Inside Outt

realizing as he woke. A protective reflex, useless now. Against the dreams, the gun wasn’t even a talisman.
    He could still hear it. A naked man, strapped to a table, eyes bulging in panic, past words, past screaming, just making… that sound. He was awake now, but he knew it would be hours before the echoes would fade from his brain.
    He got up, turned on a light, and started pacing. He kept the Glock in one hand and compulsively touched surfaces with the other—dresser, walls, a lampshade—pressing, patting, poking, anything to remind himself he was awake, he wasn’t in the dream anymore.
    People didn’t know. They didn’t know that sound, the sound a man made when you took him past the point he could endure. Every man made the sound, and it was always the same. It started with bluster. Then there would be begging. Then bawling and babbling. Childlike sobbing, shrieks for mercy. And finally, when everything had been tried, every remaining human effort and desperate stratagem and fervent hope, and all of it had failed, there would be nothing but that sound, that wordless, keening wail, the melody of a soul being snuffed, a psyche cracking open, the birth cries of an animal devolving from a man. And no matter how many times you heard it, it never pierced you less. The hair on the back of your neck would stand up no less, your scrotum would retract no less, your nausea afterward would subside no sooner. Once you heard the sound, you could live to a hundred and you would never, ever get it out of your ears.
    And God help you if you were the cause of it.
    And all that bullshit about how it was for a good reason. As though a reason would have made any difference, as though a reason could do anything to make you forget even one single moment of it. It was worse than the stink of blood and the slime of viscera. You could acclimate to killing. Torture was different.
    He slowed his pacing, breathing deliberately, in and out, through his nose. He could feel his heart rate beginning to slow. Okay. Okay. He was okay.
    If he could only sleep.
    He remembered one guy, one of the Caspers. Yhey called him Bugs, for Bugs Bunny, because he had these big, protruding ears. They’d run a routine on Bugs: sleep deprivation, hypothermia, stress positions, beatings. They buried him in a box. The box is what broke him. Afterward, just seeing his captors approaching his cage, he would scuttle into a corner and fetal up and start making the sound. It was some Pavlovian thing. No one thought he was acting. No actor could make that sound.
    And the Pavlovian thing worked in reverse, too. Just seeing Bugs scuttle off and hear him start making the sound… it was like someone pressing the nausea button in Larison’s brain. He’d come to hate Bugs for the way he felt about himself. As though Larison’s own agony had been Bug’s fault. And Jesus, what he’d done to the guy as a result. Jesus.
    He’d tried to rationalize it all by telling himself it was to save lives, prevent attacks. But they never got anything useful. And so much of what they were being tasked with wasn’t even about attacks. It was about whether there’d been a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He remembered the first time they’d issued him a list of Saddam-AQ questions. He’d done it. It wasn’t as though he’d been in the habit of thinking much then, it was easier to just do what he was told. But afterward he wondered what the hell he’d just done. He’d just endured the sound again, and for what… to provide someone political cover? That was his job now? That’s what he was being used for?
    And if they would use him for that, what else would they use him for? And what would they do when they were done using him?
    Despite his fearful secret, somehow he’d always believed the military would do right by him. He’d given the army everything, endured horrible things, the kind of things you could never utter, not even to other men who had done them, too. Things that made him wonder whether there was a God, that made him fear some inevitable reckoning he sensed but couldn’t name. He needed to believe the military would reciprocate, that in return for his sacrifice they would support and protect him.
    Then Abu Ghraib happened. He saw the way the brass and the politicians closed ranks to blame the enlisted personnel. He remembered reading an article by a guy named Jonathan Turley, about how the rank and file always got scapegoated, about the