The Great Wide Open, page 38
‘The next thing I knew one of the ambulance men was speaking in a quiet voice to me, explaining that I was suffering from an extreme form of shock, that I had suffered severe lacerations to my back, that he was going to give me something to help me sleep. That’s when I felt the dab of something wet on my arm, followed by a fast jab of a needle. Moments later the lights went out.
‘When I came to again, I was in a narrow hospital bed, in a ward with about ten other women, a smell of disinfectant and bad food everywhere, the nurses on duty all nuns and largely grim. I was aware that I was lying face down, and that when I moved it was as if all the glass in my back was digging deeper into me. I started to howl. Two nuns were immediately on the scene. The older woman – Sister Mary – was kindness itself, telling me her name, calling me Alice, saying that I was going to be fine, that all the glass had been removed and the pain was just the after-effects of all the stitches that were holding me together, and …
‘I started to howl again, my ears in damaged agony. That’s when I made the acquaintance of the younger nun, Sister Agnes. In the movies it’s always the older nun who’s the bitch and the novice who is still nice, still not all bitter and twisted by all those decades of celibacy and damp convent walls. But at the Mater Hospital in Dublin the roles were reversed, and Sister Agnes showed herself to be an authoritarian who was not going to accept the hysteria of some stupid young American who got herself caught up in a fucking bomb blast. When my screaming went off the charts she grabbed my arm and twisted it, telling me:
‘“Now, Alice, we’re having none of that. You have to stop this madness right now.”
‘That escalated my hysteria even more. I heard Sister Mary ask Sister Agnes:
‘“Let me handle this please.”
‘“I’m giving you a minute to get her quiet, otherwise I will take things into my own hands.”
‘But when I couldn’t stop screaming Sister Agnes came back, hypodermic needle in hand.
‘“We don’t like knocking out our patients, but you give me little choice.”
‘That’s when the needle went in and the world blacked out. When I finally came to the world was completely out of focus. There was a young doctor in front of me. It took me many minutes to discern his face. A soft country accent. He quietly explained that he was Dr Ryan, and that I had been in and out of consciousness for the past thirty-six hours – as it had been decided that, though my injuries weren’t life-threatening and I was going to recover from them all, the trauma necessitated that I was “kept quiet for bit”. The drugs they gave me did their job. I was in a deep fog – and over the next few days they gradually reduced my intake of tranquilizers – I’m sure that’s what they were – so I could be interviewed by the cops, by staff from the Embassy, and spend time with my father and brother Peter.
‘Dad was actually wonderful. It turned out that he’d flown the Atlantic the day after the bombing – almost immediately after the Embassy contacted him – and (as I found out later) barred my mother from coming, knowing full well she’d make things ten times worse when she showed up. He also contacted my brother in Paris – even though they were estranged from each other … I’m not talking about all that today – and told him what had happened. Peter also jumped on a plane. When I finally came around from the drugs there were my father and brother at my bedside. That was fantastic. There are moments when you really need family … even one as nuts as my own. Dad and Peter put on a great public front, not once showing me the enmity they have for each other, and Dad telling me that he was going to do everything in his power to help put this all behind me, which, in my still-druggy haze, sounded great, even though I knew it to be bullshit. I could still tell that, though he was being very take-charge – meeting with the authorities, organizing that I get flown back to the States as soon as possible – he couldn’t handle the awfulness of what I’d gone through. But he displaced all that by keeping busy, issuing orders, being the expert businessman I always sensed him to be.
‘Peter, for his part, stayed with me, held me when I was crying, reassured me when I felt myself all over the place, and even convinced my dad to get the doctors to rid me of Sister Agnes. Through my druggy haze I heard Dad blow up at Dr Ryan, telling him that he would not stand for his daughter being kept in a medically induced fog because “some little bitch of a nun can’t deal with raw emotion”.’ That got the doctor’s attention. Not only did I get moved to a private room, but Sister Agnes disappeared from my life and Dr Ryan must have made at least four bedside visits a day to ensure that I was okay. Which I was anything but …
‘Then Ciaran’s parents came to see me. Ciaran was their only child; their adored son. To say that they were heartbroken by his death, his murder … that was total understatement. They were beyond devastated. His mother Anne looked like she’d aged ten years. And his father John … it was as if his entire reason to live had been taken away from him. When they first walked into my hospital room … ’
I lowered my head, my voice suddenly shaky, unable to go on. Tears began to well up. I found that low, internal scream building up in the back of my throat. I did something that had become almost automatic since returning to the States – biting down on a finger until it truly hurt in order to keep the scream at bay. Patricia put her arms around me, but I kept biting down on my finger until it bled. When I pulled it away Duncan went scurrying off to find antiseptic and a Band-Aid. As he staunched the flow of blood from my finger, I started talking again – telling him that, in a bad moment with my mother just a few days earlier, I’d threatened to kill myself – after which she’d gone and flushed down the toilet all the pills that had been prescribed to me in Dublin, and told me that if I had one more outburst at her – I’d taken to screaming at her all the time whenever she got nasty with me – she would have me institutionalized. Then she tried to turn Dr Feelgood on me.
‘Which is when I packed a bag and ran here.’
‘Well, there’s nothing she can do when it comes to touching you now,’ Patricia said. ‘I mean, you’re twenty, right?’
I nodded.
‘That makes you an adult. And your brother Adam can vouch for you if she tries to send for the men in white coats. Trust me, we won’t let those fuckers through the door here if they show up.’
But nobody ever showed up. Adam dropped by every two days, telling me that he’d gotten Dad onside, calling him down in Chile and filling him in on Mom’s craziness and threats, as well as bringing him up to date on my plans to transfer to the University of Vermont. Showing up at the apartment one evening, with a couple of takeout hero sandwiches from a local Italian deli and a six-pack of Carling Black Label, Adam informed me that our father was very pleased to hear I was going back to school and would cover everything. Just as Dad also wanted to remind me that there was the $10,000 emergency payment – which he’d negotiated with some civil servant in Dublin who’d been assigned to my case – on deposit in the Chase Manhattan Bank on East 42nd Street in case I wanted to buy a second-hand car or anything else.
‘About the last thing I can see myself doing right now is getting behind the wheel of a car,’ I told Adam. ‘Because my inclination right now is to drive at around eighty miles per hour into the nearest wall.’
Adam’s eyes went wide.
‘Did I say the wrong thing?’ I asked, my voice reasonableness itself.
I looked over and saw Adam, his face cast downward, brimming with tears. I reached for him, clasping him hard on the arm.
‘I’m sorry … ’ I said.
‘I want to help you,’ he whispered. ‘And I can’t.’
‘You’re helping me.’
‘Don’t lie to me. I can’t help anyone. Dad’s right: I’m useless.’
‘What’s that old saying about how being comforted by someone else’s distress somehow lessens your own? … for an hour or so anyway. You are anything but useless. Don’t listen to our father. He likes to pick on you.’
‘If I drive you to Burlington, will you go to the college nurse as soon as we get there?’
I knew I had to say yes. Because maybe, just maybe, it might make my poor lonely brother – a man I still didn’t know or fully understand – feel that little bit less useless; make him believe that he’d actually won a point for a change … something he’d done little of since giving up his golden sport of hockey.
‘Okay – I will go to the nurse.’
On the day after we reached Burlington – we were both crashing at Rachel’s place (Adam finding our hostess just a little too ‘space cadet’ for his comfort zone) – I did present myself at the college infirmary, explaining I was a transfer student about to start class next week. When I told the nurse what had happened to me a few months back, and talked about the insomnia that had been keeping me awake twenty-two hours a day, and – at the nurse’s insistence – took off my shirt and showed her the scars on my back, she assumed charge of me. Picking up the phone she called a certain Dr Gellhorn. She agreed to see me that afternoon. Adam drove me to her office. I was with her for well over an hour. By the time I left she had set up appointments with other specialists and had sent me to the pharmacy with two prescriptions to aid the sleeplessness and panic attacks. As I left her office Adam smiled tightly and asked:
‘How did it go?’
‘She gave me the worst news possible.’
That stopped Adam in his tracks.
‘The worst news possible?’ he said, stunned. ‘What did she tell you?’
‘She told me: I’m going to live.’
21
THINGS CAN ACTUALLY fall into place at times of duress. As extreme and weird as you might feel, there can be another part of you which is very determined, whatever the costs, to somehow get through the next sixteen waking hours.
The first time I went back to Dr Gellhorn, she asked me if I was sleeping. I told her that the pills she’d prescribed did the trick – I was virtually knocked out. But when I awoke in the morning it often felt as if my head was like static on a television which didn’t have one of those rabbit-eared antennas. She shook her head, ‘That doesn’t sound good, Alice,’ and said she’d like me to try a newfangled drug, Valium, which was a benzodiazepine, and which could be used for sleep and anxiety. Like all such new drugs it was going to be a ‘trial and error’ introduction.
Part of me wanted to say ‘Fuck it’ and not go near any further drugs – because even though I appreciated the sleep and the way that Darvon blanketed me in a thick strange cloud of disconnection, I was now a full-time student, taking five courses this first term, and finding my concentration often playing games with me. But the Valium was most effective at night – sending me into a deep sleep and only leaving me half as fogged as the previous medication. Two cups of coffee and a jog would banish most of the murk from my head. But I didn’t like the ‘mother’s little helper’ feel of the Valium during the day. So, with Dr Gellhorn’s approval, I only reached for a pill in waking hours whenever I felt myself getting rather shaky.
Grief has its own strange trajectory. You think you are having an okay day, okay being something of a triumph for me, then the glimpse of a couple my age holding hands while walking across the quad, or the sound of a car backfiring, or the sight of a certain shade of dark green that put me in mind of that beat-up tweed jacket Ciaran loved wearing (and actually had on when he died) … a small trigger like that would suddenly send me into a sort of downward swoon which the Valium helped reduce, but which still served as a reminder: None of this is going to vanish tomorrow. It’s part of you now. And it will always be there.
Dr Gellhorn never suggested that I should talk to someone about any of the internal anguish. Up here in Vermont, a brisk walk along the banks of Lake Champlain was considered the best medicine for psychological distress – and Gellhorn seriously approved of me going out for a daily jog. I even invested seventy-five dollars in a new Schwinn racing bike with five amazing gears. It was Rachel who quietly assumed the role of my big sister, who convinced me to treat myself to the Schwinn bike, as it was Rachel who helped find me a studio apartment in a small apartment building downtown. It suited me fine. It looked over a back alleyway, so it didn’t get much in the way of light. But it did have a distinctive retro charm to it and the rent was cheap. I took it. Outside of buying sheets and towels and some basic kitchen stuff I changed nothing in it, putting nothing up on the walls, purchasing a narrow five-tier bookshelf at a junk shop which was completely brimming with books by the time Christmas came.
Holding down five classes required a lot of reading, a good excuse not to have to integrate myself into the life of the college. My classmates were friendly, a bright and engaged bunch, and I was often invited for coffee, a beer, a party at the weekend. I always politely answered that I had too much going on right now. I tried to keep a low profile, dodging any mention of, or response to, ‘the incident’. Maybe it was something to do with not wanting to allow others to partake in my distress. How could I explain that the man I wanted to spend my life with was now deep under ever-damp Ulster ground … and yet his face loomed everywhere I turned?
Indeed, when one of my literature professors, Jane Sylvester, an Anglo-transplant who wore sensible tweed skirts and fisherman’s sweaters, mentioned that she was ‘fully aware of the trauma you have been coping with’, I snapped back:
‘Was a mimeographed memo sent around telling everyone “careful, we have an unhinged bomb-blast survivor among us”?’
Professor Sylvester indicated that she had found out this information from Rachel, as ‘I have terrible flat feet and she is the best reflexologist in the area’. I too had succumbed to Rachel’s kneading talents and had taken her up on an offer of three reflexology sessions per week at a kindly reduced fee. During my next one, as I accepted her usual welcoming hug and unlaced my boots and removed my socks, I asked her, quietly and with no anger in my voice, to please not talk about my war wounds in public again. She was a touch defensive.
‘But I thought your professors would have known all about that,’ she said.
‘I hardly put it on my college transcript when rushing in my application.’
As she began massaging my feet, searching for the pressure points and entrapments of tension, I relaxed, shutting my eyes. I tried to zone out, hating myself for being even the least bit prickly toward the one friend I had in Burlington. And I had to wonder, given that Burlington was such a small place, just how much everyone else knew about me. Rachel must have been reading my mind as her fingers worked deeper into my feet.
‘It doesn’t really matter who knows or doesn’t know. What you need to absorb, Alice, is the fact that what happened to you in Dublin is now part of your being. You will have to accept this – and the changes it has brought to your very essence. It is a big psychic shift – and one which will take you time to integrate into your way of looking at the world. But as horrible as what happened to you is – and to that man you loved so deeply – the other amazing aspect of this tragedy is: you were spared. You got to walk away. You were allowed to continue the gift of life. No, I don’t believe in divine intervention, the “hand of God” and all that stuff. But I do believe in karma, in forces in the universe that come to our aid at a certain moment. Something karmic saved you, Alice. You might dismiss that as a bunch of nonsense. But I know that some force decided: she is not ready to go, she still has work to do, things to contribute. She deserves more time.’
I pulled away my feet.
‘Are you therefore saying, by implication, that Ciaran was ready to go, that these “karmic forces” you are talking about decided he’s better off dead?’
‘Hardly. But what I do know is that karma can genuinely shield you. Yours did just that.’
‘But it didn’t shield the man I loved.’
‘We are all called at a certain moment to the world beyond – and it is hard to say what triggers that departure, what keeps us here.’
‘Apologies – but I actually think you’re talking horseshit,’ I said, grabbing my socks and walking boots. ‘Do you have any fucking idea what’s involved when it comes to getting myself through the fucking day?’
Rachel took my right foot in her hand again. Even though I tried to shake it free she held firm and recommenced her reflexology. She was a lot more forceful than I imagined and bore down on the area just below the toes with a pressure that made me wince, but simultaneously unblocked a considerable amount of gathered tension. I was more than a little surprised by this – especially as it left me feeling somewhat flighty, as if I’d just drunk two glasses of wine.
‘I’m such a bitch,’ I said, after Rachel finished both feet and I was experiencing a strange lightheadedness.
‘You are what you have experienced,’ she said. ‘Maybe now you will start looking forward in a different way. I want you now to come back here every other day so I can work on you some more. Just as I also want you to get as much exercise and fresh air as you can tolerate. You need to be doing things that are positive for yourself, and that will help you sidestep negative energy.’
I kept my eyes shut. I said:
‘Please forgive me.’
‘There is no need to ask for forgiveness from me. Ask it from yourself.’
As hippie-dippy and cosmic as Rachel could be, that statement took hold in my consciousness and served as a sort of positive nag whenever the self-blame game started, and when I began to feel overwhelmed by all the negative forces swirling within me. I also allowed her to talk me into two-weekly yoga classes. I occasionally accepted her offer of dinner at her place, usually in the company of many of her like-minded friends, most of whom would talk at great length – as the days turned darker and the temperature began to head downward – of the imminent fall of Saigon, and the disgrace of Ford allowing Nixon to escape criminal prosecution, and did anyone hear about this rather cool, if somewhat Christian, governor of Georgia named Carter who was an actual progressive and someone outside of the Washington power axis?
