I, Simon, A Soldier
A Novella
from the forthcoming anthology, Triptych
Simon’s Preface
Sometimes I have imagined a world quite unlike our own: a world where there are not just two mighty nations spread across these thousand and one green islands, since their very creation despising one another and trying to seize one another’s possessions—but many nations, of many different cultures and beliefs; where histories are not borrowed and legends are not common property; where there are spoken many languages, not just this overburdened, inadequate one we share with our eternal enemy. Think of more than one word or way to describe an object, beautiful phrases that might baffle us, yet tickle the tongue with delight! (And if this missive ever were translated into the vulgate of an unknown reader of the future, will I make more or less sense?) Perhaps, too, one could conjecture not innumerable gods, half-forgotten gods once said to be ruling and guiding every entity and object from the sun above to this very pen I hold, but only one god—or perhaps better still, none. Imagine a world where there is no need for war—war because as fraternal twins we grew too much alike, too jealous and too monotonous—but instead the harmony of many voices and ideas reigns, and so humans live in uninterrupted happiness. I cannot really imagine what that would be like, all those unknown words and possibilities: faces, whole civilizations and races that might look so different from our own.
Then again, I can somehow conjecture an even more dissimilar world, one where we have yet to set foot, where indeed we (my people or theirs) cannot be imagined at all. All our buildings, all our art and our vanities, vanished, never were, never will be. All our fulsome grandeur just a smoke-ring, a soap bubble, engendered by a consciousness that does not exist—nothingness. Here then is true peace. Jackdaws soar across a sky that has never known our fires, and the badger and fox burrow among the oaks where our museums and pigsties and temples would crowd the land. Deer and elk grazing grassy meadows that we have made battlefields and cemeteries. Would that be a better world? Some day all of us will be dead—you and you and you (and me) and all our friends and your children, too—so in time, given time, there will be no trace of us left upon this planet. Will that at last be the heaven we have only dreamt of?
Simon’s Story
Before I died for the first time, I remember lastly that I was shouting, gesturing toward that alternately sun-bronzed and shade-dappled youth on the other side of the rocky rill that separated us, where since I had come here to rest he had been striding metronomically back and forth back and forth from beneath the arched chestnut trees to his campfire in the clearing. A tin-metal tramp’s kettle hissed above the fire, and the handfuls of chestnuts he tossed onto the glowing ashes below gave off a powerfully masculine odor reminiscent of saddles and sawdust-covered music halls. The heaving, sweating youth was in just his vest and rude twill trousers with their braces hanging like pendants, shod in heavy lumberjack’s boots, with a lumberjack’s broad-beamed shoulders; and his close-cropped hair looked as if it had been sheared as roughly as a ram’s. On the farther end of the clearing there might have been purple smoke exhaled from the chimney of a little fieldstone hovel, nestled among briar-bush and shedding laburnum, and there might have been a tomcat distending itself on the front stoop, and a bright canary singing its aria from a wicker cage swinging in a linden tree—but that could have been just my imagination completing the scene, familiar from a picture postcard sent to me from a neighboring county by a school chum years ago or a travel poster glanced at from a passing tram. The handsome youth had taken no notice of me sunning alone and naked there on the other side of the water, though he was smiling, and his smile was emblematic of all the serenity of his world when he parted the red-golden tapestries of bowed branches to survey his fire and his green grass and his homestead. I might have been watching him already for an hour, and in that hour I had known unutterable, unclouded peace as well. In that hour, though I was unnoticed and unwatched among my boulders, I felt as if we had become dearest friends (though he might be the enemy) who shared a moment of contentment and beauty as intimately cherished as two young lovers their ripening love. This youth might have indeed been my lover, and I might have been in love with him and his simple, joyous life all my very dull, complex life. And when at last he took notice of me when I dared to wave, it was as if he were waving to that pal he had expected to come here for years, in this strange, lost corner of the world; and when he at last took notice of me as I waved, I closed my eyes and realized that the late September sun had burned its negative image upon the inside of my eyelids and that my head was pulsing with an explosive, incandescent cadence. Not to be unduly over-expressive, but it was then that I remembered I was dead.
For what seemed a millennium I had been dead, or almost completely dead, a trifling speck of consciousness glowing feebly in a vast starless firmament. Gradually, so gradually it must have taken centuries, dull points of sensation prodded and awakened me; I was subtly illuminated by what I can only describe in my regrettably schoolboyish way as a green-glowing, viridescent light emanating from unseen galaxies impossibly far away, and then in an instant my mind traveled swiftly on a beam of that greenish-yellowish light to rejoin my broken body. Everything—every touch, every sound, every luminous memory—came hurtling back into my open brain: the secret history of my short life, its bittersweet pageant of hours and eras and mirthless tea-times; my mother’s smile, my grandfather’s coffin, Maisie and schoolmates and teachers and books, too… while cool paternal hands, the hissing of acetylene lamps, the light from lamps with green medical shades, close camphor-scented murmurs enveloped and caressed me before receding. It turned out, friends, that I was not dead after all, but lying immobile on an abrasive canvas cot within a canvas-roofed enclosure that smelled faintly of merbromine and more strongly of horses. The sun had found me through a rent in the cloth and my lips were moist, as if freshly kissed.
At first, I was angry at whatever deities or mortals had pulled me down from the heavens like that and forced me to live again within a body which I innately understood to be no longer whole or fully functional. Secondly, after I had watched the enchanted dance of dust-motes in my wayward shaft of sunlight for several minutes, I found myself furious with my own self for having imagined my premature demise and slipping so easily into what I had believed to be a bosky if under-imagined afterlife of cottages and canaries, when I should have been battling for my soul and every cherished delicacy of this world I knew so well—from my favorite gun-metal gray fountain-pen to a flock of storks turned pink by the rising sun to the scientifically instructive playing-cards we undergraduates had once shuffled and divided lustfully among ourselves. Lastly, when the ether had fully worn off, I forgot all that I had dreamed, forgot the sun-splashed clearing and the chestnuts and the smiling forester, and merely wondered where I was and what would be required of me now, and probably again.
This war, the war, or the latest war, the war to end all wars, I tried to calculate within my aching head, had been going on for over a thousand days and nights, or ten-thousand days and nights, I wasn’t clear; it must have been going on for a very long time, in any event. Hadn’t it? Hadn’t our two insular nations always been at war with one another? And I, I must have always been a soldier.
“Mussed your pretty golden locks real good, didn’t they, kid?” I heard a croaky whisper somewhere to the left of me, though I could not as yet turn my head. “Saw you when they brung you in, I did. Nasty little scene out there, all those devils and us,” the voice continued, ebbing and flowing with strength and volume. “Yep, saw you dragged in by your yallowy hair. As drained of blood as a hog hung in a smokehouse. Would’ve bet a week’s rations you was dead, me matey.”
Mustering all my strength, I was able to raise my head two or three inches, and, feeling as if my neck were pivoting on a rusty axle, I slowly turned toward the possessor of the rasping voice. He was lying on a cot, too, a giant of a man two or three decades older than myself, with ragged sandy hair and a great unkempt beard of a much darker shade (if it were not for our predicament, I would have been sure it was as fake as a street-corner medicine man’s). At first sight his skin appeared to be painfully sunburned, and not simply dusted with a reddish powder like paprika, which might have been applied on purpose or might have drifted in between the flaps of this hospital tent. When lying fully stretched out as he was, his feet stuck out over the edge of his cot and exposed his horny toenails and toes, yellowed and misshapen as an orangutan’s, to the world. The only other remarkable features of this man were his broad, fleshy hands, which had only five fingers distributed between them. Still, he handled them adroitly and was even then whittling a splinter of wood into a miniature bird.
“A tin turnip,” he explained, keen to what I had been staring at. “Bloody awful thing went off too soon. Devils coming out of the ground like termites. Someone handed me the grenade and told me to throw. ’Round these parts someone’s always passing you a grenade like it was a peppermill, right? Lucky it didn’t take the rest of me with it.”
Up until this moment, I had scarcely been aware of what part or parts of my own body might be missing, since I had just begun to realize where my body was, in general. Now I took a quick inventory and was relieved to find every visible limb and digit seemingly in place, although there was a vague itchiness along my right leg which I could not scratch, as it was bandaged like a mummy’s from calf to thigh.
“Oh, you’re all there, all right,” the bearded man said knowingly, and put down his jack-knife and the unfledged bird. “Only a bit fagged, I reckon. Or fragged! But you never mind, you—they done pieced you back together right fine.” He leaned toward me on his right side and swept back the yellowed sheet, revealing a bloodied bandage taped to his mid-abdomen. “I got this beaut,” he said with the air of a lady showing off a new ring, “the other day, I did. For a while, they was feeding me through a tube stuck smack down in the hole. I could look right in and watch myself churning up the mess. Most fun I’ve had since the draft-board caught up with me.”
I felt the remnants of my last meal rising in my throat, a meal I could remember no more of than where I had been and what I was doing when I thought I had died. Most likely, it was porridge, since all our breakfasts for nearly two years had been porridge. Beating back the porridgy sensation, I asked where I was.
“Can’t you smell the manure, bucko?” my companion said. “It’s a gol-darn barn! If I’m not mistaken, we’re right about where the horse stalls was.”
“I—I thought we were in an army tent. Maybe in a desert or in the mountains.”
“Ha! That’s just the roof torn off and replaced with any ol’ scraps. Hain’t no deserts or mountains round here. Hain’t even no real hospitals. Should know, I grew up just down the road a piece.”
Wide awake now, I pulled myself up against the damp wall (there was no pillow) and saw that the farmer was nothing less than correct, though of course the place had been given a hasty transformation and equipped with examination tables, trays, cabinets, and a quadruple row of cots, each of the cots occupied with a groaning or snoring soldier. Everything was coated with a layer of fine red dust, except where it had been brushed away here and there. An overturned watering trough lay down the aisle from us, atop which an orderly in a dirty green scrub-suit sat cross-legged, filling out a crossword puzzle in a pulp-paper digest. I was at the end of the fourth phalanx of cots, against the cold stone wall of the old barn, upon which there were still spots of moss and mushrooms that had not been scraped away. Above me, there was a hayloft, through which the sunlight shone through slats half-patched with canvas and from which there blew a musty breeze, which would precipitate tiny gusts of chaff and dust upon us all. Opposite, through the wide-open doors of the barn, I could see chickens scratching calligraphy in the red dirt and hear the army mules laughing scornfully now and then, as if this deplorable excuse for a hospital had once been their rightful home. Flashes of hard white light beyond promised an approaching storm.
“Ah, righty,” the farmer said, taking in a draft of dusty air, “they made this place overnight. We hain’t a stone’s throw from the trenches.”
Although I did not believe, or care to believe him—I had been temporarily comforted by the impression that this barn must be at the edge of a city whose hospitals were too full to accept any more reservations—I soon came to realize that those rumblings which I had assumed to be emanating from my near-empty stomach were in fact the aftershocks of bombs striking the earth in the not-too-distant distance. What I had presumed to be bolts of lightning in the sky (but a blue daylight sky?) must then be rockets being set off on the horizon. The shock of this new information naturally distressed me a great deal, and so I sulked down under the scratchy wool coverlet of my cot with a very vocal and overextended sigh. I wanted a goose-down mattress and pillows, and I longed for steaming cocoa brought in by Mother and a serious novel to read during this recovery (which would of course be as rapid as the novel was long), as well as breathless conversations on the telephone to Maisie—not the dust and itchiness and stink, yet alone the approaching devastation outside.
“Loverly day, in’t it? By the way, ol’ chap,” my bedside mate said with an amiability more often found in pub or club, a voice from beyond the foggy borders of sleep (for I had almost put myself out again with those cozy recollections of bed and book and chocolate), “the name’s Irving. By way of Dundersea. And Mounthatten. Doctor of philosophy. Formerly. Hedonist. Always. Pleased to make the acquaintance. Now, if you don’t mind… Ta!” Then it was he, not myself, who dropped into instantaneous slumber before I was able to ask whether Irving was his first or last or possibly both names. Could he really be some sort of professor, like the ones I knew back at university? It did not matter, for his interruptions had spoiled my own chance at sleep; I lay awake now staring out across the other snoring cots toward the garrulous fowl in the barnyard, pitying my present circumstances but nevertheless optimistic that in my honorably wounded condition I would be home soon. Watching Irving sleep, I noticed a ragged recruitment poster tacked between our beds: a brawny, bare-chested young fellow in jodhpurs and puttees brandishing a bayonet, daring all onlookers to “Do You’re Duty! Shut Up and Fight!” That abominable misprint of a homonym offended my earnest collegiate sensibilities almost as much as the implied exhortation against pacifists. Besides, the poster was obsolete, since the draft was now universal and the enemy on all sides of us meant even housewives and schoolgirls were launching bombs from their barricaded porches. In her last aerogram, which had been posted I’d forgot how many weeks ago, Maisie had written that at her office even the sound of the typewriters made visitors flinch.
As I was contemplating punctuation and politics, an aging officer, remarkably well-groomed, not a speck of dust on him, with wavy silver hair and wavy silver mustache, and graceful but rather long and simian arms, bared to the elbow as if just scrubbed, approached my cot, swaggering like a cadet, clipboard held high and forward like a shield. Without having to move his contemptuous lips, he announced that he had been assigned my doctor.
“Will I be all right, sir?” I asked, for lack of anything more conversational to say.
The doctor acted as if his patient had said nothing and began tapping my bandaged leg with a metal prong (actually an adapted horseshoe substituting for a medical device, I soon saw). “Feel this?” he said, jabbing the shoe into the underside of my gauzed knee. “Not much,” I replied, grimacing. Allow me: It is written that a good soldier does not feel pain for himself—only others, or so they had told us all in the infantry.
“And this?” he asked.
“Possibly, possibly not.”
“Feel this?!” His tone was growing more accusatory than interrogatory.
“Oh, a tiny bit, yes.”
“This…”
“Y-yes. Yes, sir!” It did not matter now; I was only a private and could care less about promotion, anyway. When they shipped me back home I would not demand any medals for bravery.
“Let me try here.” The doctor leaned over my lower extremities and I could smell his manly, equine odor even more on his smock. Perhaps he was a member of the cavalry. “Do you feel this? Do you feel this?”
I could not restrain myself any more than I used to when told my sources were dubious, during the days of upper levels and written exams. “Excusing your lordship, but do you actually expect me not to feel that?”
He gave me a curious but not very surprised look. “That time I didn’t touch you.”
“I beg to disagree, sir, but I saw you. I absolutely felt it.”
“I was only pretending to, private.” He dashed off a few lines into his notepad, his silvery mustache smirking. “I’m afraid it’ll have to come off,” he said, as casually as if he had said, “I’m crazy for some good hock.” Which was, in fact, what I at first convinced myself I had heard.
“I’d love a good stiff drink, too,” I agreed.
The doctor gave me a look. “I said,” he said, “the leg will have to go. Or else the infection in your bloodstream will spread.”
I nearly bit through my tongue. “No, you must be wrong, your lordship, sir,” I pleaded. “It’ll be all right. Nothing that can’t mend itself, given a little time. Look! I can wiggle my toes.” Though under the layers of gauze there was no way to prove this.
“Reflex actions.” He checked off a box on a pale green form.
“But watch, sir, I can even raise my leg a bit.” And this I was able to demonstrate, or nearly. “So, you see, I’ll be fine as soon as I’m rested and at home. Only surface wounds. I’ll be walking in no time at all.” At which point I thought, “how do I know I can’t walk now?”
The doctor resumed his amused expression and shoved the clipboard up under his arm like a rifle. “That leg,” he coolly explained, taking my limp hand in his soft but strong hand, “has twenty-seven separate particles of shrapnel in it. We have some beautiful X-rays to prove it. You stepped on a land-mine, boy! Blasted devils! The knee-cap is cracked and the tibia is shattered right down to your tarsals. Even if there were no gangrene, you’d never be able to walk again.” He dropped my hand, straightened his back, and stared regally down at me, stroking his mustache as if it were a small animal that wanted consoling. “Unless we amputate it very soon, private, your whole body will be lost. As you may not as yet have realized, we are not in the most hygienic situation here… ” He left off his mustache and placed his fingertips tenderly on the bandaged leg. “Now, what you feel are merely sensory hallucinations that are—”
“But the pain is real! And I can move my leg!”
“—are quite common in these cases. The pain you feel is illusory, a false pain, as it were, emanating from your brain and not your limb, where the nerves have been severed. That is why we must negate the appendage: because it is dead already and unless abstracted, it will wither away. Unless it putrefies first.”
“Why?” I moaned, holding onto the leg as if the good doctor were trying to tear it from its socket then and there. I was doing something else the heroic soldier should never do: sobbing. “It’s a good leg! It has always been a great service to me. It is me!”
The doctor gently ruffled the back of my overgrown hair. “Come, come, my golden boy,” he murmured, as if remembering a line of poetry. “There’s no reason to worry. These artificial legs they make nowadays are real wonders. Marvels of technology. Very light-weight and streamlined. Sturdy and really quite reliable.” He was counting off on his well-manicured fingers, a salesman. “Why, one of the newest models is ten times as efficient as the flesh and blood kind, and with regular lubrication, guaranteed to outlast the one the gods gave you.” He smiled and showed all his hard little teeth, his fingers once again playing in my curls. “So, relax, boy, and welcome your new leg as a gift to you from the twin arts of engineering and medicine. Damn me if I wouldn’t enjoy such a fine leg myself.”
Just then, a gust of wind blew some fragments of straw and so much of the red dust into my eyes the scene took on the unreal crimson hue of an archaic Hell, as invariably represented onstage. Devils. No gods. The doctor brushed my face with a horsy-smelling handkerchief, lingering on my cheek, and I thought of biting into his well-scrubbed, apelike arm. I knew they must have mixed up my X-rays with another soldier’s, the way they always mixed our laundry or our mail. But for some reason I could not bring this far more important matter to his lordship the doctor’s attention. Instead, I merely stated, “I haven’t any choice, I suppose, sir.”
The doctor lifted incredulous silver-browed eyes from his clipboard. “Of course you have a choice, soldier. Either watch your leg degrade or let us amputate it. Either obey a command from a higher-ranking officer and lord of this commonwealth, or do not obey it.”
I was too weak and exhausted to debate further. I knew deep within my soul that I had no choice. Friends, the Army has done us a great favor by lifting the burden of decision from our bent backs.
So I submitted, with all pretense of willingness, to their surgery, the gleaming vision of a sparkling, spanking-new chrome and stainless-steel leg the only thing I had with which to buoy my spirits. I had also hoped to be pleasantly gassed and awaken some time later already equipped with the artificial appendage, but the operation, alas, did not go so nicey-nicey. The field hospital had predictably run out of anesthetic; I fought so they had to strap me down with leather cinches, and when I cried out in pain they shoved a horse’s bit into my mouth to clench. And I would have snapped the bit in two if I had not cracked two molars on it first. (I am certain I heard the hirsute nurses, armed with curry-combs and a hacksaw, laughing at that.) With no prosthetic in sight, I was lifted from the operating table—in truth a stable door supported by bales of hay—and carried back to my cot, where I was given a sponge bath by an underage orderly who thought it amusing to squeeze spongefuls of merbromine over my head until my scalp may as well have been in flames. Though I cursed him at the time, I should have blessed him for taking my attention away from the much greater pain I felt south of my equator. Late into that first night, so abysmally atramentous (twelve points for that word!), when I finally dared to place my right palm where my right knee had been and felt nothing, the rest of my body seemed to vanish, too—bodiless and brainless, I floated away toward the dusty hayloft, watching myself writhing on my cot below, watching a half-hundred other sick or injured men writhing on their cots, and it was not until I regained consciousness the next morning that I realized I still had the bit in my mouth.
I awoke slowly then, once I had pulled the bit out—woke into a humming, thrumming, buzzing world. The stone wall I propped myself against throbbed with energy, all those atoms crashing inside all those molecules inside all those elements we had learned about in first-year physics, somehow keeping intact something as solid and hard as granite and mortar. And the floor hummed, cot and coverlet hummed, the air hummed, everything hummed–especially my invisible leg, which I had already almost come to accept, vibrating like a tuning fork rapped against a tomb. The hammer jostled the anvil which jiggled the stirrup of my inner ear, ever so faintly and subliminal, but ever so insistently. All this resonation told me I was still alive, insisted I was alive, alive and one-legged. Oh well, oh well, oh well… I contented myself a bit by slurping my porridge and thinking of my new superhuman supernatural leg, wondering where it was and how soon it might be delivered and affixed to me; maybe they were off polishing it and adjusting it for my own special size. Anyhow, I had plenty of time to wait...
Irving, the farmer or philosopher, was humming, too: perhaps that was where the humming of the entire world originated. Watching swifts or swallows dart in and out of the loft overhead, I found myself humming along after a few bars–it was the hero’s lilting leitmotif from a semi-popular operetta I had seen in my hometown a few weeks before leaving for active duty. That had been over two years ago. I was transported back to my rough velvet theater seat, soothed by the susurration of gaslight and eucalyptus-scented whispers, and I again familiarly took Maisie’s lavender-linimented hand. I kissed its warm, moist, aromatic palm; embarrassed, she repossessed her hand, and so, as the hero tragically ended his life with ruby-hilted halberd and choral requiem, I contented myself with fondling the fair hairs, soft as milkweed flax, on the back of her neck. Somehow, in my reverie, I now imagined the baritone to look very much like the lumberjack or woodsman from my dying dream–or perhaps it was the other way around. I could picture the burly youth unbuckling his cuirass and thrusting the naked blade into his bared bronzed chest… When Irving coughed, the vision, regrettably, vanished like a ripple on a pond. The hero’s death had been a farce, anyhow, the prop-sword thrust only into its hilt; he would come back to life in a comic epilogue. Much, I gather, as I had. “Where on earth did you pick up that little ditty?” I asked my fellow foot-soldier, expecting to hear that the parochial crofter or unworldly philosopher had tuned into it by accident on the airwaves.
Irving turned in his cot to face me, but it was not Irving at all, or did not appear to be. This bloke was freshly washed and clean-shaven, looking considerably younger and maybe even a little smaller than Irving had. He also had laundered sheets and pillowslip, and there was one of those girlie magazines spread across his lap. “So, come ’round, have you? The aureate god of dawn tickled your fine fancy? Got some fettle in your mettle? I might could spy a new obelisk erected in your county called Middlesex. So, there is life! Buck up, me bucky, thou buck-toothed buck private–it’s another splendiferous day of our ever-winning never-ending war,” he continued, eyes brightening, words tumbling; and even the timbre of this plummy new voice bore little resemblance to the farmer-philosopher’s—at that instant I couldn’t help but catalog qualifiers alliteratively as polite, polished, posh, perhaps even pretentious.
“How do you know that tune?” I repeated, and then, “Who are you, anyhow? Where’s Irving?”
“Why, it is Irving, still Irving, alas,” he answered, ignoring the former question. “Don’t you recognize me without the magpie’s nest? Lovely to look upon, am I not?”
It was the former Irving all right, and I would have felt confirmed in my suspicion that the beard had been an histrionic ploy if I did not see the razor and strop on the orange-crate nightstand between us. His large hands, which he now withdrew from behind his head and spread over last year’s nubile Nymph of November, proved, indeed, to be incomplete.
“Have they done some sort of operation on your larynx, too?” I inquired.
“Ah, look to my footnotes for an apologia,” Irving said. “You must mean the hick shtick. Sometimes it is in the nature of my profession to absorb the quality of my surroundings. Camouflage, I suppose. Curiously chameleonic, could be. You see, I’ve played so many roles, I’ve just about forgotten who I am. Today I have clean sheets and a clean colon for the first time in weeks, so I feel and talk like a poet or a prince.”
“I thought you were some sort of professor emeritus,” I ventured.
“That rustic rube of a PhD. I blame on temporary exuberance. Must have been the ether in the air. I never lied about what you might call my hedonistic tendencies, however. One does enjoy a good steak and a bottle of the bubbly. I lie hear consulting chastely with my topless muses but drool over the ads for cheap whiskey.”
“You must be an actor, then,” I concluded, satisfied that an early intuition of mine must have been correct. “Am I wrong?”
“Oh,” he said, moving his shoulders up and down as if they were balancing scales and he were weighing the question, “I used to warble with the night-birds a bit, too.”
“At night-time in night-clubs?” I asked in a newfound abbreviated manner, hoisting myself up against the wall as far as I could. I could easily imagine him in one of those new-fashioned crooner’s tuxedos, with a cummerbund replacing his bandage. “Sung for your supper? Fronted a little combo?”
Irving pointed his chin loft-ward and cast his eyes disdainfully away like a suitor spurned. “My dear backwoods boy,” he said with great disgust, “entire orchestras accompany my groans. It is the grand opera which is my bitch-goddess.”
“Oh, pardon me,” I said hastily. “I didn’t mean to imply–”
“I was drafted just as I was closing my run in something you wouldn’t know,” he amended himself, pumping himself up with a mock haughtiness which he expelled with a sigh. “Ho! You wouldn’t know it not because I doubt your cultural acumen, but because it was trash. And we closed in Serutan, of all places.” The name of my not overly small hometown fell over us both like a shroud.
“You!” I exclaimed, seeing him transformed, elegant in the vermillion armor of the Scarlet Knight, who of course turned out to be the Hero. It was based on one of those tireless (not tiresome!) legends of when armies rode on horseback to protect the honor of The Gods from The Enemy. Would the military life be so glamorous now! Maisie and I had thought that, for Serutan, Garter and Grail was high-class entertainment, and there is little difference to any of us in Serutan between opera and operetta—or art and artifice, for that matter.
“Yes, me,” he said sorrowfully. “Just as I was on the verge of joining a permanent repertory company that did real music.” Irving, who had been so cheery in the little time I had known him, fell back against his fresh pillow—and it was not hard to tell he was thinking of stentorian declarations of love and stunning leaps across the stage and the silky swish of a diva’s gown. (Diluted and impoverished imagery here admittedly all mine.) “But,” he said, snapping out of his fever-dream as if the footlights had fizzled out and the fireproof curtain had fallen down, “I’ll be back again, as long as I can hold me guts in.” He struck his abdomen to prove he was strong, but the suggestion of a wince on his face disproved all. “The name is Irving Irving,” he said, interrupting his own gesture. (Or perhaps he was merely repeating the name “Irving” for my benefit, to let it sink into my thick skull.) “Did I tell you that already? It seems I’m forever introducing myself.”
Something in Irving’s thespian effusiveness infected me, and though I am often as not (as my professors used to warn me) on the wordy and expository side, I was now a veritable lexicon of myself. I began by introducing myself for the first time and mentioned that I had seen Irving’s final–that, is last–performance (wasn’t it odd that I couldn’t recall any of the other entertainers’ names) and how my fiancée Maisie and I had simply adored it, and then revealing, like a magician drawing cheap scarves from his sleeve, a string of other useless facts about myself: such as growing up alone and reasonably happy but more than annoyed sometimes with my widowed mother, my thoroughly uneventful schooldays, the secret poetry I would write in tiny code on the backs of my favorite girls’ dance-cards, my insolence on the game-fields, the police gazettes I sometimes stole from newsstands—just to laugh at, my irrational fear of celluloid collars and watercress, Maisie of course and much of her personal history and habits, and as well of my having become junior clerk in a corner chemist’s after the islands’ institutions of higher education were shuttered, with not enough hope then for me even to become an apothecary, and how I probably would have been married by now if it were not for this confounded war. Everything nowadays was if not for the war. “I can play the toy-piano passably well,” I added, “but that’s the limit of my musical talents. Perhaps I’m too young to know if I have any talents, though I had once hoped to become, what do you call them, a man of letters. Well, actually, my greatest talent I suppose is in not becoming bored by my own boring life. I’m very seldom bored, although there’s plenty to be bored about in Serutan. We haven’t much but temple bazaars and public hangings in Serutan. In Serutan, clouds are our cinema, and Serutan thinks books like virgins male or female look best kept on the shelf, uncut and fully intact. But… am I boring you?”
“Well,” said my companion as he cracked open a pack of Laughing Lad cigarettes, “I tend to enjoy listening to people as long as they listen to me a little better than I do to them.” With that, he smiled and offered me a cigarette. We smoked and talked on and off all day until the wan autumn light dimmed and the orderlies confiscated our cigarettes; we were too tired to protest by then. Later in the night, when I awoke kicking my surprisingly energetic phantom limb, I saw a group of orderlies sitting in the moonlit barnyard, passing cigarettes and a jug of amnesia from one to another.
While the next morning was yet unsullied, the silver-haired doctor, whose name I had learned from Irving was Lord Thomas, for our doctors and surgeons are always shipped special express from the nation’s House of Lords, came briskly to my cot-side, carrying a long object wrapped in tattered butcher’s paper tied with twine. There was an ovine look on the doctor’s wooly face that promised disappointment but would not own up to it. Sheep, baboon, stallion: he really was a menagerie in himself.
“Beautiful day, private,” Lord Thomas said, squinting his silver-flecked eyes in the dust, not meeting my own eyes (whose color I have forgotten). A bomb burst nearby as he spoke. “The chrysanthemums are scattering their gold in the ha-has.”
Neither horticulture nor agriculture was on my mind.
“Sorry I haven’t popped ’round since the operation,” the doctor continued in his falsely conversational tone as he began to unwrap the package. Choice morsels for the kitties? (Of course, I thought, it’s my new leg!) “We’ve all been extremely busy with the wounded, as you may have surmised… Ah, in the name of king and country, I do miss those quietly exasperating days of negotiating estate taxes for quibbling siblings! If it’s true we’ve killed ten of those enemy devils for every one of us they’ve shot down from their newfangled dirigibles, it’s a wonder this war isn’t over by now. These things do get in the way of our studies, don’t they? A nasty imposition.” He talked as if the war were a mere fracas over billiards at a fraternal order, I thought, that had gotten out of control and lasted too long. “Be that as it may, I’ve finally brought your new prosthesis, which you’ll kindly allow me to affix and adjust. Before I give it to you, however, you must accept my sincerest regrets, on behalf of myself and my meager, sadly under-supplied staff.” The reason for the look on his face became clear all too soon as he fumbled with the twine.
“You must understand,” he went on, “in these trying times, we make do with what we have. And sometimes what we have is, like that horse-steak I ate last night, not always the best.” Swiftly, he tore away the last of the paper and held aloft the most miserable mechanical contraption I had ever set eyes upon. It looked somewhat like a corroded typewriter carriage married to an antique carriage’s axle rod—but it was, every miserable ounce of it, my new leg.
When Lord Thomas saw my look of dismay, his face regained its usual expression of smug composure. “It really is a dandy model,” he argued in his tight-lipped way, though the optimism was forced. “The best of its kind in–ahem–the last war. In fact, that’s when it was most recently utilized. I found it at the very back of an old supply cabinet in a roosting-shed we’ve been utilizing. A tag was attached to it. I believe it belonged to a hero who died on the front. You may be proud of that. Now nearly one-quarter of you will be heroic. Like that idea, private?”
“Then I must deserve a fourth of a medal,” I said, controlling my temper by keeping a tight rein on my vocal cords.
My superior officer took the remark in good stride. “Cheer up, bright bonny boy. It’s a good leg... only a trifle used.” He ran his expert’s monkey fingers lovingly down the rusted monstrosity. “But, here, let me fasten it onto you. A little oil, a little spit and polish, and you’ll look dashing. The lassies swoon over good-looking soldiers like you, they do.”
I shrank from the doctor. “I don’t want that piece of scrap metal on me,” I stated firmly. “I’d rather be in a wheelchair the rest of my life than go hobbling and bobbing about on that.”
“Don’t be foolish. It’s for your own good, son. Bless the Gods of Limpus, you’ll look simply smashing! Waltz the night away. Da da da dee, da dee… Now, let me slip it on...”
I beat him back as best I could, until the doctor’s attitude suddenly changed. “As your superior officer,” he said, dropping his avuncular pose, “and representative of the royal house, or whatever’s left of it, I command you to put this on.” Frightened by what I was doing, but doing it nevertheless, I swatted the doctor with the clipboard he’d left lying on the orange crate. At this, the doctor’s face darkened and furrowed like a nimbus cloud about to burst. A junior orderly was summoned. The nasty pimpled adolescent came trotting up and gave me an indelicate jab in the hip with a hypodermic needle.
After a moment’s flailing, my arms went limp. “You promised me a shiny new one!” I cried like a spoiled child before wilting down into the cot and sinking into mythical Leetha, river of oblivion. When I awoke, feeling an urgent need to piss like a fountain, the artificial limb was securely strapped to the stump of my scabby thigh and locked with a tiny fob-like padlock. (Irving, who should have been my protector, must have slumbered through the entire ordeal.)
At the bottom of that blessed river, I met the handsome youth I had seen in the clearing, seaweed crowning his head like a merman and sitting imperially on a throne of briny rock. His eyes were as blue as they were merry, and his pink lips had a pretty smile on them: I speak in cliches because sometimes cliches are the truest. This time we talked.
“Here there is another, more tranquil world!” he announced, and a great rollicking laugh welled up from the engine of his hairless chest. I realized then that we were both naked and unashamed. “Quite, quite different. As you can plainly see!” A school of slippery, coppery eels swam past us, and he caught one up by the tail.
“Beautiful,” I said, unclear myself as to whether I meant the eel, the world, or the merman himself.
“It’s all beautiful, this wondrous world,” he said, giving the creature a kiss on its snout before setting it free. “Because it’s all ours—no other people here. Just my friends the fish and the occasional meddlesome cormorant.”
Iridescent bubbles rose up from the depths and tickled us into laughter. Both my legs were there, in that dream. In the water, they looked white as a fish’s underbelly, felt powerful as a mule’s; and the water, though cold, seemed to fill me with energy like the shock of an electric eel. I embraced the laughing merman like a beloved comrade. And we floated, arm in arm, downstream…
Initially, I had no intention of ever using the leg. I covered it with my greasy sheet and resigned myself to a life of immobility. Sometimes I would awaken and reach down to scratch my right leg, only to recoil when my fingers struck metal instead of the flesh I had expected. It was as if I were touching the very bones which were no longer there: I could fight back the scream, but could not hold back the tears. It was, as any amputee might tell you, like I had lost a close friend whose ghost still haunted me.
At any rate, I thought in less melancholy moments, I’ll be going home soon. There would be Mother and Maisie for consolation; I would be an object of sympathy—and our sad, simple wedding would be an especially sobering yet uplifting sight, something that would elicit tears from the most stoic soul. Maybe, if he were better by then and not singing off on another island, I could ask Irving to be best man. Afterwards, Maisie and I would Make Do and eke out a living (would the chemist’s even hire me back? would Maisie stand for an impotent, unipedal husband?). It all sounded terribly, picturesquely, heartbreakingly romantic in a sentimental, melodramatic, operetta-ish way. Why, I could even get a new leg back in Serutan! In my misery I had not thought of that, obvious as it was. There was no sense then in not walking now; I might as well get into practice. So, in the course of a day I decided to change from a figure of pity into an example of fortitude and perseverance. I was actually beginning to feel pleased with myself, as if I had won an intramural debate—whose only judge and jurors and competitors were my many selves. Perhaps the chief reason I changed my attitude, however, was because Irving had fashioned a really quite splendid walking stick for me, whittled out of a black-cherry tree’s straight and supple branch that an orderly had brought him from the orchard outside; he had rubbed the fine-grained wood to a high shine with boot-polish and even attached to its top a jaunty swag of pink paper poppies on a leather thong, a loop I could slip my wrist through. It looked almost like one of those a young gentleman of means might take with him on a riparian promenade of the previous century, at his side a laughing lady wearing a broad veiled hat heaped with a salad of cherries and berries. With such a cane, even with a game leg, I would cut a dashing figure among the provincial clods of Serutan.
Irving, who had listened to me whining for days over the idea of becoming an invalid, declared full approval of my change of mind and heart. “I once knew a wooden-legged countertenor,” he professed, “who could perform such feats of acrobatics beneath the proscenium that you would have wondered if he had three legs. All it takes is getting over the stage fright, as it were. Determination is the soul of bravery... hmm, am I quoting someone there?” He got out of his cot—I saw then a still surprisingly tall man—and he helped me to my feet, or foot—no, feet, damn it. My first attempted step sent me caroming off a dinner tray into a stall and ended up somehow with both Irving and I entangling ourselves in the reptilian constrictions of a passing orderly’s roll of surgical gauze. Then I remembered the walking stick—and still landed helpless as an upturned terrapin at the feet of another orderly, who condescended to lift me up. After such a start, it would be difficult not to improve.
The antique device had frozen with red rust at its joint, making it impossible for me to ambulate in any naturalistic style, but I perfected a hopping sort of gait after a few days of practice whereby I would balance my weight upon my flesh-and-blood leg and kick out a pace ahead with my cherry-wood walking stick and stiff, metal leg. After getting the basic movements down, it was all a matter of timing and rhythm. Progress was rapid, for I was still young and strong, and soon I was cantering up and down the barnyard as quickly if not so gracefully as a newborn ostrich.
It was during one of these rehearsal jaunts one morning that I ran up against the truant Lord Thomas, who was greatly pleased to see me up and about. The doctor gave me a hearty slap on the back and told me, as if it were a great originality, that I was looking fit as a fiddle.
“Not exactly first violinist material, sir,” I said, succumbing to his juvenile humor.
“Still top form, private, top form,” the medical man said in his grinning, lock-jawed way, and proceeded to tell me how he would promptly start preparing the paperwork which would send me to the eastern archipelago, which could use a lad with my gumption and guts. “The Army needs more men like you, dear boy.” In fact, they could ship me out there in a fortnight or less if I liked. Before I could react, the doctor gave me another apish lung-bursting slap and a pinch on the buttocks for good measure before striding off to the officer’s mess hall or the stables.
All my hopes for a return to the warm enveloping bosom of my loved ones disintegrated, and I again fell into an inky black depression. Never again did I want to walk, neither be reduced to riding in a sort of overgrown pram or wheelchair. Henceforth and for the rest of my life I would make that six-by-two feet of a single bed my kingdom; I would live a horizontal existence, as all the sick and dying do. My only consolation was in deep sleep, a coward’s substitute for death. In my dreams, I was often visited by Mother and Maisie, but they both pretended as if nothing were wrong–they did not even realize I was asleep, yet alone missing a limb–so they bothered me with trivialities such as asking me to pass the raspberry syllabub or wanting to mend that embarrassing tear in my trousers. Maisie appeared again and again, twirling like a music-box dancer so I could appraise her new hat or frock. Once she pivoted and it was not Maisie’s face that turned to me, but the face of the crop-haired lumberjack by his mountain brook, beaming like a lucky throw of the dice. There he was in his sweat-soaked singlet and muddy boots, arms heavy with a bouquet of leeks and beets from the kitchen garden. There he was, running to meet and embrace me as a long-lost friend might, the vegetables falling around our feet. He was such a surprise that he jarred me from my medicated slumber—how could I ever have forgotten someone I had surely known all my life? The blast from the land-mine must have been too much of a shock for so ephemeral a vision to remain part of my conscious memory for long, but now it all came back: the emerald clearing, the purling stream and the chestnut grove just across from it, as well as the cozy cottage with its cat and canary. The memory, I reasoned, had resurfaced with a purpose. For that friend I would walk again. I would escape to the pine-forest beyond the nearby battleground and its trenches, cross the hills and ford the stream, and enter his sanctuary. He might be one of the enemy—part of this island was or had been their territory, after all—but he would hide me out until the war was over (hadn’t his eyes told me as much?), and when it was over, if it were ever over… well, we would have much time to think. Even if the entire scene were only an empire built on clouds and wishes, as my mother used to phrase it–though it all seemed much more real than the very slop we soldiers ate–it was better to risk failure to re-enter it once more than stay where I was in this half-forgotten ward, among cripples and fools who knew the shame of the chamberpot and the dread of waking to damp sheets.
“You look entranced,” Irving said to me not long after I had woken from my newly favorite fantasy. “What did you dream of? Going home? Becoming fat and rich? Writing squibs for the ladies’ pages that will change the world?” He was looking me up and down the length of my cot, where it would have been difficult to hide any sort of secret. “Ah, I see, a pretty girl.”
“Something like that,” I admitted, gathering my rags about me. “How did you know?” I decided there and then that I might as well tell my new friend the whole story.
The last morning I had been in combat, as far as I could remember, the leafy hills and canyons around our camp had become oddly quiet, and our division had been able to walk several miles into enemy territory without so much as one sniper sniping at us. The only sound was the muck muck of our boots in the red mud. After a few hours we began descending into a low-lying valley, where a yellow-green mist, like streams of diluted celery soup, could be seen drifting out of the surrounding pinewoods. Fortunately for myself, I had lagged behind the rest of the troops, discussing ancient ethics and epics with a schoolteacher who until recently had been discussing the same hallowed lines with bright orphan boys, and so from a rise above the valley we had not yet entered we witnessed our comrades dropping like mosquitoes doused with pesticide. The history teacher insisted on forging ahead into the deathtrap to help save what men he could, but, not feeling so duty-bound, I elected to run. In the opposite direction. “I’m afraid I was afraid,” I confessed to Irving, not until that moment realizing the full import of what I had or had not done. “You could I guess call me a right regular coward.”
“Oh, I could call you any number of things,” Irving said. “Lucky is one. That must have been the regiment that vanished into thin air nearly a month ago. You must be the only survivor.”
“I hadn’t realized that... No one has told me a thing, and I doubt even the doctors know what happened to me. I’ll miss some of those men, though I can’t quite remember their names...”
“So, then, aren’t you glad you ran? Smart thinking in my book, sonny boy. Better to be a live coward than a dead hero. Does it sound like I’m quoting someone again? I don’t always mean to.” Irving folded his arms. But that was not the end of my story.
Although the gas did not kill me, some of it did get in my eyes, so I was running half-blind. For a while, I stumbled through the brambles and bushes, and by the time my eyes cleared I was in a recently burned-out meadow on the other side of the valley; gunfire echoed off the hills behind me. At last I was able to sit down on a fallen tree and raid the few remaining rations in my rucksack. A little mistake, there: red fire ants came swarming out of the log when they smelled my crumbs and set to attacking my backside right through my summer uniform. I took off running down a steep hillock across a boulder-strewn moraine, toward a clear blue stream to wash away my predators, and–but Irving no longer appeared to be listening to my tale, which was just about to reach its wistful climax (at this point I was not sure how much of my memory I was inventing). No, he was not paying attention at all—instead, my neighbor was staring up at the mildewed poster of the weapon-wielding youth on the wall near us. When my voice trailed off, Irving explained, without apologizing for having interrupted my account, his sudden preoccupation with the picture.
“What a hideously unnecessary thing to have on the wall. I actually never even noticed it before this instant. How crude. ‘Shut up!’ indeed. I suppose one of these cretin subalterns around here pinned it up.”
“It’s been here all the time,” I said, annoyed that I had not been able to finish my adventure, knowing that if I tried to now it would lose its full dramatic impact. And knowing, too, that I could not be sure how much of my tale was even true. In any event, I did not see anything extraordinary about the poster; the subject, or ones very much like it, was replicated a hundred-thousand times across the islands.
“I remember posing for that ages and ages ago,” Irving lectured in a bilious tone, “when I was just about as young as you. For the last war. Didn’t recognize me, did you? Oh, yes, we entertainers, as you call us, sometimes have to do a bit of modeling for artists to get by. And sometimes the artists try to get a bit of the model, as well, if you know what I mean. All in a day’s work!”
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