I ate the hospital's surprisingly good food, submitted to the daily rituals of bath and bed-change, took their shots when they gave them, and endured in painful silence when they didn't. "Is man such a stranger to agony that he must hunt for the Garden with a needle," I say to the two nurses who drug me, Lt. Light and Lt. Hewitt. One laughs; the other thinks it is a famous quotation. Lt. Hewitt once said to an orderly at my door, "Battle fatigue," and shook her hollow head. I laughed, an obscene, barking bellow. Lt. Hewitt, or Bones as she is known, smirked and quickly left. To tattle, I supposed. Regulations permit only Death and doctors above the rank of captain to laugh in this hospital.
Gallard came soon afterward and asked after me again. Silence had begun to bore me, but I wasn't ready to talk yet. I wanted him to really want to know, so I said:
"Curious instruments aren't the keys to Heaven, sir, nor for that matter, to my heart, either."
"They, of course, weren't meant to be," he answered as he exited.
I laughed again, softer, and rang for the nurse. She raised my bed, but not quite high enough for me to see out my window comfortably. I lifted my body and a sudden wave of black discs floated at me. My head seemed airborne also, and the discs enlarged and drifted closer, then suddenly covered my eyes with a quick bright shock and I fainted.
Climbing up from the faint, more symbolically than physically, I quietly labored out of the sea of self-pity. My nose filled with the smell of fresh-cut grass, heavy and a bit too sweet, like watermelon, and the tart needles of pine, and the unmistakable mixture of make-up, sweat and perfume which meant woman. I focused on the blue, sweetly wrinkled eyes above mine.
"Hello, lovely," I said, and touched her cheek. She blushed, her face like a rose nestled among her pale short hair. Lt. Light had a large body, but her face was a small, timid oval above it. She was small breasted, but perfect in the legs and hips. I hadn't noticed before. She always hunched forward as if afraid her height might offend, and this small touch made her uniform seem less than the armor the other nurses wore.
"It seems you're all right," she said.
"I suppose the script calls for me to say, 'Well, you're pretty much all right yourself,' and you are, in spite of the script, all right."
"What do you want?"
"A cigarette?" I asked, and she gave me one and a light.
"Anything else?" she asked with the match cupped in her hand. "And if you say what the script calls for, I'll bust your head."
"It might be worth it."
"It might," she chuckled. She had sounded as if she really did want to know if I wanted anything else.
"You might stay and talk."
"I can't."
"Not right now?"
"Not anytime. You're an evil-minded enlisted man and I'm an officer and a gentleman," she said with a bit of a smile. But then back to business: "You sure you're all right?" She turned to leave as I nodded, and the hesitant way she carried her head struck me again. I wanted to straighten that back and lift that delicate face to the sun.
"One more thing," I said.
"Yes?" she asked very solemnly. She could change so quickly. Like all defenseless things, she was too ready to be hurt.
"Your name?"
She smiled again, and then did it perfectly, never thinking Lt. Light would be enough. "Abigail Light."
"Abby?"
"No."
"Gail?"
"No. Abigail," she said with a flip of her head, smiled again as if pleased by the sound of her name, then left. She had spoken her name in an old-fashioned way, musically important and not to be cheapened by a nickname, a name from a time when names mattered. Abigail Light. How much nicer than mine, I thought, mine which resembled an ominous rumble of thunder on a spring day. Jacob Slagsted Krummel. Slag Krummel.
I lay back in bed. My body, so lately and violently taught its vulnerability, forgot the pain, the violation. I stretched against the aches and pains of inactivity, scratched some of the smaller scabs on my right side, and decided I would live after all.
I examined my surroundings: my room; those sour walls; an uninviting porcelain-enamel framed bed, complete with an array of mechanical devices to push, pull, twist and turn, so that it might have been a place to get sick rather than well; two windows on the west wall, raised halfway and partly covered by age-yellowed roller shades, with panes of glass too clean to be less than sharp.
Out the windows is another story. In the distance sits the city of Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines, a multi-colored maze spread over half a dozen soft hills. Much nearer, lodged at the edge of a rise, is the Halfway House, a low and massive log building with an umbrella-spotted terrace slightly behind the ninth green. The tenth and eleventh fairways are across the road to the left, but I can't see them, nor the twelfth, and only the back edge of the thirteenth green because all this is hidden by the rise on which the fourteenth tee sits. The fourteenth fairway is straight with a slight down-slope for two hundred yards, then the plane of the land tilts left for the next one hundred yards just where a well-hit slice will run downhill into the evergreen rain-forest mixture of rough. Then the fairway is level for another thirty yards to where the raised green is banked against the side of the hill with two small traps at the fore-lip. (I once drove the right-hand trap with a good drive and lots of downhill run, but Morning thought I had paid my caddie to drop the ball there. He always was a hard man to convince.) There is a road about twenty yards above the green, and a graveled path on this side of the road leading directly toward my window. The path forks between the road and the hospital, one fork leading toward the hospital past my window, and the other toward the fifteenth tee off to the right. No one seems to walk toward my window, though.
My nostalgic lingering over the view was not without reason. There had been times when that small golf course had been our only refuge. We would come up when the heat and debaucheries of the plain had clogged our spirits, up to the mountains, to the sun and the afternoon rains. Cool air and solitude, fresh vegetables and virtue, golf and moderation, and the mountains stretching toward the sky. These things had brought peace to us then – but I wondered if they could pacify me now, now that I was alone with my memory, my history, now pinned with a wing I couldn't carry.
Less than three months before, Cagle, Novotny, Morning and I had stood on that very circle of green which so occupied me when I saw it again, stood healthy and laughing as the sun ate the morning mists. And as I thought of them, the sudden life in my veins became quick guilt, and all I had to do to see them again was close my eyes.
Black and white, black and white, stark black and white. A negative world undeveloped by dawn. A roar of all sounds lashed into one and no single cry can lift its pleading arm above the clamor. Novotny's healthy tan now blasted gray, his fatigues still starched, but he has a crazy black part through his stiff white hair. Cagle, small hairy body dancing in skivvy shorts, jerk, step, jerk, jerk, as blood spurts from his chest. And Joe Morning, Joe Morning, his strong length folding forward in a quick nervous bow as if someone important had just ended his life.
I opened my eyes and they were gone, and they were there, and there was not a thing I could do about it. I slept.
A nurse and a Filipino orderly woke me at ten for a bed-change and a whore's bath. They managed to do it without making me pass out from the pain. The clean sheets were stiff and cool against my back, and the bath had left me feeling clean for a change. I might be clean, but my right leg, after two weeks in a cast, smelled as if it had crawled in there to die. I asked for a barber and, oddly enough, one came from the hospital shop. He cleared away the stubble, trimmed my moustache and gave me a haircut.