The Healer's War (19 page)

Walking back to the Vietnamese side, I felt as if I were on a single stable stilt. Suddenly Ryan popped up in front of me. He reminded me a little of an intelligent chicken: sharp nose, sharp but receding chin, shiny little eyes, and a bit of a forelock over his brow, like a coxcomb. He grabbed my arm as I tottered against him. "Steady, L.T."

"You keep popping in and out," I complained; "it's like, now I see you, now I don't."

"You better sit down, ma'am. You feel like you're running a fever.

Anything wrong?"

"Got a sore toe. Isn't that silly?"

"You better go sit down."

"Gotta finish rounds."

"I'll finish them."

I was dubious. "Okay, but make sure everybody's breathing."

"Affirmative, L.T."

I limped back to my metal folding chair and landed heavily. I propped my sore foot on another chair, feeling like a comic figure of an old man with gout.

I wanted to take my boot off, but I was going to wait until the night supervisor made rounds, because I didn't want to be caught out of uniform and I knew that if I got the boot off, I wouldn't be able to get it back on. Actually, I didn't care all that much one way or the other, but to take the boot off would require bending over and I thought it very likely the top of my head would fall off and rattle down the aisle like a loose cookie jar lid when the jar is tipped too far. So I would just rest a minute and then I would start a letter to Mom.

My eyes just closed for a moment, but they wanted to stay closed. I fought them open again. I couldn't be caught sleeping on duty. I finally pried them open and started writing the letter. I found that I couldn't remember my last word and my pen kept slipping off the page, my words leveling out like an EKG gone flat when a patient dies.

My lids kept drooping and I wished I could use toothpicks to prop them open-the dim lighting, the muted noises, the intense heat, and the feeling I had of trying to move through molasses with my body while my mind was in free-fall made me feel drunk. I kept dropping off and startling myself awake a split second later, so that my surroundings took on the semblance of a clumsy animation with too few frames -jerky and discontinuous. I thought things would seem more real if only I could turn on more lights.

And then the ward lurched again and I saw that there were more lights, floating just ahead of me and a little above my chair. They were very pretty multicolored ones, patterned ones, a veritable Fourth of July's worth of lights, except that they weren't exploding and sparking but swirling out and dissipating like heat waves.

At first I thought there were seven, but they all sort of blurred and expanded into one big radiant pattern, flowing like smoke out of a central body, drifting, seeming to form ghosts, like the ectoplasm mediums were-supposed to exhale, only in living color-rather faded color at first, but as I watched, growing more vivid. Clear blue and jade green and spiraling flames of amethyst flowed from what seemed a redorange fountain with curls of blue smoke and rays of pure yellow, with a white spark near the center.

I thought: Far out, complimenting myself on my Technicolor imagination.

I watched the colored thing's progress passively as if it were a weird movie. I could see perfectly well beyond the light and everyone was still sleeping.

Behind the light, at first dim but growing brighter all the time, was a man's figure. Initially it seemed legless, but as it grew brighter it lit him up like a Christmas tree. I could see that he had his legs tucked up under him, yoga style.

He was floating about five feet off the ground, just above the iron ends of the beds, and underneath his toes I saw the intake and output clipboard hanging from Xe's bed foot. Through the transparent white spark his hands clasped at his chest.

I don't know if I actually said it, but I thought: What a great trick, Xe. I didn't know you could do that. I also thought it was neat the way he'd grown his legs back, but I didn't want to say anything-it seemed crass to mention it.

As I watched, the light shifted with the same jerkiness as everything else, so when the pink tendrils started waiting toward me, it was again a case of presto chango, now I see them and now I don't know if I like this whole trip or not. I scooted back and my leg fell off the chair, which sent shafts of fire up it. The tendrils shriveled, and as they shrank back to the center, they deepened to bright red, then deep brick red, surrounding the whole pattern. Through the light I saw Xe's face, and that made me scramble even farther backward.

With another of those animated frame shifts, I blinked and saw only the little desk lamp. Xe was lying quietly, his eyes closed, looking maybe a little more tired and sadder than I remembered from before, but otherwise the same. I caught the glint of Ahn's eye as he rolled onto his stomach, looking around him as if he thought a cougar would pounce on him. I started up from my chair but blinked again and there was Ryan leaning across me over the desk. "L.T., you okay? You look real bad."

"I'm burning up," I told him and realized it was the truth. "And I gotta pee."

Inside the narrow toilet cubicle behind the nurses' station, I saw in the mirror that my face looked ghastly-if I had a patient who looked like that, I'd put them on the seriously ill list. My hair was matted with sweat that rolled off my pasty face and trickled down the back. of my neck, though there were still goose bumps on my arms and ice water running through my spinal column. When I pulled down my trousers and tried to sit on the seat, my leg didn't want to bend from the hip. The rock in my groin was harder, and a ribbon of blush ran all the way down my leg.

I thought: Oh shit, and pried off my boot, which seemed embedded in my leg. I was glad I was already on the stool when I finally pulled my toe free because it hurt so badly I would have messed myself otherwise.

Rolls of puffy calf and ankle flesh almost obscured my boot garter and I cut it off with my bandage scissors. The toe was red and twice as big as the other one, and the whole foot was bloated with edema. When I limped back outside, I shoved a thermometer in my mouth before doing That's treatment. I thought something was wrong with the thermometer.

The mercury hit 105. I took three aspirin and left the rounds to Ryan.

When the shift was over, I reported to sick call and spent the next three days in my hooch soaking my foot in purple solution and popping antibiotics.

"Dear Mom," I wrote during that time, "I now know how it feels to be delirious. You wouldn't believe the dreams! And I think they may put me in for a Purple Heart on account of I got this service-incurred disability . . . ...

My toe was already turning toe-colored again, except for a slight residual purple stain, when Father O'Rourke made his sicklied visitation. The two of us sat in the lawn chairs on the porch outside my hooch and listened to my new Irish tapes, which had arrived from home a day or two before. The priest guzzled beer and I guzzled lemonaje-alcohol interferes with antibiotics. I elevated my purple foot on the rail and tapped air in time with the music. It felt good to be alive and not in solitary and not baking with fever anymore.

And if there was any man I loved to hear talk almost as much as he loved to hear himself talk, it was Father O'Rourke. It was the brogue, mostly, of course, emerging deep and sonorous from that dark and burly man, who gave the impression of being large without physically taking up all that much space. He could have made supply memos sound like Shakespeare. Or Brendan Behan, more appropriately. But he was also a lover of music and books and knew more theology than what was in his breviary.

During the time I was recovering in my hooch, I'd had a couple of dreams about what I'd seen on the ward that night. While I could pass off Xe's light show as being due to my delirium, there had been too many other off-kilter occurrences between that old man and me for me to pass it off so lightly. The brilliant light had had a very spiritual feeling about it, and I thought it might be bound up with halos after all. Everyone kept telling me Xe was a holy man. Unlikely as it seemed, I wondered if maybe-mayhe, because my illness had altered or expanded my consciousness as LSD was supposed to, I had been enabled to see his halo-maybe he wasn't just holy, but a saint or even an angel. Okay, so it sounded farfetched. But I hadn't expected to find bubonic plague in Vietnam either, and I had.

"Father, can I ask you a question?"

"After the song's over, my child," he said. The song was about an execution of an Irish patriot three hundred years before, and if I'd been paying proper attention I'd have noticed before I asked that Father had tears rolling down his cheeks.

When he'd mopped his face with a Kleenex, I tried again. "What I want to know is, who has halos and who can see them? Do saints have halos, or is it just angels? And can somebody be a saint without some sort of papal decision about it? I mean, could there be maybe Buddhist or Hindu saints that God knows about but hasn't let the Church in on yet? Could just anybody see their halos, if they let you?"

The chaplain glowered at me from under his bristling black brows. With such brows, he always seemed to be glowering, whether he intended to or not. "My dear child, what is it you're tryin' to do?

Start another holy war? Is the one not enough for you, then?"

"No, it's not that, it's just that . . . well, when I first got sick, I was delirious, you know? And another time, I thought I sawon't laugh at me, damn it, it isn't funny. I want you to regard this as being as confidential as if I were one of your patients."

"Flock."

"Okay, one of your flock. Even though I was delirious, I think this was sort of like a dream and it must mean something. I haven't experienced anything like it since I had the measles and heard this radio that wasn't really playing and smelled salted nuts when there weren't any in the house." I looked at him quickly but he had composed himself, his backwards baseball cap pulled down over his too assertive eyebrows, the words "God Power" machine-embroidered on the cap's hem. "The other night, when I first got sick, I thought I saw this giant halo that was all different colors and shapes around one of the patients, an old Vietnamese guy. And before, when the old man was in surgery, it looked like the major and our interpreter and Meyers and everybody had little halos too. Do you think, if the old man is a saint, well, could it be contagious somehow?"

O'Rourke tilted his cap back and stopped balancing his chair on the back legs, squarely setting it down. "Ah, life among the heathen isn't fittin' for ye of little faith, I see that now. Some of this Eastern stuff seems to be rubbin' off on you."

He was kidding me-the Irish always got a whole lot thicker when he was pulling your leg.

"What Eastern stuff? Halos?"

"Not halos, darling' girl. The Holy Father holds the patent on halos and on saints and angels, since you ask. Auras, now. Anyone can have an aura. Buddhists and Hindus and the lot are lousy with them.

They have quite a few over to Duke University back in the States as well."

"What did you call them?"

"Auras."

"Like the northern lights?"

"That's auroras, though I daresay it comes from the same root. Light, bands of light. Colored light, as a rule."

"Sounds like a halo to me."

"Only on your proper martyrs and such. Buddhists and them other Easterners are only authorized auras, martyrs or no. You mark my words, girl, and watch your step. They get you poor little lukewarm Methodists and all over here and pump you full of Asian germs and start showing you auras, next thing you know you'll be runnin' around shoutin' Harry Krishna and playin' with matches and gasoline."

The weather changed while I was on quarters. It started getting cooler in the evenings. At first I thought I just felt cooler because my fever had gone down, but long after I returned to work, the nights remained quite pleasant, balmy but no longer sweltering.

I'd walk home from the ward for midnight supper break and sit on the porch outside my hooch. At night everything was so much nicer. You couldn't see the barbed wire and the concrete and the raw plywood and sandbags and olive drab so clearly. The sky was black and velvety and star-studded, as glamorous as if there were no war on at all. Palms swayed on the horizon, and the South China Sea lapped gently at the beach. You could even forget the smell if there was a little breeze. I couldn't help thinking that if I were Vietnamese, I could hate the Americans on aesthetic grounds alone. Poor as the native houses and cities were, they blended with the countryside. Our compound reminded me of a strip mine I'd seen high in the Rockies. Everything else around it was breathtakingly beautiful and then there was this gutted mountain and a lake that looked like liquid cement.

On the way back to the ward, the compound was dark and muffled, with only the red glow of a cigarette tip from the guard tower to remind you it was manned by a bored soldier with a rifle. Inevitably there was a little muted rock music from some corner of the compound, a radio turned down low.

The ward was quiet, too, those first few nights except for a whisper of pages turning in Ryan's book. I still took the flashlight and rolled Dang Thi That's graft, but now she sometimes slept through the procedure. I was more curious than ever about Xe, but he slept all night. Sometimes Ahn would wake up when I did rounds and climb into his wheelchair and come sit with me by the desk, watching with serious dark eyes as I charted or read or wrote letters. I showed him how to write his name in English and he drew the letters like an artist, his small grubby hands oddly graceful, the hooded light of the lamp at the nurses'

desk gleaming on his bowl-cut black hair. He was very quick. The worst problem was keeping him quiet. Already his sessions with Xinhdy and Mai had him babbling away in fluent pidgin. Still, he would leave them to follow me if he thought I had a scrap of attention to spare him. I wrote my mother and asked her to comb the garage sales for children's clothes.