—Try the New Testament instead of the Old, Hal said, and walked away.
The boy snapped out of his dream of equality between their ranks and saluted him. Something told Hal that he should have stayed with this boy. Just a little longer.
After noon chow he found the bulkhead to the engine room open and went down the flights of stairs cutting through the runways on the sides of the amphitheater compartment in the center of the ship. When he reached the Diesel engines, he leaned on the railing to watch the walking beams pump and the pistons slash through the air with their slow murderous fists. They were oiled and burnished. The heat of the engine room was fierce. Hal wondered if great American industrialists went to a hell like this. Through the tube under his feet passed the thick axle that turned the ship’s screw in the water outside. He felt faint from the temperature and began to wonder if the engines that man had made caused God any jealousy.
A finger made a hole in his back, so he turned to face the engineer officer wearing oil-spotted blue dungarees. He was young and affected a certain brusqueness, perhaps to offset the lush nude tattooed on his chest.
—What a character to be talking about God, the engineer said. You make me laugh. If I looked like you, my Polish pig at Newport News wouldn’t be ditching me every time she gets drunk. I buy her furs and I buy her flowers. I buy sateen-covered chairs for her dive. And what for? So she can hold open house while I’m at sea and give away for nothing what I’m paying for. . . . Perhaps you can tell me what I ought to do, Mr. Anthony.
This engineer had cold Swedish eyes that pierced nonsense. He played the game his own way. He showed Hal the engines and the salt water purifiers and the boilers, touching each fondly with his red arms. And Hal thought that the sea gave men a certain immediacy to reality and an insight. This was the reason for the wisdom all sailors had. They were more and less than other human beings. They could laugh at the woman in whose arms they were lying, and they laughed at all earth-rooted men secretly, but with great good humor, pitying them a little, the way one pities those who’ve never been able to learn to walk.
—Engines, Hal said, wondering if it would get a laugh, give me more of a feeling of power than I get from the men who made them.
—You talk like I do when I get rummed up. . . . You’re slightly off the beam, but I like you. And I can size up my man, don’t think I can’t. . . . Say, why don’t you come up and live with me for the trip? I got an empty bunk. And you know goddam well that the merchant marine lives better than you poor doughfeet below deck. You wouldn’t have to eat Spam three times a day. And I got beaucoup rye. . . . Whaddya say?
—I’ve never learned to live with anyone, Hal said. I’d be a disappointment to you. I have my moods. I get ornery.
—Well, so do I, the engineer said, taking hold of Hal’s arm. There was a kindness and a disinterestedness in his squeeze. When we get ornery, we could bat the hell outa one another. Do us both good. . . . Whaddya say?
—Maybe it would be better if we met on deck at night and talked once in a while. You see, I keep telling myself I need one close friend. But I know I never can have one.
—Anything you say, bud, the engineer said, walking away. My error.
For the second time Hal knew he should have listened more.
One midnight he stood on the officers’ boat deck and watched small lightnings play on the horizon. Every fifteen minutes he’d duck inside the blackout curtain and have a cigarette. The thunder had a dull unsatisfied rumble. And certain things had come clear in his mind after thinking all afternoon. He had a tempo different from anyone else’s in this world—whether faster or slower he didn’t know. And all his current was imprisoned in himself in insulation of his own making. He’d never be able to make contact with people on their own grounds because he couldn’t accept those conventions of timing and pacing that made conversations possible. Only in moments did his spirit reach out to others’ like a flash of lightning. For the rest he was destined to be alone, like a twin whose double has died at birth. . . .
The antiaircraft guns on the turrets opened up with a spit of tracers, sending ribbons out into the sky. A rain began to fall. Lightnings soft and cozy began to play about the ship’s funnels. It occurred to him that maybe no one else on earth heard this thunderstorm except himself. In the flashes between the tracer anti-aircraft and the streaks of summer lightning he could see the other ships in the convoy rolling over the horizon. Nevertheless they seemed sure of their own reeling fates, like drunken people on a nerry-go-round. And then Hal had an intuition that in these muddy heavens a bolt was being prepared especially for him. He dropped to his knees by the railing, frightened and alone.
In the gummy city of Oran he was visited with something that in the old days at CCNY would have sent him to a smawt psychology student. It began as a malaise, a feeling that his heart had been broken crossing the Atlantic. He’d thought to carry his soul intact out of the States, but he seemed to have dropped a piece somewhere, possibly in the ocean. He would wake in the mornings with a feeling of the most intense displacement. He didn’t know where he was or why he was here. Something in him seemed to be chasing another part. Often this hunt between sections of himself became so vicious that he had to put his head between his hands, as a man with a hangover expects his heart to stop in the very next moment, and prays for even the distraction of a bowel movement.
Or at the beach of Ain El Turk, lying in the sun on his days off, drinking Grand Marc, Hal would look anxiously at the sky with the presentiment that some vulture was up there wheeling over him. These anxieties he sought to escape by being with his men as much as possible and seeking to trace his own uneasiness in his GI’s. But they only laughed among themselves and got drunk and went AWOL and picked up diseases from the women of Oran.
One day in an attempt to uncoil himself from his paralysis, Hal asked to be made officer of the day. There was to be a formal guard mount in the Place. It was the first time in the history of the American Army that a second lieutenant had requested a detail as officer of the day. A French band played two national anthems. Hal, standing in the Oran sunset by the flagpole, wondered if his leggins were tight, whether the bar of paper from an Old Gold package he’d pasted on his helmet liner had slipped off. He did a smart about-face and walked to the opened ranks to inspect their pieces. He had a pressing feeling in his head and his heart beat so that he thought he was going to fall on his face in the loose sand of the parade ground. The guard for the evening was composed of Oran MP’s, tough and cynical, because they’d been wounded in Tunisia. But instead of being sent home they found themselves patrolling the streets of Oran and arresting GI’s with loose buttons. In between these functions the MP’s operated and promoted with the bars and the ladies of the evening, arresting them or possessing them as the mood struck them. This was Hal’s guard. Yet in formation they were magnificent, nazi-looking. Their eyes glittered snake-like under their varnished liners. Their brass and weapons and cartridge belts were impeccable.
Hal stepped up to the flawless files, knowing that though they kept their eyes front they were appraising him and sniggering to themselves. He hadn’t been in Tunisia or in the landing on Gela. He was just a base section chickenshit second looie. He heard the breathing of each man as he inspected him up and down, cracking the rifle as he snatched it from each. By the second file he all but slipped in the sand as he did his right face. But he got through the whole guard without a hitch. As he was grabbing for the rifle of the last sentinel, he dropped it. He had to stoop over and pick it up. He tilted it and peeped down the bore.
—Your piece is filthy, he said to the sentinel.
—Wasn’t before you dropped it, sir, the man answered, never flicking his eyes from attention.
Somehow Hal got through with the guard mount, the closing of the ranks, the lowering of the flag. While the bugler blew retreat and Hal stood at parade rest, he felt their eyes and the setting Oran sun gouging at his back. He posted his first relief and
reported to the adjutant, asking to be relieved as OD because he wasn’t well. He was shaking so that he had to wedge his knees together as he stood at attention before the adjutant.
—Lieutenant, said the adjutant, it isn’t good policy to drink in hot weather, especially just before you have a guard mount.
—I haven’t had a drink since last night, Hal said.
—Then use your mosquito netting and take your atabrine, hear? . . . You’re relieved as officer of the day.
Hal saluted and did an about-face. His heart was going like his knees. The adjutant must have heard it. He didn’t bother with chow. But when he’d removed his side arms and leggins and had put on fresh suntans because the leggins had creased the others, he went at once to the officers’ club, stood at the end of the bar, and ordered one brandy and soda after another. Already in the lounge were majors with nurses or with French WAC’s of the Corps Féminin Auxiliaire de l’Air.
For some time now Hal had been noting in himself symptoms unknown to himself in the bars of New York, where he used to stand for hours alone, listening and appraising and throwing down the drinks. It had always been the same with him in bars: the joe next to him struck up a conversation. But in the bars of Oran some gap had arisen between him and all other human beings. It seemed to him that anything anybody else had to say was too prosaic, too factual, or too obvious to the situation. Like a bad exposition at the beginning of a play. It amazed and horrified him how people could talk for ten minutes on such subjects as how they couldn’t get the cigarette brand they wanted at the PX; what they said to their first sergeant; or the Oranaise who wouldn’t. Hal’s mind had become like an idling motor; he could foretell what they’d say ten minutes before they said it. In everything they wished to communicate there was something like a stale joke. And Hal found it difficult, after a few drinks, to look them straight in the eye. There was some vast and deadly scheme in which they were all working; only they didn’t know it.
Hal himself had an inkling of what was upsetting him. Casting about for a rational explanation of why he felt so odd in Oran, he decided it was because the war was beginning to seep into his bones. This war was the fault of everybody, himself included. Therefore he couldn’t bear to hear them jabbering at him, opaque to another reality more bitter than their own. They were enmeshed in their own tyranny of fact, insensitive to the dreadfulness of their own natures and to the position in which they happened to be—squirrels of fate in a slimy North African town, having the time of their lives. And Hal wondered if all the Americans rolling in the materialism of the base sections were living like bloodsuckers off the deaths of those at the front, which were their only excuse for being here at all. And gradually, pondering on his new inability to come to grips with people in their domain of PX rations, office hours, and no mail from home, Hal found himself swimming in a wild and lonesome lake of semantic irrelevance. Nothing made any more sense to him. There was nothing anybody could say to him to lift the weight of unreality that was crushing him. He felt like a sleepwalker among all these grimacing marionettes. He wondered if overseas in wartime there might be some dark vortex of death that sucked back from Salerno even to the city of Oran. His desire was to tear himself away from all who tried to monopolize his ear. Something in him kept saying, Come away, dear. Your place isn’t here. . . . But where?
By evening, with no dinner in his stomach, Hal was still at the end of the bar. He was slightly stupefied. The brandy of North Africa didn’t give him the compassionate calm that he got from the rye of the States. It was only a poison that anesthetized whatever censor was in his mind. In the mist of the fumes of Grand Marc things crawled up through a trap door in his brain. They were nameless little incubi with no bodies or faces, but they scuttled around inside his head squeaking in furry voices of doubt and doom. They played with one another like a litter of kittens, but it was the calculated play of children putting on a show for their parents. Hal knew that actually they were playing with him—that each of these vague animals was himself in pieces.
The bar filled up with officers and nurses and Red Cross girls. They wedged themselves into their niches and attempted to impinge their private worlds on one another. By now Hal knew also all the solitary drinkers of Oran. But if they looked his way or motioned to him to join them (he’d been father confessor to them all), he’d study his glass or look at the wall. Others would immerse themselves sufficiently to float what they imagined were their troubles, then they’d forage about the club for someone to talk to, carrying their individual obsessions in their arms like abortions being hustled to a sewer. Only Hal had no particular release. Alcohol simply shut tighter the gates of his prison, spraying the air of his jail with something deathly sweet. He saw himself beating about in the fumes and fanning, trying to create air where none was.
A figure slipped into the empty place at the bar on his left. He didn’t look, as he used once to turn welcomingly to newcomers in New York, as though they were keeping an appointment with him. He merely ordered another drink. But straightway he was aware of a seepage between himself and whoever stood next to him. It was as though they’d already entered into conversation. The elbow touching his own on the bar was eloquent though motionless. At last Hal couldn’t stand the atmosphere any longer. He narrowed his eyes and slowly turned his head to look out over the club terrace.
At his left was a parachute captain who seemed to be looking through him. Apparently he too had been waiting till the psychic charges he’d been hurling at Hal would energize him into turning, as the sun eggs on a sunflower. The captain was shorter than Hal and slighter. He had a tension as exquisite as the fake repose of Greek athletes in marble. His jet hair was so tightly curled that it had an energy all its own. He was dressed in combat fashion. His sleeves were halfway up his elbows. He wore no tie. The hair grew up his throat and on his neat tight arms. His eyes were set at a slant, and his teeth were white and daggerlike. He seemed a monarch of some race of cats.
—Look at them, will you? he said to Hal, as though they were resuming a conversation.
—Whom?
The parachute captain put one of his boots on the brass rail and kicked it. Then with a lazy tension he made a gesture including all the other people leaning on the bar:
—This race of straphangers and human adding machines. . . . Look at the faces of those nurses. Sleek inanity sleepwalking in a beauty parlor. Look at the paunches on those majors. . . .
His vituperation came out slowly, with the detailed passion of an expert at murder.
—You don’t like Americans? Hal said. He was fascinated by the green eyes and by the parachute insignia, wings suspended like a bat’s at dusk.
—Who does, except themselves? Automatons from the world’s greatest factory. . . . They have no souls, you see . . . only the ability to add up to one million. Did you ever hear them try to carry on a sensible conversation? . . . Oh, they’ve got quite an ingenious system of government, I grant you. But none of them gives a damn about it except when it gets them into a war. . . . They’ve got less maturity or individuality than any other people in the world. Poetry and music to them—why they’re deaf to anything that isn’t sold by an advertising agency. . . . They don’t know how to treat other human beings. With all their screaming about democracy, none of them has the remotest conception of human dignity. . . . Listen to the sounds that Negro band is making. That’s their American music. Sexual moans and thumps. . . . They don’t know how to make love to a woman, and all their hatreds are between football teams or states of the same Union or for people they don’t understand. Victims of the mob spirit and regimentation. . . . They’ve never really suffered. But when they get the first twinge of toothache of the soul, they start feeling sorry for themselves instead of learning any wisdom from pain.
—You’re talking treason, Hal said.
It was almost his old manner of listening and advising in the bars of New York.
—Truth is always treasonous, the captain said, clicki
ng his glass with a soft ferocity on the bar. And now these poor dears are involved in a war. This war is simply the largest mass murder in history. Theirs is the only country that has enough food and gasoline and raw materials. So they’re expending these like mad to wipe out the others in the world who’d like a cut of their riches. In order to preserve their standard of living for a few more years, they’ve dreamed up ideologies. Or their big business has. So they’re at war with nearly everybody else in the world. The rest of the world hates Americans because they’re so crude and stupid and unimaginative. . . . They will win this war. They’ll reduce Europe to a state of fifteen hundred years ago. Then their businessmen and their alphabetical bureaucracies will go into the shambles of Milan, Berlin, and Tokyo and open up new plants. . . . International carpetbaggers. . . . Millions of human beings will be dead, and most of the human feelings will be dead forever. . . . Hurray for our side. . . . We’re destroying all the new ideas and all the little men of the world to make way for our mass production and our mass thinking and our mass entertainment. Then we can go back to our United States, that green little island in the midst of a smoking world. Then we can kill all the Negroes and the Jews. Then we’ll start on Russia.
—Not pessimistic, are you? Hal asked feebly, watching the glowing green eyes.
—Me? the captain said. I’m the most optimistic man in the world. I see what is happening to the human race. It gets worse all the time. . . . What an obscene comedy.
The parachute captain had an almost effete way of speaking, like poets in the Village. This contrasted with his agile body and the violence of his passion.
—When shall I see you again? Hal said, disengaging himself softly.
—I am buried near Taormina on the island of Sicily. I wish I had a few flowers on my grave. . . . When I was alive, I loved flowers.
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