by Jerome Gold
“I don’t know. But I’d like to be able to make the choice myself.”
“Let’s wait and see what the hand looks like after we do the skin graft.” The major stood up. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Be sure to clean that hand religiously. It’s important to clear up that infection before we operate.”
After lunch I cleaned my hand again. The orderly brought the basin of tepid water and squeezed a stream of Phisohex into it as I unwrapped the thing which now most resembled a suppurating claw. I dreaded these times. I knew that I should rip the bandages off of the fingers in order to tear away the dead blood and the threads of pus that oozed through the perforations in the gauze like yellow worms.
I submerged my hand in the water and let it soak. Gently, gently, I teased the gauze away from the fingers. I dabbed perfunctorily at them with a wash cloth and made a gesture of cleansing them of the pus which fell back onto the sore wounds as though made of weak elastic. I could not see of what use a skin graft would be to this thing, or of what use this thing could ever be to me. All of it was something to turn your stomach. I picked up the tweezers and probed at a black thing that looked like it was beginning to push out of the fleshy tissue of a wound. I caught the end of it and drew it out. It was a sliver of copper about three-eighths of an inch long. A drop of blood bubbled out of the hole it had left.
“Does it hurt?”
Even as I jumped I was careful to thrust my right, tweezers-holding hand into the air away from my left hand and to shove my left hand into the middle of the basin to keep it from bumping against the side. Before I could get my breath, Lieutenant Laurel said, “Did I frighten you?”
“Yes, you frightened me.”
“I’m sorry. What are those black spots?”
“Pieces of metal. I’m trying to pick them out.”
“It must really hurt.”
“No. It only hurts to wash it.”
I patted my hand dry and bandaged it. When this was done I lay back on my pillow and slipped my feet between the sheets. I felt drained and shaky.
“I don’t know where Smythe is,” I said.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you. He’s supposed to be at Physical Therapy but he’s not there.”
“I haven’t seen him. Do you want to leave a message?”
“No. I only wanted to tease him. I’d tease you but you’re not the teasing type.”
“That’s true.”
She looked at me for a moment before saying, “Are you trying to be mean?”
“I don’t want to be your friend, Lieutenant.”
I could see the anger working on her face, and the search for words. Finally she went away without having said anything.
I tried to sleep. Someone must have walked by the sergeant in the Stryker frame; I heard him ask for a cigarette.
In the evening we watched the news and Star Trek on television. We watched the news because it showed the war and we tried to identify the units we knew. We watched the news to try to determine who was still alive. There was the news and there was Star Trek. The rest of America hardly mattered. After Star Trek the television was left on because Wendell liked to go from one to the other, from his own television to the ward’s, so he could see two programs at the same time.
I decided that I had had enough, I wasn’t going to clean my hand tonight. The morning would be soon enough. When the orderly brought in the basin of water I told him that I didn’t need it.
“Have you washed your hand four times today?”
“No.”
I glared at him until he removed the basin.
Wendell was inspecting his pubic hair. He caught me looking at him and grinned at me lasciviously. The cancer sergeant wasn’t crying or whining yet. That came with the dark. Jeff lay asleep. He had slept the entire day except when they roused him to get him to urinate.
I closed my eyes and lay my good arm across them. Soon they would turn off the television. Then the lights. Then it would be dark.
Cigarette tips made tiny orange suns in the dark. Smythe told ethnic jokes. There was the Polish nurse joke again, and another one about the number of Polacks it takes to screw in a light bulb. And there was a Jewish one: you knew when you were in a Jewish neighborhood because you could see the toilet paper hanging out to dry.
“Jesus Christ, Smythe,” somebody said.
“Hey, Smythe, you still banging Laurel?”
“Her roommate,” Smythe said.
“Christ, Smythe. Her roommate. Ain’t you got no tact?”
“A hard cock has no tact,” Smythe said.
“Laurel was looking for you this afternoon,” I said.
“She found me. She wanted to tell me that her roommate is seeing somebody besides me.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah. Laurel’s a nice lady. Not much of a fuck, either.”
“I got me a sixteen-year-old last weekend,” said the door gunner across from us. He had been shot in the foot. When he was in hospital in Japan his foot had infected because the medics refused to change his dressing, they thought he was a malingerer. No one had asked himself how someone could discharge a rifle into the bottom of his foot. Smythe was a door gunner too. He had a plastic hip now.
“No shit?” Smythe said.
“Yeah. She’s my brother’s wife’s sister.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said a sergeant from MACV.
“I’m not. She’s got the same philosophy I’ve got: If it feels good and it doesn’t hurt anybody, why not?”
“I didn’t know you were a hippie.”
“I’m not, man. I’m a killer, but I got love in my heart.”
“Hey, how’s Jeff doing?”
“He’s still asleep.”
“That guy. I don’t see how he’s taken as much as he has.”
“What choice has he had?”
“Hey, Adams, were you really a POW?”
“Yeah.”
“You were a POW, Adams?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened? Did you escape?”
“They let me go.”
“What?”
“They cut off four of my toes and then they let me go. After about six weeks. They put me out on the highway and some South Vietnamese came by and picked me up.”
“Why did they cut off your toes?”
“When we were shot down my foot got fucked up in the crash. I think they thought they were saving my foot.”
“Was it necessary, do you think, to cut off the toes?”
“I don’t know. I think they thought so. I don’t think they were trying to torture me.”
“What happened to the rest of the crew?”
“I don’t know. I never saw them after they separated us.”
“Did they give you anesthetic when they amputated your toes?”
“No.”
“Maybe they didn’t have any.”
“They had it. I saw them use it with their own wounded. I’d really like to know what they thought they were doing, whether they were torturing me or trying to save my foot.”
“We had an NVA doctor once that we almost let go.”
“Who’s that?”
“Me.”
“Who the fuck is ‘Me’?”
“Frank.”
“Okay, Frank. Tell us your story. Make it a good one—Tanner is scratching at the door, we gotta keep him entertained.”
“We were operating in the DMZ, and we captured this bunker complex. It was like an entire city below the ground, hospital, food and ammo warehouses, a generator plant, everything. It took us seven days to destroy it completely. One of the prisoners was an NVA doctor. I got to know him a little, we both knew some French. He told me how hard it was to care for their wounded because the NVA didn’t have enough drugs or adequate hospital facilities.”
“Are you a medic?”
“Yeah. I knew he would be sent to Saigon, that’s where prisoners who are officers go so the Vietnamese can interrogate them
. And I didn’t want him to be tortured.”
“Everybody does it.”
“I know. I began to make this plan to sneak him out of the compound so he could escape back into North Viet Nam. I didn’t have it very well formulated, but I was thinking about it. But on the last day, when we blew up his hospital, he went crazy. He had been getting kind of flaky anyway—I had noticed it myself but I figured it was just that kind of weird you get when you have nothing to do after you’ve been in the shit for a long time. But when we blew up the hospital he went insane. So we sent him to Saigon with the others.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to him in Saigon?”
“No.”
“Hey, Frank?”
“What?”
“If I were you I wouldn’t be telling that story too often.”
“No?”
“I mean everybody here is okay, and Tanner is okay, but you never know who else might be listening.”
“Just like in the ‘Nam, huh? Everybody you can’t see is a Victor Charlie.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I know I am.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, Smythe, do you have any more ethnic jokes?”
“Negative, negative,” Tanner broke in, coming into the ward. “Lights are out, the smoking lamp is not lit. Go to sleep now, like good little boys, or I’ll tell Big Nurse.”
“Oooh, Tanner.”
“Oooh, Big Nurse.”
“I got your big nurse hanging, Tanner.”
“I mean it. Knock off the talk.”
“Okay, Tanner. Have a rotten day.”
I lay back, my arm tingling, and waited for the conversation in my head to begin.
Jeff woke up about midmorning. We passed his bed as though to visit someone else, or on the way to the latrine, and said: “Hey, Tiger.” “How ya doin’, Jeff?” “How ya feelin’?” “Welcome back, Jeff.” “If it isn’t Moshe Dayan,” in reference to the eye patch he wore.
When I went to say hello, Jeff said, “They didn’t cut.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t cut. They gave me too much anesthetic and they spent all day just keeping me alive.”
“Oh Christ.”
“I have to do it again. When they think I’m ready.”
“Shit.”
“It’s a pisser. I didn’t even know until Laurel told me this morning. I have so many bandages on anyway that I wouldn’t have known the difference. And I’m always in pain.”
“Bastards.”
“It gets harder each time. Every time I’m more certain I’m not going to come out of it. I fight sleep because I’m afraid I won’t wake up. I don’t want to do it again.”
“Tell’em to fuck off. Tell’em you’ve had enough of their bullshit and you want out. Tell Laurel to get you your clothes. Do you want me to call her?”
Jeff laughed. With his lips stretched in the grin you could see the cyanic blue inside. “Fuck you, Dickinson.”
They wheeled me in a gurney into the corridor outside the operating room where a man who introduced himself as the anesthesiologist was waiting for me. He stuck a needle into my arm seven times. A nurse came by and took the syringe from him; she hit a vein on the first try. “Call for a nurse when you can’t do something yourself,” she said to the anesthesiologist.
“I’m still in training,” he said when the nurse had gone. He brought over a stand from which was suspended a bottle filled with clear liquid. A rubber tube with a metal clamp about halfway down hung from the bottle. He connected the tube to the syringe.
“What’s in the bottle?”
“Dextrose and pentathol solution. Have you ever had it?”
“Yes. It makes me sick.”
“It won’t make you sick. I’ll give you some now.”
He opened the clamp. The pentathol poured into my head; the headache felt like it had always been there, something pressed against my eyes, the nausea began. “How’s that?” he said.
When I was sure I could, I opened my eyes. The doorgunner was propped up against his pillow.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I asked, “Is it still Thursday?”
The door gunner laughed. “You’ve been out for only a couple of minutes.”
“Good.”
“You were really sick.”
“No shit.”
“Do you remember it?”
“I remember being sick and Tanner threatening to catheterize me if I didn’t piss.”
The headache was still there but the pressure on my eyes was gone. The muscles of my stomach were sore. I said, “I’m going to sleep.”
“Good night,” the door gunner said.
The lights were on. Star Trek was on the television.
“There he is,” the door gunner said.
“Hey, Dixie, how ya doin’?” Jeff called.
“Better,” I said.
Wendell looked up from the television and smiled and waggled his eyebrows at me and returned to the television.
“We didn’t think you were going to make it for a while,” the cancer sergeant said.
“I didn’t think so either,” I said.
Somebody not Smythe was in Smythe’s bed. There was a bandage over his eyes. The skin below the bandage was a polished red. There were spots of red on his cheeks. He lay without moving, his arms at his sides outside his blanket. He appeared to be lying in a prone position of attention.
“Where’s Smythe?” I asked the door gunner.
“He was released a couple of days ago.”
“You mean people really do get out of this place?”
Jeff laughed. “If I didn’t know you, Dixie, I’d think you didn’t like it here.”
“I love it. I eat this shit up.”
Jeff said, “I think you had it worse than I did. Did they cut?”
“I think so. My hand doesn’t hurt now, even when I try to move the fingers. Actually, I don’t feel it at all. They probably cut it off altogether. They’ll tell me when they think I’m ready.”
“Fucking Dickinson,” Jeff said.
“Are you awake?” I asked the man in Smythe’s bed. There was no sign that he had heard.
“Who is he?” I asked the door gunner.
“He came in just a couple of hours ago. They haven’t put his name on the bed yet. He must be Jewish. There was a rabbi in here looking at him a while ago.”
“It’s a real horror story, Dixie,” Jeff said. “He just got back from ‘Nam and somebody threw acid in his eyes.”
“Jesus.”
“His rabbi told me. Somebody ran up to him at the airport and threw it in his face.”
“A war protester?”
“That’s what the rabbi said. There was a demonstration and the guy just walked right into it. He didn’t even know what was going on.”
“He must have been gone a long time not to know what was going on.”
“Two years,” the man with the bandaged eyes said.
Jeff and the door gunner and I said nothing. After a moment the man said, “Not long enough.”
We gave him time but he didn’t say anything more. Finally I said, “My name’s Dickinson. I’m in the bed next to yours. On your right.”
“I’m Stein. Just Stein. Nothing in front of it; not Roth-stein or Goldstein or Rosenstein. Just Stein.”
“Stein.”
“You got it.”
“Welcome to America, Stein,” said the door gunner.
In the dream I am walking with an Asian man along a wharf where I am to board a ship that will take me back to America. We are in uniform, he in the uniform of his army, I in the uniform of mine, but the uniforms are the same. There has been much between us, and both of us feel grief at my leaving. Behind everything is this grief and, too, his resentment that I am going. As we walk I try to excuse something that I have done but this
angers him. He is a powerful man with muscular wrists and forearms, and as he grows angrier I become afraid because I know that he is right about the thing I have done and my knowledge gives him greater strength, and beneath it all is the grief and the resentment.
We turn onto a dock and begin to fight. Behind me is a peasant woman carrying a marketing bag, and I shove my elbow into her to move her out of my way so that I will have room to maneuver. My friend’s thumbs now are in the pit of my throat, the veins stand out in his forearms and on his face, and in my mouth is the taste of blood, and my vision is red and my breath is choked. I strangle him, too, but with only one hand, for the other has become weak as though crippled, and I cannot use it. I know that he is going to kill me and that there is nothing I can do, and the terror of this irrevocability is worse than and unlike anything I have known.
I dream this; it is the first time for this dream and I do not want to have it again, but I know that I will. It is that kind of dream.
They came in the morning, put Jeff on a cart, and took him away. They said he would be back by noon. At noon he was not back. At two o’clock someone asked the day nurse how Jeff was doing. She disappeared, then returned and told us that Jeff was in Recovery, that everything was fine, the surgery had gone well. But she looked frightened, her facial muscles were pulled tight and I did not recognize the smile that she gave. Those of us who were ambulatory clustered around Jeff s bed.
At three o’clock Laurel came on duty. We insisted that she call Recovery. Jeff was not there; he had not been there. One of us took the telephone from Laurel and spoke to Recovery. Jeff was not there. Laurel told us to go back to our beds. We ignored her. Another nurse, one we didn’t know, appeared, then two doctors. They did not come into the ward but conferred in the corridor. After a while the doctors went away.
The dinner cart arrived. Only a couple of us ate. Two doctors, different ones, came in. They told us Jeff was in Recovery. They told us to call. Somebody did; Jeff was in Recovery. Those of us who had not eaten turned to the cold dinners that had been left on our trays.
At midnight they wheeled Jeff in. He was still unconscious. He did not wake up for two days. There were no new bandages on him. Tanner told us that the anesthesiologist had overloaded Jeff again, had stopped his breathing, that for the next twelve hours the surgeons had worked only to make the blue in his lips and under his nails and then in his hands and feet go away. The surgery would be performed in another week or two when the surgeons were certain that the anesthesia had worked its way out of Jeff’s system. Maybe Jeff had become allergic to anesthetic, Tanner suggested.