Chapter 9

In the naval hospital in Pearl Harbor I stayed for three months. I don’t remember very much about the first week; I was feverish and under heavy sedation and I slept most of the time. People came and looked at me and went away again, but except for changing the dressings they left me alone. I ate nothing because of the nausea. Night and day a glucose needle dripped into my arm. There didn’t seem to be any reason to think, and in the brief intervals when I wasn’t asleep I lay quietly listening to the messages from my hands. It was like a telegraph system in an unknown language: little flashes, throbs, and arrows ran up the nerves to my brain where I examined them with interest. Some raced with incredible rapidity and others drifted quite slowly up the arm, little balls of aching that gathered shape as they came. I lay there by the hour wondering about the meaning of these curious messages from the ends of my arms. Were they trying to tell me something? Were they friendly or hostile? I thought that probably they were hostile and they had their reasons, but I was perfectly indifferent to them. The fact that the messages they sent were called pain didn’t prejudice me against them. I didn’t particularly want the pains to go away, nor did I want anything else. I would wake up and lie quite benignly for an hour or so with my eyes closed, listening to my hands and opening my mouth obediently when they stuck a glass tube in it for me to drink. Then they would give me another injection and I would sink away with a swoop into sleep. I would still hear the propeller blades going pough, pough underneath and it was only in my more lucid moments that I recognized the sound as my own pulse. Something about the fever made the bed tilt slowly and then turn back the other way; I could hear the soft wash of the water slipping by alongside. No more watches no, no more sweat and no goulash and it was permanently cool, like the breeze off the mountains in Utah. Sometimes it was dawn and the leaves would rustle outside the window, and I would hear a dog bark and the morning paper strike the porch with a slap. A voice would wake me up: “Temperature.” I would open my mouth and the thermometer would go in. At other times the sedation would go deeper and it seemed I was underwater; the sensation wasn’t unpleasant, only a cool blackness in which I revolved slowly, head over heels first and then spirally around the axis of my body. There was nothing strange in any of this and it seemed quite natural and simple. was not aware of myself; instead the events and sensations took place in a kind of a void, they simply were without the necessity of being perceived or understood by a consciousness. At times I cogitated (vaguely) over whom this was happening to. I was aware that there were words like me and I but for the present their meaning lay elusively just out of grasp, like a telephone number that has slipped your mind. And were they really important, these words? It was as though the pieces of my personality had been fractured and there was no particular reason for them to settle back into place again, and for a while it was uncertain what form they would take when they did.

The brief periods when it was necessary for me to become fully awake were when my dressings were changed. The hands were the worst, but there were dressings on my face too and one long pad of gauze along the side of my chest, fastened down with tape that stung and pulled off skin when they removed it. On my head, it seemed, the hair was singed off and there were other raw places from the irritation of the fuel oil and salt water. All this had to be unwrapped and redressed once a day. In Noumea they had put Vaseline on it, but it seemed the theory of medicine was different in Hawaii and they used tannic acid packs. It took three men to do it: one to turn me over, one to squirt tannic acid at me with an atomizer and then apply the wet packs, and the third to hold my bandaged hands so I wouldn’t roll on them. I lay limply as they turned me, my mind quite calm but the nerves jumping as the pains shot along my arms. I was mildly surprised that my nervous system could still feel this indignation after all that had happened to it. Usually I kept my eyes shut while the dressing was going on. “Feel that?” somebody asked me once when he accidentally dropped my hand onto the bed. Yes I could, I got the message. I didn’t say anything. If he was interested in the subject he should have talked to the hand.

After about a week of this they put me on a little cart (“Easy, watch his arm, now lower him”) and rolled me off to another ward. As I lay in the new bed I began to gather from words and scraps of dialogue that I was in the plastic surgery section.

I opened my eyes and for a day or so I just watched what happened to go by in front of me, without turning my head. There were a number of people in this ward in grotesque predicaments. One man would come down from surgery with his forearm sewed to his thigh, another one would be doubled up with flaps from his leg stitched onto his chest. The doctors took quite an interest in it. Whenever an unusual case came down from surgery they would all gather around and make comments.

“There’s a good trick, he used the pectoral flap.”

“Yeah, but where are you going to get the circulation?”

“Well, he should know what he’s doing, he specialized under Kramer.”

“Oh well, hell, he was a Mayo man. They always did it that way at Rochester.”

While the discussion went on the object of their curiosity would look at the ceiling. It was possible to learn a great many interesting facts about the circulation of the blood, the anatomy of the epidermis, and so forth by listening to what went on in this ward, in case you were interested. It was here for the first time that I saw my new face in a mirror. They had taken off the dressings except for the one on my chest and the balls of gauze on my hands, and I was propped up to be shaved with an electric razor. I was too weak to do anything but stare; with an effort I could move my eyes around the room a little. There was a mirror hanging on the folding screen at the foot of my bed. My eyes were already trained in that direction and out of inertia I went on looking. I saw a pinkish mottled face, very lean and absolutely expressionless. The eyes lay at the bottom of two pools of shadow, and the flesh had a curious rubbery-chemical look, as though it had been flattened with a hot iron. Starting at the temple and covering most of one cheek was a suppurating splotch of pink skin, shiny with some kind of medication.

The other deep facial burn, at the left corner of my mouth, was smaller but deeper; it hadn’t formed any new skin yet and it was a mass of purple bubbles, shrunken at the edge and pulling my lips a little to one side. This sardonic lifting of my mouth was the only alive thing on the face; the rest of it was a mask. Out of curiosity I made a faint effort to work the muscles of the face, but nothing moved. Meanwhile the corpsman shaved me, skirting carefully around the blistered spot. I felt nothing.

The surgeon in charge of the ward was a naval commander named Waldbach. He was supposed to have been an eminent specialist in civilian life, a member of the Columbia medical faculty and a worldwide authority on burns. I don’t know what a surgeon that good was doing in the Navy. Maybe people didn’t get burned often enough in civilian life to suit him. In any case he didn’t look like a naval officer; he was stocky and middle-aged, with a neat mustache and a brisk way of speaking, and he had a way of glancing at you skeptically as though he was trying to decide whether you were worth patching up or not and on the whole thought not. Still he was friendly in his rather autocratic medical-professor way; he never showed annoyance and he treated everybody in exactly the same way, enlisted men and officers alike. He had no patience with all the military nonsense, disliked uniforms, and went around the ward in a white linen jacket and a surgical cap, both antiseptically clean. Just the same the corpsmen were careful to call him Commander.

After I had been in the plastic ward for two or three days Waldbach came to look at me, accompanied by another younger officer in khakis with a neatly pressed necktie. This was Lieutenant Baroni, the group intelligence officer attached to the hospital, whom I was later to get to know much better. At this first interview Baroni did most of the talking, while Waldbach checked me over to see whether I was worth saving from the scrap heap.

The corpsmen had taken the dressings off my hands and they lay neatly on the sheet on either side of my body, each one resting on a clean square of gauze with the fingers clenched up tight to the palms. They were the color of boiled lobsters, and the fingers were barely distinguishable in a mass of suppuration. “These are a nice mess,” Waldbach remarked, prodding them with a swab. “What have you been doing to them?” There was no insistence in the question and I didn’t bother to answer; he was just making conversation. Skillfully he lifted the thumb with the swab to look underneath, I hadn’t realized I still had a thumb, and I watched him with considerable curiosity as he separated it from the mass of coagulated flesh.

It was Baroni who asked the real questions, the ones that were supposed to have answers. In contrast to Waldbach he was energetic and impatient and his voice had a keener edge. I lay listening to the voice the way you listen to the sound of rain or some other noise outside your bedroom window. “You see,” he explained while Waldbach worked, “it would help us a lot if you could remember what happened. The doctors think the burns on your hands might have been made by some kind of a cylindrical object, a pipe or a tube. Maybe you grabbed a hot gun barrel, or tried to pick up something burning and throw it over the side. Do you remember what it might have been? What were you doing when the ship sank?”

I said nothing, and he watched the hands while Waldbach worked on them with the swab. After a while he said, “You know, most people who have these things happen to them can remember something if they don’t try too hard. The thing is to relax and let it come out by itself. Sometimes you have to approach it obliquely. Let’s take your first name, for instance. Or a nickname; what did they call you on the ship?”

I glanced at him and went back to staring at the wall across the room.

“Well, he’s still got a little fever,” said Waldbach, who was shining a flashlight onto my left hand and lifting an edge of the skin with his swab. A flood of urgent signals arrived from the hand, but he assured me, “This positively doesn’t hurt. Nerve endings all cauterized. Those imbeciles in Noumea didn’t straighten out your fingers soon enough. If they had they’d have saved us a lot of trouble.”

They tried, I felt like telling him, but they didn’t know how hard I could yell. But this was rather complicated with a burned mouth so I went on looking at the wall. Baroni had brought a clipboard and a pencil with him, but so far he hadn’t written anything. He put the clipboard down on the bed and his manner became casual, almost friendly. “You see, there were only a couple of other survivors off the Marcus. They were Marine passengers going to Tulagi and they didn’t know anybody on the ship. They couldn’t tell us much, and anyhow they’re still in Noumea. You’re the one we’re counting on to find out what happened to the ship, especially in the last two hours. Now let s start with your name.” Unobtrusively he had picked up the clipboard again and was pretending to fill in something at the top of the sheet.

I lay passively with my hands on either side of me, still staring across the room. After he had waited for a few seconds he did a curious thing, something that was quite natural but at the same time seemed oddly callous. He reached over and with both hands turned my head toward him, as though I were an inert marionette or some kind of a machine for talking that had temporarily balked.

“Now, just try to pay attention. I know it’s hard, but it’s absolutely necessary. Afterwards we can leave you alone.”

From the bed I gazed at him without curiosity and without hostility, the way you look at things when you first open your eyes in the morning, accepting what you happen to find in your frame of vision but making no effort to judge it or even comprehend what it is. Wall, window, man, clipboard: I was aware that there were objects in my vision but I didn’t feel any need to identify them by name. It was they who wanted to put a name on things, with their clipboards and their questions. Could anyone really believe that a name, the verbal formula that other people had used to identify me a long time ago and in other places, was of any importance? I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to establish it, let alone go to the muscular effort of forming a word. The subject bored me. I couldn’t see why anyone else got so worked up about it when it was so meaningless to me. The name—the identity, the events, the things that had happened—were there, lying like pebbles in a path, but there was absolutely no reason to make the effort of turning them over. And if I did? Perhaps there was nothing underneath them.

“Well, let him alone,” suggested Waldbach. “Wait till we make some hands for him, then we can think about a mind.”

But the next day Baroni came back again, and now the struggle started in earnest between my apathy and the dogged and tireless insistence of a bureaucracy that everything must have a label. It wasn’t really that Baroni was interested in what happened to the ship: the ship had sunk, everybody on it was dead. What really drove Baroni was that he stood for Intelligence, and for Intelligence there are no mysteries. He was going to have my name if it took three wars and six clipboards. There was a blank place on his form: out with it! Everything must have a label! Intelligence confronts the sullen beast in us all.

Well, wasn’t all this sulking rather childish? Why wouldn’t I tell them what they wanted to know, these intelligent fellows with their pressed khaki shirts and their clipboards? I didn’t quite know why myself. I had no objection to facts and labels in principle. Let them find out the facts, let them write labels all day if it gave them pleasure. I had no facts to give them, that was all. I had stopped believing in facts the way an atheist stops believing in God. I was in the water and then it had all been burned away—past, ego, identity, memory. There was something left, evidently. Something was thinking. But what?

During those long weeks as I lay in bed I worked it out. Most people believed in a body and also in a soul, or whatever you wanted to call it, an ego. But it was more complicated than they thought. They thought of the ego as a kind of a foggy pear-shaped essence inside you that stayed the same no matter what happened to the body: aware of other people and different from them, knowing its name, preferring coffee with cream, disliking warm beer. It didn’t matter what you did with your body, tattooed yourself blue, became a hashish addict or fell into a sausage machine, you were still you and inside there was an unconquerable soul that went marching on. All this was probably true and I had had an ego like that once too. But what they couldn’t get through their heads, Baroni and the others with their clipboards and their questions, was that this part of me had been burned away too that night in the water. They thought the burns were only third degree (charred skin, some tissue damage) but they had gone deeper than that. Or perhaps my ego had been closer to the surface than most people’s, out in the skin where the fire could burn it away. Anyhow it was gone, disappeared with the fingerprints that had slid off on the hot metal and dissolved in the sea.

Then who was lying in the hospital bed looking at the wall? I didn’t understand this very well myself, but somehow I felt that under the ego there was something deeper: a thing without any name, formless, elusive, yet it was the thing that I was—not identity or I-ness but being itself. When you burn something living, an oak tree or a pine, for a while the husk is dead and then from inside something green pushes out. It isn’t the same tree anymore, the form and shape are different, only the life inside is the same. There I lay for three months in a hospital bed, an inert network of pains, discomfort, smells. Inside was nobody. There was only a nexus of existence, buried very deep and only gradually working to the surface. Out of habit the body when on breathing, eating, excreting, being awake and connected to its eyes and ears. Inside lay the awareness, and was magnificently uninterested in everything that went on outside.

Waldbach, that skillful man, was working on me now, slicing off skin from one part of me and stitching it onto another. Once a week or so I would go up to surgery. My hands had been straightened and were kept taped flat on boards, like two small planked steaks. They were fixed to the boards with their backs up, since for the time being they lacked fronts. Meanwhile Lieutenant Baroni came to see me every afternoon, bringing his clipboard and a constantly increasing pile of intelligence material from the Southwest Pacific. He was always the same, precise, lucid, and objective. He was a Princeton man and if he felt any resentment toward me he was too well-bred to show it.

“Now let’s go through it again,’’ he would say patiently, spreading the papers around on the bed. He had everything, maps, combat reports, even the names of the Japanese ships. “You were on the Marcus, sunk at 0140 hours by Suzuya, Nagara, and four destroyers that were coming back from hitting Chicago and Vincennes. Marcus was detached from the group at 1150 hours because she was afire and couldn’t maintain steam pressure. They were trying to make Tulagi with her, but the Japanese column ran over them on its way back. This much we’ve established with a fair degree of certainty. We’ve got to find out from you exactly how it happened, what you were doing, what you remember of it.”

After three or four days I finally thought of an answer to this. I said, “Why?”

“Because,” he explained quite lucidly, “if we can establish the details of what happened to the Marcus we can fit them into the whole intelligence pattern of the action that night, and then we can hand the whole thing over to the tacticians and let them make their conclusions. For example, the last thing heard from the Marcus was a message at 0115 that she had a submarine contact. We think she might have armed her depth charges and when she sank they detonated; perhaps that’s why there were so few survivors. Maybe this means that ships that are damaged shouldn’t arm their depth charges. In any case, as long as there are some pieces that don’t fit together the pattern is incomplete. You’re the only one that can give us those pieces.” I had my eyes closed. “Never heard of any Marcus.”

“The Marcus was a destroyer. Do you know what a destroyer is?” There was absolutely no irony in the question; Baroni was a technician and did not indulge in irony.

“Ship,” I admitted.

“How long is it? What’s its tonnage?”

I pondered over this but no inspiration came to me.

“Where did you sleep on the ship? Forward or aft? Where did you stand watch? On the bridge? In the engine room? What was your battle station?”

A blank.

“Do you remember the fire? How did the fire start?”

“Never been on a destroyer,” I apologized with my eyes still shut. And then I added, although talking hurt my mouth, “I was in the water. That’s all.”

It seemed to me that I was being remarkably, even excessively, loquacious in making this lengthy statement, but Baroni wasn’t satisfied. “How did you get in the water? Did you fall or did you jump? Was the ship dead in the water when you jumped or still moving?”

“I was in the water.”

And so on, day after day. Baroni was infinitely patient and never showed the slightest sign of annoyance, he seemed in fact to have no personal feelings or nerves, but after several weeks of this he understandably began to feel he wasn’t getting anywhere. I was repeating myself like a broken phonograph. He couldn’t think of any more questions to ask and I knew all the old ones. By this time Waldbach was finished with me, although it would take a few more weeks for the surgery to heal. From things I overheard I knew I was going to be transferred to another ward. One afternoon a new corpsman I had never seen before came in followed by three orderlies, and without a word the four of them lifted me up and put me on the little wheeled cart. I had no possessions; they threw the medical chart which was my only document onto the wagon and wheeled me out of the ward.

We went down a long shiny corridor while they talked and I watched the lighting fixtures going by in the ceiling.

“Where’s he going?”

“Psychiatry, fourth floor.”

“Take the big elevator, the long wagon won’t go in the other one.” In the elevator I amused myself by idly reading the pink transfer form stuck into the blanket near my chest, the end of which explained; Unidentified, combat fatigue, amnesiac w/poss. neural lesion due to hyperpyrexia.

On the fourth floor the corpsman stopped at the ward deck. “Where do you want this one?”

The duty nurse was a squarely built woman in her fifties, with cropped gray hair and strong hands like a man’s. She picked up the transfer form and looked at it without even glancing at me. “Four sixty-two.” She stuck the form back in the blanket.