A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  “I don’t think she’s talking to me,” Mueller said under his breath.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Let me know how the coffee is in this town.”

  “Absolutely.” They shared a laugh. Mueller, whose billet was on the second floor, continued up another flight of steps while Jamie waited for Nurse Nichols. This school building was the height of nineteenth-century French colonial grandeur, with inlaid tiles, vaulted ceilings, the works. Jamie felt as if he’d entered an art history class, the foreignness of it all was so startling to him. The main entry gallery was wide and high, like the ceremonial entryway of a museum or a train station. The Central Task Force used the entry gallery as an open ward for the wounded. Not his wounded, though. The penicillin patients had their own ward, a cordoned-off portion of the gymnasium in the rear of the school.

  “You ready to go?” Nurse Nichols asked, joining him. She was from Oklahoma, “never left till now, but for one trip to Austin, Texas,” she sometimes told the soldiers, in her lilting Oklahoma accent, while prepping them for surgery.

  His watch said eleven. The rain had stopped, and sunlight was angling through the latticework over the windows. Therefore, it was morning. Time for a cup of coffee.

  “Yes,” Jamie said.

  They went through the monumental front doorway and into the town. Once again, the French colonial influence, brought onto Muslim North Africa. You had to admire it, the architecture of this town. The whitewashed buildings, the filigree decoration. Here in a war zone, with buildings bombed, kids running around wild, and orphanages overflowing, a café was up and running, tables outside, coffee or at least imitation coffee being served, cigarettes smoked. The important things in life, taken care of: you could count on the French influence for that. A story was being circulated to much laughter in the mess hall about a unit of American troops who surrounded and conquered an enemy encampment, only to discover it was a café, filled with locals who welcomed the newcomers with wine and women. As Jamie glanced at a group of young American recruits unloading a supply truck, again he thought, It’s all so foreign; what are we doing here, so far from home?

  At the café, Nurse Nichols sat across from him. They ordered coffee. It came with hard cookies.

  “They call these biscotti,” Nurse Nichols said. She dunked one into her coffee with a flair that made her look as if she’d been dining in French cafés all her life instead of languishing in Oklahoma. “These cookies are Italian, but they serve them here anyway.”

  “Ah.” Jamie imitated her. He tasted hazelnut. Where did the locals get these things, the rich coffee, the cream, the cookies, the china cups? But he said nothing. Snow-covered mountains rose in the distance. Normally Jamie would want to know the name of that mountain range, but at the moment, he couldn’t muster the energy to care.

  “Doris—she’s one of my nurses—says this town has beautiful olive trees in the central square.”

  Clearly Jamie was supposed to say, let’s go for a walk when we finish our coffee, let’s look at the olive trees. He didn’t feel like looking at olive trees.

  “And there’s acres and acres of orange trees outside of town. Doris says it’s just gorgeous.”

  He didn’t want to be rude, but he didn’t have the strength to discuss orange trees. The paradox was, he wasn’t tired when he was in surgery or doing rounds in the penicillin ward; then he was awake. When he wasn’t working, though, his energy drained away.

  She must have understood this, because she lit a cigarette and stared into the distance. Jamie watched her. Lipstick on the side of her coffee cup, lipstick on her cigarette. She wore a short-sleeved uniform blouse, her regulation jacket over her shoulders. Strong shoulders, an alluring hint of cleavage giving promise of more…there were rules about fraternization, although he couldn’t remember exactly what they were, and besides, he was navy, she was army, and as long as it was kept discreet, who’d be the wiser.

  Really, he should say something. She didn’t deserve silence. “I’m tired,” he said.

  She smiled in relief. “Me, too,” she said.

  She was available to him, he knew. All he had to do was ask. No, he didn’t even have to ask. He simply had to nod his head. Touch one finger upon her hand. She shared a classroom with five other nurses, five cots in a row with sheets hung between them. But his cot was in the assistant principal’s office. He had the entire office to himself. They finished the coffee. He paid. The breeze picked up, bringing the smell of burned flesh and gunpowder.

  She waited for him to give a sign. “I need to visit my patients,” he said.

  “And I’ve got to supervise my nurses,” she replied, promptly covering any chagrin she might have felt while simultaneously reminding him that she, too, had power here. She was in charge of fifteen junior nurses. She had more power than he did. She’d chosen him, he realized. But he wasn’t prepared to accept. He pictured the cherished snapshot of Claire on his bedside table.

  Back at the ward, Jamie went from patient to patient, giving injections, changing bandages, making detailed notes. To protect himself, he slipped into the usual physician’s shortcut of remembering them in terms of their ailments, not their names. The perforated stomach. The third-degree burns. The double amputee. The chest wounds. Matthew Johnston wasn’t here yet; he was probably still in the surgical recovery area.

  After finding Johnston and confirming that he was stabilizing, Jamie returned to his assistant principal’s office on the first floor. He lay down on the cot and let himself fall into a chasm of sleep.

  Banging on the door woke him, he didn’t know how much later. He opened his eyes. Raining again.

  “Lieutenant, wounded in.” The voice of his medic, Harry Lofgren, from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Lofgren worked only with penicillin testing. He didn’t assist at surgery.

  “I’ll be right there,” Jamie called. He sat up. He ran a hand through his hair.

  He opened the door into chaos, stretchers covering the floors, medics and nurses hurrying from patient to patient. Where had these boys come from? A battle in the hills, who knew where, even forty or fifty miles away. They were patched up by medics at the front, then brought here by truck.

  The men called to him as he walked among them. They were delirious with pain, most of them, calling to the shadow that was him as he moved through their line of vision. No, he couldn’t stop to help them. He walked right through the chaos and downstairs to the pantry to prepare for surgery, as he’d been doing day after day. He went through the rituals of sterilization, maintaining necessary standards.

  Mueller was already there, changing. “Hey, Stanton,” he said, “enjoyable cup of coffee?”

  “Just coffee, no more nor less. I guess it was espresso. Actually it was good. Cream, too. I don’t know how these French colonials do it.”

  “Well, however they do it, we can count on them to keep doing it, so you’ll have plenty of time for more coffee later.”

  “We’ll see. Anything interesting this evening?”

  “Amputation. They’ve got him ready.”

  “Ah.” Jamie hated amputations.

  “Let’s at it, then.” Mueller’s mouth and nose were covered with a mask, as was Jamie’s. But the eyes showed. Professional. A busy evening ahead. An amputation, he called it—he didn’t call it a boy from Iowa or Michigan or Colorado who might not see his family again.

  Nurse Nichols was already there, standing beside the patient along with the requisite assistants. Everybody worked without talking, saving their energy. Except for Nurse Nichols.

  “What’s your name, soldier?” she asked.

  “Billy Baines, ma’am.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Kansas City, Missouri, ma’am.” He spoke boldly through what must have been excruciating pain. His left leg was mangled beyond repair, a black, bloody, filthy mess. His foot was already gone. He looked about fifteen. Jamie felt compelled to ponder: a good case for testing penicillin as a preventative for ga
ngrene. “Not Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri.”

  “That’s an important distinction and I’m glad you told me. I won’t forget. I bet you’ve got a million girls there, chasing you, soldier. We’re going to have you back at it in no time. Because this is your lucky day, Billy Baines: you’ve got the best surgeon in the United States Army right here with nothing else to do tonight but fix you up.”

  But Billy was already under the anesthesia and couldn’t respond.

  And there Billy was, the next day, as Jamie treated him in the penicillin ward. He was laughing at some wisecrack made by the boy in the bed on the opposite side, a boy with a chest wound, a perforated lung, and five broken ribs. Laughing was painful with five broken ribs, but he was joking around anyway.

  First, Jamie checked in with Matthew Johnston. He was doing well. Then, the abdominal patient, the shrapnel wound, and the others from previous days. Jamie had twenty-two patients on the penicillin ward. Seeing them joking together, he did begin to learn their names. He followed his ritual of four-hour intramuscular injections. He changed the penicillin-soaked bandages. Lofgren took over when Jamie was in surgery. Lofgren was also responsible for collecting the urine of the patients and extracting penicillin from it in their makeshift lab. Surprisingly, penicillin was excreted by the body, and because they had so little, they retrieved whatever they could.

  Sulfa drugs weren’t suited to desert climates, British studies had shown that. The men were dehydrated from the heat, and in conditions of dehydration, sulfa drugs caused kidney damage. But the penicillin was working fine, Jamie was pleased to see. No side effects, no allergic reactions, everything going according to plan.

  “Good job,” Jamie told Lofgren when they finished rounds. He’d trained his medic in everything, the tacit reality being that if anything happened to Jamie, someone else, i.e., Harry Lofgren, had to be able to carry on.

  Days passed. Awake, asleep, awake. As long as he did his job, Jamie understood his place and everything was clear. When he stopped doing his job, he was disoriented.

  One morning he went directly from the operating room to the penicillin ward.

  “Now, what’s your girl’s name, soldier?” A nurse was sitting at the bedside of a boy who’d lost his right arm. She was writing a letter for him.

  “Her name’s Betsy.”

  “Okay. Dear Betsy, that’s a good way to start, isn’t it?” the nurse asked. “What’s next?”

  The boy looked confused and didn’t respond. Jamie put himself in the boy’s place: how could he even begin to explain to Betsy back home? The minarets and palm trees. The whitewashed buildings. The desert scrub. The tanks and bombs and strafings. And the right arm, gone.

  Have I written any letters? Jamie asked himself. He actually couldn’t remember. Everything except the tasks directly in front of him became a fog. He hoped he had written to Claire. Probably he hadn’t. He should. What would he say? I’m here, I’m alive. Nothing to worry about. He wouldn’t write anything more than that, because no words could explain the truth of what was going on here, and the truth wouldn’t get by the censors anyway.

  One day he saw a calendar. A requisitions officer came around to check on their supplies, and this guy had a calendar. Only two weeks had passed since Jamie came ashore here. Two weeks. If asked, he’d have figured that two months had passed at least. Two years. The kid with half his abdomen burned away, the kid with his left leg blown off, the kid missing half his face. Penicillin could stop infection from setting in—that’s what he had to keep his focus on. Not whether or how the patient would go back home, would live and function at home, without a leg or a face. Saving the life was what mattered. Stopping the infections. Fulfilling the protocols of the clinical trial. Getting the boys who could return to battle out to the front lines: penicillin, a weapon of war.

  Then one day, he saw a suppurating thigh wound, with the telltale red marks up and down the leg. This wound had seemed like nothing when the patient came in. Shrapnel in the thigh—that was next to nothing. But now Jamie was looking at gangrene.

  He pointed it out to Lofgren. They nodded but said nothing. Didn’t want the boy to know. Penicillin was supposed to work for gangrene, right? Jamie doubled the dose. He felt as if everything had slowed down inside himself. If penicillin turned out not to work against gangrene, well, that would be a blow. He took this personally now. He sat down and wrote every single detail in the chart. If the gangrene became worse, the boy’s leg would have to be amputated.

  Jamie recalled a colleague at the Institute who’d been a field doctor in the Great War. Told him that he’d kept two dogs at his field hospital in France to lick and purify the wounds. Canine saliva had antibacterial qualities. Did a dog’s saliva work better than penicillin? Could a dog stop gangrene? Lucas Shipley would have made a good companion here.

  Another visit to the café, after lunch at the hospital canteen. Nurse Nichols across the table from him.

  While they drank their coffee in what had become a companionable silence, a truck came in from the front. The wounded on stretchers. And then another truck arrived, for the dead, the bodies laid out, covered.

  He thought back to when he and Tia were young, how he’d turned her head away from the bodies piled in the horse-drawn cart. Now he and Nurse Nichols watched. His life passed before his eyes, the way people said it happened during the unfolding of a serious accident. His own life would end here, he knew suddenly and without doubt. He tried to make his peace with it. So much unfinished. His love for Claire. The family he, they, might have had. The hard truth of Tia’s death. Whether penicillin and the cousins would change the world. All this, unknown to him.

  He studied Nurse Nichols, who studied the nurses and orderlies organizing the wounded. She was off duty today. Her first name was Alice, although he’d never called her that. He’d never see Claire again. The young soldiers, the eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds, they believed nothing bad could ever happen to them. A good thing, when you’re ordered to rise out of a dugout and walk into machine-gun fire. Jamie was old enough to know otherwise.

  And different rules applied when so many were approaching death’s door. Mueller was also off duty this afternoon, so there’d be no calls for Jamie to go to surgery. The hospital had four surgical teams, and Jamie worked only with Mueller. The penicillin research put Jamie on duty every day, but he didn’t have to return to the ward for two hours at least.

  He reached out his hand. With his index finger, he caressed the side of her left hand from her thumb to her wrist. Alice. She turned her head slowly to look at him. She nodded, an eighth of an inch, no more. That was all she needed to do, to whisper yes.

  It was easy, comfortable, and good, like the passing flings he used to have with married women back home. Afterward, he couldn’t let himself fall asleep or even rest. He had to get to the ward. Alice was asleep, her long, thick hair spread across the pillow. Even naked in her sleep, she looked like a pinup. Rita Hayworth. She hadn’t disappointed him. He’d quietly put Claire’s photo under some papers when they came in. Alice had pretended not to notice. Probably she had someone at home, or in some distant war zone, too.

  The sun was out. The sun enveloped her. He didn’t feel anything for her but a stirring appreciation of her beauty. He had no idea what she felt for him. He hoped it wasn’t much. He wanted them to be only what they’d been before. At the same time he desperately wanted to fuck her again and again, to keep himself alive.

  It was the next day. Or the next week. He’d lost track. He’d been trying to gauge the passage of time by how often Alice came to his room, but even that he couldn’t keep track of. Her visits were like a massage that stayed with him through nights or days.

  When they weren’t together, she’d pretend she didn’t know him. No more tête-à-têtes at the café, no more hints about walks among the olive trees. Good. They wanted the same from each other. He wished he could ask her, though, if she felt the same frisson through the day and night that
he did after their times together, but they never talked about the personal or the intimate. If they did talk, they talked about the patients. Or rather, she talked about the patients and he listened. Strange, to be most intimate, and yet never speak of anything that mattered to themselves, to their lives at home, or their thoughts and hopes and wishes. Nothing.

  Mueller was on duty today. First case, an ugly abdominal wound. Of every type of military surgery—head wounds, shrapnel in the neck, arms blown off, amputations—Jamie hated abdominal surgery most. Even after all these days, abdominal surgery still made him queasy, though he managed to hide it. Maybe Mueller was queasy, too. Even Alice. They were all doing what they needed to do, pushing themselves through.

  “Where you from, soldier?”

  The soldier, Keith Powers, drifted in and out of consciousness. He didn’t respond.

  “I’m from Oklahoma.” Alice had told Jamie that she was certain the boys could hear her whether they were able to respond or not, so she kept up the conversation. “You don’t know what hot is like until you’ve been to Oklahoma in the summertime. Don’t you worry, soldier. With our Dr. Mueller, you’ve got the best surgeon in the entire United States Army devoting himself to you today.”

  Perforated intestines, bullet hole in the stomach, blood pouring everywhere…. Good Lord.

  And now, right in the middle of their work, literally adding insult to injury, bombs started falling. The screech, the explosion, the rumble in the earth, the electricity flickering.

  “God damn it,” Mueller said as the table shook.

  The electricity went out.

  “Fucking hell,” Mueller added for good measure.

  An orderly turned on the flashlight. The planes were getting closer, what sounded like a battalion of them (even though planes didn’t fly in battalions), almost overhead. These abdominal surgeries took a long time and always seemed to coincide with electrical problems and bombing raids. The planes were now on top of them.