Her mouth even tried to curve a little and she would duck her head in a sort of apologetic gesture and collapse against the pillow again. I noticed once that the case was wet where she laid her face, so I lifted her head and turned the pillow over for her, and from the look she gave me, you would have thought I'd healed her single-handedly and brought her husband back to life to boot.
Joe called around 2100 and said that, starting at midnight, That's graft could be rolled every half hour, which helped me a little.
Still, when I got up from charting my meds at one, I couldn't bear weight on my left foot and I hopped from bed to bed, and stood with my knee on a chair while I did That's treatment.
A new corpsman, Ron Ryan, was on the other side and there was no sound except the rush of the desktop fan, which didn't cool things off much but blew my charts apart unless I weighted the papers down with I.V.
bottles and coffee mugs.
I felt funny hopping along, because with each little hop my head seemed to float right up to the ceiling and take a long time coming down. I felt as if I were looking out from a long way inside my brain, as if most of me were somewhere deep inside my body, smaller, shrunken- inside myself, with the rest of me, this big ungainly shell, hopping around and sweating. Sometimes I- didn't quite keep track of where I was and I'd think I was at bed three and I was already at five. I was well lubricated by continual runnels of sweat, but they almost felt cool by now. And I was oddly, dopily happy and unconcerned. Ryan appeared at one end of the ward with a mop and I stood staring at him for a moment and, hey presto, he disappeared without moving, just as I caught myself on someone's bed rail, falling backward.
Old Xe was still awake when I hopped to his bedside. He startled me by grabbing my wrist above the flashlight. He hissed as he touched me and his fingers felt so cool I thought for a moment his hiss was a sizzle, like cold bacon on a hot pan. "Numbah ten, co," he said, giving me a penetrating look from eyes that gleamed like pools of oil in the beam of my flashlight. I realized he realized my foot was killing me.
"Damn straight, papasan," I said from inside a tunnel somewhere.
"Beaucoup dau," I agreed, but then felt a little ashamed to be telling him my troubles, telling this legless old man about my silly sore toe.
Ryan was on his break when the commotion broke out on the GI side. I limped over in time to see one of the new men standing in the middle of the aisle, swinging his pillow in a circle and shouting. Two of his buddies were wide awake, their eyes bright in my flashlight beam like the eyes of wild animals, watching him in the dark. I started toward him, and one of the others said, "Don't, ma'am. He's asleep, but he could still hurt you." But I did my best to sound motherly-"It's okay, sweetheart. You're just having a bad dream"-and talked him back to bed.
Walking back to the Vietnamese side, I felt as if I were on a single stable stilt. Suddenly Ryan popped up in front of me. He reminded me a little of an intelligent chicken: sharp nose, sharp but receding chin, shiny little eyes, and a bit of a forelock over his brow, like a coxcomb. He grabbed my arm as I tottered against him. "Steady, L.T."
"You keep popping in and out," I complained; "it's like, now I see you, now I don't."
"You better sit down, ma'am. You feel like you're running a fever.
Anything wrong?"
"Got a sore toe. Isn't that silly?"
"You better go sit down."
"Gotta finish rounds."
"I'll finish them."
I was dubious. "Okay, but make sure everybody's breathing."
"Affirmative, L.T."
I limped back to my metal folding chair and landed heavily. I propped my sore foot on another chair, feeling like a comic figure of an old man with gout.
I wanted to take my boot off, but I was going to wait until the night supervisor made rounds, because I didn't want to be caught out of uniform and I knew that if I got the boot off, I wouldn't be able to get it back on. Actually, I didn't care all that much one way or the other, but to take the boot off would require bending over and I thought it very likely the top of my head would fall off and rattle down the aisle like a loose cookie jar lid when the jar is tipped too far. So I would just rest a minute and then I would start a letter to Mom.
My eyes just closed for a moment, but they wanted to stay closed. I fought them open again. I couldn't be caught sleeping on duty. I finally pried them open and started writing the letter. I found that I couldn't remember my last word and my pen kept slipping off the page, my words leveling out like an EKG gone flat when a patient dies.
My lids kept drooping and I wished I could use toothpicks to prop them open-the dim lighting, the muted noises, the intense heat, and the feeling I had of trying to move through molasses with my body while my mind was in free-fall made me feel drunk. I kept dropping off and startling myself awake a split second later, so that my surroundings took on the semblance of a clumsy animation with too few frames -jerky and discontinuous. I thought things would seem more real if only I could turn on more lights.
And then the ward lurched again and I saw that there were more lights, floating just ahead of me and a little above my chair. They were very pretty multicolored ones, patterned ones, a veritable Fourth of July's worth of lights, except that they weren't exploding and sparking but swirling out and dissipating like heat waves.
At first I thought there were seven, but they all sort of blurred and expanded into one big radiant pattern, flowing like smoke out of a central body, drifting, seeming to form ghosts, like the ectoplasm mediums were-supposed to exhale, only in living color-rather faded color at first, but as I watched, growing more vivid. Clear blue and jade green and spiraling flames of amethyst flowed from what seemed a redorange fountain with curls of blue smoke and rays of pure yellow, with a white spark near the center.
I thought: Far out, complimenting myself on my Technicolor imagination.
I watched the colored thing's progress passively as if it were a weird movie. I could see perfectly well beyond the light and everyone was still sleeping.
Behind the light, at first dim but growing brighter all the time, was a man's figure. Initially it seemed legless, but as it grew brighter it lit him up like a Christmas tree. I could see that he had his legs tucked up under him, yoga style.
He was floating about five feet off the ground, just above the iron ends of the beds, and underneath his toes I saw the intake and output clipboard hanging from Xe's bed foot. Through the transparent white spark his hands clasped at his chest.
I don't know if I actually said it, but I thought: What a great trick, Xe. I didn't know you could do that. I also thought it was neat the way he'd grown his legs back, but I didn't want to say anything-it seemed crass to mention it.
As I watched, the light shifted with the same jerkiness as everything else, so when the pink tendrils started waiting toward me, it was again a case of presto chango, now I see them and now I don't know if I like this whole trip or not. I scooted back and my leg fell off the chair, which sent shafts of fire up it. The tendrils shriveled, and as they shrank back to the center, they deepened to bright red, then deep brick red, surrounding the whole pattern. Through the light I saw Xe's face, and that made me scramble even farther backward.
With another of those animated frame shifts, I blinked and saw only the little desk lamp. Xe was lying quietly, his eyes closed, looking maybe a little more tired and sadder than I remembered from before, but otherwise the same. I caught the glint of Ahn's eye as he rolled onto his stomach, looking around him as if he thought a cougar would pounce on him. I started up from my chair but blinked again and there was Ryan leaning across me over the desk. "L.T., you okay? You look real bad."