Dog Tags

by Stephen Becker

  “No. They were all cheerful.”

  Jacob groaned, and said abruptly, “That’s good about the girls,” fiercely, “that’s good. Be a lover. You can always die later. Do what I tell you, Benny. Be a prince.”

  Benny grinned at this Franz-Josef and said, “To oblige his father must always be the object of a devoted son.”

  “Oh boy,” Jacob said. The brown eyes glowed. “Is that a talker! Prosit.”

  “Prosit,” Benny said, and so they passed the winter.

  3

  Benny’s fingers, quicker than the eye, stained slides, caressed tumultuous pulses and performed auscultations major and minor, amateur and professional; fiddler’s fingers. But the first time he practiced gynecological chores on a female, or once-female, cadaver he gagged severely. Rospos had already vomited several times, the sight of a string of intestine offending his ancient Attic sensibilities. They were merciless: “That’s how your ancestors said sooth.”

  “Never.” Rospos was tall, pale, black-haired, intensely handsome. “Chickens at most. My regrets, gentlemen; you behold a vegetarian.”

  “Strong meat belongeth to them that are full of age,” Dr. Asher said. “You’ll get over it.”

  “Never. It’s a question of good taste. Aesthetics.” Rospos had struggled up from a slum; his father owned an ice-cream parlor “with flyspecks for chocolate sprinkles,” a round clumsy man, as he told it, whose efforts to prepare a banana split in a cardboard container had once reduced his son to bitter tears of shame. Even in the fourth year, most of Benny’s friends were foreigners, or dubious Americans like himself. Rospos roomed with a Persian named Demavin whose English was, and seemed to remain, rudimentary; they shared a private joke, Demavin saying “Bore, bore” (in lectures) or “bar, bar” (where have you been?) or “bare, bare” (the cadavers) or any of a dozen variations, while Rospos laughed. When they met Benny the little Iranian whooped and shouted, “Beer! Beer!” reducing Rospos to giggles. Twenty years later Benny would understand. Demavin was swarthy and short, more Central Asian than Near Eastern, and they all felt that he would bring a needed shamanism to the practice of medicine. Makkar was Tunisian; he owned a prayer mat and used it.

  Lin Li-kang was from Fukien via Shanghai and proved annoyingly brilliant; he knew more of English literature, German music, French art, American slang and nuclear physics (what?) than any of them. His father had been a banker with Chiang Kai-shek, and Lin had been shipped to America during the war to study at Reed College. He was horny and cold: “I intend to go through Barnard College,” he said, “like corn through a blue goose.” He dressed like a film star, and used cologne. Adapting a technique of ancient Chinese navy yards, he had painted an alert dragon’s eye to either side of the forward median line, or bowsprit, of his drawers. “Der Jasager,” he announced one day, “is a Nō play,” and Benny realized a week later that he had made a pun in three languages. To Lin’s practical work, slides and sutures and blood samples and injections, he brought the delicacy and dexterity of a worker in ivory. The others envied him and laughed with him when he called them peasants. The women he smuggled into the dormitory were an extraordinary collection. He and Benny roomed together for a time and Benny did most of his studying in the common room, but refused to give up his sleep. Lin rebuked him and called him a stiff-necked Isaiah. Benny ran to the Bible and came back to tell him, “This is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should refrain from fornication.” “That’s Christian,” Lin said. “You’re a cultural magpie. And what about your own sins?” “Fungoo,” Benny said. Lin was shocked. “Fungoo? Can you not even curse in Yiddish?”

  “I learned in the streets. I’m a New Yorker and not a religious fanatic.”

  “But fungoo. You don’t even know what it means.”

  Benny told him, but Lin was already thinking of other matters. “Did I ever tell you about the Jews of Kaifeng-fu?”

  “You know too much,” Benny said. “A Japanese in disguise.”

  Lin was truly offended. Benny apologized and then, because he cared deeply for Lin, asked him to go on.

  “An Englishman,” Lin said, “a Victorian traveler—you know the sort, like Burton, they went everywhere—this fellow wound up in Kaifeng-fu, in Honan, and went to the marketplace to look for bargains, like a pot or a hanging he could buy for a pound that was worth half a million. And he saw a vendor standing there holding up a scroll, and he went to look at the scroll and it was in Hebrew. The Englishman went crazy with excitement, and in time he got the whole story. Hundreds of years before, a bunch of Jews had fled from someplace and crossed all of Asia and settled in Kaifeng. After a while they were assimilated and forgot who they were, but there were always those weird scrolls and books that nobody could read anymore. So every market day one of them went out and stood there, holding up the scroll, hoping that some traveler could enlighten him. Funny thing was, they still kept the Sabbath. It was on a Wednesday or some such day because the western calendar had changed and the Chinese never cared too much about the day of the week anyway, but they kept it.”

  Benny was silent in pride, wonder, sorrow; they sat for a time, and it was as if they had been friends a thousand years before.

  There were also a black American named White, a white American named Black, and a red Yugoslav named Prpl who was possibly randier than Lin: where Lin was rarely seen twice with the same quiff, Prpl was a model of old-fashioned constancy, deriving inordinate mileage from each chassis and leaving it finally at the roadside, bearings burned, pistons jammed, tires bald. He moaned and twittered and brava’d, and his ladies loved it. He wore rogue shirts. “Bawdy by Fishair!” he cried, and blew an admiring kiss; a dream from Cos Cob dimpled and yielded. Benny explained that certain of those phrases dated from 1936 or so and were to be eschewed on cultural and not moral grounds; Prpl grinned and asked, “You getting moch?” At the time Benny was not getting much. Benny was working like a mule in order later to kill as few as possible. He explained this and was ridiculed.

  Benny cried truce and worked harder. One night he came back after an Italian dinner with Jacob and found Lin and Prpl in his room sharing a plump, happy girl who even naked seemed to be an usherette. For an instant Benny saw the epaulets, the piping, and he almost reached for his ticket; and then a rage came upon him, and he saw the faces of Parsons and Pistol and Bardolph, and once again 57359. In an irrational fury he swept them to the hall; he flung clothes after them, locked his door and stood trembling. He walked the streets at midnight and wondered what sorrow was a part of him forever. But in the morning he was ashamed. Lin was pensive. “You’re a maniac. A puritan.”

  “No, no,” Benny said apologetically. “Not at all. But there was something else. The sadism.”

  “Sadism?” Lin was appalled. “We positively lavished affection on that young lady. She went home in a glow. In raptures. It was one of the crucial experiences of her intellectual life.”

  “She was a side of beef, that’s all.”

  Lin said stiffly, “You have accused me of bestiality and necrophilia.”

  “Oh shut up,” Benny said. “I guess I can’t explain it.”

  “Then consider that you may be wrong to take on so. The victim of blind prejudice, writhing in your own frustration and striking out in neurotic fury.”

  “Thanks, doc. What about this gleet here?”

  Benny was rewarded; Lin laughed, and the black eyes sparkled, the black hair flopped, straight, over the high forehead.

  “I suppose you surgeons have to be without emotion,” Benny went on.

  “Surgeons,” Lin said mournfully. “Thank God for the fourth year. It’s all been band-aids so far.”

  “What’ll you do afterward?”

  “I’ll go back.”

  “To China.”

  “Yes.”

  “But the Reds have got it all. Almost.”

  “I’ll go back.”

  Benny considered this obstinacy. “It makes no sense. They won’t have you, w
ith your cuff links and English shoes.”

  “They’ll have me. I’m Chinese.”

  “But the wine and women, and all that. I don’t see you as a Stakhanovite.”

  “Nonsense.” Lin smiled in mockery. “Quality will tell. You’ll see. I’ll be a commissar.”

  “My God,” Benny said. “You’re a patriot, that’s what.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” Lin said. “I’d go back tomorrow if I could, and I’ll tell you why: not because I’m tired of your cheap jokes about no starch but because if they had a … a Japanese in charge it would still be the most civilized country in the world.”

  “I forgot. All those mandarins. Five hundred million mandarins. Who washes the shirts? Wetbacks from India?”

  Lin glared, and swore musically in Chinese.

  At the end of his third year Benny committed matrimony. Uncoerced and to his own surprise. He married a lovely girl named Carol and quitted the dormitory amid ceremonies and celebrations; he announced that he would henceforth live a life of probity and respectability, and his little league of nations huzzahed and flung rice.

  But even Citizen Beer, householder and family man, was no match for a smirking fate; there was no escaping, six months later, the long bony arm, the inexorably beckoning finger. Fate’s agent this time was Prpl; her season winter; her purposes obscure. Bonesetter Benny was bustling off to an afternoon of solemn urology (“Take care,” Lin warned him; “do not reduce the scrotal total”) and the Serb, fleeing work, nabbed him at the door: “Party. Tonight. Stop in. A holiday from family life.”

  “A party! I am exhausted.”

  “You’re a slave.” Prpl spoke the address. “After supper. Any time. All night.” Later Benny, detained by a stunning chancre, called home and took supper uptown; returning he saw Miss Subways (“hopes to be a fashion model; is deeply religious”) and disembarked betimes, walked two blocks freezing, climbed a flight of stairs and burst into a mob scene. Noise jolted him and he knew he should not have come, but he accepted the obligatory highball, noted the obligatory bullfight poster, greeted the obligatory Negro, the obligatory homosexual, the obligatory poet, and sat on the obligatory pouf for the obligatory ten minutes with his intense, stoatlike hostess, who wore an optional sari. He waved to Prpl, who winked. He wandered, then, among instructors and students and drunks, and was escaping toward more ice, in a dim hallway lit by one red bulb overhead, when he found himself face to face with a woman he should most surely have met a year earlier or not at all. Benny gazed upon her and was shattered. Perhaps, he thought bitterly, God did exist and it was merely that he had a puckish sense of humor. The hallway tilted, and with it his brief lifetime. Friendly sheets of flame broiled him; his knees trembled and the backs of his legs prickled. She stood still. So did he. Speech seemed petty. After some moments the sounds of the party roused them; Benny, impelled by utter, inarguable necessity, stepped to her and kissed her. Only their lips touched. He spoke: “Come on.” They walked arm in arm against the cold. He told her all about himself in thirty seconds. “I don’t care,” she said. “Have you ever,” Benny asked, “had the following: chicken pox, measles, mumps, scarlet fever?” “Five foot six,” she said, “one hundred and thirty pounds,” as Benny contemplated this latter through her duffel coat and groaned aloud; “will you want a sandwich?” “You’re insane,” he said fervently.

  At four Miss Swinburne slept. Benny extricated himself from her, from the sheets, from the blanket, and half dressed. He sat foolishly in a stuffed armchair and watched over her as dawn broke. Well, old God of Abraham and Isaac, he marveled, thou hast vouchsafed unto me a miracle. A piece of cosmic mistiming but I thank thee. Benny is annihilated and has become pure spirit. I am lighter than air. I have given myself, and there is nothing left.

  You know how the Orientals name their years—the year of the rat and the year of the tiger and so on, and they pass in cycles, once in every twelve years or twenty. Well, this was the year of Nan and all the rest was foolishness, maintenance, upholstery; it was the year of Nan and it never came again, not in twelve years or twenty or a century. She had thick, wavy blond hair and dark brown eyes and paradoxically a slight, tantalizing, shifting, Oriental look; take her features one by one and she was merely superlative; take her as a whole and she was a half-caste goddess. She was from Arizona, a lapsed Catholic family, and when she entered a room Benny half expected the walls and furnishings to melt away, leave not a rack behind, only Nan in a deep green glade at the foot of a mountain on the rim of a desert, giving birth every hour to another magnificent tawny child while the sun shone and the rain fell and crops grew and cattle multiplied and birds-of-paradise caroled. To make love to her was to walk barefoot through the botanical-zoological gardens, temperature 80° Fahrenheit, humidity 50%, scattered cirrus clouds, a southwest breeze at five knots bearing a hint of spring rain and the sweet smell of pears and pomegranates. Vital signs: 98.6°, pulse 72, respiration 18, blood pressure 110/70, identical to Benny’s.

  The demigod had found his demigoddess and they yielded cheerfully to every demiurge; when they stood unclothed, gravely gazing, half a room apart, solemnly teasing, it was a sacrament, an act of pure worship, of adoration, each the other’s godhead and each merging fully with godhead; where the mystics failed, they succeeded, where the mystics lost, they won. A matter of glands, your friendly neighborhood physician will tell you; but Benny is your friendly neighborhood physician and he will tell you that it was not so. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-two, and they did not have all the time in the world.

  Blessed are they who make love on the fly, for they know not ennui. They rarely had more than half a night together, or an afternoon hour. Her breasts were too full and sagged slightly; that excited Benny inordinately, and he thought of her as a true goddess, ancient Greek and not Botticelli, fertile, hot, full of hormones, nectar, ambrosia, ichor. She perverted him: she waited naked and when they had made love he delighted in clothing her, adorning her with doilies, antimacassars, tablecloths, his own sweater, his khaki trousers. They made love historically and pastorally, tragically and comically, on beds, sofas, chairs, the kitchen table, the carpet, the bare floor, standing, seated, prone and supine, looking out her window, washing dishes. Children! She was quickly roused and avaricious, taking a violent revenge on her early years, on her parents, on the Blessed Virgin Mary, and at times it seemed to him that he was living out a ghastly anti-morality play: Everyman Beer, burgher, doctor, alderman, meets the witch Swinburne and they proceed to exhaust the catalog of orgasm while waiting for the birth of God, or the Devil, who is never born; the seasons roll on and so do Benny and Nan and there is no retribution or even remission.

  But more often it was simply funny, vulgar, stupendous, a series of oneline jokes from a suppressed (and properly so) magazine. Suitably illustrated. Tawdry. But to lovers? Uproarious. No sense was denied employment. “I can’t rank them,” he said. “If I could see you but not touch you I’d go mad. If I could touch you but not taste you I’d go mad. I like your smell and I like your voice. I may go mad anyway. I just hope we don’t kill ourselves.” Children!

  His life was saved by aeons without her: in class, on the subway, at the clinic, at home (home, yes, important matters). Benny stared at a stained slide (gonococcus), a poster (Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth), a wall of books, a dish of beans or a dead whitefish, and always, between or beyond, hovered the fuzzy, wavering, persistent lineaments of his love, that unforgettable face constantly forgotten, the brows, the nose, the mouth melting and merging with Irene’s, Felicia’s, Marian’s, Frances’s: Nan, Nan, return! He thought of Athena, popping up in human guise; he wished a janitor good day, shared the elevator with an eminent obstetrician, ordered a sandwich from an acned soda jerk, and wondered if one or more of them were Nan. He loved everybody.

  He was sad, too, sometimes. So was she. “I wish we had another lifetime,” he said. “Don’t,” she said, “don’t,” and he knew that she was thinking,
or trying not to, of Fred. Fred was her fiancé and she loved him. In Arizona. Fred Wilcox. Really Alfred. Exotic, like an early English king. She loved him. They shared ecstasies, an accent, geography, mathematics (she was a graduate student in statistics). But for now it scarcely mattered. But. Therefore. Consequently. Nevertheless. “We all do so much damn explaining,” she said. “I suppose it’s the Bible, all those stories when I was nine. Now I have a big black Hebrew of my own. Next thing to a beautiful Negro.” Benny was shocked but recovered quickly. His experience of master races was not encouraging. He pictured himself with a black girl. She was a housemaid. Conscientiously he gave her other occupations but to his shame his mind pressed her continually back into servitude. He saw her dusting, raised her skirt. Dismayed by this infidelity, he nibbled at Nan. His succulent pink pig, his Arizona ham.

  Nan feared the irrevocable word and never said that she loved Benny. She said everything else: want, adore, need, assorted drivel. Benny too refrained from oratory but it broke out: “God! I love!” And their sadness never lingered. Twenty-five; twenty-two; what else mattered? What else should matter? Romp and hurrah and the world their oyster!

  And the acrobatics! In the center ring Beniamino sways, twirls, swings from hoop to hoop in loops and twists and gyres and gainers, grinning like a seal, barking and snuffling likewise, peering through blond canyons, chasms and coppices at a sternum, a collarbone, a smile, a row of vertebrae caravanning single file over a tawny desert toward a tawny nape. And Nan, scaling the flanks of Ben Beer, blushed. Morals? Mere exertion? Blushed here, blushed there, checkered and patched pink and white—“It’s your beard,” she said, and he ran to shave. Sometimes he was Benny the Navigator, dauntlessly ranging the hemispheres, pitching and rolling and yawing, beating and reaching and running, pausing in astonishment to check his position (celestial! stem to stern!) as if he were the first that ever burst into that silent she; then the laughter died; and waves rose to meet the black sky. Once he was Benny Agonized (he: ruined for life! she: the first fine careless rupture!) but recovered. That frightened him. He had heard from an earnest colleague that each man had in him precisely three thousand fucks; should he save one or two for his old age? Nah! Onward and upward with der Arzt!