I am and what I am.” He spread his arms. “And here I am in this room with my doctor. My only problem is…” He was going to say touch, but he might have said blank spots in his memory, or confusing memories with dreams. He might have said a lot of things. But none of them was the only problem. His eyes drifted down to the bits of plastic on the table. “When my brain healed, what went wrong?”

  She stepped out from behind the desk and took his hand in hers, holding it up like an exhibit. “Look at these knuckles. They aren’t normal. This thick shiny skin here”—she ran her finger over the scar tissue that joined all four of his knuckles into a single cicatrix—“how did you get it?”

  “Practicing martial arts. Punching a lump of straw called a makiwara every day after school.”

  “Damage. That’s how you got it. Damage and healing. The body self-repairs. It adapts and remodels. And not just the skin, but the bones too. If I scanned your hand, I’d see microfractures that healed, making the bone denser, stronger.” She went back to her chair. “Skin and bones are very good at self-repair, but the brain isn’t. Growing back brain cells is one of medicine’s Holy Grails. Even today, we’re only at the stage of trials and experiments. But in your case, you were in a military hospital with its own rulebook and you weren’t expected to live.”

  “So they took risks?”

  “They removed some brain tissue. They cultured it and injected the cells they’d grown back into the damaged areas along with an ambitious cocktail of drugs.”

  “Like stem cells?”

  “Not exactly. My guess is that it contained D-cells, doublecortin-positive cells. They’re similar to stem cells but behave differently. In recent experiments, they’ve used them to repair damaged brains, with remarkable results.”

  “Experiments? On trauma victims like me?”

  She hesitated. “Human brains are similar to monkey brains in that—”

  “Monkeys? They’re only testing it on monkeys now, and eight years ago they tried it on me! Where does that put me on the evolutionary scale?”

  “But it worked. Your brain healed. Only like your hand, it remodeled itself. It adapted. Stronger and faster in some ways, but problematic in others.”

  “So where am I now? Is the healing done and dusted?”

  She pointed at the computer screen. “That’s not what these results tell me. Your brain is continuing to grow skills and efficiencies. Your hearing and vision are so remarkable we had to repeat the tests, and your dexterity and coordination are extraordinary.” She threw up her hands. “That’s why we need more time.”

  So this was it. Not the graduation ceremony he’d hoped for. More like a half-term report card.

  He pointed down at the brain bits.

  “Why didn’t the touch part heal?”

  “It did. Physically it’s intact. But somewhere along the line, your body adapted to pain by ignoring it. Painkillers like morphine don’t block pain. They just stop you suffering from it. Somehow your nervous system is actuating similar pain tolerance, but it’s also interfering with these other sensations. Cold, hot, tickle, itch and so on.”

  A file on the desk rattled and she snatched a phone from under i
t. She glanced at the screen, then tossed it aside.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I turned it off. But it has this emergency thing. If someone keeps calling, it puts them through.”

  “Maybe it’s important.”

  She shook her head.

  “We could try hypnotherapy,” she said. “And I could teach you how to use self-hypnosis.”

  CJ liked that idea. He was done with drugs and here was something that put him in the driver’s seat.

  “Could it help me remember too?”

  “You don’t have amnesia. Remember what?”

  “That last day.”

  It had been troubling him from the start. He could play everything back like a video from the day they were taken hostage. But that last day was patchy and hit a blank screen when Alex had a knife at his throat.

  “It’s probably for the best,” she said. “Self-protection. You buried it and tossed away the map.”

  “Can you help me find it?”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. He didn’t have an answer. But that didn’t make it any the less important. They always got to this point when he pressed her. He wanted to explain why the events of that day were so important. But every time he tried to put it into words they choked up in his throat. Anger? Guilt? He didn’t know why. But whatever was doing the choking, it was the one thing that could still hurt him.

  “Thanks for everything.” His mood shifted, suddenly frustrated, done with it all. Doctor Sam. The hospice. He reached for his crutches and struggled to get out of the chair.

  “Stop.” She jumped up.

  He let go the crutches and they clattered to the floor. That was so undoctorly. The way she said it—blasting it out like a friend or a lover, like somebody who actually cared.

  “Your sanity is the issue. You have to build your own route back to these memories.”

  “But it’s taking so long.”

  She picked up a file and shuffled through its pages.

  “If I help you, will you stay longer here?”

  He nodded.

  She pulled a note out of a file.

  “I was contacted by someone in the Foreign Office. Julian Ashford.” She looked up. But CJ shook his head. “He’s put in a written request to see you a number of times, but I’ve always denied it on medical grounds. He called me again last week. Some sort of follow-up. Box ticking, I suppose. He knows more about that last day than I do. All I have is medical reports.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  CJ reached across the desk and as they were shaking hands, her phone rang under his arm. He picked it up and passed it to her, noting the caller ID was a single word: Him.

  “Why don’t you take the call?” he said. “We’re about done here.”

  “No,” she said. “There was something else important.”

  “I can wait,” he sat back down.

  She hesitated, then walked out the door and headed down the corridor. CJ levered himself up with the help of the chair and after looking at the crutches, he tried his luck without them. His goal was the bay window overlooking the gardens. He slid along the desk before stumbling and falling onto its broad windowsill. They were just baby steps, but they were important. Another triumph. He looked out the window at the winter sun filtering through gray clouds, then down at patients jogging behind a physio, doing gentle laps around the pond. He tapped on the window, but no one looked up.

  There were piles of magazines stacked at each end of the windowsill. He checked a few, their covers trailing contents with teasers like 5 Ways to Improve Lithium Tolerance. He set them aside and pulled himself up against the wall noticing a framed photo hanging there. A family shot. Mother and father standing like bookends on either side of two kids. The girl was a younger version of Doctor Sam and the boy was obviously her brother. He towered over her. Military. Not in uniform. But CJ had no doubts. Her arm was snaked around his waist and she was leaning into him, sheltering under a thick arm laid like a cape across her shoulders. Their faces were alive with the soft edge of sibling love. Her lost brother. No idea why, but CJ knew for a certainty that he was on the other side with Alex.

  He looked around the office. Just the one photo. No shot of her own family. No picture of Him and their brood of kids. The family whose welfare was now the topic of a testy exchange down the corridor. He didn’t like to eavesdrop, but there was no real choice. Doctor Sam was right about his hearing. His post-trauma world was a jungle of sound, his refurbished brain switched from single to multitrack and the power button amped up to max. Their conversation, like their marriage, seemed to be winding up, so CJ hurried back to his chair. He didn’t want her to see him stumbling and falling. He made it just in time, catching the corner of the desk and sliding along it until he could flop into the chair.

  Doctor Sam apologized for the interruption and made an excuse about a family emergency. His instinct was to tell her to dump her husband and be done with it. But he kept his mouth zipped. It was none of his business, and she would read his comment as another example of his socially inappropriate behavior. He’d been told about that. Warned, even. It was a symptom of his PTSD, she said, a reflex of his retread brain and its iron-man scaffolding.

  He waited while she fiddled with the controls of her chair, adjusting the seat and muttering like it was the major problem in her life. All theater. And not very convincing. CJ wanted to tell her to have a good cry. But he kept quiet about that too.

  “You okay, Doc?” She looked up and flashed him a game face before sorting out papers on her desk. “I’m really looking forward to working with you on the hypnotherapy,” he said. “And I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I know I’m a lucky guy.”

  She stopped fiddling.

  “Thank you, CJ.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  She leaned back in her chair like she didn’t need notes or bits of a plastic brain for this part.

  “According to your sister—”

  “My sister?”

  “Half-sister, I mean.”

  Whole or half, any fraction of sister was news to him. But he let it go. There was only one candidate for his sister role, and he had no need to ask who it was.

  Enya!

  “She told me that you’re still getting those…” She paused, scouring her doctor’s dictionary, no doubt, looking for the kindest word.

  “Delusions?” he suggested to help her out. “Hallucinations?” He had to say something, anything to mask the stream of anti-Enya abuse wobbling in his throat and looking for the exit. The sister lie, he could live with, but sharing confidences with Doctor Sam was an outrage. He’d told Enya everything—the medicines he was skipping, the tests he was faking. Worse yet, the H-word. Hallucinations. This wasn’t about dodging medicines or faking tests. This was the biggie. Seeing the dead. He’d lied about it, telling her that it was all in the past.

  “I see we made adjustments to your dosages last month.” She was peering at her computer screen. “I thought that had done the trick.” CJ kept quiet. “I’m talking about Alex.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Can you see him now?”

  He thought about lying but then nodded.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s standing next to you. Just to your right. He’s reading my test results on your computer, and that’s not so easy when you’re decapitated. Even for a Marine. So he’s dangling his head in front of the screen, and it’s dripping blood on the keyboard.”

  Her eyes swiveled towards the computer, dragging her head shakily in their wake until she caught herself and snapped it back.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” she said.

  He shook his head. He was never going to fess up to that. He was a Marine, a ghost-maker, not a believer. There had to be a scientific explanation.

  “What about the metal stuff in my head? Could that be acting as some kind of antenna, picking up signals?”

  “I’m not following. Radio waves?
Like FM. The BBC.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  There had to be a good way to put this. CJ glanced back at the brain, but that didn’t help.

  “I read that psychics have solved murders by contacting the dead. So what if…” He stopped short, pulled up by the horrified look on her face, and let her finish the sentence.

  “What if you’ve been transformed into a psychic? You’re asking me—a psychiatrist—if shrapnel in your head could be picking up radio waves. Like Instagrams from the dead?”

  CJ winced. Laid out like that—clinical, cold—it sounded crazy. And there was worse to come.

  “Cee-Jay.” It was just one word said quickly, but she stretched it into two that seemed to go on forever.

  Splat!

  Reality 101.

  There are no ghosts.

  She went back to her computer, and CJ went back to shrinking into the fabric of his chair.

  “Impressive CV,” she said. “Special Boat Service. Combat. You saw men die.” She looked up at him like it was a question.

  He nodded. Barely perceptible.

  She went back to the screen. “And some you killed?” This time she didn’t wait for a response. “Have any of those turned up in your life lately?”

  “I get the point.”

  He was ready to move on, but there was no chance of that.

  “Are you straight?” she said.

  He stared at her as if her question had been addressed to someone else. But she waited him out, staring right back.

  “As in gay?” he said finally.

  “I’m your doctor. Knowing these things helps me.”

  “You’re asking me if Alex was my lover?” He tried to say the word with a straight face, but it was hard. Alex was shaking one fist and waving his head around with the other. CJ tried to read his lips, but it was tough with it bouncing around like that. Something along the lines of…

  Your goddamn what!

  “Did I say something funny?” she said.

  “Not at all.” CJ shook his head. Without Alex’s performance to clue her in, she’d obviously read his reaction all wrong, and he was eager to sort that out. “I’ve served with gay men. No worries about that. It’s just that Alex wasn’t one of them. We were mates. That’s all. Buddies. We met in the Iraq War, when the US Marine Expeditionary force was put under the tactical command of 3 Commando Brigade. I was a serving Royal Marine officer back then.”