by Joe Haldeman
“Nah.” He struck out a palm as if to ward off monsters of paper and government. “The wife takes care of that stuff. She’ll get the forms together by Monday.”
They shook hands and Spider left, thoughtful. It would be an interesting schedule. To get here by 3:00 A.M., he’d have to leave home every morning a little after two. Make it two-fifteen, with no traffic. So he ought to be in bed by nine each night. But twice a week, the astronomy class met at night, eight to eleven; have to catch a nap here and there.
He might be better off getting a room in College Park. He could easily find one in the summer for fifty or sixty bucks a month. Maybe he should rent Beverly’s old room. Maybe not.
“Move out?” His mother actually turned pale. “I promised Dr. Folsom I’d watch out for you.”
“He’s not a doctor,” Spider said, “and you’ve done a real good job.”
“You’ve only been home two weeks.”
“And I feel fine.” He felt stupid, actually, standing in front of the refrigerator with a beer in one hand, a salami in the other, and a jar of pickles under one arm. He set down two of them and opened the third. “I’ll try commuting for a while.” He returned to the refrigerator for mayonnaise. “Do we have any peanut butter?”
“I’ll get it.” She bustled off to the pantry. “It’s not that far.”
“Eighteen miles.” He got the cutting board from beneath the sink. “That’s a gallon of gas, two gallons both ways.” He cut three thick slabs of salami and sliced two pickles into strips.
“So what’s that, eighty cents a day?”
“Twenty-four dollars a month. That’s half what a room would cost.”
“Well … you could use my Esso card for gas. Your father wouldn’t mind.”
Spider refrained from pointing out that his father had been gone for two weeks, and probably would mind. He put mayo on one slice of bread and crunchy peanut butter on the other and stacked the salami and pickles together into a thick pregnant-woman’s sandwich. His mother handed him a plate. “You don’t like mustard anymore?”
“Not with pickles. You eating?”
“No, I had an egg.” There was no evidence that she’d had anything but bourbon and ginger ale. Spider put the stuff back in the refrigerator and carried his sandwich and beer to the dining room table.
“Dad call last night?”
“Yes. He’s in Gettysburg.” Spider had overheard a teary drunken conversation between his mother and Aunt Phyllis two nights before. All the collect calls were coming from the same number in Baltimore. His father was supposedly out “checking prospects” for his insurance company in western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. She’d checked with the company, though, and he was on an indefinite leave of absence. He was with that girl, his mother had said. Aunt Phyllis had said that she was hardly a girl anymore.
What Spider wanted to say to his mother was that it was obvious his father was not coming home as long as Spider was there, for some mysterious reason, and they were probably running out of money, and pretty soon his father wouldn’t have a job to come back to. The best thing in the world for all of them would be for Spider to pack up and move out to College Park. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to. This house was secure, especially the room upstairs. And in some screwy way he liked the family the way it was, having his mother to himself. Maybe it was an Oedipus complex.
Spider went to bed early and set the alarm for 2:00 A.M., partly to get used to it, and partly so he could use his telescope after moonset. He’d wrestled the heavy instrument downstairs and set it up in the back yard while there was still light, covering it with a plastic tarp to keep the dew off. He’d gone down for a few minutes after sundown to look at the crescent moon and Jupiter, which wouldn’t be visible later.
He dressed in the dark to preserve his night vision, and felt his way downstairs in the darkness. He had a red-light astronomical flashlight, the lens dimmed with thick coats of fingernail polish, but he’d left it down on the back porch, with the star map and eyepiece box.
The sky was black and brilliant with summer stars, just a faint horizon glow in the direction of Washington. The Milky Way rolled from Cygnus overhead down to Sagittarius in the south and Cassiopeia in the north. Spider stood and looked up at the sky for a minute, drinking in the familiarity and the alien aloofness of it.
He slid the tarp off and enjoyed the faint smell of the machine, the pungent Bakelite telescope tube and the grease-and-cutting-oil whisper of the heavy mounting. He’d built the telescope in junior high, half a year’s worth of weekends and a red ribbon in the Science Fair. It was a six-inch Newtonian reflector. The workshop leader had persuaded him to build a mounting sturdy enough for a bigger machine, since most people go straight back to the workshop and start grinding an eight-inch mirror, and then a ten- or twelve-inch, and so on up. Spider had never contracted “aperture fever,” though. Puberty struck, instead, and his weekends were spoken for.
He rocked the mounting around a few inches so it was in line with Polaris, and then used bright red Antares to adjust the viewfinder, a modified riflescope. He inserted the high-power eyepiece to lock in the focus, switched back to the low-power one to look at the globular clusters in the south, and then slowly cruised up the Milky Way. He paused for the blue-and-gold double star Alberio and the four jewels of Epsilon Lyrae. He found the tiny O of the Ring Nebula, and started to switch eyepieces, to get a close-up look. He saw a light out of the corner of his eye and looked up.
It was a brilliant meteor, rolling slowly down to the west, coruscating white and yellow and red, leaving behind a pale gray glowing trail. For some reason it was terrifying rather than beautiful. Spider dropped the eyepiece. He heard it click against the tripod leg and thump in the grass some distance away.
Spider set down the eyepiece box and picked up the flashlight, hands shaking. The batteries were dead. He crawled out into the darkness on his hands and knees, patting the damp grass in careful arcs. His heart was hammering. He thought he heard a noise and looked up, and saw he wasn’t alone.
There were vague figures everywhere, motionless in the dim starlight. And right by the telescope, not six feet away, the familiar slumped posture of the man with no face.
Spider did know there was no one there, no one real, but his legs would not be convinced. He ran straight for the porch steps, slipped on the damp wood and almost fell, rushed through the door to the kitchen and locked it. Then he turned on both kitchen lights and got a beer out of the refrigerator and drained it in three fast gulps. He pulled out two more and trudged up toward his room, leaving a path of light behind him.
Decisions
Roe v. Wade was still five years in the future, but it wasn’t hard for a woman in California to get an abortion. The three-room clinic friends had recommended to them was clean and modern; the gynecologist and nurse they talked to were casual, reassuring. It would cost $575, cash on the barrelhead—feel free to shop around, but you get what you pay for. Beverly said they had to talk about it, and took the release form down the block to a coffeehouse.
Beverly took one sip of cappuccino and let it turn cold as she read the form over and over.
“You don’t have to do it,” Lee said. “I’ll stick by you.”
“You said that already.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“I know you think it’s true.”
“What do you mean by that? Don’t you think I’m a … You think I’d back out on—”
“Shut up,” she said quietly, not looking up from the paper. “Would you please shut up and get us a couple of beers?”
The waitress brought two drafts and centered them on souvenir blotters that said STEAL ME BUT LEAVE THE GLASS. Beverly put the paper down and reached for the beer, but then stood up suddenly. “Have to go barf. Save my place?” She put a hand to her mouth, looked around quickly, and darted toward the sign that pointed to the rest-rooms.
She came back pale. Her hand trembled as she picked up the beer.
“I’m sorry about the morning sickness,” Lee said.
“That wasn’t morning sickness.” She took a slow sip and made a face. “That was thinking about that old man sticking a vacuum cleaner up my cunt and sucking the life out of it. Wouldn’t that make you puke, if you had a cunt?”
Lee made a helpless gesture.
“But you do have a cunt. You’re stuck with me.”
“Not stuck with. I do love you, Beverly.”
“Uh huh.” She unfolded a paper napkin and pressed it to both eyes. “I feel so shitty. I don’t know what to think, I don’t know what to do.” She balled up the napkin and looked at the ground. “Whatever I do is going to be wrong for both of us. And the baby, too, or whatever you call whatever it is now.”
“We could raise a baby. There’s that commune up in Oregon—”
“Oh, stop. You’ve already fucked half the women in that commune. You’d fuck the other half while I was changing diapers.”
“I wouldn’t. I’d promise.”
“I guess you would. Promise.” She took a big drink and set the heavy mug down silently. “How much money do we have?”
“About six hundred, plus whatever’s in your purse.”
“Twenty and two ones.” She looked straight at him. “We better do it now.”
“He said a month wouldn’t make any difference.”
“Not to him. I think we better do it now.”
“You don’t have to rush into it.”
“You’re right.” Her face tightened with the effort of keeping tears back. “Let’s finish these beers first.”
PTSD
If Spider had presented his symptoms a few years later, he probably would not have been misdiagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1968, people mumbled about shell-shock and neurasthenia, but there was no actual medical term for the malady that eventually affected about a third of the men and women who were exposed to combat in Vietnam.
There was nothing new about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Odysseus shows symptoms of it in Homer’s banquet scene. The disease is accurately described in Henry IV, Part 1, when Lady Percy complains to her soldier husband Hotspur:
Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks;
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars.
Hotspur can’t answer. Lady Percy presses him, and he blows up:
… Love! I love thee not,
I care not for thee, Kate: this is no world
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips:
We must have bloody noses and crack’d crowns.
Psychologists note that veterans like Hotspur, who were able to respond to the terrors of combat directly, by killing the enemy, later also respond with violence when confronted with the more mysterious anguish of PTSD. Those like Spider, who witnessed the terrors but never fought back, tend to retreat into more passive states of anxiety, panic, and depression.
Captain My Captain’s DSM-I, the diagnostic manual that classified homosexuality as the prime sexual perversion, didn’t have any description of psychological problems caused by combat stress, although individual physicians had been reporting them at least since the Civil War. Years after that war broke Walt Whitman’s heart, tending the wounds of “O my soldiers, my veterans,” he described PTSD’s characteristic recurrent dreams:
In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
Of the look at first of the mortally wounded,
(of that indescribable look),
Of the dead on their backs with arms extended
wide,
I dream, I dream, I dream.…
Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches
and fields,
Where through the carnage I moved with a callous
composure, or away from the fallen,
Onward I sped at the time—but now of their forms
at night,
I dream, I dream, I dream.
The 1987 DSM-III(R) does list PTSD, and its description of the cause and symptoms fits Spider well:
A. The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone, e.g. serious threat to one’s life … or seeing another person who has recently been, or is being … killed as the result of an accident or physical violence.
B. The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in at least one of the following ways:
(1) recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event
(2) recurrent distressing dreams of the event
(3) sudden acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring
C. … numbing of general responsiveness …
D. Persistent symptoms of increased arousal …
(1) difficulty falling or staying asleep
(2) irritability or outbursts of anger
(3) difficulty concentrating
(4) hypervigilance
(5) exaggerated startle response
Spider always had been a little antsy, as his mother put it, but now he was a constant nervous wreck. He jumped at the slightest noise. If a car backfired he would dive for the ground. He’d done it twice indoors, frightening her—once in the grocery store, when someone dropped a large can, and once at home, when she drew the living room curtains shut. He had picked himself up sheepishly and explained that it sounded like an artillery round coming in.
She didn’t know how to act. He got agitated when he realized that she was tiptoeing around him. But if she tried to “act natural,” it was even worse. He drank beer all the time, but of course she couldn’t say anything about that. He’d found an old BB pistol that Terry had given him for his twelfth birthday. She remembered how relieved she’d been when he lost interest in it. Now he spent an hour or more every day down in the garage, listening to the radio and shooting Necco Wafers that he propped up on a Scrabble rack. (She’d hated the smell of the little candies ever since his uncle had shown him how the BB made them explode.)
He kept talking about leaving, getting a room near College Park, and she half wished he would. But that would be like deserting him. And she didn’t want to be left alone, herself.
Magazine issues
Spider decided to investigate reality as a kind of research project. At the hospital they’d only had a limited range of magazines, like Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, and even those had articles missing if they were potentially disturbing. He stopped at a newsstand and bought a couple of dozen magazines, from National Review and Harper’s to various journals of observational gynecology.
One article really got to him, a supposedly factual thing called “What Every Vietnam Veteran Knows.” It was a catalog of horrors—GIs mutilating Viet Cong bodies, making necklaces of ears and even genitalia, fragging officers, massacring civilians, running amok on heroin and speed. There was a kernel of truth in all of that. Everybody did know about the necklaces of ears, though to his knowledge nobody had ever seen one; unpopular officers died and there were whispers; civilians got in the way of bullets and bombs; men took dope and some got addicted. But things like that must have happened in every war; it was basically an unsavory and dangerous, dehumanizing activity. This writer acted as if Vietnam vets were something out of a grade-B horror movie, soulless zombies out to destroy anything that got in their path. Killer was the only guy he’d known who was crazy, and even he wasn’t that crazy.
Spider started to write a letter to the magazine, but after half a page he saw that it made him look like a raving maniac. And he reminded himself that he hadn’t exactly been in the hospital
with the flu; he wasn’t the world’s most reliable authority on sane soldiers.
And then his father came home.
Hashbury
Beverly suffered no physical complications from her abortion. She was upset, especially after the doctor insisted that she look at the fetus, but after only a couple of days of lying crying in a dark room, crammed with cotton and full of Valium and pain pills, she was ready to sample the wonders of Lee’s spiritual home, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
Haight-Ashbury wasn’t the only concentration of hippies in the area. The Pine Streeters could lay claim to more solidarity. Virginia City, Nevada, was probably more drugged-out. But the Haight drew media attention and became symbolic of the youth revolution characterized by particular kinds of rock and folk music, dope smoking, interest in oriental religion, weird clothes, and sexual liberation.
The term “hippy” was originally a derisive name applied by the few surviving beatniks to these young and uncool upstarts—“hipsters” who didn’t quite make the grade. Since the mid-sixties, beatniks and hippies alike had been moving out of their traditional North Beach digs, which had become fashionable and expensive. Haight-Ashbury attracted them with its big cheap Victorian houses and funky atmosphere.
When Lee had left the Haight, early in 1967, there were already signs of trouble in paradise. He was part of the January Be-In, more than ten thousand “Love Generation” youths wandering around Golden Gate Park absorbing Krishna consciousness, stoned on marijuana and Owsley Stanley’s new White Lightning LSD and each other. The Diggers passed out free turkey sandwiches (from dozens of turkeys donated by dealer Owsley) and the Hell’s Angels kept the peace. Free music from bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Loading Zone, and the Grateful Dead. Two mounted policemen moved through the crowd, ignoring violations of drug laws.
But there were problems, for the ten thousand and for Lee. At one end of the crowd, fights broke out between the hippies and a group of local blacks and Chicanos. When the horde left the stadium, the waiting police arrested nearly fifty for obstructing traffic. Lee saw it happening and slipped away through side streets, wandering around while his high dissipated. When he came back a few hours later, though, the cops had towed his car away. He’d left it in gear, and so they’d kindly wrecked the transmission in the process of towing it. Fixing the transmission would have cost more than he’d paid for the junker. He bought the Thing From Detroit from a friend and headed east, just to be away for a while.