The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  You’d put them in bags if they didn’t make it. You’d change dressings on stumps, and you had this deal with the corpsmen that every fourth day you’d clean the latrines for them if they’d change the dressings. They knew what it was like.

  * * *

  They’d bring in a boy with beautiful brown eyes and you’d just have a chance to look at him, to get a chest cut-down started for a subclavian catheter. He’d say, “Ma’am, am I all right?” and in forty seconds he’d be gone. He’s say “Oh, no” and he’d be gone. His blood would pool on the gurney right through the packs. Some wounds are so bad you can’t even plug them. The person just drains away.

  You wanted to help but you couldn’t. All you could do was watch.

  When the dreams started, I thought I was going crazy. It was about the fourth week and I couldn’t sleep. I’d close my eyes and think of trip wires. I’d think my bras and everything else had trip wires. I’d be on the john and hear a sound and think that someone was trip-wiring the latch so I’d lose my hands and face when I tried to leave.

  I’d dream about wounds, different kinds, and then the next day there would be the wounds I’d dreamed about. I thought it was just coincidence. I’d seen a lot of wounds by then. Everyone was having nightmares. I’d dream about a sucking chest wound and a guy trying to scream, though he couldn’t, and the next day I’d have to suck out a chest and listen to a guy try to scream. I didn’t think much about it. I couldn’t sleep. That was the important thing. I knew I was going to go crazy if I couldn’t sleep.

  Sometimes the dreams would have all the details. They’d bring in a guy that looked like someone had taken an icepick to his arms. His arms looked like frankfurters with holes punched in them. That’s what shrapnel looks like. You puff up and the bleeding stops. We all knew he was going to die. You can’t live through something like that. The system won’t take it. He knew he was going to die, but he wasn’t making a sound. His face had little holes in it, around his cheeks, and it looked like a catcher’s mitt. He had the most beautiful blue eyes, like glass. You know, like that dog, the weimer-something. I’d start shaking because he was in one of my dreams—those holes and his face and eyes. I’d shake for hours, but you couldn’t tell anybody about dreams like that.

  The guy would die. There wasn’t anything I could do.

  I didn’t understand it. I didn’t see a reason for the dreams. They just made it worse.

  * * *

  It got so I didn’t want to go to sleep because I didn’t want to have them. I didn’t want to wake up and have to worry about the dreams all day, wondering if they were going to happen. I didn’t want to have to shake all day, wondering.

  I’d have this dream about a kid with a bad head wound and a phone call, and the next day they’d wheel in some kid who’d lost a lot of skull and brain and scalp, and the underlying brain would be infected. Then the word would get around that his father, who was a full-bird colonel stationed in Okie, had called and the kid’s mother and father would be coming to see him. We all hoped he died before they got there, and he did.

  I’d had a dream about him. I’d even dreamed that we wanted him to die before his mom and dad got there, and he did, in the dream he did.

  When he died I started screaming and this corpsman who’d been around for a week or two took me by the arm and got me to the john. I’d gotten sick but he held me like my mom would have and all I could do was think what a mess I was, how could he hold me when I was such a mess? I started crying and couldn’t stop. I knew everyone thought I was crazy, but I couldn’t stop.

  After that things got worse. I’d see more than just a face or the wounds. I’d see where the guy lived, where his hometown was and who was going to cry for him if he died. I didn’t understand it at first—I didn’t even know it was happening. I’d just get pictures, like before, in the dream and they’d bring this guy in the next day or the day after that, and if he could talk, I’d find out that what I’d seen was true. This guy would be dying and not saying a thing and I’d remember him from the dream and I’d say, “You look like a Georgia boy to me.” If the morphine was working and he could talk, he’d say, “Who told you that, Lieutenant? All us brothers ain’t from Georgia.”

  I’d make up something, like his voice or a good guess, and if I’d seen other things in the dream—like his girl or wife or mother—I’d tell him about those, too. He wouldn’t ask how I knew because it didn’t matter. How could it matter? He knew he was dying. They always know. I’d talk to him like I’d known him my whole life and he’d be gone in an hour, or by morning.

  I had this dream about a commando type, dressed in tiger cammies, nobody saying a thing about him in the compound—spook stuff, Ibex, MAC SOG, something like that—and I could see his girlfriend in Australia. She had hair just like mine and her eyes were a little like mine and she loved him. She was going out with another guy that night, but she loved him, I could tell. In the dream they brought him into ER with the bottom half of him blown away.

  The next morning, first thing, they wheeled this guy in and it was the dream all over again. He was blown apart from the waist down. He was delirious and trying to talk but his jaw wouldn’t work. He had tiger cammies on and we cut them off. I was the one who got him and everyone knew he wasn’t going to make it. As soon as I saw him I started shaking. I didn’t want to see him, I didn’t want to look at him. You really don’t know what it’s like, seeing someone like that and knowing. I didn’t want him to die. I never wanted any of them to die.

  I said, “Your girl in Australia loves you—she really does.” He looked at me and his eyes had that look you get when morphine isn’t enough. I could tell he thought I looked like her. He couldn’t even see my hair under the cap and he knew I looked like her.

  He grabbed my arm and his jaw started slipping and I knew what he wanted me to do. I always knew. I told him about her long black hair and the beaches in Australia and what the people were like there and what there was to do.

  He thought I was going to stop talking, so he kept squeezing my arm. I told him what he and his girlfriend had done on a beach outside Melbourne, their favorite beach, and what they’d had to drink that night.

  And then—this was the first time I’d done it with anyone—I told him what I’d do for him if I was his girlfriend and we were back in Australia. I said, “I’d wash you real good in the shower. I’d turn the lights down low and I’d put on some nice music. Then, if you were a little slow, I’d help you.”

  It was what his girlfriend always did, I knew that. It wasn’t hard to say.

  I kept talking, he kept holding my arm, and then he coded on me. They always did. I had a couple of minutes or hours and then they always coded on me, just like in the dreams.

  I got good at it. The pictures got better and I could tell them what they wanted to hear and that made it easier. It wasn’t just faces and burns and stumps, it was things about them. I’d tell them what their girlfriends and wives would do if they were here. Sometimes it was sexual, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I’d just ruffle their hair with my hand and tell them what Colorado looked like in summer, or what the last Doors concert they’d been to was like, or what you could do after dark in Newark.

  * * *

  I start crying in the big room one day and this corpsman takes me by the arm and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the john and he’s got a needle in his hand, a 2% solution. He doesn’t want to see me hurting so much. I tell him no. Why, I don’t know. Every week or so I’d walk into the john and find somebody with a needle in their arm, but it wasn’t for me, I thought. People weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. Junkies on the Pike back home did it—we all knew that—but not doctors and medics and nurses. It wasn’t right, I told myself.

  I didn’t start until a couple of weeks later.

  There’s this guy I want to tell you about. Steve—his name was Steve.

  I come in one morning to the big ER room shaking so hard I can’t even put my
cap on and thinking I should’ve gotten a needle already, and there’s this guy sitting over by a curtain. He’s in cammies, his head’s wrapped and he’s sitting up real straight. I can barely stand up, but here’s this guy looking like he’s hurting, so I say, “You want to lie down?”

  He turns slowly to look at me and I don’t believe it. I know this guy from a dream, but I don’t see the dream clearly. Here’s this guy sitting in a chair in front of me unattended, like he could walk away any second, but I’ve had a dream about him, so I know he’s going to die.

  He says he’s okay, he’s just here to see a buddy. But I’m not listening. I know everything about him. I know about his girlfriend and where he’s from and how his mom and dad didn’t raise him, but all I can think about is, he’s going to die. I’m thinking about the supply room and needles and how it wouldn’t take much to get it all over with.

  I say, “Cathy misses you, Steve. She wishes you could go to the Branding Iron in Merced tonight, because that band you like is playing. She’s done something to her apartment and she wants to show it to you.”

  He looks at me for a long time and his eyes aren’t like the others. I don’t want to look back at him. I can see him anyway—in the dream. He’s real young. He’s got a nice body, good shoulders, and he’s got curly blond hair under those clean bandages. He’s got eyelashes like a girl, and I see him laughing. He laughs every chance he gets, I know.

  Very quietly he says. “What’s your name?”

  I guess I tell him, because he says, “Can you tell me what she looks like, Mary?”

  Everything’s wrong. The guy doesn’t sound like he’s going to die. He’s looking at me like he understands.

  I say something like “She’s tall.” I say, “She’s got blond hair,” but I can barely think.

  Very gently he says, “What are her eyes like?”

  I don’t know. I’m shaking so hard I can barely talk, I can barely remember the dream.

  Suddenly I’m talking. “They’re green. She wears a lot of mascara, but she’s got dark eyebrows, so she isn’t really a blond, is she.”

  He laughs and I jump. “No, she isn’t,” he says and he’s smiling. He takes my hand in his. I’m shaking badly but I let him, like I do the others. I don’t say a word.

  I’m holding it in. I’m scared to death. I’m cold-turkeying and I’m letting him hold my hand because he’s going to die. But it’s not true. I dreamed about him, but in the dream he didn’t die. I know that now.

  He squeezes my hand like we’ve known each other a long time and he says, “Do you do this for all of them?”

  I don’t say a thing.

  Real quietly he says, “A lot of guys die on you, don’t they, Mary.”

  I can’t help it—I start crying. I want to tell him. I want to tell someone, so I do.

  When I’m finished he doesn’t say something stupid, he doesn’t walk away. He doesn’t code on me. He starts to tell me a story and I don’t understand at first.

  There’s this G-2 reconnaissance over the border, he says. The insertion’s smooth and I’m point, I’m always point. We’re humping across paddy dikes like grunts and we hit this treeline. This is a black op, nobody’s supposed to know we’re here, but somebody does. All of a sudden the goddamn trees are full of Charlie ching-ching snipers. The whole world turns blue—just for me, I mean, it turns blue—and everything starts moving real slow. I can see the first AK rounds coming at me and I step aside nicely just like that, like always.

  The world always turns blue like that when he needs it to, he says. That’s why they make him point every goddamn time, why they keep using him on special ops to take out infrastructure or long-range recon for intel. Because the world turns blue. And how he’s been called in twice to talk about what he’s going to do after this war and how they want him to be a killer, he says. The records will say he died in this war and they’ll give him a new identity. He doesn’t have family, they say. He’ll be one of their killers wherever they need him. Because everything turns blue. I don’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s like a movie, like that Manchurian Candidate thing, and I can’t believe it. They don’t care about how he does it, he says. They never do. It can be the world turning blue or voices in your head or some grabass feeling in your gut, or, if you want, it can be God or the Devil with horns or Little Green Martians—it doesn’t matter to them what you believe. As long as it works, as long as you keep coming back from missions, that’s all they care about. He told them no, but they keep on asking. Sometimes he thinks they’ll kill his girlfriend just so he won’t have anything to come back to in the States. They do that kind of thing, he says. I can’t believe it.

  So everything’s turning blue, he says, and I’m floating up out of my body over this rice paddy, these goddamn ching-ching snipers are darker blue, and when I come back down I’m moving through this nice blue world and I know where they are, and I get every goddamn one of them in their trees.

  But it doesn’t matter, he says. There’s this light-weapons sergeant, a guy they called the Dogman, who’s crazy and barks like a dog and makes everyone laugh even if they’re bleeding, even if their guts are hanging out. He scares the VC when he barks. He humps his share and the men love him.

  When the world turns blue, the Dogman’s in cover, everything’s fine, but then he rubbernecks, the sonuvabitch rubbernecks for the closest ching-ching—he didn’t have to, he just didn’t have to—and takes a round high. I don’t see the back of his head explode, so I think he’s still alive. I go for him where he’s hanging half out of the treeline, half in a canal full of stinking rice water. I try to get his body out of the line of fire, but Charlie puts the next round right in under my arm. I’m holding the Dogman and the round goes in right under my arm, a fucking heart shot. I can feel it come in. It’s for me. Everything goes slow and blue and I jerk a little—I don’t even know I’m doing it—and the round slides right in under me and into him. They never get me. The fucking world turns blue and everything goes slow and they never get me.

  I can always save myself, he says—his name is Steve and he’s not smiling now—but I can’t save them. What’s it worth? What’s it worth if you stay alive and everybody you care about is dead? Even if you get what they want.

  I know what he means. I know now why he’s sitting on a chair nearly crying, I know where the body is, which curtain it’s behind, how close it’s been all this time. I remember the dream now.

  Nobody likes to die alone, Steve says. Just like he said it in the dream.

  * * *

  He stays and we talk. We talk about the dreams and his blue world, and we talk about what we’re going to do when we get out of this place and back to the Big PX, all the fun we’re going to have. He starts to tell me about other guys he knows, guys like him that his people are interested in, but then he stops and I see he’s looking past me. I turn around.

  There’s this guy in civvies at the end of the hallway, just standing there, looking at us. Then he nods at Steve and Steve says, “I got to go.”

  Real fast I say, “See you at nineteen hundred hours.”

  He’s looking at the guy down the hallway. “Yeah, sure,” he says.

  When I get off he’s there. I haven’t thought about a needle all day and it shows. We get a bite to eat and talk some more, and that’s that. My roommate says I can have the room for a couple of hours, but I’m a mess. I’m shaking so bad I can’t even think about having a good time with this guy. He looks at me like he knows this, and says his head hurts and we ought to get some sleep.

  He gives me a hug. That’s it.

  The same guy in civvies is waiting for him and they walk away together on Phan Hao Street.

  * * *

  The next day he’s gone. I tell myself maybe he was standing down for a couple of days and had to get back, but that doesn’t help. I know lots of guys who traveled around in-country AWOL without getting into trouble. What could they do to you? Send you to ’Nam?

 
; I thought maybe he’d call in a couple of days, or write. Later I thought maybe he’d gotten killed, maybe let himself get killed. I really didn’t know what to think, but I thought about him a lot.

  * * *

  Ten days later I get transferred. I don’t even get orders cut, I don’t even get in-country travel paper. No one will tell me a thing—the head nurse, the CO, nobody.

  I get scared because I think they’re shipping me back to the States because of the smack or the dreams—they’ve found out about the dreams—and I’m going to be in some VA hospital the rest of my life. That’s what I think.

  All they’ll tell me is that I’m supposed to be at the strip at 0600 hours tomorrow, fatigues and no ID.

  I get a needle that night and I barely make it.

  * * *

  This Huey comes in real fast and low and I get dust in my eyes from the prop wash. A guy with a clipboard about twenty yards away signals me and I get on. There’s no one there to say good-bye and I never see the 23rd again.

  The Huey’s empty except for these two pilots who never turn around and this doorgunner who’s hanging outside and this other guy who’s sitting back with me on the canvas. I think maybe he’s the one who’s going to explain things, but he just stares for a while and doesn’t say a thing. He’s a sergeant, a Ranger, I think.

  It’s supposed to be dangerous to fly at night in Indian Country, I know, but we fly at night. We stop twice and I know we’re in Indian Country. This one guy gets off, another guy gets on, and then two more. They seem to know each other and they start laughing. They try to get me to talk. One guy says, “You a Donut Dolly?” and another guy says, “Hell, no, asshole, she’s Army, can’t you tell? She’s got the thousand yards.” The third guy says to me, “Don’t mind him, ma’am. They don’t raise ’em right in Mississippi.” They’re trying to be nice, but I don’t want in.

  I don’t want to sleep either. But my head’s tipped back against the steel and I keep waking up, trying to remember whether I’ve dreamed about people dying, but I can’t. I fall asleep once for a long time and when I wake up I can remember death, but I can’t see the faces.