Where They Wait

by Scott Carson

You’re a skeptic’s skeptic. By which I mean a reporter’s reporter, too. Being embedded within some group but operating outside of it is perfect for you. ‘Trust but verify’ doesn’t even go quite far enough. You’re more like ‘Doubt and verify.’ ” He paused, smiled. “ ‘And then verify with a second source.’ ”

It’s how he was raised. Some circuits stay lit, Nick.

One listen, and yet it was all there, branded into my brain as if I’d lived the experience rather than dozed through it. Maybe, I thought, this was what it was like to be a dreamer, to wake and remember the bizarre imaginings of the sleeping mind.

Some circuits stay lit.

I’d heard of night terrors, interviewed soldiers who told me of the physical power of PTSD dreams, how fingers curled around imaginary triggers.

How long it took for healing to begin, I wasn’t sure, but if pain was a part of it, then the healing had started.

I filled out the paperwork, trying to ignore the flush of shame that came on with answering “No” to the insurance question, thinking about how many millions of people went through this every day, and was waiting in one of the uncomfortable vinyl-upholstered chairs, when my phone rang.

The truth was nothing to fear.

I felt like the emperor wearing his new clothes then, exposed and ridiculous, the only man in town who doesn’t understand that he’s the joke.

learn? I’d spent my whole life looking deeply into other people’s stories, but I had no need to question my own.

You don’t verify something you know. It’s a scary idea to think that you might need to.

I looked back eventually, though. At some point, we always do, even when we should know better.

The laugh was a sound that felt close to galloping away under its own power, like a horse that has thrown its rider.

Then, yesterday, I looked into your eyes when we were down there at the harbor, and you were so deeply… convicted—I think that’s the word. Deeper than convinced, more personal.”

Suspension of disbelief occurs pretty damn fast when the impossible has happened to you.

“A beta-blocker. It calms the adrenal response. There’s a great deal of excitement about its potential for people who suffer from PTSD. The idea is that it diminishes the emotional impact of a traumatic memory, and thus the staying power of the memory.”

“Ethically, it’s not right. Memory is identity. Unwinding one destroys the other.”

“Imagine the assault victim who became agoraphobic, or the witness to a tragedy who has become an addict, or the soldier who can’t leave the war behind. Imagine those people who want—need—nothing more than relief from a traumatic memory.”

“Bad relationship, bad choices, bad circumstances, bad lots of things,” she said. “Isn’t that how it goes? The first visible problem usually isn’t the only one. Everything’s connected.

Because you can remove the man but not the memories.

“The impact of auditory cues on human memory. And I swear, Nick, it was a more effective antidepressant—and a less damaging one—than any pill on the market. But it was all done in the lab back then. Controlled, monitored. When Bryce took the reins, the research began to move toward the tech sector, where he had less regulation and more room to play.”

What happened?” I asked finally. It was a simple question and yet I hesitated to ask it. An honest answer to a simple question can cause complex pain. “She killed herself,” Renee said. A two-word question and a three-word response built a total silence. Like I said, complex pain.

A good reporter knows how to keep his emotional distance. You form relationships with sources, different levels of closeness, but you never give them one hundred percent of your faith. You also, most crucially, do not let anyone—a source or a stranger—bait you into an emotional response.

Emotion is the enemy of objectivity. It’s the very reason that memory researchers had such rich material to work with on studies of eyewitness accounts of traumatic events. The more emotionally charged the moment, the less objective one feels.

The algorithms know what we want: tragedy. There’s a reason bloody stories dominate the box office and bestseller lists. We like the voyeuristic thrill of a good death story absorbed from a safe distance.

The only way you could listen to the sleep songs was to bring them as close to your brain as possible. Nestle them right into your ears. Maybe there was some neuroscience-backed argument for proximity of sound and effect of sound.

“It was never trouble. It was muckraking.” “I still don’t understand that term. Why does one rake the muck? Shouldn’t you just search the muck?”

It’s the dance, man. Security to the right, hackers to the left, swing your partner, now do it again!”

A lot has changed about college towns over the years, but I think there’s one constant: there tends to be a good bookstore and a good stereo supply store in each one. Even in the age of online-everything, these little places seem to survive.

Strawn’s survived mostly on equipment and gear, boosted by another college-town constant: a surplus of shitty musicians who were convinced that they were just one amplifier or microphone upgrade away from playing stadium shows. Don’t get me wrong, there were always great local bands, but for each one you wanted to hear there were a dozen you’d like to send out to sea. Good or bad, though, they all had to buy gear.

“The average American believes that military-grade weaponry shouldn’t be put in civilian hands. They’re thinking of AK-47s and tanks and missiles, things of that nature. All very scary, yes, but I would say this: at least you can see the AK-47 in someone’s hands.”

Marilyn Lermond’s take on the idea of sonic weapons in that case was concise and chilling. “Beyond plausible. It’s already in existence. The question is the mechanism of delivery, the frequency of the tones, and whether their goals were achieved or missed. All of the reported symptoms are in keeping with the technology we already understand, but there’s also the chance that those symptoms fell short of a more dangerous goal.”

Chasing the truth is a great feeling, and knocking down walls of secrecy to show the truth is a special high.

I rinsed the can out and crushed it slowly and methodically in the manner my father always had—an engineer’s approach to can crushing, with a careful crease in the middle and then the left side smashed down, then the right. Everything uniform, even, precise.

“Grackles,” I said, and laughed. The laugh was a cold, mean sound, the bark of a dog with pinned-back ears. I heard its meanness and didn’t mind.

Nothing in my body language to betray the pounding adrenaline. A reporter’s response, always neutral. Just here to listen. No emotions, no opinions. One last question, though…

Can a whisper be a scream?

I will remember the sound his back made until the day I die.

The sound his back had made—like a dry walnut in a campfire—echoed in my skull, and within the echo was a warning, a command: Do not move him! Do not move him! Do not move him!

You never move someone with a spinal injury, of course. You wait for the medics.

Why do you keep lying? Because the truth is worse. That’s why.

For a few hours, it was peaceful, and my body drank in the sleep like water offered to a dehydrated man.

“Too late to leave,” she said, “but too dangerous to linger. You see the problem?”

Calm begets calm.

Darkness rises, fog just behind, and once you’re lost there, it’s the end.

Renee looked down at her hand, considered it, then released the railing and stepped away. It was as if she had to convince herself to let go, like a rock climber making her way across the face of a sheer cliff, afraid that a free hand would invite a fall.

She’d gone from bridling anger to the appearance of complete calm, as if she could change circuits at will. The juxtaposition of scene and circumstance made my head ache.

“It is the worst of all worlds,” she said. “A weapon that combines the most futuristic ideas of neuroscience with a ballad that’s older than this country.”

“To hurt me or to help me. Usually, that’s clear in a ghost story, right?

We stood like that for a while. Renee pressed her face into my chest and I held her even though she’d gone very still. There was nothing romantic to the moment, and yet there was something deeply intimate to it. A simple but profound need for shared warmth.