The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  “Veterans Administration.”

  “Oh, right. No, no. You can put that notion right out of your head. Ours is a special project.” Lansdale smiled and swung his clipboard around and tapped at it. “As I said, let’s get cracking.”

  ***

  “One thing war taught me was that we are all ants,” Lett said, letting the words form and flow before he could think them. “Just ants. We are all ants and we are done for, sooner than later. It’s as if we are crossing, say, a fast boulevard of heavy vehicles, and it’s all in deep fog, and the noise is so deafening that you couldn’t have seen that giant truck coming, crushing you like you’re that ant, flattened by people and forces that don’t even know it or care. And even if you make it across that hopeless divide, you’re still heading for a cliff deeper than the Grand Canyon, so deep that the best binoculars a unit could obtain by hook or by crook could not penetrate that abyss, so deep that as you fall you lose all sense of time. You are neither here nor there. You’re just facing it, see, forever, back against the wall, all out of change . . .”

  “I see,” Lansdale said. He sat next to Lett, who lay on his bunk, his head resting atop two pillows. This was their second morning session, two days later. In their sessions, Lansdale called Lett’s talk “free association.” Lett welcomed talking for once. Simply jawing on was the whole point of their sessions. Lansdale sat in a simple metal chair, but he made it seem as cozy as an upholstered armchair by the way he rested his long torso.

  Lansdale had told him the way the treatment would proceed. There were three stages: talk, medication, and training. “You see, our treatment here results in the full confrontation of what’s troubling you. First, you’re talking it out, then you’re helping things along with revolutionary new medication, then, and only then, you’re ‘replacing’ your problem areas with a fresh new duty that retrains your ability to cope by reinforcing your latest deeds. You will own your combat fatigue and thereby destroy it. We rebuild you, you see. You see?”

  “Training, duty?” Lett had said. “That implies an assignment at some point.”

  “That’s good. Yes. If we have a specific need, yes. Training is where you begin to reacquaint the new you with the world, working matters out, and an assignment—or assignments, I should say—would be where you finally act things out so as to understand and confirm that you are, indeed, cured. Make sense?”

  It had. So Lett talked and talked and now he was talking some more. He let out a big sigh, and another. He interlocked his fingers on his stomach, then let them relax.

  Lansdale said, “Our aim is to get you to the point where you feel like the one driving that big truck, instead of feeling like that lousy ant.”

  Lett said, “But, I have to stay alert. The distractions will fool a guy. Trick you. There are so many triggers out there. Weather, smiles, sudden pops, people simply screwing up. So much can trigger it. But then there are other tricksters beyond the real and the triggers. Nightmares. Hallucinations. You cannot let down your guard, even when you think you are dreaming or even dreaming of dreaming. Because then you’re dead, too. You just focus on the mission at hand, but go about this deliberately, trusting no one. That’s all you do. It’s mechanical, and you let the machine inside sync its gears. That’s how I found the peace and calm to operate. I let the machine inside me take over. I didn’t concern myself with who or what flipped the switch. All of which, of course, is a hell of a problem in peacetime.”

  Lansdale was nodding. He picked up his clipboard, glanced at it, set it down. “That is how you ‘survived’ in the field. You might call it ‘operate,’ but it’s really performing at the highest levels of confidence despite all odds stacked against you—it’s what made you perform so ably on your missions. You possess what few do. You don’t crack. You’re the perfect engine.”

  “Oh, I come close to cracking, Doc. I come close. But it’s after. After is the problem.”

  “Which is what we are here for. And we are making progress, don’t you agree?”

  Lett had to admit it. Call it what Lansdale may, call it whatever the headshrinkers preached, but just talking it out like this seemed to work wonders.

  Along the way, Lett asked more questions of Lansdale. Lett wondered what intelligence agency ran the camp. Lansdale hesitated at first, just staring. “I can’t tell you much, but . . . Well, we work in conjunction with SCAP, but we’re really becoming our own autonomous group. That’s our aim. Driving that big truck, if you will.”

  “SCAP?”

  “Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific—MacArthur’s boys in Tokyo. It doesn’t hurt to tell you. During the war, you had the OSS and the MIS and later the CIG and what have you, but now there’s a need for a new, prevailing agency. Because of the Red Menace, you see—this Cold War of ours could get hot any time, especially in Asia. Now, there’s another new gang calling themselves the CIA. They want to absorb us all, but we’ll see. We might well end up on top. If we can help it. Don’t make the claim if you don’t got the aim!”

  Lett was getting as used as he could to Lansdale’s impromptu slogans. He had learned just to nod and smile, as if Lansdale had offered words both profound and entertaining. But he couldn’t just laugh. It wasn’t a joke. Just laughing made Lansdale glower and leave the room, which he did once, and he took too long to come back. As Lansdale came and went, Lett noticed he had the slightest stoop, and his left arm tended to dangle with his left hand twisting slightly. At first Lett thought this pointed to a disability. That was far off the mark. It was just Lansdale. He had his own way.

  “I can’t believe you had me sent here from halfway around the world,” Lett asked at one point.

  “That was Colonel Selfer’s doing, getting the ball rolling. But it was your own keen initiative that started it. You’re quite the go-getter! As far as transport goes, well, we do that all the time. No matter if it’s for the right goal or for the right man. The right man is so hard to find, especially one who’s been proven in the field. And you’re definitely the right man.”

  “What’s an intelligence agency doing in the healing business? I mean, this isn’t part of a VA program, yet you want to cure combat fatigue?”

  Lansdale grinned and kept grinning, showing Lett plenty of yellow teeth. He held up a finger. “We want to understand better how men reason, and don’t reason. Isn’t that what intelligence is all about? Yes? Yes. Besides, it gives our new agency a damn fine edge. Because it’s the future. Strike that—you’re the future!”

  At one point, Lett gestured at the two men in coveralls out in the corridor and asked Lansdale, “Do they need to be here?”

  Lansdale shrugged.

  “When they first came?” Lett said. “By the looks of them I was a little worried you were going to replace my carburetor or tinker with my ticker or something worse.”

  “Say no more,” Lansdale said, and the men only ever returned to bring him his chow.

  ***

  The talking therapy went on for a couple more days, but that stage was ending, Lansdale told Lett. They were moving him to the second stage: the medication. At intervals over the next two days, Lansdale would inject him with a shot of a clear solution. The glass syringe was too wide for Lett’s taste and the metal ends too stout. After the prick, it stung a little for fifteen seconds or so. But Lansdale knew how to find a vein. Lett didn’t feel much different after. His head was clear, yet he felt relaxed, and talking came easier—he could still talk all he wanted if he wished. It certainly helped that Lansdale administered the dose himself, not some lug in an orderly smock. They were hunkering down here on this tropical island and just taking it easy. He felt free and easy. He might as well be swinging in a hammock in the breeze between palm trees. He didn’t even need a drink of that rum from the Philippines.

  “Hey, I was just thinking: They got a hammock up there somewhere?”

  Lansdale chuckled. “I’m sure they do. If not, I’m sure they can set one up for you.”

&nbs
p; He had asked about Kanani. Lansdale told him she was doing fine and getting trained, and Lett didn’t worry about her. He felt so good about everything. He was being given a new lease, really. That was the way he was looking at it.

  Lett didn’t care if Lansdale was a doctor or not. He just liked calling him “Doc” now and then. It fit. Lansdale didn’t tell Lett what the shot was; Lansdale only said that it contained a “revolutionary light sedative,” and that it was confidential information. It was best for the cure, and he cautioned Lett not to swap too many treatment stories with the other subjects because every cure was different. That was fine with Lett—all he knew was he wasn’t feeling any adverse side effects. In fact, he welcomed the way he was breathing easier and talking things out and learning things and knowing matters. His treatment could’ve ended up much worse for him. Electric shock. Lobotomy. A dark cooler that no one ever came to release him from.

  Once Lansdale felt Lett was ready, he broke down the incident on his first day and helped Lett understand his episode. That gargantuan zipper Lett heard was no MG 42 but just a dumbo recruit gone a little too happy with a jackhammer—they were still building here in camp, after all. The thunks Lett heard? Not enemy artillery of course. Just a motorized pile driver. Meanwhile, a crew had been burning trash and it had old tires in it. And no bodies were decomposing, for that matter. Some goldbricker hadn’t sorted the barrels of trash, which happened to contain carcasses of small island animals, which mixed up with the rest of it, and when the breeze carried that smell it was just horrid. So Lett got a whiff at just the wrong time.

  “You triggered it all,” Lett protested, tightening up.

  Lansdale clucked his tongue, a tsk-tsk sound. “No, that we did not. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I can see it on your face. That you had failed. It had been your first test, certainly, but don’t think that you had failed it. You can only learn from this.”

  Lett nodded along, loosening up again. “What about the incoming? The attacker, I mean.”

  “That was fantastic. As I said. You really walloped him. Nice job.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean to.”

  “But you did—you did. You really impressed us with it.”

  “That wasn’t my intention. You said he was a Marine.”

  “Yes. Jock Quinn. Unfortunate.” Lansdale added one of those sneers of his and wiped at his mustache. “He’d been undergoing his own treatment. But he managed to go off on his own for a while. That was him finding his way back. The rain didn’t help. You didn’t. And that was no German Luger pistol in his hand, son, just a lava rock.”

  “Aw. Gee. I hope I get to tell him sorry.”

  “You will. Now, those MPs you saw were actually there, and they were armed as it happens, which was regrettably the first weapons here that you’d seen—and it didn’t help one iota that MPs present a trauma for you owing to your war service.”

  No one had ever called his deserting a service before. He had served heroically, after all. Lett told himself this was progress, too. “What about my back, Doc? I took one in the back.”

  “You did indeed, Wendell.” By the end of the first day, Lansdale had taken to calling him by his first name. “I must apologize for that. Certain sentries had been trying out a new tranquilizer gun, and one got a little eager with the clumsy thing.”

  “A dart gun?” Lett remembered his muscles had gone weak and he could not breathe and he’d dropped.

  “I’m afraid so, yes.” Lansdale added a shake of his head. “It was curare. Our weapons team was working on something new.”

  “You were experimenting with me?”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Tranquilizers are for animals. I’m not some animal, Doc.”

  “No. Of course not. In point of fact? I’ll have you know that I investigated all of this personally and have passed my recommendations on to Lieutenant Colonel Selfer. All appropriated parties are being reprimanded.”

  At the end of that day, Lansdale assured Lett that the third stage, his training, would begin once they determined that he was ready. Lett’s development would be “cultivated until it met a certain standard.”

  “This is the whole point of the cure, after all,” Lansdale told him.

  “What’s the training?” Lett asked. “The assignment.”

  “Well, that’s up to us,” Lansdale said. “And, it will depend on how you respond from here on out.”

  And then, Lansdale stopped visiting Lett.

  8.

  Without Lansdale, Lett didn’t get his injection. Without that syringe, Lett didn’t seem to be able to find those profound and illuminating thoughts he was voicing before when “associating free,” as Lansdale called it. Staying calm wasn’t as easy, either. He worried that the nightmares or an incident would come any moment. Even the slightest muffled sound through the ventilation grate could set him back. He needed to keep his treatment going.

  Lett wasn’t sure how much time had passed exactly, but he figured it had been a day. The minutes wore on, becoming hours. He didn’t know when it was daylight exactly, let alone the position of the sun. The two guards in coveralls returned but only to bring him his food. Other than that, Lett paced and he stewed.

  He banged on the hatch of his room until the two guards opened up. He repeatedly demanded to see Lansdale. The two told him that Lansdale had other business and had instructed that he stay put.

  He stewed more, paced more. He hung up his blue corduroy robe and made sure he was fully dressed, ready to go. He reasoned things out in his metal chair, facing the wall as if it were a chalkboard, the gray paint blurring into options, acceptable losses, lesser evils. Again, he banged on the door, this time with a more measured pace that brought the two guards back sooner.

  “I would like to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Selfer,” he told them in an equally measured tone. “I’m a patient, not a prisoner.

  They exchanged the briefest glances. “We’ll see what we can do,” they said at nearly the same time.

  The two guards came back a couple hours later and, to Lett’s full surprise, announced that Selfer himself had authorized his release. They escorted him out, taking him along more corridors like his and through connecting hatches, then finally to a narrow metal stairwell painted the same gray as the concrete walls. The stairwell shaft rose straight up. At the top landing waited a large hatch with an oversize handle. Lett stepped outside and saw that the hatch was built into a rectangular steel housing inside the forest, its olive drab paint blending in with the thick greenery. He could see from the sun that it was late afternoon. A short trail delivered him to a clearing that neighbored the one where he’d lost his marbles.

  There a clerk gave him a small bungalow of his own. Lett noticed, meanwhile, that he was feeling none of the effects he’d felt the first time out here. The clerk advised him to remain at his quarters until called for. He shouldn’t have visitors just yet, and he shouldn’t try visiting others, any offices, or even the mess hall just yet—these were Selfer’s strict instructions. They brought him his meals, good chow and lots of it, too, with fresh coconut on the side and the best coffee he’d ever tasted. Yet another day passed. He was growing jumpy again, and itchy, so much so that he kept unbuttoning his shirt and trousers to check for ants. He started walking laps around his bungalow and pounded out a little path. While he was circling the bungalow, the man who brought him food offered to put up a hammock for him.

  “I don’t care about a hammock!” Lett shouted back.

  When he wasn’t pacing, he was sitting on the edge of the porch, very much like he had as a boy, keeping lookout for a nondescript sedan to pull up after he’d been directed to wait outside his latest foster home, only to be taken away to another, and another, until he started thinking maybe he was better off in that Mennonite orphanage. And then he had started thinking that maybe he didn’t need another of their homes or institutions or even a high school like the regular kids from regular homes had—that maybe what h
e really needed was to strike out on his own, and for good, and so he would dream of hopping on a train or fighting in Spain or later of a room in a boarding house that he could call his very own while he saved for night school. And then the war came. At least the Army would want him, or so Lett thought. Only death and desertion wanted him in the end. That thought made him want to pull up all the planks off the bungalow porch and smash them over a rock and light the fragments and splinters into a bonfire before ripping off the plain fatigues they’d given them and tossing them on the fire.

  He wasn’t done. He had more in him. He needed more.

  Selfer had promised to get a letter to Heloise. He needed that, too. That had to be done.

  He walked more laps around his bungalow, his fists balling up. Then he shot inside, grabbed the letter he’d written, came back out, and bounded down the middle lane of the clearing. He made his way through camp using various trails and cut-throughs, the clearings he passed like so many compartments, drawers, cells. He followed the signs. A longer, bending trail through forest delivered him to the area holding what was called the Main House—Lansdale had mentioned it in their conversations as being Selfer’s quarters. It stood on a ridge, open to a horizon made up of three layers—the green island coastline, the gray-blue sea, the azure sky spotted with white puffs.

  The well-groomed house grounds resembled those of an upscale country club, with shrubs like sculptures and a lawn like a putting green and palm trees in rows like giant sentries. He’d expected to find guards. He saw no one, not even a gardener. In the circular driveway before the house stood a couple brand-new jeeps and gleaming postwar sedans, a DeSoto convertible, a Chrysler four-door. The Main House wasn’t that imposing in itself—a ranch style in an L shape with white walls and a modest swimming pool nestled in the L’s angle. Not quite modern but with clean lines, one of those homes owned by people who made it rich at a rapid rate and liked to pretend they were still homespun and ordered out of the Sears catalog.

  A small and elderly Hawaiian woman opened the front door. “Aloha. Have appointment?” she said smiling.