Ricky Wu

Ricky Wu is Maya Stern’s doctor and the person she consults when she cannot tell whether seeing Joe Burkett on a computer screen was a symptom or a deception. His role is consequential because he takes her trauma seriously without making the screen image easy to explain: he first lays out the most likely clinical interpretation, then points to a difference between her established flashbacks and this new, visual experience.

Identity and Role

Wu is addressed by Maya as Dr. Wu, and he discusses her symptoms and medication as her clinician. The story gives little biographical information about him; instead, it defines him through the careful, sometimes uneasy work of listening to Maya and helping her test explanations for what she has experienced.

When Maya returns home, she finds Wu waiting on a bench by the back door, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. He waits until she has left her car before looking up, closes his pen with a click, and greets her. Maya does not return his smile. The scene establishes both their familiarity and her guardedness: she has sought his help, but she arrives carrying an urgent uncertainty rather than trust in an easy answer.

Treatment and Maya’s Distress

Maya tells Wu that she scared her child the previous night. He listens without interrupting, then proposes switching her medication to Serzone, saying that he has recently had success using it with patients experiencing similar symptoms. He has some with him in his car. Maya, unable to trust her voice, responds with a nod. The exchange places practical treatment beside the more difficult question of what her experiences mean: medication may address her distress, but it cannot by itself establish whether the image of Joe was real.

Maya objects to Wu’s repeated use of the word episodes, calling what she experiences hallucinations instead. Wu resists the term because of its connotations, while Maya insists on asking directly whether she hallucinated the image or whether it was a hoax. His attention to her wording matters: she is not only seeking reassurance but demanding that he name the possibility she fears, even if the label is uncomfortable.

The Image of Joe and the Limits of Diagnosis

Wu first offers the most straightforward explanation. He points to Maya’s PTSD, the murders of her sister and husband, the pressure of raising a child alone, and her having ignored most therapies. On those facts, he says, most experts would conclude that she imagined—or hallucinated—seeing Joe, perhaps because she wanted so badly to see him. He presents this as the simple diagnosis, not as proof that the screen image was fabricated.

Then he qualifies it. Maya does not generally suffer visual hallucinations, he says; she has vivid flashbacks, a common feature of PTSD. He explains that such flashbacks can resemble hallucinations, and that hallucinations can lead to psychosis, but emphasizes that her recurring experiences have been auditory. At night, she does not see the dead. His distinction sharpens the unresolved question: the image of Joe does not fit neatly into the pattern he knows, even while her trauma offers a plausible explanation for it.

Clinical Insight and Narrative Significance

Wu does not settle whether Maya saw Joe or imagined him. Instead, he makes the uncertainty more precise by separating the ordinary form of her symptoms from the unusual sighting. His approach gives the scene its tension: the clinical explanation is reasonable, but its own details leave room for doubt. He neither confirms a hoax nor treats Maya’s account as conclusive evidence that Joe survived.

Maya’s later account of her combat trauma adds another layer to that distinction. She says that her flashbacks do not come from guilt over civilian deaths; what haunts her is knowing she would make the same choice again to protect her soldiers. The narrator later questions whether someone without remorse would still be haunted by those actions. Against that unresolved conflict, Wu’s careful separation of symptoms from interpretation remains significant: the flashbacks are real as experiences, but their meaning—and the status of the image Maya saw—cannot be settled by naming them.