Dear Eglantine,

Thank you so much for the drawing. I like it very much, especially the little flying man.

Your friend,

Erik

I HAD SEEN too many veterans during my years at the hospital to fall for the moronic patriotism they were offering the public on television: cameras and tanks rolling, flags and dust flying, eager journalists decked out in combat fatigues sputtering in excited tones about our brave troops, the sturdy families back home, sacrifice, duty, America, homeland. Inga’s book had spoken directly to this kind of grotesque spectacle, and yet I was certain that her words would be met by deafness. History is made by amnesia. In the American Civil War, they called it soldier’s heart, and over time it changed its name to shell shock, then war neurosis. Now it’s PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, the most antiseptic of the terms for what can happen to people who witness the unspeakable. During World War I, in the barracks of field hospitals French and British doctors saw them coming in droves—men blind, deaf, shaking, paralyzed, aphasic, catatonic, hallucinating, plagued by recurring nightmares and insomnia, seeing and re-seeing what no one should see, or feeling nothing at all. Clearly, they weren’t all suffering from brain lesions, so the physicians began to tag their patients NYD (not yet diagnosed) or GOK (God only knows) or Dieu seul sait quoi (God alone knows what this is).

“Dr. Davidsen,” he said. “It’s come back now all these years later. It’s not like remembering, no sir. It’s the shock, same as it was, as if I’m goin’ through it again. I wake up to the impact in my leg, no pain, just the blast, and then I see it.” A chronic alcoholic, Mr. E. hadn’t been hospitalized for trauma. He had had his ascites drained but was sent to me after he screamed at night and woke up the whole ward.

“What do you see?” I said.

He had a wrinkled red face mottled by brown spots. He rubbed his cheeks with both hands. His arms shook uncontrollably. “Harris on top of me. Rodney Harris, without his head.”

Trauma isn’t part of a story; it is outside story. It is what we refuse to make part of our story.

MIRANDA RETURNED FORCEFULLY to my consciousness that weekend. On Sunday morning when I retrieved my New York Times from the doorstep at around nine o’clock, I saw her on the sidewalk. Her back was to me, and at her feet stood a bucket of soapy water. To my surprise, she appeared to be washing the tree. When she took a step to one side, I immediately saw why. The stranger had left his mark in red paint on the trunk of the tall oak just beginning to bud.

I didn’t walk down the steps to speak to her. I grabbed my newspaper and shut the door very quietly, but she heard the sound and turned. For a moment our eyes met through the glass door. She didn’t smile, but I saw in her face something softer than the time before. I think I nodded before I returned to my coffee, my whole body electrified by the expression on her face.