by Gil Hogg
Amherst considered and said, tentatively, “Are you making too much of this?”
“Every time I see or think of Jim Blake I see that poor abused woman with her legs twisted under her, and the children… How could I marry Gail, join Jim’s family, probably see him regularly at family gatherings, and as guest in my house, and a confidant of my wife’s for the rest of my life; maybe live a few blocks away, have our children grow up together? On the other hand, how could I tell her? It would be like detonating a grenade over the relationship between three people. Who would she believe? The soldier-hero, or the broken-down veteran? Telling her would be explosive. Not telling her would leave a barricade between us.”
Amherst didn’t seem to be convinced. “Are you sure you can’t talk to her? I mean, the two of you are planning to share the rest of your lives. That’s a bigger deal than her relationship with her brother. Some brothers are bad. Some are bad and still loved. Couldn’t she swallow that? All you’d be saying is, ‘I don’t want to be too close to your brother in our life together.’ You’d tell her why.”
“That sounds very rational. Can you imagine the mental mayhem that she would suffer in the telling? I think you can. But can you foretell what her reaction would be? I don’t think so. No way. The chances are that much as she cares for me, she would decide my view of Kam Sung is suspect, unbalanced. Why not believe the strongly and calmly held view of her heroic, unsullied brother? It was an interrogation in difficult and dangerous circumstances. The idea that, after a talk, Gail and I would walk into the sunset together, hand in hand, is impossible to believe. Deep fissures would appear in our relationship. Whether we could negotiate our way over or around these is impossible to say. Let’s say we could. It would have a cost in anguish for us both. Is there any point in starting the most important personal relationship in our lives when I know it’s going to be riven by this flaw?”
Amherst looked into the distance again, his forehead creased. “Yeah, perhaps you’re right that the outcome of a talk could be uncertain… and leave lasting scars. Getting the facts on the table might hinder as much as it helps.”
“Because there aren’t any absolute facts,” I said, “only different views of past events, as Dr Meadows is fond of saying. Talk would be ruinous to the three of us and silence is impossible for me. I can’t see any way out but parting, but you don’t really agree.”
Amherst looked at me out of the corners of his eyes, perhaps wondering if he should oppose. “No, to be frank, I don’t agree. I think it’s better to face the ugly facts and see what happens. It would hurt Gail, and of course you, but it might lead to a resolution. This is better than turning somersaults, waffling around with ‘what-ifs’ to protect Gail, with the rest of your life in question. You’re proposing to run away from something you should confront.”
I merely nodded. We had stated our positions, and we returned to the terrace and had a cup of coffee without returning to the subject again. When Amherst had finished he stood up and we embraced. “I’m very grateful for what you did for me, Geoffrey.”
“I guess you won’t be around in this area when I’m here next time, but we’ll keep in touch,” Amherst said.
As he walked away towards the gate, I realised that we had no practical way of keeping in touch. Amherst looked back when he was on the drive approaching the gates. I felt very alone. I knew that at that distance he couldn’t see my hollow cheeks or opaque eyes, but I had developed an unmilitary slouch which would have been visible.
Amherst paused again when he came to the low box hedges near the gate. I raised one hand – I was still holding the whiskey – and gave him a thumbs-up with the other. He waved, a resigned, final sort of gesture.
36
My worries about leaving the veterans’ home, wondering whether I could stand on my feet, did not go away. Gail was trying to persuade me I was cured or nearly cured, quietly willing me towards the door. And although I had virtually told her we weren’t going to make a permanent couple, she ignored it, assuming that once I left the home a well or nearly well man, we would come together and marry. And I didn’t want to face the final break with her that would have to come when I was free.
Another thing that worried me about leaving was precisely what I would do. It was one thing to bullshit with Amherst about ‘hanging out’ and another to decide on how I was really going to spend my hours and days. My parents were too old for me to live with; theirs was the distant, quiet life of two creatures who had become encrusted together in their tiny ambit of happiness. A restless man in the house would only worry them. My kid brother was still in college. I had friends, but no close friends. I couldn’t imagine starting teacher training immediately; I couldn’t face the concentration of it at the moment. A day is a long time. I feared drifting from bar to bar like so many other veterans.
The routine of the home muffled me, the warmth and the comfort and the casual companionship; and the talks with Dr Meadows. All the inmates in our section were apparently well self-controlled. We had been selected, according to Dr Meadows, because our characteristics were purely psychological, mild and believed to be reversible; we didn’t present any violent or dangerous potential. We were surprisingly compatible. We seldom talked about active service although we had all experienced the hardships of it as commissioned officers. We made a good life for ourselves in an undemonstrative way. We dined well, played sport, and engaged in constructive activities like current affairs discussions and debates. We had visiting lecturers on art and books, and we had leisure to read and rest. I was swaddled here, a chick looking out of its nest at a disordered world, and putting off flight until tomorrow.
I had gone for a long period, many months after the trial, feeling that I had fortunately avoided the disgrace of the court martial. Spared from any sentence on medical grounds, I knew I would eventually be discharged sick from the Army. I believed then that I was quite well, and at a time of my choosing, or that of Dr Meadows, I would be able to depart the home and take up my life with or without Gail. It all looked, then, like a clever manoeuvre thanks to Amherst, rather than a disreputable evasion of responsibility.
But eventually my talks with Dr Meadows had become less a psychological game with him, in which I pretended to be a mildly confused person, and more a genuine dialogue between a sick patient and his doctor. I suppose you could say that Dr Meadows convinced me, or showed me that I was sick. Not that he ever said so. It simply became apparent from the weight of his questioning that I didn’t see things clearly and must be sick.
What Dr Meadows did was to point out to me that I didn’t know Jim Blake or Colonel Vaughan or Darrel Trask and they didn’t know me. What he meant was that you couldn’t know another person. You might think you did, especially, say, a sister or a brother, but you could never really tell with certainty what they were thinking or how they were going to react. He said people with the best possible motives were always misunderstanding each other, leading to differences, and often violence. Each person was unique and had a unique take on events – that was why human relations were so interesting and at times, so bad.
This was why he concluded that in my case it wasn’t any use taking a particular position about what happened at Kam Sung. To him, the idea that the massacre could be seen as an incontrovertible fact was simply wrong. Therefore there was no reason to go out on a limb for one particular interpretation or another. He said I could, by all means, have my own view, but I always had to recognise that it mightn’t be right. And this recognition of fallibility ought to be a corrective for me if I was inclined to blame Blake or Vaughan or Trask.
Actually, I found this a helpful insight, thinking in terms of my personal guilt, but I began to have nightmares and headaches because I came to understand that I was indeed cast into a world where people didn’t know each other, the half-blind leading the half-blind. Dr Meadows was very candid in saying that all the evidence was that people were self-interested and selfish, and that the pursuit of our desires wa
s what drove us. That pursuit was what made us suffer because we could never achieve our desires or completely satisfy our wants. He believed that life was suffering and the only way you could deal with it was to eliminate your desires, to accept the way things were. With this thinking the world both outside and inside my nest appeared to me to be more bleak than I ever thought it was.
The nightmares, which were all different, had a common pattern: an enticement or some imagined urgency to leave a place of safety and enter a place, a town, a house, or a road or rail system where there was superficial order, but underlying disfunction. I had to find my way but I could not. I lost small possessions on the way, like my watch or my wallet or some clothes, and made frantic but failed attempts to find them. Maybe these were exaggerations of what scared me – leaving the home. Sometimes at the conclusion of the nightmares I was cast into that place which terrorised me; it was dark, disjointed, and created a deafening ear-drum piercing noise, the grinding noise of trains, of screaming jets and heavy artillery. I would awake sweating and yelling, with an ache like a piece of hot metal in the centre of my skull.
Dr Meadows wasn’t worried about my nightmares and headaches. He seemed to take them as a matter of course. I had a brain scan and there was nothing organically wrong with my head. Was this just a phase of healing? Dr Meadows thought so. I didn’t think so. I thought my condition hadn’t improved – as Dr Meadows insisted it had – but had worsened. I didn’t think Dr Meadows was actually driving me mad; that was a thought too far. But what he had done was to identify a ‘reality’ – my own personal and unique reality – which was nihilistic and too awful to face.
Yes, he had given me the clue to nirvana – acceptance – but it was a small gem buried in the tumult of my imagined problems. And I knew it was there. I just couldn’t deal with it; I couldn’t bring it to the forefront of my being.
Therefore, I reasoned that the only way for me to relieve myself was to leave the home; to go out into that crazy ‘reality’ that unnerved me. The agreeable Dr Meadows, with his many gentle insights, was prolific with drugs, and my nights and days now were often spent on my bed in a languid daze in which my mind was stuck with his conclusions about me.
I could now have left the home on my initiative alone. I had no obligations. My discharge had come through. I had money in the bank. My continued treatment was by consent, unless the doctor felt I was cured, in which case he would discharge me. Feebly, I chose to enlist aid from Gail. Was this a wrong move? When I first told her I wanted leave, she behaved like a nurse and said I had to go when the doctors regarded me as cured. But the lover in her eventually got the upper hand over a period of weeks. And she was certainly influenced by my protestations that I believed I was getting worse, not better.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m inclined to think that Gail spoke to Dr Meadows about me, probably revealed what I was thinking. But he was the sanguine, confident type unlikely to be swayed in his judgment or his treatment by a side-wind. He had a shell of professional arrogance, likeable as he was. And he also had a what the hell, nothing really matters, attitude to patients. His kind of medicine was hit or miss anyway, so what if this vet or that was retained or discharged wrongly?
Gail collected me in her car one afternoon. I took my best clothes with me and a few books. I left a letter of explanation for Dr Meadows and one for my buddies, and I left all my pills.
37
I moved into Gail’s small apartment in Buffalo, near to the hospital where she worked. It was a very cozy apartment and it would have been ideal if it hadn’t been so close to the Buffalo State Veterans’ Hospital. I wanted to get away from the hospital as an idea and a reality. However, Gail was committed to her work and for a month or so we enjoyed being together, and I said nothing.
I even agreed to go with her to see her workplace. She wrongly assumed I would be impressed. Certainly, it was an impressive place of its kind, and doing astonishing work repairing broken people. I had simply had enough – too much. But I said nothing. I smiled. I joked a little. I allowed her to conduct me through pristine, well-staffed, ultra-modern wards equipped with probably every technical device which could in some way relieve the agony of the wretches who lay there in their beds. I silently congratulated the humanity of a government which could assemble this care, while I cursed the inhumanity of a government which caused the need for it. I tried to remember the Bob Dylan lyric about the death of Medgar Evers, where nobody believes they are to blame.
Gail showed me the shining operating theatres and I saw them as shining meat-processing plants. “Remember the unfinished one at Hoi An?” she asked with a laugh. I recalled a moment of ecstasy from a different life.
She explained that teams of surgeons were brought in to perform the most intricate procedures. They tinkered with hearts and nerves and brains and bones in unimaginable ways. The results lay in the beds and wheelchairs around the building, or in the mortuary.
Gail worked in the neurological department and the wards were chambers of horrors to me. Soldiers once so heroic-looking in their helmets and flak jackets, fighting and winning in the mud and dust, were now strapped and bandaged in beds and wheelchairs; they were fitted with grotesque supports and stays and braces for their heads and limbs; some were bandaged with only a little protesting, pink flesh showing, or a rolling, terrorised eyeball. And then there were the men whose limbs appeared to be intact, gowned, sitting on their beds, shoulders slumped, like starving herons by a dry lake, staring with wary eyes at us: the immaculately uniformed captain of the Nursing Corps, and her pale and thin, grey-suited visitor, strolling on the shining rubber floor.
I noticed a difference between the ward where I had stayed until recently and these ones of Gail’s. At Saratoga Springs we had been a mild and gentle crew, sedated into a mild and gentle routine; we played cards quietly and discussed politics and the country’s economy. Even if we argued it was in a dry, academic way. We were in a cushioned space between the clinical chill of hospital, and the noisy nightmare outside, trying to believe that the nightmare could be faced.
Here in Buffalo, there was a sense of shadows behind a curtain. Outwardly there was order, a strained quietness only broken by the odd moan or cry. What might be behind the curtain in the mind was only betrayed by a soldier’s occasional unwavering eyes, or an enigmatic half-smile – the knowledge of the fearsome and mindless void where they were now; a void which I knew was filled with thunderous noise and searing heat.
The horror of war, I had found, wasn’t in the blast of bombs, or the whisper of bullets, or the stench of corpses, or the suffocating mud of the jungle, or the lunatic order to attack; the horror was afterwards, when you were shipped home and you had to get up from your bed in the morning and face the screaming anarchy of your broken mind.
I shivered.
When we came out of the ward into the sun on the patio I was in a dark cloud.
“What’s the matter, Bob? You look upset.”
The sun warmed my face. I saw that the garden, exquisitely colourful as it was, had been planted in rectangles and squares of flowers, shrubs and small lawns. The shrubs, hedges and lawns were so neat that they might have been clipped with a pair of surgical scissors. The architect had created straight lines that joined other straight lines, in a frightening attempt at a kind of rectangular sanity. I knew that actual existence couldn’t be like that; it was full of jagged lines and curves which bent and crossed and jarred on each other.
“I can’t stand it in there, Gail.”
“Of course, it’s horrible in one sense, Bob, but in another it’s a marvellous place. I thought you’d like to see the difference from the Springs… and maybe see how well you are in comparison.”
“Thanks, I do. Or I think I do… It’s a kind of prison. It’s hell, with air conditioning and clean linen.”
“Yes, but we’re doing good work. Don’t you see that, Bob?”
“Sure, but do you have to do it? You’ve already done more th
an plenty. I mean, I know how you felt in ‘Nam.”
“I chickened out. I couldn’t take it. Not that close. I was a little ashamed of myself, but it was self-preservation.”
“I thought you might like to get out of the Army.”
“Not until it’s over, Bob. I quit once, but I know I can handle this, what I have here.”
“But the mangled and mutilated vets won’t stop coming until long after the day of victory, whenever that is; and there’ll be more, hundreds more with every month that passes before then.”
“I can handle it. I must. The day of victory as you call it is the date I’ve set myself.”
“You’ve done enough, Gail.”
“Not until that day. I owe it to Jim and to those guys in there,” she said, pointing to the door.
“You sound like Jim. You owe him nothing that you can deliver by service here.”
“He’s my brother and I love him and he’s putting his life right on the line. You’d expect me to sound like him, wouldn’t you? Don’t you want me to go on with nursing?”
“Nursing, yes, Gail, but not nursing vets. I’d like to get away from everything connected with being a damaged vet: hospitals, psychiatrists, crazy guys. I want to get out there where people live ordinary, peaceful lives and do all the boring things. I want to work quietly, probably as a teacher, read the newspapers, watch baseball, mow the lawn and have a couple of kids with my loving wife.”
Gail was silent. She was thinking. Her eyes were wet, and her cheeks. But she was otherwise composed. She put her head on my shoulder. “I want those things too. The war has ripped our lives apart. We’re both damaged vets.”
38
Gail and I remained on terms which were outwardly affectionate. We didn’t argue. We enjoyed sex. I used my days walking around the town and on trails in the woods and reading, hardly thinking, trying not to think. In the evenings I sometimes cooked for Gail or she for me, and we went to the cinema and football games. At times we met friends of hers at restaurants or bars.