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Under the Guns

Michael Summerleigh

    “...Doctor Torelli will see you now,” said the receptionist. “Just through this door...”
    Regretfully he hoisted himself out of the velvet cocoon masquerading as a chair in the waiting room, nodded and followed her snug curves to a panelled oak door, ducked his head and said thank you as he inched sideways past her. He found himself bathed in light from a wall of windows...floor to ceiling...the Potomac a glistening ribbon below him in the afternoon sun...Georgetown and DC blossoming northeastward from the Arlington Memorial Bridge...Theodore Roosevelt Island...
    He stopped dead a couple of paces onto carpeting that felt more comfortable under his feet than the mattress he slept on...wagged his head for just a moment...enough to appear as though the postcard picture was something new.
    “Thank you, Barbara...and hello, Mister Hogan. I’m Patricia Torelli.”
    The heavy door snicked shut behind him and the voice materialised in front of him, shoulder-length blonde hair framing wide-spaced brown eyes in a faintly oval face... lightly tanned for April...pale rose-glossed lips a bit thin but welcoming. His hand totally engulfed the one she offered him. Not so much she was small only that he was so big...
    “Doug is okay,” he said, making sure he kept the volume down. “Douglas if you have to, but please not Hulk.”
    It took her a moment to process, gave him time to check out the rest of the package she presented—understated upscale casual...an open-neck blouse in pale cream silk under a sculpted jacket and skirt in light chocolate. Expensive and tasteful. From the knees down he figured she played golf or tennis regularly. Suddenly he felt like a character in a Raymond Chandler novel.
    He lied, “I’ve never been in the Towers before. This is quite the view,” and she seemed pleased. From where he stood he could spot every landmark he once had visited for the first time when he was in the sixth grade.
    She smiled warmly, but not with her teeth showing...a bit of professional reserve...
    “I expected a uniform.”
    Listening more closely now her voice was not so much cold as it was cautious...waiting for more information...chess on a psychological chessboard. She was calculating the amount of distance she would need in order to do her job properly. He appreciated that...not wanting too much closeness. He didn’t intend to see her again.
    “I left it in the car,” he explained. “I’m not back on until tonight. Special session.”
    “Did you have any problems parking?”
    “None at all, thank you. Lots of space. And I’ve got a ton of clearance high enough I can park just about anywhere I want if I have to.”
    He liked that she was barefoot on her carpet. And that she turned her back to him as she invited him to sit...
    “You asked for the afternoon, Doug, so please just call me Pat and if you’d prefer something stronger than tea or coffee or water I try to stay well-stocked. Sometimes it helps to get the words flowing...”
    The rest of her office space was almost spartan. A small low desk that looked superfluous to her work...a matching credenza that seemed to be the wellspring of her offer of refreshment. A few things on the walls...photographs mostly...one large oil that looked like it might be a real Impressionist and expensive. Haphazardly between him and the wall of glass were three mismatched but expensive-looking armchairs and a fainting couch in the ubiquitous velvet...all very comfortable. He chose an armchair with a view and examined the effect of sunlight bouncing off the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The dome of the Capitol reared up behind them.
    “I’ve never been accused of being stingy with words,” he said. “Scotch would be great. Johnny Walker...?”
    Pat asked “What flavor?” and he turned round to see if she were serious...decided he liked her immensely...wished there was more time...
    “Whatever you think is appropriate,” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this before but so far you’re definitely not fitting any of the stereotypes.”
    She laughed. A nice sound. Nothing personal in it she was still casting about for the role she would play in their relationship but it was an intimation of what she might be outside her office and for an instant he wondered how it would sound if they were to be together...a few weeks into something that had nothing to do with why he was there. She handed him a glass...three fingers...he ran it under his nose and then took a drop on his tongue...
    She said “I usually record my sessions so I don’t get distracted by having to take too many notes.”
    To himself he said I know...
    Aloud he said “I have no problem with that.” Sipping his scotch. “I’ve never had this before.”
    “It’s the Blue label.”
    “That would explain it then. I’d have to retire and rob a bank before I could justify a bottle of this.”
    “You’re probably selling yourself short, Doug, but you’re more than welcome. Honestly...our session is going to buy me my next bottle so please ask for seconds...”
    She poured herself an equal measure and they shared the ring of crystal as they bumped rims. She padded across a few feet of carpet and sat on a corner of her desk, crossed one knee over the other.
    “You’re a luxury for me. I don’t drink with everyone...and you appear to be very normal.”
    She seemed quite at ease, but he knew she was still probing for boundaries, that they were fencing he said:
    “I seem to have issues.”
    “Don’t we all?”
    “Yeah, but mine seem to worry my immediate superiors.”
    “How is that?”
    He put his head down, wondering where to begin it was so much more difficult knowing only how it would end.
    “I was driving home...well...it was the end of my shift and I was going back to where I sleep...and some asshole in a Lincoln SUV pitched a McDonalds bag full of garbage out his window in the middle of an intersection. I stopped...I’m allowed to do that...picked it up and followed back him to Georgetown...”
    Pat Torelli sipped her Scotch and nodded.
    “I guess I was a little bit hasty when I smashed the bag down onto the snappy leather seat that was still warm from his lazy ass sitting on it. There was still a lot of oozy stuff in the bag.”
    “Anger management.”
    Doug nodded. “I’d gotten served by my wife’s lawyer a couple of hours before so I wasn’t at my best.”
    “So you’re in the middle of a divorce.”
    “Not for much longer. I don’t want t’fight about it. I’m gonna miss her, but somewhere along the way it just stopped being good...for either of us.”
    “Is that why you’re here?”
    “Maybe a little...no not really...but that was the beginning of this thing...three weeks ago...he lodged a complaint and I got called onto the carpet and I had to promise them I’d get a bit of counselling while I was going through my personal shit...”
    “So far that all seems reasonable.”
    “Yeah mostly...but I’ve always been outspoken and the problem is that lately I seem to have lost some of my filters...the patience to put up with the double-speak in favour of the status quo...to simply keep my mouth shut when I should keep my mouth shut...”
    Pat Torelli nodded...commiserative...sipped JW Blue...noticed he had finished his and offered more. Doug poured a few more fingers and set the bottle down beside his chair. The wall of glass in front of him caught a stray ray of light and went blank with bright...
    “Maybe paranoia is my problem, but I’m fairly certain they want to put me out to pasture...any excuse to get me there...shut me up...PTSD...”
    “I could bankrupt you, Doug. Why don’t you let the US Army pay for your rehab?”
    “I think they’ve already made up their mind, Pat. I wanted an independent observer.”
    “How did I get to be that?”
    “You spoke before a Senate sub-committee...the application of civilian psych protocols in the treatment of military PTSD. I run a security detail at the Capitol...was on duty that day. I stopped in, paid attention and I was impressed.”
    She mulled over the compliment for a few moments
    “Do you think you’re suffering from PTSD, Doug?”
    He emptied his glass again and shrugged.
    “I don’t know, Pat. I really can’t say.”
    She opened a file folder lying beside her on the desk, briefly looked at what was inside he got the distinct impression she already knew everything there was to know about it.
    “I was curious when Barbara told me about your appointment. Usually my new clients want a short session to start with...to see if we’re going to get along. You asked for an entire afternoon right out of the gate and, according to Barb, made it clear you were career military. I looked you up.”
    “And...?”
    “Highly decorated....valorous to the point of near-legendary and, considering where you’ve been and what you’ve probably seen, I would imagine you might be a stellar candidate for PTSD...”
    “But I don’t seem to be.”
    She shook her head. “No, you don’t...but you have concerns so I guess that’s why we’re here. I’m going press some buttons on this digital thing and we can get started.”
    Hogan nodded, poured more whiskey but only to warm it up in his hand. Torelli left the recorder on her desk, walked over to sit facing him in one of the two remaining armchairs.
    “I grew up on a farm in Nebraska...and I enlisted straight out of high school because my old man had been Army and I’d grown up being taught that serving my country was an honour and a privilege.
    “I’d been in less than a year. On March 8 in 1985 I was in Lebanon just a few days short of my nineteenth birthday and I rode shotgun on a detail that delivered a vehicle outside an apartment building in west Beirut. Extremists took credit for the explosion, but for all intent and purpose it was the US of A that engineered the whole thing. We killed eighty people...seriously injured two hundred more almost all of them women and children...the rationale being that the Moslem cleric we were trying to assassinate was himself responsible for violent acts of terrorism....”
    Torelli remained silent, met his gaze and for an instant she let something personal show through on her face. Hogan looked away first, back out through the plate glass. If he tilted his head the tiniest little bit he could almost line up the dome of the Capitol right off the top of the Washington Monument.
    “I was still a kid. I told myself I didn’t know all there was to know about something like that. We didn’t have access to all the Vietnam papers we have now.”
    “So how did you feel after the fact?”
    He turned back to her.
    “I was a few days shy of my nineteenth birthday...serving my country... At that point I didn’t know what to make of it. At that point I didn’t even know that I needed to make something of it...”

***

    Torelli shifted around in her chair, faced him more squarely.
    “What’s going on with you and your soon-to-be ex...?”
    Hogan looked down into his glass, swirling the whiskey around watching it coat the glass in pale transparent amber and gradually drift back into something richer and deeper at the bottom of the glass.
    “We got married right after I got back from Lebanon. Eleventh-hour high school sweethearts. Refugees straight out of the Fifties me and Lacey...but I’d mooned at her for three years and gotten the shit kicked out of me playing front line offense/defense for our football team trying to impress her and one day she actually noticed me...
    “She said I looked stupid in a buzz-cut. After that I became a with-it dude, even if I couldn’t dance worth shit.”
    He smiled...remembering Life a little bit simpler.
    “I was in Central America when Chase was born in ‘87...wandering around Guatemala and Honduras and Nicaragua...but I was actually home when Charlotte was born in ‘89...got t’see Lace get chubby all on account of me. It was great...
    “And then it started to stop being great. I was too good at whatever it was they wanted me to do. I never got home for more than a few weeks at a time...my children grew up hardly even aware that they had a father...
    “When I’d manage some leave Lacey used t’keep me up nights telling about everything I’d missed. We’d fuck like there was no tomorrow and then she’d tell me some more. And then I’d go away again...this time back to the Middle East...the first Bush war... serving my country...tearing down a guy we’d set up because he’d stopped being cooperative...”
    “And your wife?”
    “My wife got lonely.”
    “She started seeing other men?”
    “Yep.”
    “How were you with that?”
    “I was angry as hell...but I was busy at the time, trying to keep myself and a bunch of other people alive and somehow being angry slipped away...and then I just got sad...back then I just got sad...I thought I was doing what was right...not blind and stupid like these blowhard assholes wandering around America thinking automatic weapons make them soldiers of freedom. I got to where it felt I was just paying for the privilege of being an American for me and for my family. I knew some of it wasn’t right, but I knew I didn’t know all of it and I trusted them to be making choices for me. Behind all of that I also knew better than anyone I was letting Lace and my kids down...”
    Pat Torelli got up, walked across to her desk to make sure the recorder was doing its job. While she was about that he topped up her glass. Held his up to hers and clunked them again. He could feel sympathy coming off her in waves, and perhaps an instinct for kindness that was being held in check simply because she took pride in doing her job professionally at all times. Again, he wondered what it might be like if she put her arms around him...kissed him...anything else...realised none of that was going to happen...that she was warmly empathetic and very attractive and he needed her for something else that had nothing at all to do with either. She sipped her whiskey...held the highball glass in both hands it reminded him of a photograph of his son’s youngest daughter...four years old with a sippy-cup of milk he wondered if a trickle of JW was going to run down Patricia Torelli’s chin...
    “I’ve never seen my grandchildren,” he said, appalled that for the first time in recent memory the thought made him want to cry. “Photographs. Chase and Charlotte started out by wondering why their father always missed birthdays...communions... graduations...weddings...and along the way they found out why and stopped caring whether I showed up or not...stopped talking to me, right about the time they were old enough to instinctively know what it’s taken me an entire lifetime to figure out...”
    He emptied his glass and reached for the bottle. Left it on the floor. The afternoon was running along and he didn’t want to be driving with too much alcohol in his system.
    “Douglas, you’re not suffering from post-trauma stress,” she said.
    He looked up at her, shook his head.
    “No. I’m not, Pat...”

***

    After that they talked about all sorts of other stuff. She asked questions and wherever he could he replied with things that closely approximated real answers, and then outright fabrications where they best served him. He knew she was mapping him, finding the boundaries of his feelings about as many things as she felt might be helpful to her in a preliminary diagnosis. Just about the time he thought the receptionist should be making a reappearance there was a knock on the door to the office...an apology...a question...
    Torelli looked away for moment, said “We’re going to be a bit longer, Barbara, thank you. Go on home and I’ll lock up when we’re done.”
    Barbara purred Good night Mister Hogan and closed the door. Some bustling ensued in the outer office, then quiet. Pat turned back to him, apologising for the interruption; he just waved it off.
    “Were you ever scared, Doug? In all the places you’ve served...I’m assuming you’ve been under enemy fire dozens if not hundreds of times. Are you trying to deal with the fact you were scared?”
    He shook his head again, but smiled.
    “I near shit myself for far longer than I will admit to anyone but you...and of course I was scared. Terrified. But my father told me some things about his time in southeast Asia... before it crept up on him...
    “He was the one with PTSD, Pat. It took almost forty years for it to bleed through, but in the interim he told me it was okay to be scared...okay to want t’run away and hide; it was only crazy people who were never afraid...
    “So I looked at it and I looked at all the other guys around me who maybe hadn’t been lucky enough to have that tiny precious thought explained to them and I held it together for me and for them and I was afraid all the time, but whenever they gave me more people to look after it got less and less scary...
    “Now I’m a fucking hero...with a big mouth...”
    “Where’s your Dad?” she asked softly.
    Hogan considered refilling his glass after all.
    “In the ground. When my mother died he started reliving Vietnam...waking up in the middle of the night thinking he was back there...like she had been the buffer between him and all things he’d never told me. I was back in the Middle East when he killed himself.”
    She was quiet for a while he could watch her processing information...mentally weighing the things he’d said against statistics and her instincts. He sensed it was coming close to the time for him to go...
    “Doug, what is this?” she asked, frowning a little, speaking very slowly. “I’m starting to feel badly about my new bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. You could have chewed the ear off a bartender in any DC tavern for a lot less. You’re desperately lonely and horribly disillusioned...but you’re not crazy or anything that anyone could misconstrue as being crazy.”
    He smiled, nodded.
    “You’re right. I’m really just angry...now more than ever after this last little circus called an election...”
    And that was the final act in his performance...the real distillation of why he was there. In between all their talk had been long long silences and the afternoon was going away... the time was coming closer...a few more minutes and there would be nothing else to say.
    “I’m like that guy in the movie. I’ve had enough and I’m not gonna take it anymore.”
    Her frown grew deeper, drew her eyebrows down towards the bridge of her nose as she slipped in her chair, looked up at him...startled...almost afraid...
    “Are you still with me, Pat?” he asked softly.
    She looked up at him blearily...dazed...
    “Douglas...I’m so sorry...I think...I think I’m going to...have to...cut this short...” she said slowly. “I am...suddenly...so tired...”
    He stood up...walked to her chair and scooped her up into his arms...no weight at all he felt as if he had grown wings and had only the sky before him...placed her gently on the couch.
    “It’s just the little something I slipped into your last glass of whiskey,” he explained. “I’m not here to hurt you I promise, but you’re going to sleep through the night.”
    He read the puzzlement in her eyes.
    “The real reason I’m here is I need a witness, Pat. I checked you out...read up on the things you’ve done...the things you’ve said...the causes you’ve stood up for...and I came to you because I needed someone to know the Truth. I’m depending on you to tell the Truth...to take that digital recording and put it out in the world so when you wake up tomorrow and they try to paint me as some radicalised Muslim convert...or right-wing racist nut-job...or some left-wing commie sympathiser out to turn the US of A into a Russian satellite nation...there’ll be a record of what it was really all about...
    “That it was just me. Major General Douglas MacArthur Hogan. Someone who has done murder for them for over forty years and just wants it to stop...wants his son’s daughters to be able to walk to work in their executive suites bare-ass naked if they feel like it and never have to worry about getting groped or being assaulted because they were asking for it. Somebody who wants his daughter’s sons to respect women, never know the weight of an automatic weapon, or blow the crap out of innocent human beings in a war manufactured for profit. I want my family to be able live without fear...without a gun under their pillows at night...in a country where they haven’t been taught it’s okay to hate people for any reason that feels right on any given day.”
    He found a light coverlet in a lower drawer of the credenza and draped it over her.
    “Just tell them I was tired of the bullshit, Pat. Tired of being lied to, scammed on the American Dream, thrown crumbs and bullied into believing America was this great principled nation full of kind generous loving people. Tired of football-and-beer sideshows and flag-waving as an easy out for the responsibility of what we’ve let our leaders do to us and the rest of the world.”
    She was entirely out now. Snoring softly. He hit the STOP button on her recorder. Hit SAVE. He looked back at her from the doorway, washed in the light bouncing off the Potomac...shadows crawling into the inner corners of her office...
    “Tonight they’re all going t’be there, Pat,” he said quietly. “That gibbering idiot from the White House right on down. Heaven knows how much more damage they’re intending to do to this country.
    “But tonight I’m going to put them all under the guns. If I can kill enough of them, perhaps We the People can start over and get it right the second time around.”

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