Please forward to your mobile phone contacts.

A short story

A Day in the Cold Season

Tomas Brandt suddenly woke the way he woke every morning, with his right hand already closed around the strap of his bag.

He had slept from three until a little past five in the recess where the pharmacy’s delivery door met the back wall of Vasco’s Bakery. Vasco lit his ovens at two, and by three the brick felt like a furnace. Tomas lay on flattened cartons with a charity blanket over his army coat, boots on, laces tied, the bag under his head and the strap wound twice around his wrist. Before three he had walked, because the wall was cold until then. What sleep came after that arrived in pieces, and the dream cut the pieces shorter.

The dream was the valley road again. The convoy stalled, a cab burning, Joss Hale’s frightened voice on the radio saying “Tomas”. Tomas woke with the smell of diesel in his nose. Nothing on Gantry Street was burning. But the smell stayed, and his pulse ran on for a full minute while he counted the bricks in the wall across the alley, a trick a medic had taught him in the war, a medic who was no longer alive.

The war had been over for seven months. It had lasted four years, between two countries that shared a river, most of a language, a great many marriages, and as far as Tomas could determine, it had been fought over the high valleys in the north. There was copper under the valleys and cold clean water running through them, and on the far side a deep harbor that one government wanted and the other would not sell.

The early speeches had talked about borders and security and the dead of older wars. Nobody had mentioned the farms. Tomas had driven recovery trucks for an engineering corps, and he had seen the farms: gates standing open, bread still on kitchen tables, and roads the army wanted cleared by a certain date because a schedule in a distant capital said so. There were people on those roads. Each day he tried not to think about the roads, but he couldn’t stop it.

At twenty to six a car turned into the lane, headlights sweeping the wall, and Tomas was on his feet with the bag on his shoulder before the engine died.

“Morning,” said the man who climbed out. He wore a patrol officer’s dark jacket and carried a flashlight pointed politely at the ground. “There’s not a problem. The pharmacy gets a delivery at six and the driver needs that door. I’d rather ask you than have him do it.”

“I’m going.” It came out harder than Tomas intended. He was standing too straight. Uniforms did that to him; his spine remembered what to do before his mind agreed.

“Leave the cartons if you want them tonight.” The officer’s eyes went to the boots, to the tied laces, and came back up without comment. “Sam Adeyemi’s my name”

Tomas said nothing and went out the far end of the lane, pulse racing.

It was a Wednesday, so there was no van. On Mondays and Thursdays, a van from the convent kitchen on Hollis Bridge parked under the train viaduct at seven and handed out bread and soup, and Tomas stood at the back of that line, where he could see both ends of the arches. On other days there was the bakery’s back step. The girl who worked the counter, flour in her eyebrows, sometimes left a paper bag of yesterday’s rolls there and sometimes didn’t, and never looked at him when she did. Today there was a bag. He ate two rolls walking and buttoned the rest inside his coat.

The public library opened at ten. The staff allowed anyone to sit as long as they stayed awake, and Tomas had spent three weeks reading a newspaper to keep his eyes open. Today’s paper carried the final text of the joint development agreement for the northern valleys, signed in a hotel by two ministers who had smiled for the photographers. He read the clauses about copper, water rights, and harbor fees. He looked for information about the villages and found none. He coughed quietly. A student looked up. He turned to the classifieds but didn’t read them.

Midday was cans. Between the market and the river there were bins, and on a good day perhaps sixty aluminum cans could be found in them if he walked the whole route, and the machine behind the supermarket paid a small coin for each. Sixty coins bought a hot tea and a bun at the stall by the tram stop. After three, when the stallholders folded their awnings, he went through the crates they left behind: bruised apples, a bag of onions some gone soft at one end, once, memorably, a wheel of cheese with a cut in the rind. He waited until they had gone. He did not like being watched while he foraged.

At a quarter past three, on some days, his feet took him to Orchard Street. He stood across from the school gate with his hands in his pockets and watched children come out in twos and threes but didn’t see his daughter. Mira was twelve now, taller than in the photograph in his bag. He left.

Elena had asked him, in their last months, to see someone. That was how she put it, in the kitchen, with her back against the counter and her arms folded. He had stopped sleeping in the bed by then. One night near three he had found himself standing in Mira’s room, checking her window latch for the fourth time, and Mira had woken and seen a large shape in the dark and screamed. Elena took her to her sister’s the next morning. Tomas told himself it was temporary but a few days later he moved out.

He lost his work at the depot in the same month, for shouting at a man who dropped a wrench behind him, and his apartment two months after that. His brother Anton left a message on the phone before Tomas sold it: “Call me when you’re ready.”  Seven months after the guns stopped and four months after the door of Elena’s sister’s house closed behind his daughter, he was still not ready.

By dusk the cold had a grip on the city. He had tried the municipal shelter in October, sixty cots in a gymnasium under lights that never fully went out, and sometime after midnight a man at the far end had screamed in his sleep and Tomas had been standing on his cot with his hands up before he knew he was awake. A hand had been on his bag. He had shoved it away, and a staff member had written his name on a form. He left before breakfast.

He tried a hostel across the river after that and woke to find his gloves gone. A boy of about twenty with a ring in his lip had cornered him once under the viaduct and demanded his coat. Tomas had the boy on the ground before he could decide anything, a knee on his chest, and then he saw the boy’s frightened, young face, so let him up. His hands shook for an hour. He had stopped himself, barely, and the barely scared him.

So, he took the pharmacy alcove again that night and checked his bag by the light of the streetlamp: the discharge papers in their plastic sleeve, a spare pair of socks, a razor with no blade, and the photograph. The cartons were where he had left them. The wall began to warm at three.

The Man with the Flashlight

Sam Adeyemi came back the next morning at twenty to six, and the morning after that. Tomas was always gone by then, and Sam accepted that. By the second week Tomas had started staying until the car turned in, a small test of his own. Sam always said “Morning” and nothing more. On a Tuesday he left a paper cup on the corner of the pharmacy’s step, lid on, and drove off. Tomas let it sit for an hour. Then he drank it.

“Thanks,” he said the next day, to the windshield.

“Sure,” Sam said.

In the third week of November Tomas looked up from the viaduct line on a Thursday evening and found Sam in jeans and a gray sweater, no uniform, holding a paper bag. He kept ten feet back.

“I’m off shift.” He held up the bag. “Tonight we have dumplings There’s too many. If you want, I’ll eat with you or I’ll leave it on the wall, whichever you want.”

Tomas ate. Sam sat on the wall and ate with him, and when the bag was empty, he said, “I go to a church on Eastgate Avenue. Thursday supper in the basement, seven o’clock. Sixty people, give or take. There’s singing. It might be loud.” He turned the empty bag over in his hands. “When I was ten my father slept in a car for a year. A man from a church came and put a key in his hand, a room over a garage, and never asked for anything. My father died without finding him to say thank you. I’ve been trying to do the thanking for him ever since. That’s all this is.”

“I don’t go to churches.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not sure He’d know what to do with me.” The sentence got away from him. He had not intended to say it.

Sam folded the bag into quarters. “I’m told that’s the whole point of Him.” He stood. “Seven o’clock, Thursday. Bring nothing.”

Boots

The first hard freeze came in the second week of December. Tomas went to the municipal shelter because the wall behind the bakery had gone cold and the cartons were stiff with ice, and he lasted until two in the morning. When exhaustion did what fear had stopped in October, he slept deeply enough to take off his boots. When he woke, the boots were gone. So was the bag, and the photograph in it.

He walked out onto the pavement in his socks at four a.m. in sleet. He went three streets before the cold in his feet turned into a heavy numbness he knew from the high valleys, and by the viaduct, the numbness in his mind forced him to sit down on a curb. That was where Sam found him a little after six, patrol car idling, door already open.

“Brandt.” It was the first time Sam had used his name. Tomas had never told him; he must have read it off the shelter’s list. “Can you stand?”

“They took the photograph.”

“Okay. Get in the car.”

Sam did not drive to a hospital. He drove to Eastgate Avenue, a long brick building with a lit window by the side door, and a woman in a gray cardigan was already waiting there with a ring of keys. Pastor Lorna Fenwick was perhaps sixty, short, with a still facet, and she took one look at him. She sat him in a chair beside a radiator and filled a basin with water for his feet that was only lukewarm, because Sam told her the cold had probably gone deep. She unlocked the clothing room in the basement and came back with wool socks and a pair of boots that were almost his size.

“They’re broken in,” she said. “A man died last month who wore a ten and a half.”

“I’ll pay for them.”

“Wednesday nights we need someone on dishes. Or just take them. It’s all the same to me.”

A nurse at the free Saturday clinic looked at his toes and said frostnip, nothing worse. Sam kept driving by at six every morning anyway, and Tomas stopped pretending not to look for the car.

On Thursday he went to supper, because he had eaten nothing all day and the church was warm. He sat in the folding chair nearest the door. The basement hall held long tables and had a smell of onions and floor wax. Pastor Fenwick put a bowl in front of him and moved on. When a woman at the piano began a hymn, sixty voices came in unevenly, and Tomas was on his feet in the corridor before the second line, breathing hard. He had not known it would be the sound: the sudden rise of so many people at once. A child laughed somewhere near the kitchen; he thought of Mira and found himself nearly crying.

When the singing stopped, he went back in and finished his soup.

What the Pastor Read

He washed dishes on Wednesday and discovered that scraping plates was a task he could complete. On Sunday he came again, sat in the last pew beside the door, and listened to Pastor Fenwick read from the fourth chapter of James. “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill.”

She spoke for fifteen minutes, in the same level voice. She spoke about wanting, and the way one person’s wanting of a field or a harbor or a house could grow past the point where the faces of the people living there were visible. He sat very still until the end.

In the foyer afterward he said to the wall more than to her, “The ones who wanted the valleys. Do they get forgiven too?”

“If they ask,” said Pastor Fenwick. “But I think they’ll have to answer for the villages first. I believe both are true.”

“I was on the road.”

“Sam told me a little.” She took a step back, giving him room. “There’s a fund here, kept by the congregation. It pays for a counselor who sees six people a month. Dr. Raman. She’s good with soldiers. She asked me last week whether there was anyone, and I said I’d mention it.”

“No.”

“All right.”

He might have held to the no. On the nineteenth of December, a delivery truck backfired outside the viaduct at ten in the evening, and Tomas found himself on the ground behind a pillar with his hands over the back of his head, unable to make his legs obey him. Sam found him there forty minutes later, after a call from the girl at the bakery, who had noticed the cartons empty and his coat. He stayed beside Tomas on the cold concrete until the shaking finished and said nothing.

On the twenty-first Tomas climbed the stairs of the church annex.

The Chair That Faced the Door

Dr. Priya Raman’s office was on the second floor, a small room with a window overlooking the car park. She had left the door open. There were two chairs. One faced the door and the other faced the window, and she was already sitting in the second.

“Take whichever you like,” she said. “I’ll adjust.”

He took the one facing the door. He stayed twenty minutes, answered her questions about sleep and food and work in short phrases, and left when she asked him to describe a typical night. He did not go back the following week, and Sam didn’t ask about it. On the third Thursday he went up the stairs again.

She did not hurry him. In the early sessions she taught him things that sounded too small to matter: how to slow his breath when his pulse started to climb, how to describe where he was by the light and the objects in the room, how to tell himself that the road was in the past. The treatment itself, when it came in January, was slow and hard. She asked him to say what had happened on the valley road aloud, in the present tense, with the door open and her in the room, and she asked him to say it again the next week, and the next. On the valley road a wounded woman and an old man had been lying in the ditch, and the order came over the radio to leave them for the medical column, because the convoy had a schedule. Joss Hale had stopped his truck to lift the old man clear. Tomas had driven on, as ordered. The ambush caught Joss at the bend.

“I drove on,” he said, in the sixth week, and then said it again, and then lowered his head onto his knees.

“You were given an order by men who weren’t there,” said Dr. Raman slowly, after a while. “You can grieve for Joss, and you can see plainly who put you in that cab. You’ve been carrying all of it as if it were yours alone.”

In February the nightmares fell from every night to two or three times a week. In March they came a few times a month. He still startled at a dropped plate. He still sat with his back to a wall, and he still could not stand inside a room while the whole congregation sang; he waited in the corridor for the hymns and came back for the sermon, and Pastor Fenwick, who had noticed, put a chair just outside the door.

He asked her once what God had been doing on the valley road. She read him Psalm 34, the eighteenth verse: “The LORD is near to them that are of a broken heart; and saves those with a contrite spirit.” She did not explain it. She closed the Bible and said she had no answer to why it had happened, and that she believed God had been nearer to Joss on that road than anyone in a uniform.

Tannery Row

Walter Ostrowski was a deacon at Eastgate who ran a repair shop on Tannery Row: bicycles, lawnmowers, small engines, the occasional generator. Tomas had met him in the basement the week of the frost, and in March, when the church’s old generator died in the middle of a storm, Tomas went down with a tin of brake cleaner and a screwdriver and had it running in forty minutes. Walter watched him do it, hands on his hips.

“Seven to one,” Walter said. “Mornings. I’ll teach you the books after. Afternoon’s when my crew gets loud.”

The shop had been arranged for Tomas in a handful of ways he noticed slowly. His bench was in the back room, as far from the compressor and the grinder as the building allowed. The crew had agreed, without being asked twice, to say his name before they came up behind him. Thursday afternoons were his for Dr. Raman, without question.

For the first month the church’s work ministry sent a woman named Ines, three mornings a week, who sat on an upturned crate and helped him sort invoices and learn the ordering system. When a test engine backfired and Tomas froze with an invoice in his hand, Ines walked over and sat down next to him waiting for his fingers to open.

A widow in the congregation had a room over her garage she wanted to rent. Tomas took it in April and paid the first month from his own wages. For a while he slept on the floor, boots beside the bed, laces loosened but not untied. In May he slept in the bed.

Saturdays

Anton came first. Sam had mailed a note to the last address he knew, in Tomas’s name, and two weeks later a car pulled up outside the shop on a Tuesday morning, and Tomas’s brother got out looking a little older. They stood in the doorway with the smell of oil around them. Anton’s eyes teared up and Tomas didn’t know what to say, and finally Anton said, “Have you eaten?” and they walked to the corner café.

Elena was slower. Pastor Fenwick wrote to her in February, with Tomas’s permission, and a reply came in three weeks, two lines in a hand he knew. I’m glad you are alive. I am not ready for more than letters. He wrote her one every Sunday. They were short and honest. In April a longer letter came back and tucked behind it a second sheet in a girl’s rounder handwriting that said, Dad, Mom says I can write now. I’m in the orchestra. I play the cello but pretty badly.

In June Elena agreed to meet in the church hall, on a Saturday morning, with the door open and Pastor Fenwick in her office down the hall. She came in a blue coat, with Mira half a step behind her. She had her mother’s way of standing with her weight on one leg.

Elena stopped a few feet from him. “I’m not agreeing to anything beyond Saturdays,” she said. “I want you to know that. I don’t know what will come of this.”

“Saturdays are fine.”

Mira had brought her bicycle because her chain kept slipping off the rear sprocket and the shop on her street had quoted a price that made Elena wince. She held it by the handlebars and did not look at him. “Mom says you can fix this.”

He knelt on the church hall floor with a wrench from his coat pocket. The chain was stretched and the derailleur had a bend in it, an easy fix, ten minutes of work. His hands were steady enough. Behind him he could feel Elena in the doorway with her arms folded, trying to watch inconspicuously. A car backfired out on Eastgate Avenue, loud as a gunshot, and his shoulders went up around his ears, and the wrench rang against the floor.

Nobody said a word. Mira bent and picked the wrench up and put it back in his hand with a smile and he finished the chain.

Notes on the Research Behind the Story

• PTSD symptoms fall into four groups: intrusive memories and nightmares, avoidance, negative changes in mood and thinking (guilt, numbness, detachment), and heightened arousal (startle, irritability, poor sleep, trouble concentrating). Tomas shows all four.
• Employment and severity. A study of Vietnam veterans in VA treatment (Smith, Schnurr and Rosenheck, 2005) found that those with more severe symptoms were more likely to work part-time or not at all, with a 10-point rise on the clinician-rated severity scale linked to a 5.9 percentage point higher chance of being unemployed. The authors concluded that even modest symptom reductions may bring employment gains.
• Working with symptoms. A study of women veterans (Schnurr and Lunney, 2011) found that each PTSD symptom group was tied to occupational impairment, and that depression carried a large, independent effect on work outcomes.
• Accommodations such as a quiet workspace, time off for therapy appointments, modified duties, and a job coach are commonly recommended.
• Honest limits. Recovery varies, and many people need more time, more than one course of treatment, or different kinds of help than Tomas did.

If you or someone you know is suffering from PTSD these number could help:

North America crisis lines include 988 then 1 in the United States and Canada, with additional US options like 1-800-662-4357 (SAMHSA) and 741741 (Crisis Text Line). Mexico utilizes 525-510-2550 or 9453777.

Europe offers 3114 in France, 0800 111 0 111 in Germany, 024 in Spain, 113 in the Netherlands, 116 123 in Ireland and Norway, 143 in Switzerland, 142 in Austria, 90101 in Sweden, 70 201 201 in Denmark, and 09 2525 0111 in Finland. Other notable numbers include 0800 32 123 (Belgium), 1018 (Greece), and 116 111 (Hungary/Lithuania).

Asia hotlines include 14416 in India, 0120 061 338 in Japan, 15555 in Malaysia, 1166 in Nepal, 0304 111 1741 in Pakistan, 2389 2222 in Hong Kong, and 1900 6233 in Vietnam. China’s support number is 12355 or 800-810-1117, while Israel’s ERAN line is 1201.

South America provides 188 in Brazil, 4141 in Chile, 106 in Colombia, and 113 in Peru. Argentina uses 0800 999 0091, Uruguay uses 0800 0767, and Venezuela uses 0424-290-7338.

Africa crisis lines include 0800 567 567 in South Africa, 0722 178 177 in Kenya, 0800 078 7746 in Nigeria, 16328 in Egypt, and 199 in Tanzania. Other regional numbers include 0999 399 765 (Malawi) and 029 226 5000 (Zimbabwe).

Oceania crisis support is available via 13 11 14 in Australia and 1737 in New Zealand. Pacific Island nations like Fiji (1543), Papua New Guinea (7147 1518), and Samoa (800 7874) also have dedicated lines.

Relevant Scripture

If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? (James 2:16)

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. (James 4:1-3)

So do not fear, for I am with you;
    do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you;
    I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)