The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  Everyone inside the house—Hillary, Eric, Private Bicyk, Private Talomey, and Mrs. Zapolitz—watched the grenade roll on the floor in diminishing circles until it came to a stop. Then Private Bicyk threw himself on it.

  Still no one else moved. Slowly the grimace on Private Bicyk’s face slackened; eventually he opened his eyes. The grenade was a dud.

  Private Talomey took charge. He shouted to Private Allgood, posted outside the door, that they were under attack; he shrugged the radio off his back onto the table and began tuning it; he advised the doctors and Mrs. Zapolitz to get low and out of sight; and he told Private Bicyk to toss the fucking grenade back out the fucking window already. This was done—and instantly there came a tearing burst of semi-automatic fire. The militia, who had not been expecting three soldiers and a jeep, were jumpy too. Bullets raked across the walls of the house; a porcelain jug in the kitchen exploded. Private Allgood somersaulted inside, and everyone got low and out of sight. Mrs. Zapolitz muttered phrases of amazement and disgust to herself. Eric and Hillary exchanged a glance, each finding comfort in what they took to be the other’s look of calm reassurance. Meanwhile, Private Bicyk squirmed on the floor in a puddle of blood. He had been hit.

  The gunfire ended as abruptly as it had begun. Voices outside screamed questions, accusations, and orders. Hunched over Private Bicyk, Hillary and Eric worked obliviously, cutting away the collar of his uniform and stanching the blood that poured from the hole behind his ear while simultaneously trying to determine the extent of the wound. —“Don’t see an exit, and I don’t see the projectile.” —“Looks small caliber, at least.” —“But it could have got anywhere.” —“Doesn’t seem to have interfered with his airway. Give me a deep breath, private.” But Private Bicyk wouldn’t open his mouth. “Through your nose. Excellent.” —“You’re going to be all right, soldier.” —“How long till we can get an evac helicopter in here, Private Talomey?” —Private Talomey swore, slammed down the radio headset, and immediately picked it up again to resume negotiations. “The fuckers say they can’t land with the rug this hot.” —Private Allgood, with one eye above the windowsill, said, “I’d say the rug has cooled down some.”

  In fact, the militia, expecting retaliation, had already retreated to the woods, leaving the village to its fate. They all rebuked one another for starting a firefight so close to home; but their bitterness was alleviated by the romantic prospect of building a new community in the treetops, or underground.

  Private Talomey said, “What they really mean is they won’t drop into a partisan village. The best they can do is Hill 70.” —Hillary objected, “That’s halfway back to base!” —“We’ll have to run for the jeep,” said Private Allgood. “Can he move?” —“Ask him,” said Eric, pressure-dressing the wound. —Private Bicyk, by narrowing his eyes and clenching his jaw, seemed to nod.

  “Bullshit,” said Hillary. “Can’t we get an ambulance out here?” —“Driver shortage,” shrugged Private Talomey. —“Bullshit. I am going to shit down someone’s throat for this.” But she helped Eric get Private Bicyk to his feet, and together they supported him as far as the door. Then, at Private Allgood’s signal, they staggered from the house—leaving Mrs. Zapolitz to fend for herself. Half an hour later, still grumbling, she stood, dusted herself off, and surveyed the damage desolately.

  In the jeep, Hillary kneeled next to Private Bicyk, who lay on the back seat. Eric sat in the front, wedged between Private Talomey, who drove, and Private Allgood, who aimed his rifle at the trees hurtling past.

  “We don’t necessarily need to stop,” said Hillary tentatively. —“What do you mean?” —“At Hill 70. We can just keep going, back to base.” —Eric turned around; his eyes grew wide with understanding. “Oh, no. No, no. This soldier needs to be medevacked. He needs blood and fluids, and a full exploration of the wound and a radiograph to rule out hematoma, and—” —“We’ve got ultrasound, and we’ve got two units of packed red cells, which will surely tide us over till we can tap the walking bank.” By this she meant that they could draw blood from other soldiers—the ‘walking blood bank.’ —“How on earth are we supposed to do a crossmatch?,” Eric asked disingenuously. —“White tile method.” She went on quickly: “What if there’s a backlog at Poplar Junction? He’s going to sit in the triage tent for an hour. Meanwhile, we could be debriding and exploring and repairing. If we find nerve trauma or hematoma, which I don’t think we will, we can still call in the medevac, and our chart’ll push him to the front of the queue.” —Eric chewed his lip. “We don’t have the resources they have.” —“But we’ve got the time and the personnel, which they may not have.”

  The helicopter came into view. “What are we doing?” asked Private Talomey. “Stopping or going?”

  “Come on, Doctor.” Hillary’s eyes said what she did not: that this was her fault.

  “I’d feel a lot better,” Eric murmured, “if we knew the trajectory of that projectile.”

  “Oh, we know that,” she said. Private Bicyk, who was afraid of crying out, was grinding the bullet between his teeth.

  “Stopping or going, Doc?”

  “Going,” Eric sighed. “Fast.”

  Over the days that followed, all of Hillary’s energy, anxiety, and compassion found an outlet in Private Bicyk. She confined him to bed and prohibited him from trying to speak until his wound had fully healed; and his mute immobility made him seem as helpless and needy as an infant. Twice daily she redressed his wound (which, aside from a shattered tooth, was not serious); she sponged and shaved him; she emptied his bedpan; she improvised a feeding tube from a nasal trumpet and an infusion pump, with which she sent a continuous diet of mashed rice, potatoes, and bananas directly into his stomach; and she gave him morphine for his pain. She slept on a gurney in the medical tent to be near him at night.

  Eric took over her neglected duties—treating the cuts, abrasions, ulcers, and sexually transmitted infections that appeared sporadically on the base. He was still left with much free time, which he spent less often in the mess, and more often with Hillary at Private Bicyk’s bedside.

  Together they soothed and entertained the patient with tales, riddles, and simple children’s games; occasionally Eric read a few pages of Pascal. “It’s not necessary to have a very elevated soul to realize that there is no true and solid satisfaction here, that all our pleasures are only vanity, that all our evils are infinite, and that in the end death, which menaces us at every instant, must inevitably, in a few years, place us under the horrible necessity of being either eternally born, or eternally unhappy.” Finding some of these passages rather bleak, Hillary asked Eric to refrain from translating them.

  But mostly the doctors gave Private Bicyk lessons—for they believed that conversation was salubrious, and they found it easier to talk about biology, chemistry, and physics than about themselves. Since he could not tell them what he already knew, nothing was extraneous. Every object around them, every spoken word, every invoked concept suggested new topics for their lectures. One would tell him everything they knew, everything they could remember, about spiders; or glass; or dust; or the water cycle; or white blood cells; or static electricity; or carpentry; or harmonics; while the other, acting on Private Bicyk’s behalf, would play the role of naive interviewer, posing the endless series of “why” and “how” questions that are the despair of so many overtaxed parents. But Eric and Hillary were not overtaxed, and their unhurried investigations, rather than leading to frustration or annoyance, ended only in wonder and delight. They looked at everything with the fresh, inquisitive intensity of children, and admired everything with the adult’s capacity for understanding and awe. They imagined that they were seeing the world through Private Bicyk’s unclouded eyes, and that they had him to thank for this vision of glory.

  But in fact, when Bicyk was not voluptuously stupefied by morphine, he was alternately bored and mortified. He was appalled at having so much a
ttention paid him, and his shame was only aggravated when his friends came to visit. He could not demonstrate his strength or his stoicism while lying speechless in bed, and his injury was not horrible enough to constitute its own heroism; so he resorted to implying—from his bearing, or his gaze—that he was in a great deal of pain, which he was withstanding manfully. Doctor V. detected these hints more readily than his fellow soldiers, however, and was always quick to administer another dose of painkillers—thus depriving him of both the means and the desire to continue miming distress.

  On the day that Captain Augello’s replacement finally arrived, Eric and Hillary took Private Bicyk for a walk around the base. They had a wheelchair, so they used it. This humiliation was more than Private Bicyk cared to bear; he allowed Hillary to conclude that his tooth was hurting him. With the morphine in his body, he was content to be rolled around like a well-fed baby in a pram, absorbing sunshine and oxygen. It had rained heavily the day before, and the slimy puddles lying everywhere prompted Hillary to tell him all about freshwater algae.

  “Most of them are too small for us to see individually, and in a mass they often just look like green scum. But when you view them under a microscope, you discover that there are actually more different kinds than there are species of plants in a rainforest. The algae are plants, too, of course—at least, they convert sunlight directly into nutrition like plants do—but some of them swim around like little fish. They’re as varied and colorful as tropical fish, too. Even the single-celled ones come in dozens of shapes and sizes. Some are spherical, some long like needles, some crescent shaped; some are like balloons, some like canoes, others like jellyfish, others just blobs; some are smooth, some spiny; some look like S’s, or C’s, or J’s; some are triangular, some cubical, and some are perfect pentagons. And sometimes they get together in colonies, or many-celled bodies, which in turn can take the form of discs, or globes, or sheets, or rods, or cogwheels, or even branched filaments, or broad leaflike fronds. Unlike plants, though, they don’t actually have leaves, or distinct stems, or even proper roots. And they don’t grow fruit, and they don’t have seeds!” —“How do they reproduce?” asked Eric. —“All kinds of ways. Sometimes they just split in two. Sometimes two cells come together to make new cells. Some give off spores, which are tougher and simpler than seeds, and can survive indefinitely—through freezing cold, or drought, or even fire. There are spores everywhere, which is why a rain puddle that wasn’t there yesterday can be flourishing with life today. And some spores can swim—even those of certain stationary algae. Imagine if an apple tree dropped apples that could walk!”

  But Private Bicyk, who was an amateur photographer back home, was more interested in the way the reflection of the sun shrank and expanded on the rippling surface of one puddle, but without growing brighter or dimmer. He realized that the sunlight was falling equally on every part of the puddle, indeed on every inch of the earth, and that with just the right combination of waves, the entire ocean could become a blinding spotlight. “The light’s nice,” he murmured, and gestured at the puddle. Immediately, Doc Eric launched into a lesson on the physical properties of color.

  “The funny thing about color,” Eric concluded, “is that it’s what’s rejected. The redness of the rose is due to the fact that the petals absorb blue and yellow frequencies of light radiation, but can do nothing with red. Red gets reflected, and that’s what reaches our eyes.” —“So,” said Hillary, “it’s almost like what we see is the opposite of what really is?” —“Exactly!” And, searching for a dramatic illustration, he became somewhat fanciful: “Take the darkness of the night sky, the blackness of deep space. It’s actually brimming with sunlight; a rainbow shower of electromagnetic waves pours through it constantly. But nothing stops it, nothing deflects it—except occasionally a planet, or a comet, or the moon.”

  Private Bicyk smiled and nodded, hearing in this description a beautiful echo of his own unexpressed idea.

  BUZZING OF THE INTERCOM, followed by knocking at the door. Two janitors, a man and a woman, enter. Noise from the factory floor while the door is open.

  Male janitor. “Ain’t here.”

  Female janitor. “Good. Maybe we’ll get done on time for a change.”

  They relax, taking possession of the room. It is a plush office, with a view of the factory’s vast ceiling through the window.

  Male janitor. “I don’t mind overtime.”

  Female janitor. “A born janitor, all right.”

  Male janitor. “What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t muss those papers.”

  She shifts some papers on the desk. “A born slave.”

  Male janitor. “I just happen to like getting paid time and a half’s all.”

  She sits in the chair behind the desk. “They throw you some scraps, you forget you’re a dog.”

  Male janitor. “Aw, don’t start. Janitor’s a good clean job. —You know what I mean.”

  Female janitor, reading a page. “Seven thousand dollars for transportation!”

  Male janitor. “Transportation of what?”

  Female janitor. “How should I know? Of him, probably. Him and his secretary. All over God knows where and back again.”

  Male janitor, sitting at the conference table. “Boss gotta travel, I guess.”

  Female janitor. “Ever hear of a telephone?”

  Male janitor. “What do you think it’s like, being boss? Running meetings. Organizing things. Bossing.”

  Female janitor. “Degrading. Shouldn’t even be offices like this. All this for one person!”

  Male janitor. “Aw. I think’d be fun.”

  Female janitor. “Seven thousand dollars.” She stands, covertly replacing the papers. “I’ll tell you one thing you don’t know. This might be the last time I ever clean this office.”

  He stands and begins tidying and dusting. “I don’t see you cleaning it now.”

  Female janitor. “And I do know what you mean: you mean it’s honest, necessary work. Like farming, and cooking, and teaching, and building—and cleaning. So how come everyone looks down on us?”

  Male janitor. “Aw, don’t start.”

  Female janitor. “You’re part the problem: a dog who wants to be master. A slave who only wants his own slaves. Your hope’s what fuels the whole apparatus. When you gonna wake up? We need to get rid of slaves and masters and dogs and bosses altogether.”

  Male janitor. “You sound like a churchman.” Laughs. “You sound just like a Church man.”

  Female janitor. “At least Matheson Church and the union’s willing to fight for our rights.”

  Male janitor. “Bite for ’em, you mean—the hand that feeds.”

  Female janitor. “And you sound just like Babcock. At least coming from him it’s self-preservation. You, you lick the foot that kicks you. A foot-licking lackey, that’s what you are.”

  Male janitor. “I ain’t gonna let you rile me up.”

  Female janitor. “Exactly your problem.”

  Male janitor. “I ain’t gonna get riled up. It ain’t healthy.”

  Female janitor. “Working in these conditions—”

  Male janitor. “I don’t know if your union’s gonna do any good, or it’s just gonna get us all fired. One thing I do know. Getting riled up ain’t healthy for a life. Since the union came in, you all look sicker and unhappier. And uglier.”

  Sid Babcock enters. The janitors start.

  Sid. “You can leave.”

  Female janitor. “Yes, sir.”

  Male janitor. “Should we come back, or—”

  Sid. “Straightaway! There’s a shareholders’ meeting begins in five minutes!”

  Male janitor. “Yes, sir.”

  Sid. “Take the garbage at least!”

  Female janitor. “Yes, sir.” They take the garbage and go out.

  Sid paces, muttering and ges
turing. He uses the intercom on the desk.

  Receptionist. “Yes?”

  Sid. “Can you bring me the recentest quarterlies, please?”

  Receptionist. “Yes, sir.”

  Sid. “Oh, forget it, I’ve got ’em.”

  Receptionist. “All right.”

  He flips through papers, then again uses the intercom. “Get me Pensilby.”

  Receptionist. “Just a second.” Pause. “Uh, she’s not at her desk at the moment.”

  Sid. “Where in hell is she at?”

  Receptionist, after a pause. “I’m not sure, sir.”

  Sid. “Inexcusable.” He disengages, then again engages the intercom. “Daize is around, I suppose? There’s a couple of things that I’d like to review with her. Well? Are you there?” There is no answer. “Why the hell in the name of the holy today is this happening here?” He goes to the door and throws it open. “Is there anyone working today? Where is Daize?”

  Daize Glied enters, papers in hand. “Sid?”

  Sid. “Close the door. Did you finish the list?”

  She hands him a sheet of paper. “Here are the thirty-one names.”

  He glances at it. “Which is what we decided?”

  Daize. “Other things equal, that brings us by year-end to ten and a quarter.”

  Sid. “All our youngest employees?”

  Daize. “Leaving out those with dependents.”

  Sid. “Is Renfrento not union?”

  Daize. “So is Parhada, and others. We don’t want to look like we’re playing at favorites.”

  Sid. “Take them off. We don’t need to give Church an excuse to start rousing the rabble again. And besides, our apparent collusion with them will make them seem complicit with us in the layoffs. With luck, we discredit ’em.” He hands the paper back, and watches over Daize’s shoulder as she sits at the conference table, making changes. “Good. Then tomorrow we’ll hand out the first of the slips at the afternoon shift-change. On their way out the gate.”