The new doctor specializing in tropical diseases, which were often transmitted by insect bites, had just come on-line, and I had borrowed several of his reference books one night, but under spider bites found no symptoms remotely resembling my own. I took my own pulse and temperature, and both were normal, but the temperature of my palm, which I measured with a flat thermometer, was always 105°. In addition to insomnia, my other symptoms were frequent loss of appetite: sometimes I went a whole day without food and didn’t realize it until the next morning. At the same time, my weight remained exactly the same. Sometimes I drank two liters of water at a sitting, and like a spider craved the heat, but I never sweated, even on the hottest days. After leaving New Orleans, I began having very irregular periods, months apart, and then I stopped getting them altogether. In Savannah, when no rings had yet appeared in my palm, I underwent a complete blood workup after my induction, but it had been all clear.
I soon discovered that the powers of my memory were greatly heightened: I seemed able to scan its contents, no matter how remote or obscure the incident, to the minutest detail, as if I had at my disposal for review in my mind’s eye vaults of unedited film footage encompassing my entire life. With the utmost clarity, I reviewed a visit to the Statue of Liberty with my third-grade class; a trek to the grocery store with my mother during the famous blizzard of 1948; and Luna’s eleventh birthday party. I also suffered (or enjoyed) occasional bursts of visual hyperacuity, when I could perceive remote objects in great detail: the flags on ships crossing the horizon, the plumage of birds winging near shore, the auras around individual stars.
With battles, this meant I not only heard, but saw, far more than I wanted to—often more than I could bear. As I did at the end of that boiling night, when the last mortars streaked into vapor, and the choppers ferried us the wounded and the dead, and it became grimly clear, as always, that the fireworks display had been a ferocious pitched battle—one small corner of bedlam brought to us at dawn in the persons of soldiers, most of them my own age or younger, broken and blood-drenched, piled six deep in triage.
The USS Repose housed a crew of three hundred twenty men and thirty women—all nurses—and at any one time as many as two hundred male patients. Some of these—the lucky few—had come in with tropical diseases or “natural” emergencies like appendicitis. The others had limbs blown off by land mines, eyes scorched by phosphorus bombs, feet and hands shredded in booby traps, torsos gaping open or riddled by gunfire and grenades, skin charred by incendiaries like meat in an oven.
“Wanna play name that tune?” Sharline said, moistening her parched lips.
Even if I had known it, I could not have identified the song she was droning.
“It’s ‘Star Jam,’ by Jelly Roll Morton.”
Zaren Eboli’s generous notion of a small bonus when I gave him notice had been five hundred dollars, which I had spent in one shot in Savannah on the night before my induction into the Navy. With a year of motels and furnished rooms behind me, I had taken a room for the weekend at the only four-star hotel in the city, paid for with the two hundred fifty dollars I received for my Impala. Then I spent my bonus from Eboli on a pendant.
Just around the corner from my hotel I had wandered into a shop so small it could only accommodate two customers at a time. Not that people were waiting on line to get in. It was just before midnight and the place was about to close. The walls were hung with posters of movie stars and faded tapestries from Indonesia. Behind the counter, the proprietor had long platinum hair and half-lidded eyes. He wore a tie-dyed shirt, an Indian vest, and a scarlet bandanna around his head. In the single cracked glass case before him, among a scattering of gaudy trinkets, cigarette lighters, and cheap earrings, my pendant stood out. Literally, a gem.
It was a piece of highly polished volcanic stone—blacker than onyx and flecked with silver. According to the proprietor, it was created during a massive eruption in the South Pacific in 1701. Never cut, the stone was shaped by natural forces—lava hitting the raw tropical air and then cooling in the sea—into a seven-pronged star. The pendant hung from a black chain with a silver clasp, and had been brought to England in 1779, by one of Captain Cook’s men after the captain was killed in Hawaii. Fifty years later, the proprietor assured me, it found its way to America in the possession of a woman who died at the age of one hundred and five in Savannah. Longevity was one of the qualities it might confer, he added. He wanted to fill me in on more of its history—he said he’d brew some tea—but I was in a hurry, and after paying him, followed the directions he gave me and joined an antiwar candlelight vigil in a public park across town. It was about that time the war had truly begun raging out of control, so there was a large crowd. Several speakers took the podium: a just-returned vet, a priest, and an activist lawyer who was aiding draft resisters. A pair of guitarists played. A Buddhist monk led a chant. In my last year at college in Boston, I had regularly participated in sit-ins and demonstrations. During the last of these, I narrowly escaped arrest after being gassed by the police outside Government Center.
Since that night in Savannah I had taken off the pendant only once, after riding a taxi out to the naval base at Point Vincent and stripping down for my physical examination. I had already cropped my long hair to fit the regulation length for the nursing corps, and after being vaccinated, photographed, and measured, I was issued two uniforms, identification papers, training manuals, and a regulation watch, ultrashockproof, with radium numerals and hands.
Which were glowing now on my wrist at two-thirty in the morning as Sharline and I sat down side by side on two beach chairs. Prolonging our stay on deck as long as possible before submitting to the claustrophobia of our cabin, we turned our attention to the sky and I began picking out constellations—Cetus, Taurus, and Perseus—for her. The sky was velvety black and the stars were blazing so brightly they seemed to be falling toward us at great speed. But Sharline had already absorbed all the stimulation she could that day, and after finishing her joint and taking a last sip from the thermos, she fell asleep, her head cocked sharply to one side, her mouth open.
Aside from my pendant, I only had one other prized possession which I had brought into the Navy, the only object that I kept when I sold my mother’s house: the Silver Star my father was awarded after he was killed on Guam. Living on the eastern seaboard all my life, that island had always seemed utterly remote to me—outside of time and space—but now I was due north of it, in the same ocean. I remember Luna showing it to me in an atlas when I was five years old, a tiny green dot far from any other dot, in an endless blue expanse. When I sailed back to Honolulu from the Solomons after completing my residency, we passed near it, but not near enough to see. Having polished the Silver Star, badly tarnished after all those years on the living room wall in Brooklyn, I kept it in my locker in the velvet-lined box in which my pendant had come.
Among our personal effects on board, we were allowed only three books apiece. The library in our cabin contained two Bibles, a dogeared Arabian Nights, Sharline’s copy of The Dhammapada, given her by a dying marine lieutenant, and some detective novels. I had brought along books on astronomy by Pliny and Manilius and a selection of Cicero, all in Latin, which were not of any use to the others and had previously been of no interest to me back in Boston, in my other life. In Pliny I read that Hipparchus had been the first ancient astronomer to question the notion that the stars were embedded in a solid sphere—like a giant Fabergé egg—which surrounded the earth. After witnessing a stellar nova, he realized the stars had not all been created simultaneously, and he began cataloguing them by position and brightness so that future astronomers could trace their evolution. And it was Cicero, drawing on Anaximander, who believed that the innumerable stars in the heavens were, each of them, gods. That night, a week before Christmas, I thought they must be so, certain that on occasion some of them fell to earth and mingled among us, shimmering with light or burnt out like cinders.
Later in the same book, try
ing to pin down a definition of the human soul, Cicero sets forth Democritus’s theory that the soul, like any material object, results from an accidental collision of atoms, and Empedocles’s that the soul is the blood permeating our hearts. Though many others, Cicero adds, hold that the soul is an unknowable substance in the brain, he concluded that the soul is simply breath; after a man’s death, his soul—freed, immortal suddenly—rises into the upper atmosphere, where it is vivified by the same forces that stoke the eternal fires of the stars.
At the X-ray machine I looked into men’s bodies for twelve hours a day. Sometimes longer. In studying X rays day after day of these wounded men, who were often dying men, and always men in peril, I personally subscribed to the theories of those who called the soul an unknowable substance. Unknowable but not invisible. After a while, in that small room dark as a cave, I was sure at times that I could see a man’s soul rising up at me from the photographic plates, floating there, piecemeal or condensed, among the bones and muscles and nerves and the dark shadows of the organs which I came to know so intimately. I scanned the smears and blurs, the fogs and mists, within each body, and the even darker shadows hovering behind the organs, for the white slashes of shrapnel or the duller streaks of bullets. Iron that had torn into, and settled deep within, the flesh.
At six A.M. every day except Sunday those of us who were asleep were awakened by “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the P.A. system. I was usually up already, sitting on deck, waiting to assume my duties and watching the sun rise pink and hot across the sea. I no longer drank coffee—no longer needed it. I had quit smoking cigarettes just as abruptly. And no matter how exhausting my stint in the X-ray room, I never slept more than two hours at a stretch during the twelve months I served on that ship. In fact, I had required very little sleep since New Orleans: three hours a day at most. And Christmas Eve that year was no exception.
I got off duty at six P.M., skipped dinner, and slept restlessly for an hour. Then I went to the Christmas party in the mess hall. It had been a quiet day: only three wounded men brought in, around noon, and only one of them serious. Doctors and nurses were gathered around a long table with two bowls of wine punch, cans of beer in a bucket of ice, and a chocolate cake with red frosting. A small aluminum Christmas tree from Sears, Roebuck was set up in the corner. Someone had trimmed it with balls of cotton dyed green and cutouts of angels, from a coloring book. A tinfoil star adorned the tip of the tree. On the phonograph Elvis Presley was singing “Silver Bells.”
I scooped a cup of punch, which I didn’t drink, and someone cut me a piece of cake, which I didn’t eat. In our tiny quarters I got along well enough with my three cabinmates, but otherwise I wasn’t much of a mixer. In fact, this was the first social event, such as they were, that I had attended since coming aboard.
The next number, “White Christmas,” came on, the lights were dimmed, and people began slow-dancing. First a surgeon, then a petty officer asked me to dance, but I told them both I wanted to finish my cake first. Instead, I slipped out and went up to the nurse’s deck, where Sharline had dozed off with a joint stuck between her index and forefinger. I removed it and draped my jacket over her. She was skipping the Christmas party altogether. She and I, one of the orderlies had informed me, were considered “the most desirable” nurses aboard by both the crewmen and those patients whose wounds still allowed them such considerations. At any rate, it was not a distinction that meant much to me one way or the other. Not so with Sharline. She had been getting it on with a sailor who had completed his tour of duty that month and then flown back to Honolulu. Several times a week we gave up the cabin to them for an hour. One of the other nurses had the same arrangement, with an anesthesiologist, but not so frequently. For fraternization of the carnal sort they could all have been discharged and sent home—which wasn’t much of a threat to them, though it would have been to me, had I the slightest interest in fraternizing. There was some irony in this since I was the only one of them who had entered the Navy decidedly opposed to the war. An opposition I confided to no one, though most of my medical shipmates hated the war soon enough more than anyone stateside could imagine. This was not the case, however, with my one dour cabinmate, Evelyn, a starchy, taut-faced Alabaman from a fundamentalist military family who had intuited enough about my feelings on this subject to tell me, unsolicited, that it didn’t matter what had brought me to Vietnam so long as I kept doing my job so well. She was most put off that I read Latin, which she considered a heathen tongue, without a dictionary. As for Sharline, she had been keeping even more to herself, and smoking even more Thai stick, since her paramour’s departure.
“His tan was a shade lighter at the base of his ring finger,” she told me one day. “By now he’s back in Portland and he’s put his wedding band on again.”
The nurses called such sailors “territorial bachelors.” Most nurses avoided them, but they were the only kind of sailor Sharline liked.
“Definitely no emotional strings attached that way,” she observed, flicking her lighter.
The weather could change in seconds in those waters, and suddenly it began to rain, a dark squall that swept the deck with a staccato burst for several minutes. Sharline and I, once again sprawled out on beach chairs, were immediately soaked through, though she never stirred. Just that morning I had read in Pliny of a time during one of Rome’s bloodiest civil wars, before a massive battle, when it was reliably recorded that milk and blood rained down from the sky, then flesh—snatched in midair by the birds—and finally iron. This was a rain which would not have been foreign to Vietnam, I thought, watching the squall, like a black top, whirl across the sea toward the jungle.
When the stars reappeared, I scanned them. In the constellation Perseus the Medusa’s head has a winking eye, which my star books listed as Algol, a self-eclipsing double star, one star large and dim revolving around the other, which is small and bright. Every three days the larger star briefly eclipses the smaller one, and Medusa winks. As she was doing at the stroke of midnight when the P.A. system blared to life with a scratchy Christmas greeting from the captain and an announcement that a sleigh and eight reindeer would soon be touching down on the landing deck. Sharline woke up and without a word to me went down to our cabin.
Moments later, as I got up to leave, I heard a distant roar in the sky, farther out at sea. Straining my eyes, I finally saw a triangle of stars to the north streaking toward shore: a squadron of high-flying bombers. They were too big and too high to have come off any of the aircraft carriers, so I knew they were B-52s out of Guam. Vulnerable to sabotage, they could not operate out of Saigon, so they flew for eight hours to reach their targets and, after dropping their payloads, returned to the huge air base on Guam. Usually they made their runs much farther north of us. To someone in a faraway command center, I thought, it must have been a very important mission that required men to be sent up on Christmas Eve. Unless that someone had forgotten, or just didn’t care, what night it was.
By dawn a number of the men in those jets were being wheeled into my X-ray room. Dressed in an elf cap, with a cotton beard, I had joined several nurses in serving Christmas breakfast to our patients when the call came in that the choppers were bringing out some casualties: nine airmen—pilots, bombardiers, and a single navigator—who had been shot down while taking out a series of bridges in the wake of a battalion of marines retreating under hostile fire. Their planes were hit with surface-to-air missiles and then strafed with antiaircraft guns as they crash-landed. The survivors suffered multiple shrapnel wounds, broken bones, and burns. Two dozen airmen had died in action, and their bodies, in black bags, were lined up on the deck awaiting transfer to Quang Tri.
So we had nine new patients: Santa and his eight reindeer, Sharline dubbed them.
The last one I x-rayed was the navigator, whose dog tag read GEZA CASSIEL.
They wheeled him in facedown because he had shrapnel wounds across his left shoulder in the back. He was lucky—that is, he was going to
make it—because the shrapnel, six pieces running in an absolutely straight line, had missed both his heart and lungs, and his neck, by no more than an inch on either side.
I x-rayed him from head to foot, then the orderlies turned him over slowly and one of them supported his shoulder while I x-rayed him up and down in the front. None of the shrapnel had come out his chest. And the X rays turned up one more piece lodged, inexplicably, in his right ankle. It, too, was extracted in surgery, but no entry wound was discovered.
Cassiel was an Air Force captain. Thirty-one years old. A tall, striking man, solidly built, with strong arms and shoulders and sleek black hair cropped short. He had been heavily sedated and his eyes were closed. His body had only been partially cleaned and there was still blood caked on his right hand—not from his wounds, it turned out, but from those of a fellow airman whom he had dragged free of their plane before it was engulfed in flames. Then he had crawled a hundred yards into the jungle, and with the shrapnel embedded in his other shoulder must have been in agony pulling a deadweight like that.
But it was something else—nowhere near his wounds—which the X rays had picked up that most stuck in my mind. It was a small key, with a round head, clearly visible in the bottom of his stomach cavity. Its teeth were complex. At first glance, I thought it had two holes at the top. Then I realized that what looked like a second hole was really a circular mineral or gem set into the key that was the same size as the key-ring hole. During my training in Honolulu we had memorized lists of substances, including minerals, that X rays could penetrate, and I guessed that this was one of them. At any rate, in other men’s X rays I had seen coins, marbles, even a soda bottle cap in their stomachs. But never a key. For that reason, and also because I wanted to see what his eyes looked like, I resolved to drop in on him the day after his surgery.