Sometimes stories are written for catharsis, and they may be useful therapy for the author, but most of them shouldn’t see print, because a priori the author’s story sense and stylistic judgment are subordinated to his emotional need. They usually read like cries for help.
This said, I’ll admit the following story was written for catharsis, and, to make matters worse, it’s a story about self-pity. But I wouldn’t have included it in this collection if I’d thought it was bad.
The protagonist of this story is missing a leg and a foot, and I really don’t remember whether I chose that disability consciously, but it is appropriate. Some years ago I lay in a crowded jungle hospital in Viet Nam, not yet recovering from the effects of having stood too close to a booby trap when a booby set it off. I was a veritable encyclopaedia of shrapnel and blast wounds—it had been a company-sized boobytrap—but the only ones here relevant were the left leg, which was pretty well shattered and flayed, and the right foot, which had a hole in the heel, where your socks wear out. In the first surgery, there wasn’t enough skin to stitch the leg wounds up, so the limb was wrapped in a huge roll of blood-soaked bandage, for safekeeping. The flies were so taken with it that they ignored my waving, and they also beleaguered the foot wound, which hadn’t been bandaged—which, in fact, the surgeons had missed. It was ungodly hot and humid.
A harried-looking doctor came through, stopped at my bed, and warned me that I might lose the leg, and then left (I’ve always wondered why he felt he had to tell me). At least I got an orderly to put a bandage on the foot, to keep the flies off it. He didn’t put any antiseptic on it, though, and the next day it looked terrible and smelled bad, and I could just imagine what my leg looked like under all that cloth. Even the fact that losing my leg would surely get me out of the war couldn’t cheer me up very much.
All’s well that ends, though, and some brilliant anonymous surgeon-perhaps the one who had scared me so—did fix up the leg and foot, and miscellaneous other parts, and after a mere four months of painful physical therapy I was able to be a soldier again, and then a civilian.
Another damned war story, you say, but no, that’s not the particular demon I was trying to put to rest here, even though war did provide a certain amount of the detail. The real experience to be exorcized is the more subtle one of reaching up one day and finding that your halo’s gone. I had a friend who was suddenly and severely disabled, and he reacted in a human way, sliding into bitterness, lashing out at the people around him, driving away his family, then his friends, and then one day I left him too, in spite of knowing how he felt. Exit plaster saint.