by C. P. Boyko
“And what about you?” she asked. —“What about me?” —“By your own logic, and given your scruples, shouldn’t you be refusing to participate? Where’s your civil disobedience?” —“I, Doctor,” he said, taking a sip from his graduated cylinder, and retrieving the other and placing it on the floor beside Hillary, “I am in the process this very moment of incapacitating the occupying forces’ medical personnel.” —She slid the glass back across the floor till it rested against his leg. “Shouldn’t we get the fuck out? Aren’t we contributing to the problem?” —“Aw, hell,” said Eric. “We’re here. We’ve made our decision. Now we’ve got to live with it.”
The conversation had been vehement; now it grew lugubrious as they each acknowledged the validity of the opposing view. Hillary admitted that the war was immoral, that the eastern government was a repressive regime, and that his and her work here, making soldiers fit for more fighting, was indefensible. Eric replied that they were too close to the war to judge it objectively, and that their duty was to follow orders, and to save lives. “Besides,” he said, “you can never know whether the private you patch up today will go on to kill more civilians, or fly home to their four kids tomorrow. You’re no more responsible for their future crimes than you are for the reporter’s future slander or the lawyer’s future embezzlement. These people need medical attention. We give it to them. End of story.”
Far from having its intended effect, Eric’s thesis only made Hillary feel culpable for all of her patients’ future crimes, and made her doubt, for the first time, the worthiness of the medical profession. She overlooked an abyss: what if doctors actually did more harm than good?
“We all do about as much harm as good,” said Eric. “Even our good does harm, and our harm good. The trick is to do the best one can in the circumstances, and to enjoy oneself in the meantime.” He climbed to his feet to elaborate on this theme, but quickly sat back down as an exploding shell rattled the walls and rained debris like hail on the metal roof. “The world is in as bad a state as it ever was—” —“Worse,” said Hillary, and cited examples. —“All right, worse than it ever was, despite (I’ll not say ‘because of’!) hundreds, despite thousands of years of attempts to improve it. So the best any of us can do is take pleasure where we can find it.” And he sipped whiskey. —“Hedonism,” muttered Hillary. —“No; utilitarianism: the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But you can’t make others happy. So it’s a moral imperative to enjoy yourself—that’s the only certain way to increase the total happiness on the planet.”
His argument mollified Hillary, less by its convincingness than its bravado. She admired the sanguine ingenuity with which he defended his hedonism; and she was touched, too, by his self-contradictory attempt to win her over to this hedonism, and to make her happy.
“If you, at this moment,” he went on, “are healthy and well fed, it is a sin not to rejoice—even if, especially if, someone somewhere else is miserable. If we don’t get into the habit of enjoying ourselves now, while the world is a mess, we’ll lose the capacity for it by the time the world is put in order.” —She smiled. “I thought the world was never going to get put in order.” —“Exactly!” he cried. They laughed at his inconsistency. “The bottom line being,” he said, “that you should seize the day, carpe felicitatem, and have a goddamn drink with me, Doctor.”
—“I think you drink too much, Doctor.” In fact, she liked him better when he drank—he was friendlier—but she worried about his health. However, she did not have time to elaborate. —“On the contrary,” he declared, “I drink too little. To prevent habituation, I should really drink more, less often, and less more often. But I’m weak; I like being fuddled too much.”
Climbing onto his haunches, Eric delivered a paean to drunkenness, pacing and gesticulating as expansively as his posture allowed. Drunkenness was light; drunkenness was wisdom. Drunkenness allowed one to see the truth: that the world was a garden of delight teeming with plants and animals as lovely and various as colors, as dense and numerous as stars, as vivid and insubstantial as sparks, each one itself comprising a dense, vivid, and various universe of cells, every cell in turn a bogglingly fine-tuned society of organelles, which were themselves made of intelligent proteins, and so on. He spoke almost angrily, for the vision was one that he cherished, but seldom possessed.
Hillary, reluctant to acknowledge the beauty of any system revealed by inebriation, agreed that the human body was a complicated machine, but reminded him that that very complexity was a liability: the machine often malfunctioned, and was all too easily broken. “And frankly, I find the microscopic view rather depressing. All that intricate technology, and look what we do with it! Playing solitaire, collecting stamps, washing dishes, buying shoes. It’s like using a supercomputer to hammer nails.” She confessed that sometimes, listening to two ordinary people converse, so clumsily, so trivially, she was appalled to think of the sophistication and tireless heroism of, for example, their immune systems. “If we’re galaxies, we’re transmitting inanities in morse code across light-years of emptiness.”
“But that’s just what makes our communication so precious! Every conversation, however stupid, however inarticulate, is as momentous, as miraculous, as worthy of celebration and awe as interstellar contact with an alien intelligence. Maybe we do only touch at a point; but how amazing that we touch at all.”
And he touched the tip of her knee with the tip of his finger; and to their mutual surprise, something nontrivial was communicated.
Private Bicyk entered, and Hillary scrambled to her feet. “Is everyone all right?” —“Huh? Oh, sure.” —“What’s the matter, soldier?” asked Eric, lifting himself onto a chair.
Private Bicyk had come to ask Doctor V. for pills, but was obscurely discomfited to find Doc Eric there. He sensed, first, that he was interrupting. He felt, too, that it would be immodest, even obscene, to be treated by two doctors at once. Besides this, he had steeled himself to confess to one person, and found his will now insufficient to face two.
And finally (though he was unconscious of this), he did not like the idea of revealing his weakness to a man whom he drank with, and whom he considered a friend.
His platoon had been picked to go on patrol that night; the route would take them through the minefield. Private Bicyk was terrified of mines. More sudden than mortars, more impersonal than sniper fire, they filled him with the kind of primal dread that he felt in dreams towards snakes and deep water. He was certain that, without some kind of nerve pill, he would be unable to cross the field this time; and the thought of delaying the patrol, of being physically unable to move while the others pushed and screamed at him, was more tormenting, because more tangible, than the thought of injury, pain, or death.
“Oh, nothing, really,” he said. “I’ll come back later.” And, neither crouching nor hurrying as the sky retched another barrage of mortars, he walked back out the door.
When the explosions had dwindled to an intermittent roar, Eric, again seated on the floor, said, “You know, I think the privates find you a little remote.” This was not quite true. Eric had noticed Private Bicyk’s discomfiture, and was eager to attribute it to some cause other than himself. —“Remote?” —“You know: Distant. Unapproachable.” —Hillary was aghast. “I certainly don’t mean to be.” She fell into a reverie of self-interrogation. Was it true? How had it happened? —Embarrassed by the effectiveness of his pretense, Eric now tried to restore levity. “It’s only because you never drink with us,” he joked. —Hillary looked at him beseechingly. “You know I’m not a prig. I can’t drink when I’m on duty, and I’m always on duty.” —“You don’t need to be. Nothing ever happens.” —“But if something did!” —“We’d evac them.” —She shook her head; but she had already conceded much. Finally, by promising to stay sober himself, Eric persuaded her to come to the mess hall the following evening.
The soldiers were honored, and nonplussed, by
her presence there. They were formal and solicitous, and pressed food and drink on her. Hillary was charmed by their kindliness, and though she drank little, she was soon pleasantly and unwittingly intoxicated. Eric acted as master of ceremonies, encouraging conversation and eliciting old stories and favorite anecdotes. But the privates’ esteem for Doctor V. was an obstacle to intimacy; and some were constrained by the memory of infections or rashes she had treated. Some, like Private Bicyk (who had crossed the minefield the night before like everyone else), were abashed to think how close they had come to confessing to her their worst fears. And her own feelings of goodwill were not untainted by condescension. They were all so young, and so adorable—even the unhandsome ones. Every face seemed to glow with its own uniqueness; she felt that she could read in each one an eloquent expression of its owner’s character, desires, and passing emotions. She enjoyed watching them and listening to them speak, but felt no inclination to confide in them. To Eric’s chagrin, the talk repeatedly stalled; he began drinking surreptitiously. At last Private Maldau suggested they play a game.
There was an implicit consensus that the doctor would not care to gamble, so card games were ruled out. With the enthusiasm of nostalgia, the privates named different games they had played as children: Mumblety-peg, Lapjack, Hot Buttered Beans, Mother May I, Follow the Leader, Bloody Murder; but the only game they all knew was Hide and Seek. Private Patello was elected to be “it,” because his resentment could be relied on. “Aw, fuck you guys,” he whined, and everybody laughed. The ammunition shed was chosen as safehouse, the entire base was ruled in-bounds, and Private Patello began counting down from one hundred. Everyone scattered.
Hillary crossed the base briskly and squeezed between a concrete revetment and the wall of the motor pool. Someone was revving an engine inside; she could not hear Patello’s count. Then the noise ceased. She listened intently, but could hear only the wind rattling an aluminum roof panel and the chirring of cicadas in the tall trees beyond the perimeter fence. The evening was warm, the air soft, the sky a lingering lilac. A tiny beetle with legs like wire brushes clambered onto her left index knuckle, then seemed to pause to catch its breath. She realized that she was holding her own breath, and let it out slowly, stirring the dust between her fingers. Her face felt strange. She was smiling.
Eric found her at last, and joined her noiselessly, crawling forward on his belly till their foreheads almost touched. “Where is he?” she whispered. He mouthed the words: “He’s coming,” and every muscle in her body tensed, making her feel like one solid unit of poised readiness.
Eric scrutinized her face in the darkness with an attentiveness bordering on anxiety, as if he were memorizing an escape plan. He too was smiling, but painfully. His only thought was one recurring word: “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Then from the woods, closer than either of them had ever heard it, came the familiar fwump, fwump, fwump of mortars being fired, followed a few seconds later by the screaming falling shells, and then all around them the shuddering explosions. They did not have to move to take cover, and this novelty made them feel absurdly safe, as if all the world were a hammock cradling them. Eric stopped worrying that he would have to kiss her, and simply lay there, riding the earth like a raft downstream. And Hillary’s happiness was so great that it frightened her; suddenly she felt sick and dizzy and disgusted. Her imagination provided a reason: someone was hurt, and she could not help them, because they could not find her! And she had been drinking, and could not do her job properly. Doctor Latroussaine too had been drinking, she knew, but this only made her angrier at herself: she had smelled whiskey on his breath, and ignored it. The great hammock was now a suffocating cage. She climbed to her feet, and, oblivious of the bombardment, which twice threw her to her hands and knees, hurried to the medical hut. There she sat on the floor, writhing with dismay and willing herself sober, and awaited the casualties.
In fact, no one was hurt; the shelling ended, and the game continued. Eric, assuming that she had made a bold dash for the safehouse, was filled with admiration. When finally he realized that she had simply quit, he made excuses for her, then for himself, and retired to his bunk and stared for hours at the meaningless code of Pascal.
The next day, Hillary visited the village of Pastor’s Hill—something that none of the soldiers would have done alone, never mind unarmed, for the village was known to be held by rebels. Eric was organizing a rescue party when she returned in the late afternoon, carrying a somewhat depleted first-aid kit. He harangued her for taking unnecessary risks, and she harangued him, and, by extension, all the mainland forces, for ignoring the plight of the local populace.
“If we only treat our own people, we’re not a medical service, we’re a military one. Besides, I thought part of our mandate here was to win the islanders over to our side.” —Eric spluttered, able to sense but not to identify the contradiction in these two statements. “Look, you can’t just hand out meds to a partisan village. That is a military act.” —“I saw no evidence of any allegiance to the partisans.” —“They aren’t going to stand up and announce their allegiance!” —“No, but we can’t assume every islander is a rebel, either. Most of these people just want to be left alone—by both sides.” —Eric sighed and rubbed his eyes. He admitted that most islanders were probably nonpartisan, but he could not see how a unilateral withdrawal would benefit anyone but the partisans. “The more we leave them alone, the less the rebels will.” —But Hillary was not, at the moment, advocating a withdrawal, or even addressing the larger morality of the war. She granted him that most of the locals probably were partisan, but that was no reason to deny them medical attention. “We do our job. End of story.”
She argued the more forcefully for the abstract good, because the specific good was in this case somewhat hazy. That day, she had been welcomed warmly enough into several homes, but none of the villagers would admit to any ailment more severe than psoriasis. Nor did they seem to be suffering from malnutrition: cauldrons of stew bubbled in many kitchens, and the larders she caught glimpses into were crammed with canned goods. She thus felt some misgivings when Doctor Latroussaine finally capitulated. The next day, with Major Lopez’s authorization and Major Jenkman’s blessing, Hillary returned to Pastor’s Hill in a jeep, accompanied by Doctor Latroussaine and three jumpy privates acting as bodyguards, among them Private Bicyk.
To her relief, the village bore a very different aspect twenty-four hours later. Now no food of any kind was in evidence, and all the villagers, even the children, complained of headaches and stomachaches, fevers and chills, insomnia and fatigue. The change was puzzling, but too gratifying to analyze. She supposed that they had been shy, and that now they trusted her. She and Doctor Latroussaine did what little they could with what supplies they had. They swabbed and sterilized; they palpated and massaged; they auscultated; they bandaged. They dispensed salt tablets and their least expired metronidazole pills. Mostly they took notes and made plans to return, to see if the oddly elusive symptoms persisted.
In fact, the villagers were shamming. The local partisan militia—that is, all the boys and most of the girls aged fifteen to twenty-five—had instructed their parents, grandparents, and younger siblings to defraud the mainland doctor of as much food and pharmaceuticals as possible, which could then be sold back to the mainlanders stationed or on leave in the cities. In the same way, partisans across the island had found it more profitable to sell their produce, dairy, and meat than to eat it—the occupying forces’ need for these things being great, and their dollar being worth so much more than the island currency. And the partisans, who were young and zealous, happily subsisted on canned rations—which were for them, indeed, a delicacy, because foreign and machine-produced. Besides, they could always raid a nonpartisan town if they wanted to eat, say, a carrot. (Although, to be sure, this practice had a discouraging effect on the farmers, and had helped contribute to the food shortages—which, happily, raised the prices of wha
t remained.)
Mrs. Karla Zapolitz refused to participate any longer in this scheme. She sensed that her grandsons, profiting by the presence of the very army that their rebellion had drawn here, had no intention of ever allowing the war to end. But she, for one, was fed up with the guns, the bombs, and the deaths. With heroic defiance, she told the doctors that there was nothing in the world wrong with her. “I am perfectly healthy!” she shouted out the window. “And am not the least bit hungry!”
To most of the thirty young partisans in hiding around her house, this declaration seemed merely odd; but it filled one young man with consternation and anger. Her grandson, First Cadet Ice Sword, who was crouched just outside the window, recognized her defiance, and realized that she was betraying the militia’s presence to the enemy. She was a traitor to the rebellion. He hesitated only a moment.