Inbreak

Talk to Me

I’m home and I stare at the turned off TV screen in silence. Laura is finishing some paperwork for the insurance company and scribbles on the dining room table. The house is quiet. I can hear the wind blowing in the trees.

“It will probably take a month. At least. That’s what the documents say. The indemnification process can take up to thirty days or more in case of a natural disaster.”

I keep looking at the empty TV screen.

“Thirty days or more. All they have to do is make a check. And in the meantime the windows are still broken. Do they think everyone can afford this kind of repair on their own money?”

She looks at me, her hand in mid-air, waiting for a reply.

“I’m just tired of the plywood sheets,” she adds.

“At least it won’t rain inside,” I say.

“Thirty days or more.”

I crack my knuckles. Laura leaves the table and sits on the sofa near me.

“Talk to me,” she says.

“I’m good, honey.”

“Talk to me.”

“I really am.”

“You’re cracking your joints. You’re always cracking your joints when you’re worried. So talk to me.”

My reflection stares back at me in the TV screen.

“Are you thinking about it again?” she asks.

“Of course I am.”

“Of course you are.”

“But I’m good. I’m with you. It’s all that matters, right?”

“You’re not good. How could you be?”

My reflection keeps staring at me.

“I should be anxious but I’m not. I mean, not the way I should be. That’s weird. That’s bugging me out.”

“What is the way you should be?”

“I should have the regular PTSD symptoms but I don’t. Or maybe I do but I don’t want to notice. I don’t know.”

“You won’t change anything.”

“I don’t know.”

“You couldn’t have done anything.”

“It’s not that. The kid, you know. He didn’t — he wasn’t angry. He didn’t seem to be. He was acting normal. I watched the tapes and that freaked me out. He was acting really normal, like any other day. He didn’t seem desperate. He was just walking.”

“I saw his face on the news.”

“Bored. He looked bored. As if it was yet another Tuesday afternoon.”

“They’re all bored at this age.”

“I know I couldn’t have stopped it.”

Laura smiles and puts her hand on her baby bump.

“What is it, then?” she asks.

“Inside the school, it was so quick. I don’t remember everything. The adrenaline kicked in and I just acted by instinct. I saw the bodies and I took cover when I heard the shots and it was over.”

“What did the therapist say?”

“She wanted to know if I was upset because of the bodies. I’m not. I’ve seen bodies before. Most of the time they’re nothing special. They were almost all lying on their stomachs anyway. You couldn’t tell who was crouching and who was dead. And it happened too fast for me to really look at them.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. She said the PTSD could take a few weeks to manifest. So I guess I’ll wait it out.”

“Is it why you’re worried? Because you’re waiting for the pain to come?”

“I’m in pain already. I feel it.”

“You’re in pain because you’re not in pain.”

The wind makes the porch lights flicker.

“A kid wakes up in the morning. He’s from a normal family, with a working mother and a working father. Normal people. He eats his cereals at the kitchen counter with his little brother. He prepares for school and talks with his mother on the way. Normal conversation. Something about a radio station or a tune that is playing. Her mother drops him off in the parking lot. He walks in the parking lot and he waves at a friend who just bought a car.”

“Don’t do that,” my wife says.

“He enters the school by the main door and walks to his locker. He’s a normal student with average grades. He wrote a paper about domotics earlier in the month. He’s never been bullied and has never picked a fight. He’s a normal kid in a normal town and it’s a normal day.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Except he has a sawed-off shotgun and two automatic pistols in his backpack, and he draws them out in the middle of the crowded hallway.”

“There was nothing you could have done.”

“This is not important. What could have been done is not important.”

“What, then?”

“He kissed his mother goodbye and waved at a friend. He inflated his bike’s tires the day before. Can you imagine?”

“I can’t.”

“Exactly. You can’t. Because he had no reason to do that. No reason at all. He was a normal kid.”

“And yet he did it.”

“And yet he did it.”

“What’s your point?”

“There is no point, that’s what I mean. There is no point. It doesn’t make any sense. The kid just wakes up, takes his breakfast and kills dozens of students with no reason at all.”

“You’ve been a cop for seven years. You know better than anyone that things sometimes happen with no good reason.”

“Not like that. Never like that. This comes out of nowhere. There is not any sense in it. Not the tiniest single piece of sense.”

Laura stands up and gives me a glass in which she pours a dose of single malt scotch. She sits on my lap.

“I can’t drink but that doesn’t mean you can’t,” she says.

“How are we supposed to live if there is no sense anymore?”

“You will be a good father.”

“Or maybe there’s a big conspiration behind it. A kid doesn’t kill other kids simply because he’s bored. Maybe I’m wrong and there will be an explanation. There has to be an explanation.”

“Sometimes it’s better to just let go.”

“I won’t let go. That would prove everything is pointless.”

“That wouldn’t prove anything.”

“Things like this can’t happen without reason.”

I stay on the couch as my wife goes to the bathroom. I listen to the leaves scraping on the roof over me and I turn on the TV to make my reflection in the screen disappear.