The treatment is pioneering, and never

more in demand than now

as in daily dozens the sore-afflicted

lope

into reception, thousand-yard-

staring and gritting their teeth.

In stage one - diagnosis - the patient,

extensively instrumented,

is prompted to home in on his stress-trigger

which blooms across the screen

as it is spoken.

Graphs are extrapolated, correlations mapped

by costly hardware in the east

wing, codenamed

BRAINIAC - appropriately, as it too

is a cluster of very many small

functions running massively

in parallel. This takes

time; the patient is offered

a glass of water, which he

invariably slops.

Stage two is treatment. For this

the patient is strapped down, and a warm

moist pad laid across the temples.

Much of what happens next takes place

outside the field of vision.

There is

an intense buzzing, and migraine-

like aura; ideation follows,

a fugue of daily life with obscene

interjections, evidently-

imaginable horrors

peeling from the wallpaper.

This passes; the buzzing persists

with tiny modulations. Nurses loom.

The last

half-hour or so is frankly boring.

The apparatus, referred to in acronym

exclusively, weakens

the connections between trauma

and the life sustaining it.

Nothing of what happened is forgotten;

only that it mattered -

that it had

to be accounted for, and could not be.

It dissolves, say its inventors,

moral problems

like those of pain and evil, which are not

in their opinion

worth half the trouble people take with them.

“Pain’s just a signal; likewise moral pain,

a crude reflex of early conditioning

usually received too late to be of value.

What’s eating these guys is emotional

neuralgia, a maddening

unscratchable

itch. Why not just make it go away?”

The project leader gestures through the window.

Outside young soldiers smile at their young children,

hold hands with girlfriends, jape

boyishly with the buddies they came in with.

“Why not ask them”, he says, “if they feel

violated?”