Riggs had discussed the guilt he felt with just two other people, DJ and Hoss, and both of them had assured him that it wasn’t their fault. The system had been crap from the start, they said, and should have never been approved. On an intellectual level, Riggs understood that. But on an emotional level, he couldn’t get past feeling that he owned some of the responsibility. If only someone had thought to share the navy analyses of the accident with him, he might have better appreciated how the divers never really had a chance.
Hoping a change of scenery would help him get unstuck, Riggs and his wife moved the family from the desert of Nevada to the verdant mountains of Plumas County, California. There was no work for him there, though, so he would spend the week on job sites in the San Francisco Bay area. Each weekend he’d make the nine-hour round-trip drive home to be with his son and daughter, as well as with his wife, although their estrangement continued to grow.
It was around one in the afternoon when DJ threw off the five-hundred-thread-count sheets and climbed out of bed. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face before drying with one of his Ralph Lauren Egyptian combed-cotton washcloths. He padded through his leased condo in an upscale Waltham complex, past the boy’s bedroom with the PlayStation that he’d set up for his son’s visits, past the crystal stemware in the dining room, past the high-definition TV in the living room. He opened the blinds to take in the view. In the parking lot, DJ spied two of his newest and most prized possessions. There was the silver 2001 F-350 power-stroke diesel Ford pickup truck that he’d special-ordered, with every possible add-on, to the tune of $43,000. And sitting on a trailer hitched to the truck was his black $36,000 custom Bourget Low Blow motorcycle, which turned heads on the highway every time he opened its throttle.
It was a beautiful day, and for the first time in his life, DJ was surrounded by beautiful things, the kinds of material status markers he had dreamed about when he’d been the high school transplant from Oklahoma who showed up in Massachusetts embarrassed by how little he had. As he stared out at his acquisitions now, though, DJ could feel no happiness. Instead, he felt an overpowering depression. With tears forming in his eyes, he began talking to himself. Why don’t I just get on my motorcycle and go for a ride? He felt immobilized, and he couldn’t figure out the reason. Why am I so depressed?
In moments of deep reflection, DJ began to understand what made him incapable of truly enjoying his new things. He’d ask himself, Where did that motorcycle come from? That truck? Do I have them because I worked hard and put my money in the bank? Then he’d answer his own rhetorical question with cold candor: I have them because those two guys are dead.
It hadn’t taken long after the accident for DJ to get back on the partying circuit with Dana. For her, it was a way of celebrating the fact that DJ had cheated death. It took her a while to notice that, for him, there was a different motivation. He no longer seemed to take pleasure in his partying, even as he pursued it more vigorously than ever.
She thought that getting him away from Boston might help. Two months after the accident, they went on vacation together in Jamaica. They threw themselves into the high life, but the week ended on a low note, as they both sensed the drift between them.
Back home, they became more detached. To Dana, DJ had grown hopelessly sad. All the things that had made him so attractive to her—the lightness he brought to everyone around him, the pride he took in his appearance, the irresistible sparkle in his eyes—all seemed to have disappeared. It was as if those qualities had somehow remained trapped in that hellish tunnel even as his body had managed to escape. His reliance on pain relievers had begun to worry her. One night he held out his palm to reveal a handful of pills of various shapes and in a rainbow of colors. “Take one,” he told her.
Dana hoped that, if nothing else could help him, maybe their Catholic faith might. For his thirtieth birthday, she gave him a Jesus medal on a chain. On the back, it read, “Dear Lord, have mercy on us.” Under the prayer, she had it engraved: “Love Dana, 9-27-99.”
But his descent continued. One night three months after the accident, DJ came over to her house, carrying a pair of steak-tip dinners in Styrofoam takeout containers. He was unkempt and unshaven, and as he sat across from her, attempting to cut his steak, the knife was unsteady in his hand. She had sensed for some time that the guilt he felt from having survived the accident was leading him to believe that he didn’t deserve anything good, and causing him to let himself go. Now she concluded, He’s just gone.
She told him she couldn’t be with him anymore. She feared that if she stayed with him, she’d slip down the same self-destructive path. She didn’t feel strong enough to save them both, so she decided she needed to save herself.
Five years earlier, when Dana had broken up with him the first time, DJ had settled into a long, deep funk. In perhaps the clearest indication of the accident’s lingering cloud over him, he met this second breakup with resignation. He handed Dana back the Jesus medal and headed home.
He was consumed with panic. The air around him was a dense mix of smoke and fog. It was so dark and he was so disoriented that he couldn’t tell which way was left and which was right. But he knew that if he made the wrong choice, he would die. They would all die.
DJ turned to the two guys who were with him. It was hard to make out their faces in the dark, but he knew it was Hoss and Riggs. They began arguing over which way to turn to get out. DJ could feel the sweat soaking through his clothes.
He awoke with a start. Just like in the nightmare, his body was drenched in sweat, but now he noticed that so were his bed sheets. He was breathing heavily, and there were tears in his eyes. Ever since the accident, he’d had the same recurring nightmare. There were occasional variations—Billy was sometimes there, joining the debate over which way to go—but DJ always came away feeling completely drained.
Before the accident, whenever he’d heard people talk about traumatic flashbacks and nightmares, he could never understand what the big deal was. Even if it was a bad nightmare, it wasn’t real, so couldn’t you simply splash some water on your face and get on with your day? He’d never grasped how paralyzing a nightmare could be. Every time he had one, he awoke consumed with guilt. Guilt that he had switched positions with Billy at the last minute, even if Billy had been the one who requested the change. Guilt that maybe, if he had just continued chest compressions a little longer, he might have been able to resuscitate his buddy. Guilt that, no matter how negligent Harald or anybody else was, he had personally failed to save Billy and Tim.
Although Hoss, Riggs, and DJ had all experienced the same trauma and were all racked by nightmares, each one of them was responding in a fundamentally different way. While Hoss bowed to the power of his PTSD in the hope of conquering it, Riggs was trying to outsmart it and, when that seemed impossible, to displace it with anger. As for DJ, he just kept trying to outrun it.
Even though he’d found himself unable to return to diving, the settlement money had bought him plenty of time. After Dana, he’d moved on to a series of head-turning girlfriends. He knew he probably should return to the therapy sessions he’d undergone in the year after the accident, when he’d been diagnosed with PTSD and depression and had been prescribed Klonopin and other antianxiety medication336s. The pills had side effects, and the draining sessions did little to keep the soul-sapping nightmares and waves of guilt at bay. So he came up with his own treatment regimen—one built largely on continual motion. If he resumed the role of being the life of a never-ending party, he wouldn’t have to confront the ways he was dying inside. Not long after the accident, DJ took a few Percocets to try to ease the pain. He found they helped take the edge off, so he added them to his diet, one that he later fortified with Vicodin and other opiate painkillers. Still, he hated to go to sleep at night because he knew that’s where the nightmares would find him. So he began deliberately trying to stay up all night. This was done most easily in loud bars. He found that when he mixed his prescription painkillers with lots of booze and a line or two of coke, he’d eventually pass out, giving him a few hours of peaceful sleep. He liked the combination of cocaine, which gave him a feeling of euphoria and increased sex drive, with opiates, which relaxed his muscles and eased the paranoia that the coke often introduced. But to maintain its effectiveness, the regimen demanded that DJ be forever on the go.
336 (Chapter 15, note 8)
Klonopin and other antianxiety medication: