The army doctor in Munich says the doctors in New York and Lenggries are full of shit and pours something silvery into my eyes that feels like acid. He tells me stop whining, be a man, you’re not the only unit to get this infection, goddammit. I should be thankful I’m not a unit in Korea getting my ass shot off, that half these fat-ass units in Germany should be over there fighting with their paisans in Korea. He tells me look up, look down, look right, look left, and that will get the drops into every corner of my eyes. And how the hell, he wants to know, how the hell did they let these two eyes into this man’s army? Good thing they sent me to Germany. In Korea I’d need a seeing-eye dog to fight off the goddam Chink units. I’m to stay in the hospital a few days and if I keep my eyes open and my mouth shut I’ll be an okay unit.
I don’t know why he keeps calling me a unit and I’m beginning to wonder if eye doctors in general are different from other doctors.
The best part of being in the hospital is that even with the bad eyes I can read all day and into the night. The doctor says I’m supposed to rest the eyes. He tells the medic to pour the silvery liquid into the eyes of this unit every day until further notice but the medic, Apollo, tells me the doctor is full of shit and brings a tube of penicillin ointment which he smears on my eyelids. Apollo says he knows a thing or two because he went to medical school himself but had to drop out because of a broken heart.
In a day the infection disappears and now I’m afraid the doctor will send me back to Lenggries and that will be the end of my easy days reading Zane Grey, Mark Twain, Herman Melville. Apollo tells me not to worry. If the doctor comes into my ward I should rub my eyes with salt and they’ll look like
Two piss holes in the snow, I say.
Right.
I tell him my mother made me rub salt on my eyes a long time ago to make them look sore so that we’d get money for food from a mean man in Limerick. Apollo says, Yeah, but this is now.
He wants to know about my coffee and cigarette ration which, obviously, I’m not using and he’ll be glad to take them off my hands in return for the penicillin ointment and the salt treatment. Otherwise the doctor will come with the silvery stuff and in no time I’ll be back in Lenggries counting out sheets and blankets till my discharge in three months. Apollo says Munich is crawling with women and it’s easy to get laid but he wants high-class stuff not some whore in a bombed-out building.
The cause of all my misfortunes is a book by Herman Melville called Pierre, or the Ambiguities which isn’t a bit like Moby Dick and so dull it puts me to sleep in the middle of the day and there’s the doctor shaking me awake and waving the tube of penicillin left behind by Apollo.
Wake up, goddammit. Where did you get this? Apollo, right? That unit, Apollo. That goddam dropout from a half-ass medical school in Mississippi.
He marches to the door and roars down the hall, Apollo, get your ass in here, and there’s Apollo’s voice, Yes, sir, yes, sir.
You, goddammit, you. Did you supply this unit with this tube?
In a way, sir, yes, sir.
What the hell are you talking about?
He was suffering, sir, screaming with his eyes.
How the hell do you scream with your eyes?
I mean, sir, the pain. He would scream. I would apply the penicillin.
Who told you, eh? You a goddam doctor?
No, sir. It’s just something I saw them doing in Mississippi.
Fuck Mississippi, Apollo.
Yes, sir.
And you, soldier, what are you reading there with those eyes?
Pierre, or the Ambiguities, sir.
Christ. What the hell is it about?
I don’t know, sir. I think it’s about this Pierre who’s caught between a dark-haired woman and a fair-haired woman. He’s trying to write a book in a room in New York and he’s so cold the women have to heat up hot bricks for his feet.
Christ. You’re going back to your outfit, soldier. If you can lie on your ass here reading books about units like that you can be an active unit again. And you, Apollo, you’re lucky I don’t have your ass before a firing squad.
Yes, sir.
Dismissed.
Next day Vinnie Gandia drives me back to Lenggries and he drives without his drumsticks. He says he can’t do it anymore, that he nearly got himself killed after he brought me to Munich the last time. You can’t drive, drum and handle your asthma, simple as that. You gotta choose, and the drumsticks had to go. If he got into an accident and had damaged hands and couldn’t play he’d stick his head in the oven, simple as that. He can’t wait to get back to New York and hang out around Fifty-second Street, the greatest street in the world. He makes me promise we’ll meet in New York and he’ll take me to all the great jazz joints, no charge, no cost, because he knows everyone and they know if he didn’t have this goddam asthma he’d be right up there with Krupa and Rich, right up there.
There’s a law that says I can sign up for another nine months in the army and avoid the six-year army reserve requirement. If I re-up they can’t call me back any time the United States decides to defend democracy in distant places. I could stay here in the supply room for the nine months doling out sheets, blankets, condoms, drinking beer in the village, going home with an occasional girl, reading books from the base library. I could journey back to Ireland to tell my grandmother my sorrow over walking out in anger. I could take dancing lessons in Munich so that all the girls in Limerick would be queueing up to get out on the floor with me in my sergeant’s stripes which I’d surely get.
But I can’t afford another nine months in Germany with the letters coming from Emer telling me how she’s counting the days till my return. I never knew she liked me that much and now I like her for liking me because that’s the first time in my life I’ve heard that from a girl. I’m so excited over being liked by Emer I write and tell her I love her and she tells me she loves me, too, and that puts me in heaven and makes me want to pack my duffel bag and jump on a plane to her side.
I write and tell her how I long for her and how I’m here in Lenggries inhaling the perfume from her letters. I dream of the life we’ll have in New York, how I’ll go to my job every morning, a warm indoor job where I’ll sit at a desk and scribble important decisions. Every night we’ll have dinner and go to bed early so that we’ll have plenty of time for the excitement.