Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  Psych.: Anyone in particular? Beethoven, say? He’s always good to start with.

  Me: Oh sure. Beethoven.

  Psych.: Do you play the sonatas?

  Me: One or two of the early ones. Sort of. You know what I mean.

  Psych. (nodding): And Bach?

  Me: Oh sure, Bach, too. Certainly. Ira Fedderman liked Berlioz. Berlioz was his favorite. He wanted me to like him, too. He used to call him Hectoring Berlioz. He liked him a lot.

  Psych.: I can believe that. I like him, too. Hectoring Berlioz, that’s pretty good. I can see the point.

  Me: Yes.

  Psych.: Well, we all have our favorites. I guess you could do worse.

  And I have others, I wanted to say. A dozen more. They change from day to day. My tastes are fickle. It’s one of my worst faults. Just ask my friends.

  But the doctor apparently had the answers he was looking for. At least, he didn’t ask anything more about composers. Did that mean that Beethoven and Bach sufficed? Perhaps they would help to absolve me. A lot was at stake. My life, perhaps. The doctor then made a suggestion, proceeding with care.

  Psych.: Son, I don’t want you to misunderstand what I’m going to say now.

  Me: No, sir.

  Psych.: It’s important for you to know that we have your well-being at heart and that we have ways to help you feel better. Tested ways. Safe. But I don’t want to put you in a position where you’ll be doing anything against your will.

  He paused. We looked at each other. It was too abstract for me. He had to be more specific. Watching him, I had the sudden feeling that he was actually very shy, that this interview was painful for him, too. This brought on a rush of sympathy in me. I wanted the doctor to feel comfortable. How could I assure this? I waited for him to go on. I was thinking about what he had said about doing something against my “will.” Nobody in the Army had ever talked about that before.

  Psych. (pleasantly): Did you hear what I just said?

  I nodded and smiled a ghastly smile.

  Psych.: There are new techniques. The latest in medical advances. We have full access, even here at the front.

  What front? I didn’t see any front. Everybody at the base hospital, I was discovering, liked to talk like that, as though they were risking their lives every day, as though they were in actual combat. The real front was miles away. Miles. Although you could still hear the big guns and their echoing aftermath from time to time. I remained silent. Orderlies and doctors and a few nurses hovered nearby, talking shop. The women’s voices were among the first I had heard in many weeks; they were full of wisecracks and promise. But I was getting impatient. I began to squirm. I wanted this confrontation to be over. The doctor and I were sitting in a corner of a tent, facing each other on metal barrels. Our feet dangled uncomfortably in the air. The doctor spoke quietly to enhance the illusion of privacy. It almost worked. He glanced at my thumb every now and then while we sat there. So did I. It was still bandaged and the bandage was filthy. I tried to hide it.

  I waited for him to go on.

  “For example,” he said, “we have a serum available to us that will relax you, help you to sleep, even help you to talk.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “I recommend it,” he answered. “It’s very effective.”

  “Ira Fedderman,” I said, “went to a psychiatrist once in Brooklyn. The principal of his high school made him. He wouldn’t let him back in school unless he went. Ira Fedderman told me about it. He told me that—”

  “Ira Fedderman is not the subject here, son,” the doctor said, suddenly frosty. “Let’s try to remember that.”

  “Do you think I’m having trouble talking?” I asked, returning to the subject.

  He hesitated a moment, considering. He pushed at his specs. I liked his specs; they were flattering. They took attention away from his eyebrows and his long, thin nose. I wanted them for myself. I thought they would look good on me. Better than on him. “Well,” he said, “what I’m talking about operates like a truth serum. You know? You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?” He faked a laugh.

  “You mean the stuff really makes you tell the truth?” I asked. I was perfectly straight-faced.

  “Right. It helps you to relive your experiences and then helps you to talk about them. Of course, I’m simplifying.”

  “What kind of experiences?”

  “Well, painful ones, mainly. Those you have trouble surfacing. Those you choose to block. Like the one you just went through.”

  I changed my mind about his shyness then. I began to think that he was merely clumsy and, what’s more, didn’t care; and further, that part of the clumsiness may have come from the fact that I was his first patient. Literally. It was as though he had just opened his first office, which happened to be located in the wilds of Alsace-Lorraine, and I wandered in unexpectedly. More patients, of course, could be expected to arrive at any moment.

  “I don’t have any trouble talking about what happened to me,” I said. “I’ve been talking to you for hours.”

  “Look, it’s for seismic events,” he said. “The big ones, the ones we have trouble assimilating. The serum actually acts like a kind of soul balm,” he went on, “if you want a poetic description.” Here he laughed in self-deprecation. “I have to try it, you know. I really do. With your cooperation, of course.”

  “You have to?” I asked. I was pitiless.

  “Yes, I’m obligated in my role as division psychiatrist. I must use everything that is available to me on behalf of my patients. But I want you to understand that I firmly believe in these techniques. They’re the wave of the future. I have faith. They promise great rewards.”

  There I was sitting on this metal barrel in a corner of the tent with all the medical buzz going on around me, all the benign, health-giving chatter, and it was all somewhat confusing. It was making me tired, and I was shaking again. I could see the shaking and so could the doctor. It was impossible to hide, especially my hands, and I was still having intermittent weeping fits, which mortified me. I couldn’t help them, I didn’t even want to, so I said to myself, Screw it, go for some of the great rewards the doctor just mentioned, what can you lose?

  The answer, obviously, was my autonomy, fractured as it already was. Peculiar as it may sound, that didn’t occur to me until I was already going under, the next morning, soon after the needle had delivered its first benevolent dose of the doctor’s so-called soul balm into the veins of my upper left arm. Sodium pentothal, the doctor called it, when I asked him. He could hardly wait.

  I CERTAINLY talked. The doctor was right about that. A floodstream of obsessive language was released. On and on, words rolling to infinity. It was the same old story, perhaps, but this time, for once, I was not interrupted. This time, too, my voice carried a greater authority, a real authority, that of the serum itself. Every word I spoke now could be believed by the doctor; the integrity of his science assured it.

  I lay prone on a canvas cot in the corner of another tent and talked to the doctor, who sat alongside me on a stool, notebook and pen in hand. A black Waterman, I remember, thick as a cigar. Every now and then as I talked, he would scribble something in his notebook—a word, phrase, a whole sentence perhaps—full of clues, I hoped, then lift his eyes and look down at me through his specs, nodding encouragingly. Not that I needed encouragement. The drug saw to that.

  I think he was pleased. He certainly looked pleased, nodding at me like that. On the other hand, he would sometimes wince at a particularly graphic image, even though he had heard this story at least three times before, almost word for word—and I didn’t try to make the images fresh, either; I didn’t have that kind of control. What did it matter, anyway; it all sounded new to me in my present state, running off at the mouth while my voice shook. I was like a garrulous hostage trapped in an alien land, with an alien fluid running through my veins, bending my damaged mind to its whim. I talked, he listened. We had become the perfect couple, the doctor and I, mesh
ed in passing.

  Almost at the very end of my monologue, the doctor suddenly said, “By the way, what did you do to your thumb?”

  I looked at it. “Cut it on a C ration can. I think.”

  “What do you mean you think?”

  “I don’t remember. I’m not sure.”

  He wrote something down. “Better get a clean bandage on that,” he said after a moment. “No point in inviting infection. When did it happen?”

  I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even remember it happening.

  THAT first session on sodium pentothal took about two hours, maybe less, and I fell into a deep sleep when it was over—the kind of sleep that is like a lost universe in itself, an entire vast dark underworld that leaves no trace of itself behind. Later—three, four hours later—I began my monologue again after I awoke, but this time, I soon learned, I had other things on my mind, all of them cryptically disjointed.

  The Psych. was back in place, along with his notebook and Waterman, and another doctor, one I had never seen before, had joined him. We were introduced.

  “Dr. X,” the Psych. said. With a strange doctor present, his tone was suddenly crisper, as though he was afraid of being caught with an emotion. “He’s one of our surgeons,” he went on. “He has nothing to do with your case. He’s only going to observe. I hope you don’t mind.” He was certainly clipping his words.

  No, I didn’t mind and indicated so. In fact, after a moment’s thought, I rather liked the idea of having an audience of two. Maybe they would serve as a check on each other. Maybe they would help to assure the other’s reliability. But I didn’t tell them that.

  As I said, I now had other things on my mind. I was finished with Bézange-la-petite for the moment, with machine-gun sweeps, mortar shells, snipers, and all the rest. It was the noise, really, that I was finished with, or trying to be finished with, but the noise of Bézange lasted. It still lasts.

  “I wish you had known Ira Fedderman,” I heard myself say.

  “I wish I had, too,” my doctor said, without a pause.

  “He was really smart. Brilliant, actually.”

  “You’ve made him seem very vivid.”

  “When did I ever say anything about Ira Fedderman to you?” I really couldn’t remember.

  “Here and there in our talks. Berlioz, remember? Therapy? In Brooklyn?”

  “He could really be fucking awful when he wanted.”

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “ ‘Like’ was not the issue. ‘Pity’ was. Oh, I could really be fucking mean to him.”

  “I’m sure you weren’t the only one,” the Psych. said, making a note. “You know that type often makes other people behave badly. Sometimes deliberately.”

  “A sad fucking sack.”

  “What’s all this fucking talk all of a sudden?”

  “I always talk like that.”

  “Not with me you don’t.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. You’re always apologizing.”

  “Am I? Maybe I like to accommodate people.”

  “Just go on with what you were saying.”

  “Right. Fedderman. A sad fucking sack.”

  “Why are you punishing yourself for your friend’s death?”

  I waited a moment before answering. “Is that what I’m doing?” I finally asked.

  “Think about it for a minute.”

  I thought about it. “Who knows?” I said. “He’s dead.”

  “They’re all dead, aren’t they? Why single one out?”

  I began to squirm. He was speaking the icy truth. And he was pushing me. I was supposed to take this at my own speed. Maybe it was the presence of the other doctor that did it.

  “Paul Willis was another one,” I then said. “A mother-fucking thief.”

  The Psych. was concentrating hard. His colleague, the surgeon, sat there deadpan, observing.

  “Who was Paul Willis?”

  “He was in the squad. He was our scout. He was the one who stole our shitty underwear.”

  The Psych. was now writing very fast. So was the other doctor. Why, I don’t know. But it made me puff out. I couldn’t help it. I felt that I was like a hero in a struggle that I had to win. Me, a hero? And the Psych.? Was he just another prick? I wondered about that.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” I went on. “Paul Willis was no asshole dummy. He had a hell of a lot going for him. It was just that one thing. Stealing. He was a hell of a lot smarter than Barney Barnato, with those nose-drip quotes of his from philosophy.”

  “Sounds like quite a crew,” the Psych. said, trying a smile.

  “Who knows?” I said. “They’re all fucking dead. You just said it yourself.”

  And I was off again, racing through the mournful litany of names from the first squad and the third platoon, the ones I knew, telling the stories, their own, mine, everyone’s. I must have talked for an hour, while my eyes tried to close on me. Sometimes I heard myself shout, as though my emotions were trying to catch up with my narrative. My voice began to grow hoarse. My mouth dried up. I had lost the ability to salivate for the moment. Even so, I never got to Bern Keaton, never even brought his name up—I thought that was strange when I remembered it later—and never did manage to mention Francis Gallagher, either—Lieutenant top-class, fucking A-l. That seemed even stranger.

  • • •

  WHEN I finished, I said, “Do I have to see Captain H”—meaning the division’s historian—“again?”

  “He’s gone back to Division Headquarters,” the Psych. told me. “Where the big brass are. Is that okay with you?”

  I tried to smile. “Why not? I hope he’s happy.” But I didn’t care two cents. He had his history. “Did Gangplank Paul ever make it overseas?” I then asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve actually seen him?”

  “Well, I can’t swear …”

  “Then don’t be so sure.”

  He laughed at that. The idea seemed to please him.

  “You know,” I said, “about Ira Fedderman …”

  “You look pretty tired to me,” the doctor said, getting up to go. “Maybe it’s enough for one day.”

  I could hear some fuss going on outside the tent.

  “We’re going to run a few physical tests,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “General stuff. I want to check out your circulation. I want to make sure you’re getting enough oxygen in your system.”

  I breathed in deeply and exhaled. “How’s that?”

  “I want to make sure the oxygen is getting to your brain.”

  For some reason that struck me as funny. Oxygen. In my brain. My fucking brain. Jesus, they thought of everything. “What’s all that noise out there?”

  “They’re bringing some wounded in,” the surgeon said, his first words of the day. “And I’d better go.”

  By then I didn’t know whether I was awake or asleep. Had I said all this aloud or was I just talking to myself? In fact, I still don’t know, to this day, and nothing in my experience helps or reassures me. Outside the tent, to the north, there were a couple of artillery blasts, big ones. While I was still carrying on, still murmuring, as though I wanted to fix the pitch of what I was saying in my inner ear for all time, one of the orderlies came in to give me a shot. “It’ll put you to sleep,” he said, taking out a swab. I just stuck out my arm as though I was welcoming him, and in the needle plunged, like so many before it. This time, the effect lasted fourteen hours and burned me out, scoured me, down to my toes.

  Later, I learned that the oxygen was flowing very neatly into my brain, just as it should. My circulation was working. At least, that was out of the way—the physical part, I mean.

  NINE

  Duffel Bags

  IN ANOTHER three days, I had arrived in the city of Nancy, where my Psych., in collaboration with some of his cohorts at the base hospital, had decided to ship me for a while. The move, he explained, was
designed to offer me some daily chores for which I would have full responsibility and, in the process, give me a chance to return to myself. That was what I seemed to need, above all—to go full circle. Of course, I leapt at the chance that he was offering me to get away from the front, to heal—as I’m sure he knew I would—but I nevertheless tried hard to hide my excitement at the prospect in case he might change his mind. It wasn’t altogether clear to me then, but it is now—I no longer trusted anyone.

  The Psych., I finally decided, was probably doing his best. He had tried hard to deal with me, or so I had to assume; but I had the clear feeling when we said good-bye that he couldn’t wait to get rid of me. For one thing, for a man who rarely smiled, he was smiling a lot as we shook hands.

  “Thanks for everything,” I said, as I climbed into the back of a truck that was going to make a mail pickup in the city and then deliver me to my new post.

  “Take care of yourself,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice. “You’re not out of the woods yet. And don’t be shy. If you feel that you need me, you know where I am.” Then he smiled some more and backed away from the truck’s exhaust, coughing from the acrid fumes. I wanted to pat him on the back, to soothe him and show him I cared, but instead I just sat there, smiling too.

  Actually, I appreciated what he said, even while doubting his sincerity. But why should I have worried about his sincerity? The important thing was that he had said it. I guess the real truth was that we were both a little sick of each other. I was even sicker of myself, and knew it. But there was no time to consider all that at the moment. I would have to remind myself of it later, for we were suddenly off to Nancy, far enough behind the lines, the driver revving up without a word of warning and stepping on the gas full-strength. In a moment, the doctor had become a blur behind me, then a dot. Finally, I lost him entirely. He was gone.