The Evil Hours Read Free

alter one’s material position in the world. One British World War I veteran described his postwar existence as one lived in “a mental internment camp.”Alice Sebold, in her bestselling memoir
Lucky
, which describes the aftermath of her violent rape at age nineteen, looked out at the faces of her college classmates less than an hour after she had been raped and saw that she “was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn’t understand it myself.”
    This palpable sense of not belonging, of being “on the other side of something” after trauma, has in fact been widely noted.Anthropologists who study tribal societies describe this state as one of “liminality,” which comes from the Latin word for “threshold.” Arnold van Gennep coined the term in his 1908
Rites of Passage
, a book that draws on his studies of the tribes of southwestern Africa.The liminal state, as observed by van Gennep, was thought to be “dangerous” and “precarious” because of its social ambiguity and the conflicting, paradoxical demands it placed on both the individual and society. In tribal society, liminal states, such as adolescence, were punctuated by ceremonies designed to “accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another.” Weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs, and quinceañeras are all examples of van Gennepian rites of passage, which end dramatically and decisively with the person’s new status made clear to the community. Yet as Victor Turner, an influential anthropologist, pointed out, the modern world has no such “rites of incorporation” to mark the transition from the underworld of trauma to the everyday world, saying, “The liminal persona, in this case the returning veteran, is not alive, not dead, but somehow both and neither.”
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    It wasn’t until the summer of 2009, some two years after Saydia, that I got the first hint that I was “on the other side of something.” I was in a theater watching an action movie with my girlfriend when a black curtain fell over my head. The world disappeared for a few minutes. Looking around, I noticed that I was pacing the lobby of the theater, my head on a swivel, looking at people’s hands to make sure they weren’t carrying. My mind had gone dark, but my body was back in Iraq.
    I managed to slip back into the theater and sit back down next to my girlfriend. I looked around to see if it had happened to anyone else, but they were all engrossed in the movie.
    â€œWhat happened?” I asked Erica, who seemed as confused as I was.
    â€œThere was an explosion in the movie. You got up and ran out of the theater.”
    Soon after, I began to have dreams with explosions in them. Sometimes they were about Saydia. Sometimes innocent items exploded more or less at random—an apple, a garbage can, a box of Chinese takeout. Over time, I began to see that Saydia was beginning to infiltrate the present, albeit in a slightly disguised form, as with the exploding garbage can, which I understood to be related to the loud garbage truck that jolted me awake every Thursday morning. My dreams about Saydia were frightening, but I sometimes saw them as a kind of debriefing, a way of examining different versions of the past, and as meditations on what had happened, or might have happened, in the street that afternoon in Saydia. Sometimes the gunner was decapitated by the blast. Sometimes a machinegun opened up from the neighborhood and wasted us all. Frequently, a member of my old Marine platoon was in the Humvee next to me, watching, shaking his head in disgust, or providing a sort of color commentary on the action.
    The dreams usually ended the same way. Something would explode, unleashing a tidal wave of blackness that obliterated everything, and I would wake up with my heart racing. I was dead. This was what the blackness