by C. P. Boyko
The operation was over quickly, before the ordnance-disposal technician could return with flak vests, which he had at first forgotten. Baltin injected a sedative and muscle relaxant intravenously, and lidocaine locally. Hillary and Martoskif stood with their hands on the casualty’s arms, less to soothe him than to appear useful. Hartner extended the edges of the wound with a plastic scalpel, reached into the abdomen with both hands, tugged three times, paused, tugged three more times, then pulled the grenade free. It was covered in blood and smaller than she’d imagined; for a moment she feared he had removed the bladder by mistake. He placed it in the containment receptacle and lowered the lid. Then he straightened, peeled off his gloves, and said, “I believe this soldier has just been retriaged.”
They rolled him back to the preponderant room but did not stop there. Hartner led them to the command hut, and asked to see Major Witte.
Witte promptly called in Communications Lieutenant Pastrick as a witness, and ordered his secretary to take notes. He listened to Hartner’s allegations intently, almost without blinking, and Hillary sensed that there was impatience, even distaste, in his show of grave efficiency. With a giddy flash of impiety, she decided that she did not like the man. She stood at attention, her eyes moving alertly from man to man, ready to confirm or elucidate any detail. But Hartner was accustomed to giving dictation: his words were well chosen; his breath-length clauses followed one another in limpid sequence; even his pauses were eloquent, his periods distinguishable from his semicolons, his semicolons from his colons. No clarification was required. Neither she nor Baltin nor Martoskif were addressed at any time; she supposed their presence was corroboration enough.
When Hartner had finished, Major Witte, off the record, asked whether he had given any thought to who should replace Latroussaine, should matters come to that.
Hartner made a gesture of indifference. “If not for the perennial shortage of surgeons, I’d volunteer myself. However, literally anyone would be an improvement. Any one of these doctors, for instance, would do an excellent job.”
She had thought little of this at the time, but now, lying awake in bed, she curled up in dismay. She could not do Latroussaine’s job; she could barely do her own. The difficulty of the senior triage officer’s job became suddenly apparent to her. Faced with thirty or forty casualties at once, you could but examine them one at a time. You sent the first casualty to the preponderant room; but the second one was in even worse condition, so you sent him too. And so on, till all the tables in the PR were full, and you realized, with the next massive trauma, that you had not been performing proper triage at all. Or vice versa: expecting worse, you sent the first several casualties to the nonpreponderant room—and all the casualties that followed proved to be less injured. Or, simply, the last casualty you examined had already expired—and should have been the first you examined. Indeed, it seemed necessary to triage all casualties first to know what order they should be triaged in. The only feasible method she could think of was to have on hand as many skilled and experienced triage doctors as incoming casualties; each could immediately shout out their assessment to the senior triage officer, who could then turn to the most urgent cases. But the triage tent had only five or six staff on duty at any given time, and only two of these were doctors. Suddenly Hillary went from despising Latroussaine to pitying him. His task was obviously an impossible one. Why couldn’t Hartner see that? And how could he imagine that she would do better?
By the time they returned, the PR had emptied. Hartner sent them for lunch, while he himself went to the operating room. Neither Mills nor Nurse Thota were in sight, so Hillary visited the intensive care room. There she found their last casualty, his central venous catheter neatly in place. Perhaps another doctor had assisted; perhaps Nurse Thota had seen the procedure done enough times to finish it herself; the chart did not say. Whatever the case, it proved to Hillary what she had long suspected: that she was not necessary here; that she would be more useful at the front, where soldiers were actually being wounded, where people were dying.
Her mind turned again, inevitably, to Andrew, who was driving an ambulance somewhere at the front. She had been suppressing thoughts of him all week, but she was sick of not-thinking about him; the effort was exhausting, and anyway ineffective: everywhere she looked she encountered reminders of him. Very well: she decided finally to deal with him directly, to put him under the microscope of her full attention, to cauterize with the intensity of her focus the part of her mind that would not ignore him. She would think everything that could possibly be thought about him. Once and for all, she would solve the problem of Andrew.
She recognized in her feelings towards him several elements, among them anger, pity, and guilt. She was angry because he had acted impulsively, as usual. One simply didn’t run away and join a war as though it were a circus. She remembered him as a child, hurtling down Hawk Hill on his bicycle, laughing as cars braked and honked; in high school, being the first to hand in an exam, never pausing to double-check his answers; in college, sleeping with women before he knew anything about them. Most annoying was the delusive facility with which he justified even his most irresponsible behavior, giving it a heroic, romantic, or otherwise self-serving interpretation. Thus, he had sex with a woman because he was deeply, poetically in love with her—never mind that she was fatuous and shallow. He was exempt from traffic laws because he was a skilled cyclist—never mind the bruises on his knees, the scabs on his palms. He handed in his exams first because he was the smartest in the class—never mind what the grades showed (and never mind the students who followed him to the teacher’s desk, having modestly waited for someone else to stand up first). He could always find good reasons for everything he did, for anything he wanted to do, and the war was no different. He had managed to convince himself that he’d always wanted to drive an ambulance, that he’d always been fascinated by ambulances; he had even manufactured memories to support this idea. In his letter, he claimed to recall that one of his earliest memories was of an ambulance siren. He’d asked his mother what it was; she’d told him, and explained what an ambulance was. He’d said, “But why does it sound so angry?” This question was allegedly repeated to his brothers and sisters, who found it amusing, much to his exasperation. An ambulance did sound angry; and peremptory; and powerful; and that was why he’d always wanted to be an ambulance driver. Never mind that this was the first, surely, that anyone had ever heard of it.
She felt guilty because he was at the front and she was not; and because she was responsible for his being there. She could hardly recognize herself in the portions of her letters that he had quoted back to her. (They were riddled with spelling mistakes, for one thing; but she knew that Andrew was quite capable of misspelling a word even while copying it from the dictionary.) She supposed that she had exaggerated the virtues of her colleagues to forestall his criticism of their presence on the island. In her letters home to her family she had a similar tendency to gloss over anything unpleasant; but with them she was motivated by consideration: she didn’t want them to worry. With Andrew, apparently, she had been more zealous, probably because she had been expecting an argument. She remembered the Christmas at his parents’ house when he had picked a fight with his sister Chloe’s soldier boyfriend—a fight aimed at Hillary herself, of course, who had just enlisted in the army’s medical program. He had made an ass of himself, angering everyone—but she had said nothing. Perhaps in her letters to him from the island she had been trying to atone for that silence. And trying too, perhaps, to convince herself that she was doing the right thing. Well, it seemed she had convinced not just herself; and now she regretted it. Why?
Because he didn’t belong here. Because he would not survive.
Where did that thought come from? There was no reason, aside from his atrocious driving habits, to think that he would do a poor job. And in fact, his fearlessness and aggression behind the wheel might even be assets to an ambulance
driver here. (By his own account, they were.) Some people thought he was lazy, but she knew that when he found something that interested him he could apply himself to it fully, with prodigious, effortless industry—at least until he grew bored. (She recalled the time that, inventing a charity, complete with letterhead, he had wheedled most of the town out of their recyclables. And the time that he had stood on one foot for two full days, even while asleep, in pursuit of a world record. And the time that he had watched every Taiwanese movie ever subtitled, seeking evidence for some thesis for a film-studies paper; the research had continued for months after the end of the course, which he had failed.) She could only hope that the unpredictability, the drama, and the danger of driving an ambulance at the front would keep him interested and alert for as long as he chose to do it.
But she did not believe that they would. He had only rarely taken jobs, because his mother and several of his siblings could not resist lending him money; but every one of those jobs had ended badly, with acrimony on his part, on his employer’s part, and on the part of the friend who had recommended him for the work. Hillary herself had regretted providing him a reference on more than one occasion; and now she feared that she would be given much greater cause for regret. Indeed, though she knew it wasn’t rational, she could not shake the feeling that he was going to die in this war. She was overwhelmed with pity for him, a doleful pity beyond the correction of intellect. Her exhausted mind, coming untethered from language, reeled through images of Andrew, grieving in flashback the way mourners do in films and almost never do in life—memories being just what one does not lose when a loved one dies.
In fact, what she took for memories were actually inaccurate reconstructions, absurd and discursive dramatizations of her feelings of pity, anger, and guilt—in a word, dreams.
In one of these dreams, Andrew was an adolescent; she was much older. They had broken into the school at night and were exploring the halls and classrooms, all fascinatingly transformed by darkness and silence. They left oracular messages on the blackboards in disguised handwriting; they switched the left and right drawers of Mrs. Allard’s desk; they locked toilet stalls from inside and crawled out under the doors. Andrew became excited by these depredations, and was breathing heavily. Afraid that his pranks would become destructive or cruel, she challenged him to a game of basketball in the gym. The balls were locked in the equipment room, so instead they built with gymnastic mats a fort, which they took turns leaping into and rebuilding. Finally, sweating and out of breath, they lay on their backs and stared up at the ceiling, and talked. His tone, as usual those days, soon became aggrieved. He criticized her friends; she defended them vaguely. —“What do you see in those guys anyway?” —She found it hard to put in words. —“All they’re interested in,” he said, “is driving up and down Main Street, getting drunk, and getting laid.” His contempt for these things was absolute, though he had never done any of them. This made him difficult to argue with. —She asked, “What do you have against driving up and down Main Street?” —“It’s boring!” —“What do you have against drinking?” —“Are you joking? It makes people stupid, and even more obnoxious than they already are.” —“Well, what do you have against getting laid?” —Now he struggled to find words, and the struggle made him vehement. “It’s disgusting,” he said finally. —She sighed. She knew that he had recently written several long and fervid love letters to Stacey Minto, a girl who wore a lot of eye makeup, who waved her cigarettes around at arm’s length, who called everyone “earthling,” and who was mortified by Andrew’s protestations of everlasting devotion. In Hillary’s opinion, Andrew’s problem was his virginity: he was sexually frustrated. —“You know,” she said, “sex isn’t really anything special. It’s a bodily function, is all. Like drinking a glass of water.” —He snorted, as if to say he could name a more pertinent bodily function; but after a long pause he sighed, and in a voice quavering between derision and appeal, he said, “Well, since you’re such an expert—just what is sex, exactly, anyway?” —She showed him.
In another dream, Andrew was a young man sitting in a bar, surrounded by friends; Hillary was at home studying. At that age, he was the cynosure of any group. Men loved him for his joviality, his irreverence, his mischievousness, women for his aristocratic languor, his self-deprecating grin, his scruffy cuddliness, and his innocent self-absorption—the way he was constantly asking others to tell him what they really thought of him, what he was really like. He was the cynosure of the group, though he pretended not to be: he solicited others’ opinions and preferences so that he could defer to them, he broke off muttering in the middle of an anecdote if he was the only one talking, he disappeared to the bathroom or into the street for an hour at a time, or even went home without telling anyone. But tonight he suddenly thought of Hillary, and decided that she should join them. After much discussion, a delegation was elected and sent to collect her. As they neared her apartment, Andrew paused to inspect an untied shoelace, so Bruce pressed her buzzer. In one voice, they clamored for her to come down. —“I can’t,” she said. “I have a test on Friday.” —The group dissolved, leaving only Andrew standing there in the cold, hopping from foot to foot and blowing on his hands. “Can’t I come up?” —“No,” she said; but somehow he got inside. —“I won’t make a peep, I promise. I’ll just lie here on the bed until she calls.” Apparently he had given by mistake Hillary’s phone number to a woman at the bar. Hillary scoffed. He shrugged, forgiving himself. “A common error. Who calls their own number?” —She sat down at her desk and lowered her head into a textbook the size of a suitcase. He began telling her about the woman at the bar. —“You said you were going to be quiet.” —“So I did. And I shall!” His mouth clacked shut; soon the bedsprings were creaking beneath the effort of his self-control. She slammed her book closed. They had an argument. —Why did he come here just to disturb her? —Why did she always work so hard? —Why was he so lazy? —Why was she allergic to having fun? —Why did he sleep with sluts? —Why did she only date men she hated? —“Because they leave me alone when I tell them to!”
—Finally he left. Too angry to work, she lay down on the bed, which, she discovered, he had muddied with his boots.
In another dream, Andrew was scattering breadcrumbs for a gaggle of geese. She seized his arm and pointed to a sign that read, “Please do not feed the birds.” Together they roamed the park, confiscating food from well-meaning visitors and burning it. Their campaign was successful: all the birds starved to death. “Don’t worry,” said the park warden. “This happens every year.”
In another dream, Andrew was a child with scabs on his knees. He was lying on a gurney in the preponderant room, pleased to be ill and being cared for. He had swallowed a bottleful of grenade-shaped pills; they were bursting inside him. Blue light spilled from cracks in his abdomen, and he pointed to these boo-boos proudly.
The blue light of dawn was coming in through the cracks around the door. Hillary rolled off her rack, laced up her boots, and stepped, blinking, into the morning. The compound was still, but already noisy with the buzzing generator, the roar of approaching helicopters, and the rumble of distant mortar fire.
She jogged four times around the perimeter, then, on her way to breakfast and the showers, she stopped at Major Witte’s hut.
He had a telephone to his ear, but motioned for her to speak. She stammered a few words of humility and apology, expecting at any moment to be interrupted by Witte’s phone call. When Witte realized that Hillary was not there on behalf of Hartner, he became friendly, sending his secretary out of the room, inviting her to sit down, and offering her real coffee. Major Witte held conservative opinions about women in the military, but these opinions did not extend to nurses. (He believed that Hillary was a nurse.)
The focus of her resolve blinded her to his flirtation and condescension. With effort, fighting feelings of betrayal and ingratitude, she asked that she be removed from consideration for the
post of senior triage officer.
Witte made a gesture of curtailment. “No need to fret. I’ve given that little bailiwick to Doctor Hartner. He seemed to be brimming with ideas on how better to run the show. So.” —“But can the OR and the PR spare him?” —Witte smiled benevolently and a little sadly, like one about to dispel superstition. “The doctor is not quite as indispensable as he would have us believe. Just between you and I, his staff management leaves much to be desired. His use of steroids in brain injuries is positively medieval. And his on-table triage is woeful. He simply refuses to give up on a casualty, no matter how hopeless.”
Hillary’s allegiance to Hartner was provoked. “But he shouldn’t be getting sent hopeless cases!” —Witte made an elaborate gesture of uncertainty amid a multiplicity of opinions. “In any case, we have several surgeons arriving next week, two of them outranking Doctor Hartner. So his petition was not untimely. And I for one think he will do a fine job. Don’t you?” With the phone still to his ear, he sipped his coffee and glanced meaningfully at hers, which remained untasted.
“What about Doctor Latroussaine?” —“To make the good doctor happy, we’re sending Latroussaine to Pastor’s Hill. Well, to be quite honest, it was time to rotate somebody out.” —“To the front, you mean?” —“It’s an enemy-proximate installation, yes, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’d like to go with him.”
“With Latroussaine?”
“What I mean is, I’d like to request permission to be transferred to an enemy-proximate installation, sir.” —“But not Pastor’s Hill in particular, with Latroussaine in particular.” —“No, sir.” —His face showed a struggle, but his hands were still. “Might I ask why?” —“I’d like to do more for the effort, sir.” —“You don’t feel you’re doing enough here?” —“No, sir. I mean—I feel that I could do more good at the front.”