Jack stood by the bedside, one hand lightly resting on the rail. He looked down at C—'the woman' or 'the patient' – he reminded himself sternly. He always tried to keep his thoughts clinical while he received the initial status of someone's injury, even his own. Much easier to stay calm and professional when you talked about 'a patient' with 'an injury' than a person with a problem. Later, in private, he would let his emotions out. Relief or anger or pity or whatever else might come after getting the news.
"How is she?"
"She'll live." Fraiser pursed her lips. "At least as long as she's in here."
"She's on life support?" Damn. It had looked serious, but he hadn't imagined it was that bad.
"No. But watch this. She has three broken ribs." The doctor reached out and pressed on the unconscious woman's ribcage.
"Hey! Should you --" His hands, reaching out to pull hers back, froze as the patient moved.
Into the touch.
Toward the pain.
"Doesn't that hurt?"
"Yes. Hear the heart monitor accelerating? Look at the readings -- she's definitely in distress."
"Shouldn't she move away?"
"Unless she's been conditioned otherwise."
He gaped at her. That wasn't possible. It just wasn't. How much conditioning would it take to overcome instinctive physical reactions while you were unconscious?
"Wait, there's more. We found this by accident." Fraiser unbuckled her belt and pulled it off.
As the sliding sound ended with a snap, the woman, still unconscious, responded. She uncurled from her semi-fetal position and lay flat, opening her body to attack rather than curling up in defense.
"Another conditioned response."
"Are you sure?"
"Try it yourself." Fraiser had done it three separate times that afternoon, just to prove it wasn't coincidence.
Jack pulled his belt off. At the second repeat of the sound, she reacted again, stretching her hands above her head and crossing her wrists.
Both of the watchers gasped at that. There could be no debate about that pose.
Nor was there any possible misinterpretation of her feelings about what she expected to come next. The monitor fairly screamed out her fear, it's panicky wail and her short ragged breaths belied by the stillness of her body.
After a stunned moment, Janet suddenly shook herself into action, pumping something into the IV. The monitors slowed, the frantic pulsations dropping to an ominous beat.
"How long?" Jack ground out finally, hands clenching the bed rail to steady himself as the horror of the situation sank in. His voice was rough with barely repressed emotion.
"Sir?"
"How….long!" He could barely force the words out. He'd been tortured before, more often than he liked to think about, actually. But even the longest stint, four months of living hell in Iraq, hadn't done this to him. It had done the opposite, in fact; to this day no one dared come near him in his sleep for fear of his violent reaction. Others in his ward at the veteran's hospital had had the opposite reaction; curling up defensively at a too-familiar sound or action. Some would scream, or scrabble fearfully away. Plenty, himself included, would scream when they were yanked from their desperately needed haven of sleep by the brutal memories that went with the sound or touch.
Not one of them, awake or asleep, had ever done this.
The obscenity of it jarred him to the core. That she, that anyone, should be so subjugated as to reflexively open herself to pain, to automatically move to increase it even when unconscious. It was inhuman; the action as well as the person who had ingrained it into her.
How long had she been suffering in silence? And why? What alternative was dire enough to coerce her to go to work every day, spend hours just one step away from safety, and not take the step? She didn't just keep her head down and work, either. She smiled. Made jokes. Helped people. Was that part of the conditioning, too?
Fraiser was answering his question and he tore his mind away from this incomprehensible new reality and tried to listen.
"Well, you could get someone to do it consciously by threatening worse if they refused."
He knew that. Had lived the non-choice of voluntary submission to one pain to avoid another. But that wasn't what he was asking, and she knew it. He stared at her, waiting for his answer.
She sighed, looking away from him and sadly down at the now-still figure in the bed as she began her mini-lecture. "The reaction to the sound is simple conditioning, like Pavlov's dog. Since the 'reward' for this behavior is negative, the response to failure must be much more negative."
She didn't see him grimace behind her.
"As far as the reaction to pain, if I weren't seeing it happen, I wouldn't be sure it was even possible. Conscious submission to pain is a matter of will and incentive. To do it even when unconscious?" She shook her head. "It's not natural. An organism can't survive if it acts to increase the damage to itself. So it has to be force of habit, in some form. She must have been forced to do it often enough, and with sufficient incentive, that…"
The doctor's bitter attempt to explain how it could come about faded as his mind focused on those three little words. Force of habit. With a sick feeling, he thought it might just be possible after all.
The prison guards in Iraq expected instant obedience when they ordered prisoners to kneel. Jack learned to beat them to the punch – literally, as the command was accompanied by a vicious strike at the subject's head – and drop to his knees. Sometimes, the guards would stand in the hallway and shout 'kneel,' laughing as they heard all the prisoners thump to the ground. There was no time to baby his bad knee, he had to let his weight crash down upon it to avoid the head punch. It hurt, more and more as time went on, but it didn't stop the reaction. He had adopted that painful habit, and could easily picture himself responding to the command in his sleep.
He shuddered. The Iraqi prison had been hell as it was. Imagine if they had thought of this creative new idea in torture….
oOo
Next: Jack faces the accused, and some of his own memories