1968. Part 17

He wondered about that for a minute. Then he checked the box's wrapping: it was his old Vietnam address. The box had gone to Kontum and been forwarded here. He ate a gingersnap; it lacked snap.

Interesting. Unless somebody had gone to a lot of trouble unwrapping and rewrapping, the package had not been inspected. He had a hunch they wouldn't appreciate his having a psychology book. He sat on the bed and read parts of it for an hour. When Knox came in with his pill cart, Spider slipped the book under the mattress.

He traded Knox a cookie for his Thorazine. "Food from home?"

"Yeah, dear old Mom." He washed the pill down with juice. "Knox, look," he said quietly. "Am I a schizophrenic?"

"Don't ask me that, man. I just work here."

"Don't give me that s.h.i.+t. You see a hundred schizophrenics a day. Am I one of them?"

Knox looked at his chart and frowned. "You want my diagnosis," he whispered, "my professional opinion, what I say is that you f.u.c.ked up in the head. Now, on my way to work, walkin', I pa.s.s three or four people look more f.u.c.ked up in the head than you. But just because they ain't in here don't meanyou ought to be out there. See?"

"Okay. But am I a schizophrenic?"

"I don't know what the f.u.c.k you are. You see a guy who's not there, right?"

"Well, he isthere. He's just not real."

"Jesus." He shook his head, hard. "You know what it's like to talk to crazy people all day long?" He laughed. "Spider, I don't know what the f.u.c.k a schizophrenic is, and I don't think Captain My Captain does either. I mean, you can say a guy who stares at the wall all day jerkin' off, he's probably schizophrenic, and you can say Lyndon Johnson, he probably isn't, but in both cases you gonna findsome guy with a degree say the contrary. So what the f.u.c.k. You see little green men, you know somethin' wrong with you. The label don't mean s.h.i.+t. Just go with the flow; you get better, they let you out."

"And if I don't get better?"

"At least you don't got to get a job." He pushed the cart on.

Spider ate another cookie, slowly. It was the first time he'd thought of that possibility. What if theydidn't let him out? Could he wind up like one of those zombies who just sit around and drool?

The man with the skull face appeared on the empty bed next to him, where Sanders used to be until he snapped. Spider tried to project a thought at the apparition.Go away. He stayed about ten seconds and then disappeared, as if to demonstrate who was in chargeof the situation.

The book said that schizophrenics had auditory hallucinations. The skull guy didn't talk anymore. Did that make him more crazy, or less?

Had he ever seen the guy in real life? A clearing up on a hill. Something to do with Sarge, but Sarge was dead. That's a face he would never forget, the teeth blown out. Slick black blood all over his chest, flies, vultures. What was the deal with the clearing? He'd stuffed C-4 in a tube.

s.h.i.+t, there was a lot he couldn't remember. Something real important, something Knox had said.

He suddenly stood up, cold sweat evaporating all over his skin. Jerking off. He remembered sitting in the car with Beverly, petting. And he was absolutely sure he wasn't a virgin. But he couldn't remember anything in between.He couldn't remember f.u.c.king her! Not Beverly, not anybody else.

Knox looked up at him from across the ward. "What's up. Spider? You okay?"

All he could do was shake his head.

DEROS.

The popular illusion of the American dogface in World War II was of a determined "Willie and Joe" kind of guy, a civilian in uniform who came to war unwillingly but waged it with stubborn tenacity, year in and year out, slogging through freezing mud and steaming jungle until Hitler and Tojo were finally brought down.

Indeed, some GIs did have to survive years of combat. But most of them did not come through it well.

The government's postwar a.n.a.lysis...o...b..t Exluinstion said: . Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached the peak of his effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless.

Certainly one factor that wore these men down was uncertainty: they might be soldiers for another month or another year or just however long it took for their luck to run out. That was one thing the military thought that it could control when Vietnam rolled around. Instead of sixteen million men scattered all over the planet, they could take care of this one with a few hundred thousand working in a country the size of New Mexico. And each one of them could work for a definite period of time: twelve months or thirteen,depending on rank and branch of sendee.

So every soldier went to Vietnam with a magic date, more important than any date could ever be for the rest of his life: DEROS, the Date Eligible to Return from OverSeas.

It backfired. Soldiers developed "short-timers' att.i.tudes," being reluctant to undertake dangerous missions when they only had a few weeks, or even months, left in the field. Whenever anyone was killed within a couple of months of DEROS, it added to the superst.i.tion that the closer you were to leaving, the more likely you were to be killed, which did wonders for morale. Morale was also hurt by the fact that platoons and companies tended not to develop a group ident.i.ty, since people rotated in and out on a staggered schedule. If you had only a month till DEROS, you had a lot more in common with any random short-timer than with the FNG the army had just tossed into your platoon.

April All Fool's Day Beverly had never liked April Fools' Day. As far back as she could remember, her father had startled her with some malicious silliness that he considered good clean fun, and so for more than half her life she had tiptoed through that day, expecting the worst.

This April 1st, she was invited to be with Spider's father, not her own, going with him to Walter Reed to visit Spider for the first time. His mother had begged off tearfully, saying she would do more harm than good.

Lee wondered whether Beverly would do any good, either, and said so, but otherwise didn't pressure her. It was obvious that she was unsure and nervous about it and would probably be miserable no matter which course she chose. So he played it smart and stayed neutral.

Mr. Speidel picked her up a little before eight. She was dressed in an alien high-schoolish frock, wearing makeup the way she had when she was dating Spider. Lee watched from an upstairs window as they drove off. He skipped breakfast and went to work early.

She showed up at the warehouse while the guys were eating lunch, still in the frock, her painting clothes rolled up in a grocery bag. Larry wolf-whistled at her prettiness. She smiled nervously and said she had to change.

"Take it easy," Lee said after she disappeared into the bathroom. "Can't you see she's been crying?"

"Hokay, okay. Maybe she needs like some cheerin' up, hmm?"

"Maybe. Let's let her call the shots."

She came back out in the baggy spattered overalls, her hair pinned up, and quietly accepted a slice of cold pizza and a long-necked Budweiser, the first time she'd had a beer on the job. She gave Haskel a dollar and took a quarter in change.

Young Vince broke the silence. "So what was he like?" The other guys shot him a look.

"Oh, he was real quiet. Drugged, for sure." To Lee: "Valium and. what was that one you told me about?""Thorazine. Use it to bring people down from bad acid trips."

"That's it. Valium and Thorazine, the doctor said. I'm not sure whether he recognized me. His dad, yeah.

But even with his dad he didn't bring up anything about the past.

"He looked really out of it. Just really half-listening to what we said. But he's nervous, too. His dad's umbrella made a noise falling over, and he nearly jumped out of his skin."

"I think that's normal," Haskel said. "I still do it."

"At least he's out of the boonies," Lee said. "He's alive and has a chance to get better."

"The doctor, he give the guy a prognosis?" Larry said, the last word slowly.

"No, not the doctor. He acted half as stoned as Spider. Some other guy, a captain I talked to before on the phone, he was sort of optimistic. But he seemed goofy, too, in person. Fidgety. Maybe being around crazy people all the time gets to you." She looked at Lee. "He will be coming home, he said. In a month or two."

Lee nodded. "We'll handle that when the time comes, I guess."

She put the pizza slice back half-eaten. "I'm not sureany of it's our problem anymore. My problem. If he doesn't even recognize me."

"Well, he'll be happier at home, anyhow."

"I wouldn't count on it. His father was really p.i.s.sed off at his mother for not coming along, and you can tell that there's something a lot worse than that buried away. He's really on the edge." She sipped at the beer. "It's funny. If you didn't know any of them, and you put all four of them in a room together-Spider and his father and the shrinks-you couldn't say which one of them was reallycrazy, you know? Spider would seem kind of dumb, yeah, but his father really comes on more nutty, like he was about to explode.

He's always been a mean drunk. One of the shrinks is creepy, antsy, and the other's as stoned as any dropout hippy."

Larry laughed. "You ask me, the whole f.u.c.kin' world's crazy. Some of us is crazier than others, but it's all a big f.u.c.kin' nut house."

"Well, that explains everything," Lee said, and lit up a joint.

Neither Lee nor Beverly had seen the morning paper, which had arrived late after the biggestStop the Presses! order in some years. At the end of a predictable pro forma television speech the previous night, the President dropped a bombsh.e.l.l. Banner headlines exclaimed LBJ TELLS NATION HE WON'T RUN.

Also in the paper, the results of a Gallup poll predicting that Robert Kennedy would beat either Republican, Nixon or Rockefeller, and a wry note saying that ex-actor Ronald Reagan had been chosen as California's favorite son candidate.

Martin Luther King would have had the headline if LBJ hadn't upstaged him. Dr. King spoke to an audience of four thousand at Was.h.i.+ngton Cathedral, trying to bolster support for the Poor People's Campaign. The previous week's demonstration in Memphis had erupted in violence; King warned hissympathetic audience that "if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will be not only as bad, butworse than last year."

In years to come, not many people would see past the smoke and flames of 1968 to remember that previous summer. Dr. King had three days to live.

Sweet mystery of life Spider could smell Captain My Captain's tobacco for some hours before his appointment. He must have changed blends; it smelled a little better. He took the list out of his pocket and checked for the hundredth time what he was going to ask. He stared at the clock and wished it had a second hand. When it finally crawled to 10:29, he walked across the hall and knocked on the door. When Captain Folsom bade him enter, he walked in, hardly limping anymore, and stood at loose attention until Folsom offered a chair, waving without looking up from the file folder he was studying.

As usual, Folsom gazed at him for an uncomfortable period before speaking. "So. Specialist Knox said you wanted to speak to me about your medication."

"Yes, sir. I just can't think straight. I have trouble, um, concentrating." He tried to remember what was on the list. "My memory's shot to h.e.l.l, too. Maybe that's the shock therapy, though."

"You've become an expert on shock therapy?"

"No, sir. I'm not an expert on anything, In fact, I feel pretty stupid about everything. But I do know there's things that happened to me that I just don't remember anymore. Big things."

"Such as?"

"Like s.e.x. I know I've done it because they said I was getting pills for syphilis. Antibiotics. But I don't remember ever doing it. Not with anybody."

"Spider." He inspected his pipe, a meerschaum whose finish was an ugly dapple of off-white, brown, yellow, and black. "Sometimes we forget things because they were too unpleasant to remember."

"That just doesn't make sense."

"s.e.x isn't always pleasant. Sometimes it's very painful."

"If I was gonna forget unpleasant things, how come I remember every stinking body I took out of every f.u.c.king bag at Graves Registration? How come I remember everybody in my platoon gettin' blown away in that ambush?That's unpleasant. I can't forget those things. I think about them all the time."

"It would be worse without the drugs and the ECT."

"I don't know. If I'm gonna remember the bad s.h.i.+t anyhow, I'd just as soon remember everything."

"You can't say that. Don't you see? You can't know how bad the things were that you're forgetting, repressing."

"Yeah, like getting laid. That sounds really horrible." He crossed his legs and rubbed the sole of his foot through the slipper. "The bulls.h.i.+t with the dirty pictures and the shocks. Is that why I've forgotten havings.e.x?"

"Oh, no, never," he said quickly. "A slight shock to your foot couldn't affect your memory." Three days before, they'd sat down Spider in a small mirrored room with a stack of 8X10 black-and-white photographs of naked people. Some of the subjects were standing or lying alone in various postures, and some were couples engaged in various s.e.xual practices. Whenever the picture showed h.o.m.os.e.xual s.e.x, or just a man alone in a state of arousal, Spider was given a shock through a pair of electrodes taped to his foot. Captain Folsom had put the aversion-therapy treatment together himself, at no cost to the government, and he was proud of it.

Spider looked at his list. "That was another thing I wanted to know. I got a shock every time I turned over a picture of a queer. Is that supposed to prove something? Does somebody think thatI'm queer?"

"Well, we don't use that word. But you said in an interview that you had had s.e.x with a man named Lee, and you enjoyed it."

"What?"

"And when you came here you had a syphilis chancre in the a.n.u.s. There is only one way that could happen."

Spider looked at him for a moment and his jaw dropped. "Oh, bulls.h.i.+t. Me let somebody f.u.c.k me in the a.s.s?" He screwed up his face. "I mean,ee-ewe. I'd kill him first. I really would."

"His name was Lee Madden. You remember Lee Madden?"

Spider looked nervously around the room, as if there might be a queer hidden someplace. "This is such bulls.h.i.+t! Jesus! This Lee Madden says he f.u.c.ked me? You bring him here andI'll f.u.c.k him, all right."

Folsom sat quietly, observing. Denial, healthy under the circ.u.mstances. "You remember Beverly. You saw her in this room not long ago."

"Yeah, 'course I do. I don't remember f.u.c.king her, though."

"She's Lee Madden's roommate. You must have met him through her."

"Now, wait." He looked at the floor and thought. "She does have a roommate Lee, but Lee's a girl.

Oriental, really pretty. I remember now, some. Maybe I did have s.e.x with her, with Lee, not Beverly."

"Lee is a twenty-two-year-old white male who got out of the draft for h.o.m.os.e.xuality."

"So I met him over at Beverly's and let him cornhole me."

"That's the word you used before."

"That's absolutely crazy. I would never do that."

"But you said you did."

"No!"He gripped the arms of the chairs as if to restrain himself. "You believed me then, but you don't believe me now?""It's not a question of 'belief-"

"Thef.u.c.k it isn't!" He got halfway to his feet, leaning toward Folsom.

"Sitdown, Speidel! If you can't eontrol yourself I will have Specialist Knox restrain and medicate you."

Spider slumped hack into the chair. "Look. Isn't there some way you can test somebody? I mean, Iknow I'm not that way. Like, the pictures of the girls, they got to me, but the pictures of the boys didn't do anything."

"That could be a defense mechanism. How do you explain getting a syphilis sore. there. and on the mouth, rather than on the p.e.n.i.s?"

"How the h.e.l.l should I know? Ask some s.e.xologist, if there is such a thing."

Folsom pursed his lips. "Do you know what Ockham's razor is?"

"Huh uh." Spider swallowed hard. "A treatment for syphilis?"

"No, it's a logical principle. Basically, it means that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. In your case, it means that you must have had oral and a.n.a.l s.e.x with a man, and willfully put it out of your mind." He leaned forward. "But you know. I hadn't thought of this. that doesn't necessarily mean you're h.o.m.os.e.xual. It could have been done against your will. Then, because you couldn't handle the memory, you blocked it off."

Spider rubbed his chin. "People do that."