That day, the sky was a gray dome holding the world together, holding me together somehow. It seemed big and absorbent above me, like it could take anything I offered up to it, like it was big enough to swallow the past.
I took a deep breath in, exhaled, and climbed into my sister’s car.
The administrative assistant looked nervous. I don’t remember what the rest of her looked like, but I remember her nervous smile when Beck and I first walked into the office. She asked us to take a seat. Then she knocked on a door, opened it a crack, and exchanged low murmurs with someone we couldn’t see. We were late for my appointment, but it wasn’t too late. The guy would still see me, she said.
Beck had found an OIF combat-veteran-turned-social-worker and booked an appointment for me because she was a doer. A maker. A producer. She’d just written, produced, and starred in a short film. The film was about a woman whose roommates turned out to be figments of her imagination. There was this scene in the film where the main character tried to slit her wrists in the shower, but one of the roommates — the guardian-angel roommate, I guess — stopped her from going through with it at the last second. I couldn’t decide if Beck was afraid I was going to kill myself, too, or if she just really wanted to be my guardian angel. Maybe both.
In the waiting room, we waited in silence. I was ready to tell the social worker I was fine. I just needed to get out in nature a little more. The short walk from my apartment to Beck’s car had perked me up and given me some relief from my hangover. Being outside awakened the senses, which seemed to dull my pain. If I could focus on the wind against my skin or the scent of crushed leaves, I could temporarily forget about what happened in Iraq. If I could just be outside, where there was enough room to move, I could move past what happened back then.
That’s what I’d tell the social worker. The thing about nature. If I told him I blocked out the noise in my head with the noise of a bar, he’d probably make me go to AA. The nature thing sounded better. Less alcoholic. I’d go with that. I just really, really hoped he wouldn’t ask some lame question like, “What seems to be the problem?” I couldn’t stand stupid questions like that.
A white guy in his midthirties emerged from behind the door and stepped into the waiting room.
“I’m Jack,” he said, reaching to shake my hand. “I’m a clinical social worker,” he said.
Jack’s dark hair was carefully coiffed in a large, deliberate pompadour that stretched past his forehead like a plant seeking the sun. It seemed like his sole attempt to remind the world he was once young and hip. The rest of him had settled into the safe mediocrity of middle-aged, middle-income Midwesternness: nondescript brown shoes, sensible slacks, suburban physique, and a perfectly pressed button-down shirt his wife had probably ironed that morning. But it was clear Jack had an agenda. There was an outcome he was after. I didn’t know what it was, but I could tell just from shaking his hand that he knew exactly how to get it, no matter how unassuming he looked at first glance.
My dad was a social worker for thirty-two years. When I first toyed with the idea of following in his footsteps, he told me there were two kinds of social workers: the kind who genuinely wanted to help people and the kind who were so messed up, they needed an entire career to figure out why. For the latter kind, working through other people’s problems was just a way to poke and prod into the hairy folds of their own trauma. They used client sessions as therapy sessions, either projecting their own issues onto the client or using the client’s issues to distract themselves from their own problems. I had an idea which type of social worker my dad thought I’d be. I wondered which type Jack was.
“Would you be more comfortable if your sister was in the room?” Jack asked, ushering me toward his office door.
Beck leaned forward in her chair, wide-eyed and eager, hoping I’d say yes — like my mental health was an item she could finally check off her to-do list.
“No, I’m good,” I reassured everyone, including the nervous assistant. She and Jack seemed to think I was there against my will — like Beck was the only thing stopping me from running out of the room and into oncoming traffic. But besides what remained of my hangover, I was fine. I was at the appointment of my own free will, and more important, I didn’t need to be there. I was just there as a courtesy to Beck, since she went to all the trouble. She wanted me to talk to someone, so okay. I’d talk. I’d tell Jack that I was a functioning, contributing member of society and that I was fine. More than fine. Why did everyone seem to think I wasn’t fine?
I left Beck in the waiting room and followed Jack into his office. He sat down behind a big, outdated desk. I chose the empty office chair directly across from him. On the wall behind Jack hung framed photographs of him with his buddies in Iraq. Images of sunglasses, weapons, and fatigues had been lovingly framed and displayed like fancy medical degrees. If I were sitting across from any other social worker in town, it’d be impossible to explain the unspoken things captured in those photographs of war.
“So,” said Jack, and paused.
I waited for him to ask one of those shrink-ish questions you hear on TV, the kind that made me cringe. “What seems to be the problem?” was only slightly worse than “What brings you here today?” Maybe, if he asked that, I’d say something snarky, like “My sister brought me here today.” But Jack just looked at me for a moment without saying a word.
Finally, he asked, “What happened?”
I stared at him for a moment, completely taken aback.
What happened?
The question inserted itself into my chest like a key into a lock.
What happened.
Those were the two words no one had dared ask until that moment — two years since I’d returned from twelve months in Iraq, where I’d served in a scout sniper platoon as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those were the exact words I couldn’t stop asking myself.
What happened.
What happened to me?
Tommy Voss. Tombo. I was the kind of guy who was friends with everyone in high school. I was the quiet one, but when I spoke up, everyone laughed at my jokes. I was a lover, not a fighter: a lover of football and video games and after-school snacks and Kimmy. She was a wicked basketball player back then, all thin and tall and blonde and bright-eyed. We’d chat on AOL Instant Messenger when the internet was still in its adolescence, just like we were. On weekends, we’d get drunk on Smirnoff Ice.
When I was away at basic training, Kimmy mailed me letters and photographs. The raciest pictures were of her and her friends at the beach in their bikinis. I put the pictures up in my wall locker in our barracks. The guys in my platoon would crowd around the pictures and call to their friends, “Dude! Go check out Voss’s locker! He’s got all these chicks!”
But I only had one. It was her.
Kimmy was the kind of girl who’d fly 1,991 miles just to spend forty-eight hours with me right before I deployed to Iraq. And then, after saying goodbye to me in a Seattle hotel room and letting me go so bravely,