by Joe Haldeman
MR. SPEIDEL: Schizophrenic? John doesn’t have a split personality or anything like that.
CPT. FOLSOM: Oh, that’s not schizophrenia. It’s a totally unrelated neurosis. Common mistake.
MRS. SPEIDEL: I want to see him. Why can’t we see him? (She is destroying her only tissue, twisting and tearing it; the captain slides a box across the desk.)
CPT. FOLSOM: I do sympathize, Mrs. Speidel. But John is very confused. He doesn’t really know where he is—
MRS. SPEIDEL: SO why don’t you tell him!
CPT. FOLSOM: We have.
MR. SPEIDEL: Honey, he’s right. We’d just make things more complicated.
CPT. FOLSOM: I’m afraid so. Besides, the ward he’s in is closed to visitors. There are other patients who would be upset if unfamiliar people came in. (Hastily) It’s not a “loony bin.” It’s just a controlled environment.
MR. SPEIDEL: I don’t think he did anything really crazy as a kid.
CPT. FOLSOM: Was he ever in trouble with the law?
MR. SPEIDEL: Broke a window with a rock. (Laughs) It was two in the morning. He snuck out and went over to a girl’s house. Tried to wake her up by throwing pebbles at her window, on the second floor. Got caught by the girl’s father, who called the police. No big deal, really.
MRS. SPEIDEL: You thought it was at the time.
MR. SPEIDEL: I was pretty damn annoyed. We were on vacation. He met this fast girl and tried to get a little premature sex education.
CPT. FOLSOM: Did he?
MR. SPEIDEL: I don’t think so. That was back when he was fifteen, sixteen. I think he’s still a virgin.
MRS. SPEIDEL: Beverly’s such a nice girl.
CPT. FOLSOM: (Pauses) I’m sure. Of course the army changes people. Your son may be more sophisticated now. More experienced.
MR. SPEIDEL: Well, there sure weren’t any girls out in the boonies where he was.
CPT. FOLSOM: No. No girls.
The captain gave Ray Speidel a knowing look, and held it. For a moment Ray was puzzled. Then his jaw dropped.
Dangling conversation
For a long time Lee couldn’t get Beverly to talk. When he came into the bedroom she was sitting up in bed, rocking, sobbing, the covers pulled up to her shoulders.
He stopped asking questions and sat quietly with his arm around her. She was fully clothed and shivering, stiff. Finally she leaned into him.
“Could you get me a drink? I don’t want to go downstairs, I might meet somebody.”
“Coffee, tea, or me?” That was the title of a silly book they’d read about stewardesses. She gave him a weak smile.
“See if there’s some of that rum left. Or anything with alcohol.”
He came back up with half a pint bottle of Bacardi and some root beer. “No Coke,” he said, and mixed her a drink. He poured himself an inch of straight rum and waited for her to talk.
“Spider’s … he’s …”
“Dead? He’s not dead?”
“No, he’s … he’s here. In Walter Reed.”
“Wounded!”
“No. Well, yes.” She took a long drink. “I talked to his father. He’s … he says Spider’s in a ‘rubber room.’ He’s gone insane.”
“My God.”
“The army wouldn’t let him see him. His dad … I’ve never heard a man so freaked out. All I could get out of him was it’s something awful and he can’t talk about it.” She sobbed once and wiped her face with a corner of the sheet. “I should never have sent him the letter.”
Lee shook his head. “What letter?”
“I didn’t tell you. I told him, I wrote him—I told him all about us.”
He swirled the rum around and sipped it. “Everything.”
“Oh, you know. Not the nitty-gritty. Just that we were together, living together. You know, I told you I wrote him about Hawaii.”
“You said you told him you couldn’t come. You couldn’t let your father pay for it.”
“Yeah, well, that was part of it. I also said that if somehow I could come, it would be just as a friend, a good friend. Because I, you …”
“You told him you loved me?”
She looked at him. “Something like that, yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was really pissed off at you. You may remember.”
“Because I said you could go fuck him?” He shrugged, slowly. “I still say that’s your own business.”
“Yeah, you’re such a fucking romantic fool. I think what I told him was I wasn’t sure where we were headed, you and me. I just couldn’t be his girlfriend anymore, his virgin.”
“Okay. You were going to have to do that sooner or later.”
“But now he’s, he’s …” She started to cry again.
“It’s not your fault.” He stroked her arm. “Even if he did read the letter. Which he probably didn’t.”
“The timing’s right. And he didn’t write back.”
“Maybe he didn’t write back because he didn’t get the letter. He was out in the field, that can mean an extra week or two. And there was all that Tet bullshit.”
“I guess. I don’t know.” She set the glass on the floor and started unbuttoning her flannel shirt. “Feel like shit. Could we just lie here a while?”
“Sure.” He lit the candle on the nightstand and turned out the light and watched her undress. “You don’t want to, uh …”
“No. Not now.”
“Sure.” He took off his boots and slid under the covers next to her, rough denim pressed to her skin. She sighed and put an arm around him, and in a few minutes was asleep, snoring softly while he stared at the candle flame.
The third version
It was too late in the day to start a patrol. They sent us out even though they knew we wouldn’t have time to make any kind of bunkers for the night. Just scrape out a little hole and hope nobody comes along.
It was tough going, prickly comealong vines up to your knees and thick stands of bamboo to chop through with machetes. We made enough noise to wake up the dead.
Wake up the dead. We came to a Montagnard cemetery just as night was falling. There were two artillery craters in it, and one had dug up a bunch of bones and old gray rotten cloth, maybe skin. Creepy.
Sarge knew it was on the map as an artillery reference point, so we went on past it into the jungle about two hundred yards straight north. We dug our holes, one for each two guys, and did perimeter guard four-on-four-off.
The moon was full and it was godawful bright. In a way, that was worse than pitch darkness. The jungle looked like a washed-out black-and-white photograph of snarled and shifting lines and curves. It could have hidden anything.
My buddy Moses had the first watch. I couldn’t sleep, though; I was spooked. I kept hearing things—I mean, you always hear little stuff all night in the jungle; the wind moves the tops of the trees around, critters jump from limb to limb and scurry through the brush—but I was hearing things I never heard before, like voices whispering, just loud enough so you could tell it wasn’t English. Sometimes I’d hear something like heavy breathing right behind me, but I’d turn around quick and there was nothing there.
So after four hours of this, Moses gets out of the hole and racks out on his air mattress. He isn’t scared; he’s been sucking cold C-ration coffee to stay awake. I’m still scared, though, even though I’m sure it’s my imagination, just got a little freaked by the cemetery. I secure my grenades and magazines and get into the hole, which is about waist-deep. We’d cut a little shelf to sit on.
I swear I couldn’t have fallen asleep. Just not possible. Some kind of trance or something. I blink and suddenly it’s like the moon has moved about thirty degrees. I mean you can’t see the moon but you can tell where the light’s coming from.
I check my watch and it’s 3:30, past time for shift change. But then I look over at the air mattress and see that Moses isn’t there. But then I see that part of him is there, his legs. Bones sticking out, jagged
and slick in the moonlight, and this dark shiny shit sprayed all over in front of the position, like Moses just exploded or something.
I look out and there are dead people all around, some just wounded but not moving much. I think it must be a dream but you can smell it and I look down and I’m covered with blood, too, from Moses.
There’s someone walking around out there. I scrunch down and peer out over the edge of the hole. At first it just looks like a head floating, but then I see that he’s dressed all in black, in black pajamas. His skin is gray and rotting; you can see his teeth all the way back where there should be cheeks. His eyes are round black holes with a dim point of light inside each one.
He stops over one guy who’s moving a little bit. He kneels down and grabs him by the throat with one hand, and with the other hand he sticks his finger right on the guy’s forehead and pushes down. The skull cracks like a teacup and you can hear his finger mushing around inside. The guy’s legs and arms flail around for a second and then he falls limp.
The man in black stands up and wipes the brains off his finger and moves on to the next one. This guy’s dead already but he pops his skull anyhow.
I don’t want to see any more. I curl up in a ball in the bottom of the hole and wait.
He never comes for me. It gets light and I get out of the hole and on the ground there’s nothing but dead people, rotting guts and brains everywhere, flies and buzzards. Worms. I guess I went a little crazy. I ran like hell.
Schizo (1)
If Spider had been diagnosed as schizophrenic twenty years before 1968, he might have been treated with an icepick thrust through the eye socket into the brain: transorbital lobotomy. About a third of the five thousand lobotomies performed annually at that time were transorbital, which was an inexpensive office procedure. All the doctor has to do is knock the patient out with electroshock, saving the expense of an anesthesiologist; lift up the eyelid and insert the icepick (sometimes a “transorbital leucotome,” which is an icepick with centimeter markings) and pound on it until the orbital plate fractures and the point jabs through into the brain. Then stir left and right, up and down, randomizing the information in the frontal lobe. Then withdraw the point carefully, applying pressure to the eyelid so blood and cerebrospinal fluid don’t leak out into the eye socket, which could upset the patient. Then go to the other eye.
A fast worker could do three or four patients in an hour.
Lobotomy had fallen out of favor by 1968. Psychoactive drugs like chlorpromazine and reserpine were just as effective in calming down mental patients, and although the drugs didn’t cure people of schizophrenia, it wasn’t clear that lobotomy worked too well, either. Lobotomized people, perhaps unsurprisingly, showed a marked decrease in intellectual ability, and many of them relapsed into schizophrenia or depression or committed suicide.
Captain Folsom regretted the absence of lobotomy from his repertoire. He felt that people’s rejection of it was due more to squeamishness than anything else. It certainly had a better cure rate than any school of psychotherapy.
He had other tools.
Minds meeting
This was Folsom’s second year at Walter Reed, so he knew that February was the worst month on the wards, in terms of smell. In March, they could start opening up the windows in the day rooms. The window fans would draw fresh air down the corridors and attenuate the smell of urine and vomit. In February it was ghastly.
He was aware that his sensitivity to smell was abnormal. He knew that he was too sensitive, in many ways, for this job.
He always spent as much time as possible loitering at the nurses’ station at the north end of Ward A. The smell was least strong there, but it was strong enough for his olfactory receptors to begin to adapt. If he tried to walk straight from the brisk clean outdoor air into the middle of the ward, he would probably lose his breakfast.
The only nurse at the station was Leticia Washington, a young black woman from Georgia whom Folsom had difficulty understanding. She was pretty, though, and more important, she seemed somewhat afraid of Folsom. Most of the nurses treated him with good-natured contempt. Head Nurse Charton was openly sarcastic, and unfortunately outranked him.
He leaned into the service window, inhaling Washington’s wildflower perfume. “Let me have Specialist Speidel’s folder, please.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with three musical Savannah syllables, and produced a gray file with only four pages. “Dr. Yarrow drop his Thorazine down to twenty-five milligram last night.”
“Did he sleep all right?” Folsom snapped the report into place under the jaws of an all-metal clipboard.
“Far as I know, sir.”
“No morning meds yet?”
“No, sir. Specialist Knox don’t come in until nine.”
“Good. That should make him more, uh, verbal.” He studied the four pages intently, although he had written three of them himself and was probably the world’s only expert on the mental state of Spec-3 John Speidel. He really didn’t want to walk down that corridor. “Interviewed his parents yesterday.”
“He say they live ’round here.”
Folsom looked up. “When did he say that?”
“Last night. I go in to check those stitches and he ask ‘Where am I?’ When I tol’ him Walter Reed, he say that his parents live in, where, Bethesda?”
“Right, right.” he rubbed his chin. “That’s good. Did he say anything about wanting to see them, or anything?”
“No, sir. He was half asleep.” She looked thoughtful. “He did say, he say some nonsense. Bathsheba, like in the Bible, mother to Solomon? And then cheese. ‘Bathsheba cheddar cheese.’ Funny thing to say.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, sir. Just ‘Bathsheba cheddar cheese’ two, three times.”
Folsom took a 3×5 card out of his shirt pocket and wrote the phrase down. “I guess Bathsheba comes from Bethesda; that’s simple paranomasia. No telling where the cheese comes from. Did Bathsheba have anything to do with cheese in the Bible?”
“No, sir, not that I know. But she did be connected to the army, to soldierin’—she’s Uriah’s wife, Uriah the Hittite; old David sees her takin’ a bath, he lusts after her and orders her to, uh, to get to his bed. She get pregnant and David get rid of Uriah by tellin’ his commander, Joab, to put him up front where he be killed.”
“That’s interesting. Speidel was sent to the front, so to speak, as punishment.”
“What he do? Sir.”
“Oh, he flew off the handle. Attacked a sergeant. He was probably starting to present symptoms then, but there was nobody around to properly interpret them.”
“Maybe he should be restrain’, sir?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary; it was a one-time thing.” He shuffled through the pages. “He isn’t otherwise violent. If he becomes agitated, you can tell me or Captain Yarrow. We can adjust his Thorazine.”
“I keep an eye on him. He probably a nice enough boy, religious.”
“Probably. Let’s hope we can help him.” He put the clipboard under his arm and looked down the corridor. “I’d like to see him in the consultation room. Would you have an orderly bring him over?”
“See can I find one, sir. Might be a while.”
“That’s all right. I’ll wait in there.” Folsom could have interviewed Spider by his bedside, but he decided the patient would be more comfortable talking to him in the neutral, un-medical surroundings of the consultation room. It smelled better, too.
At least this wasn’t Ward C, the Vegetable Garden. That was all catatonia and gibberish, the air thick with urine and soil and disinfectant. He had only been there once; its inhabitants had no use for his talents. He hoped Speidel wouldn’t wind up there.
He held his breath most of the way to the consultation room, covering the last ten yards with two shallow inhalations. He closed the door behind him and crossed the small room to sit in the swivel chair under the only decoration, a black-and-white portrait of Lyndon J
ohnson. The walls were the same depressing green as the walls outside. He pulled a fresh 3×5 card from his pocket and wrote “paint & pictures in CR?” The old oak table could use refinishing, too; the other side, where patients sat, was an intaglio jungle of names and doodles and graffiti.
The table had a stained blotter, a brass ashtray, and an intercom that looked like someone had used it for batting practice. He pushed the button. “Corporal Washington … do you hear me?” She answered yes, sir.
He leaned back, withdrew a fat leather tobacco pouch from his back pocket, and unzipped one side to extract the day’s pipe, a natty Kaywoodie white briar, Yacht shape. He allowed himself three bowlsful a day; perhaps more on a stressful day. Most work days were stressful.
He unzipped the other side and deeply inhaled the reassuring fragrance of his special mixture. He packed the pipe scientifically—“first with a child’s hand, then with a woman’s hand, then with a man’s hand”—and struck a wooden match, waited for the sulfur and phosphorus to burn down, and lit the tobacco carefully all around the perimeter of the bowl. Then he took a pewter tool from his pocket and tamped the coals down evenly, and relit it. He leaned back and savored the exotic smoke: perique, latakia, and Turkish, flavoring a base of the finest Virginia.
He knew that most of the people he worked with thought it smelled like compost burning. But he outranked most of the people he worked with.
There was one perfunctory knock and the door swung open. Phillips, a Spec-6 lifer, stuck his neckless head in and made a slight grimace at the smoke, “In here,” he said, and steered Spider in.
Spider shuffled in with a crutch, staring at the floor, slightly limping. Folsom noticed he was using the crutch wrong, putting it down in time with his injured leg, rather than using it to take the weight off his bad leg, working in parallel with the good one. He wore faded blue pajamas a couple of sizes too large and garish homemade orange-and-red slippers donated by the Red Cross.