Читать книгу Missile Paradise - Ron Tanner - Страница 12
ОглавлениеWhen Cooper wakes, he knows he’s higher than he’s ever been. It’s got to be an opiate of some kind because he’s all but levitating. At first he thinks he’s waking from a nap—he feels the bob and sway of his boat. Then a different reality starts to take shape: he’s on drugs, okay; he’s been injured, right; he’s in a hospital, of course . . . but then things get vague again and he can’t explain a distant kind of dread that tugs at him, like someone calling to him from across a canyon: Watch out!
He’s so high, he knows the warning doesn’t register the way it should. This bothers him. He knows he should get up. He really has to get up. But, damn, he’s so high, he can only giggle at how crazy this is. Get up! Maybe not. He can’t have been here, in this hospital, for more than a day. Oh, wait: he remembers the trip, the trippy trip.
Like a lightning flash, it comes to him: the Army rescued him, as that bull walrus Thomas promised. A medic parachuted down with impressive precision to assess Cooper’s injury. “Oh, baby, this looks bad,” the medic said, at which point Cooper, in shamed defense, tried to explain how he had carefully ministered to his wound but to no avail. The medic didn’t seem to be listening. Slapping at the radio on his harness, he said, “We got to get him out of here, man.”
They pulled Cooper up in a rescue harness, into the bowels of a thundering Black Hawk chopper, which had followed the HN-130 Hercules out to the island. Then they flew him straight to Kwajalein. And so—ironically—he arrived at his destination ten days earlier than he had planned. At Kwajalein’s modest hospital, a young internist examined the wound, found it gangrenous, and called for an immediate amputation. An IV’d sedative was already leaking into Cooper’s left arm when the doctor told him, “I’m sorry, buddy, but this is a simple thing. It’s your leg or your life.”
It all happened so fast, Cooper could hardly focus on the urgency of this request. Leg or life. Wasn’t there another choice?
As soon as Cooper signed the waiver, the doctor suited up, the orderly radioed Hono Army Hospital for some virtual consultation, two nurses prepped Cooper, and that was that. While the GP talked to the Hono doctor, sometimes cracking a bad joke (“This time I’m a leg up on you, Chuck. . . .”) Cooper felt himself swinging in the rescue harness. Everything below him—the little island, the islanders, Harold-the-mayor, the big bearded Thomas—grew smaller, as if he were a movie camera receding for the picture’s closing shot, framed between his two dangling feet.
His feet. He tries to look at his feet but can’t raise his head. He is alone, he realizes, in a room whose door is open to the hallway. A strap as wide as a seatbelt holds him to the bed. Two IV bags are dripping into him, one on each restrained arm. He calls for a nurse. His voice seems to rise from behind him, slurred and syrupy.
If he weren’t so stoned, he would yell. But as frantic as he thinks he should be, his mind won’t rise to the alarm. At last a nurse arrives. She says, “It’s about time you woke up!” She goes straight to his IVs and turns them off.
“How long have I been out?”
“Three days!” Now she’s unplugging his arms, pressing adhesive bandages to the holes.
“No fucking way.”
“Way!”
He can’t read her name tag. She is a short, thick-boned blonde, in her late twenties, with a bunny-small nose, full cheeks, and pink-framed eye glasses that look too big for her face. If she were in the States, she’d live in an apartment complex by the interstate. Maybe newly divorced with a kid and dreams of a Carnival Cruise vacation. She says her name is Inez. He asks her what drugs he is on. Morphine, she tells him. Tomorrow it will be Demerol, then a transition to Tylox.
“I’m so fucking high!” he says.
“That’s how it’s supposed to be,” she says. “But you’re all right—right?”
“I’m scared shitless,” he says, “but I don’t feel scared shitless except in a really far-out disconnected way.”
“If you want scary,” she says, “I got plenty of things to tell you.”
“About my leg?” he asks.
“About the world,” she says. “I hear you’ve been on a boat for, like, a year.”
“No, not that long,” he says.
“Maybe you don’t know what’s going on any more.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever really known what’s going on,” he says. It’s supposed to be a joke, but Nurse Inez doesn’t seem to get it.
She says, “Should I tell you all the news?”
“Is it good news?” He attempts a smile and discovers, with alarm, that he can’t feel his face.
“Nothing good happening these days,” she says brightly. “More than 500 of our boys are dead in Iraq so far. Still nobody’s found any weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqis think we’re dominators, not liberators. I bet you didn’t hear about the guy they beheaded.”
“Beheaded?” Cooper pushes himself up a bit. Did he hear right?
“I’ve got the video at home,” she says eagerly. “It’s awful.”
“You’ve got a video of a beheading?”
“I didn’t take it!” she says, holding up one latex-gloved hand as if to swear an oath. “It was all over the news.”
“Who beheaded who? And why?”
“It’s war, Mr. Davies. That kind of thing happens in war.”
“I know we’re at war,” he stammers, “but how in the hell—”
“It’s craziness,” she says. “The Arabs caught an American reporter and cut his head off because they’re angry. Everybody’s angry. Especially about the prison scandal. President Bush gave a speech yesterday and he mispronounced it three times. Even that made people angry.”
“Mispronounced what?”
“Abu Ghraib. Is that so hard to say? Go ahead, say it after me. Ah-boo Gray-b.”
“Abu Ghraib.”
“That’s right. You’re going to be a good patient.” Then she winks at him. “I’ve got pictures of the Abu Ghraib atrocities—all of them—which I downloaded from the internet. If you want I’ll bring them in.”
Has the world slipped off its axis while he was sailing across the Pacific?
“No, thank you! Maybe I should nap,” he says, desperate to get away from her gleeful gloom.
“Okay, Mr. Davies.” She snaps off one glove, then the other. “You want me to read your cards to you?”
“I got cards?” Suddenly he is very hungry. “Someone I know?”
“Who do you know on Kwajalein?” She says this in good humor, but it is a reality check. He can’t quite grasp that he is on an island 4250 miles west of California. He’s been alone on his boat for so long, he has simply assumed that now, landed at last, he would be within reach of anybody, everybody. But he’s not in reach. He’s out here, on a sand speck in the middle of the Pacific.
Nurse Inez reads him the notes, the first from his co-workers, a card whose photo shows a group of orangutans piled onto a hospital bed: “What some people won’t do to get out of work!” the caption reads. “We’re thinking of you, Cooper. Keeping your seat warm in the quad. See you soon. Your A-team.” Then a crowd of signatures. Inez reads every name. Eight in all. The other note—from the Colonel, the island’s “governor”—is handwritten on impressive letterhead, The United States seal in one corner, the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site seal in the other.
“Dear Cooper, we are thankful that you are safe and sound,” the Colonel writes. “The doctor tells me you are going to be fine. We look forward to welcoming you into our little community. I will drop around soon to visit. Until then, I am yours sincerely, Colonel ‘Sandy’ Sanderson.”
Later, after dozing off and on, gazing at the stripes of sunlight across the room, and wondering about his boat, where the fuck is his boat?, Inez returns to help him with the bedpan. Only then, as he leans to one side while she snugs the pan into his crotch, only then does he see his stump, the bandaged nub pressing into the mattress. He nearly pukes at the sight of it. But he doesn’t puke because he’s convinced suddenly that it’s not really him. His leg is still there. He can feel it. So this stump, with its intermittent hotwire of pain, this stump is not his. It’s like a loaner. Until they return his leg.
After Inez takes away the pan, a weather-beaten orderly sidles up to the bed and says, “Hey, sailor, you ready for a ride?” Then, without asking, he hikes Cooper off the mattress and sets him into a wheel chair.
“This is Jimmy,” Inez says.
All arms and legs, Jimmy looks like a sixty-year-old roofer who has seen better days, his face sunbrowned to a squint. He wears green scrubs, his stringy gray hair contained by a net. He reeks of cigarette smoke.
He says, “You’ve had some wild time, haven’t you, pal?”
“I’m still having a wild time, aren’t I?” Cooper says.
Jimmy grins and nods his head.
“I want you to see the view from the lounge,” Inez says cheerily, walking ahead. “Hospital’s one the tallest places on the island. You can see the lagoon!”
Lagoon: what a romantic word! How heroically brave, heroically sad, heroically misunderstood Cooper felt when sailed from Half Moon Bay without Lillian and Bailey three months ago. He’s not sober enough to take a measure of his regret. But he pictures himself trying, like a deckhand dropping rope into the water to measure fathoms.
“Where’s my boat?” he asks.
“I’m sure your boat is in the water, where boats belong,” says Inez.
Jimmy parks Cooper in front of the three windows, each as big as a beach towel. Cooper surveys the island for the first time: he sees whitewashed cinderblock duplexes and triplexes amid a clutter of palm trees and too-green greenery. The place looks run down and overgrown. Beyond the furzy green lies the turquoise expanse of too-blue water. Then he sees an old gray-metal transport plying away from the island.
“Where they going?” he asks.
Inez leans into the window. “That’s the afternoon ferry to Ebeye.”
“Ebeye?”
“Where the natives live.”
When Cooper doesn’t answer, she adds, “You know, the Marshallese?”
My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone.
But he can still feel his leg.
“There’s our celeb,” a young doctor greets him.
“You’re the guy!” says Cooper. He means to say, You’re the guy who took my leg!
“Yeah, I’m the guy!” the doctor says with good humor. Then he wheels Cooper away.
Inez calls, “Later, gator!”
“You’re the talk of the town,” the doctor says.
“There’s a town?”
The doctor chuckles. “No, not at all. We have a department store that looks like a bargain barn, a snack bar attached to one side, the post office attached to the other. Then there’s a kind of hardware store in a prefab building. That’s your downtown. Oh, and we have a grocery store half a mile from that. We call it Surf-way. Isn’t that cute?”
Cooper likes speeding through the wide hallway, strangers nodding and smiling at him. Maybe he is a celebrity.
Celebrity fuck-up is more like it. He is so shamed by what has happened, he doesn’t want to call his parents, though he knows they’re waiting to hear from him. He last talked to them via Skype from Honolulu. And Lillian, would she care to know?
The doctor wheels him into a rectangle of sunlight in front of his desk. He’s younger than Cooper remembers, a short athletic man with a weak chin and wavy dirty-blond hair. He pulls his desk chair around so that he can sit nearly knee to knee with Cooper. He’s wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, wrinkled khakis, and classic Jack Purcells.
“I’ve visited you many times, my friend, but I’m not sure you remember.”
Cooper tries a smile. “Inez says I was out for three days.”
“We weren’t going to let you stay down any longer than that,” he says. “There’s a lot to do.”
“I am,” Cooper begins. Happy to be alive? Grateful that you saved me? Scared out of my fucking mind? “I am a little confused right now.”
“We have a counselor you can talk to.”
“Where’s my leg?” The question surprises Cooper as much as it seems to surprise the young doctor.
“Cooper—”
“I’m just curious. What do you do with a leg?”
A piece of him loose somewhere in the world—it’s an unsettling thought.
The doctor eyes him as if to search out a symptom. At last he says, “Nobody’s sorrier about what happened than I am. It was the last thing any doctor would want to do.”
Cooper nods his understanding. “I would have died. I know that.”
The doctor nods yes. “It was a difficult procedure, but I was careful and I had help.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, doc.”
The doctor’s name, Cooper remembers, is Boxer. He wears a wedding band. Is everyone on Kwajalein married? The place must be crawling with kids.
Boxer looks disappointed or hurt, his thin lips pale, his eyes narrowed and unfocused as if he’s withdrawn into himself.
The voice in Cooper’s head says, Half a leg is better than no leg. Half is better than none.
Then he hears Boxer say, “It’s gone, Cooper,” so directly, so surely, that there’s nothing more to say.
Gone.
Something—maybe the drugs—allows Cooper to say, “You did a great job, I’m sure.”
Boxer nods a silent thank-you, then describes with increasing enthusiasm the business of rehab, which will be “slow and painful.” Through it all Cooper nods dutifully, like a soldier hearing his assignment. There is so much to do, he doesn’t try to keep it straight. All he knows right now is that he wants to get out of his chair. He wants to walk. And get to his boat. He’s got to get to his boat.
When the orderly returns him to his room, Cooper meets his first visitor: a big-bellied, bald man who looks to be sixty and is dressed in a white T-shirt, dirty khaki trousers rolled up nearly to his calves, and rubber flip-flops—like a hip summer kid from the States, though Cooper suspects the old man has been dressing this way for decades. He has a big hound-dog face, thin legs, and the mottled complexion of a man who should but consistently fails to avoid the sun. In fact, he’s blocking the sunlight at Cooper’s window. It appears that he’s been here some time, perhaps picking through Cooper’s fruit basket, smelling the flowers, reading the cards.
He offers his small hand, which Cooper takes with some effort. “Art Norman, Cultural Liaison. If you’re too tired I can come back.”
Cooper regrets his own weak grip. He wonders how bad he looks.
“I’m fine.” He waves away the glum orderly, then returns his gaze to the visitor. “Come back for what?”
“Your orientation. Haven’t you checked your schedule?” The liaison lifts a sheet of paper from atop the EKG at the side of the bed and waves it at him as if it were wet. His close-set eyes give him a shrewd look; his downturned mouth suggests a fretter.
“I rate a personal visit from the Cultural Liaison?”
“We don’t want you starting without knowing some basics about the Marshallese people.”
Cooper nods agreeably. His first day out of bed and already he’s getting lectures? “Why isn’t a Marshallese person telling me this?”
“They don’t like to talk about themselves. You will not find a more modest people. They don’t wear shorts, you’ll notice. Do you know what iọkwe eok means?”
This sounds like Yuck-way Yuck.
“Something like ‘greetings,’” Cooper says. “I read it in one of the guides.”
“It means ‘love to you,’” the liaison says with satisfaction. “The ri-aje, as they call themselves, never ever want to disappoint you, so they will tell you whatever it seems you want to hear.”
“I’ve heard,” Cooper muses, “they are promiscuous.”
The man winces, his mouth working as if on a jawbreaker. “Like rabbits?” he says. “Jungle bunnies maybe?”
“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Cooper says quickly. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”
“Crap like that makes my job a joy, you know that?”
Cooper raises both hands in surrender, then asks: “Am I going to work with the Marshallese?”
“You will be among them.” Breathless already, the liaison gulps for air. He appears to teeter ever-so-slightly from foot to foot. As big as he is, it seems he seldom sits still. Sourly he says, “They do all of the menial labor on this island.”
“Do they mind?”
“Hell, it looks like they don’t mind a God damn thing. But they mind!”
Cooper nods agreeably. “I guess you mind too.”
“And you don’t?”
“Sweet Jesus, Mr. Norman, I just got here. Nobody’s told me a thing!”
“They won’t either. Do you know these islands have the highest per capita rate of attempted suicide in the world?” The liaison’s face is nearly the color of liver. “This place will fuck you up, son!”
Cooper would like to believe that the man is a jokester, hazing him for a laugh. But until the old man reveals the joke, Cooper feels an urgency to keep talking: “The Marshallese don’t live on Kwajalein, right?”
The liaison nods, seeming calmer now. “They live next door, on a little pile of sand and shit called Ebeye. We ferry them in every morning so they can do our dirty work, then we ferry them back. They can’t be here after sundown.”
“What, it’s like some kind of apartheid?”
At last the liaison smiles. And Cooper thinks of attempting a smile of his own.
“Keep talking like that,” the old man says, “and you’ll win me over.”
“Does the Colonel know,” Cooper begins but then thinks better of it. This can’t be the liaison’s job to alienate every newcomer.
“Fuck the Colonel.” Art Norman lets one hand fly up as if to flash the finger. “I’m two years away from retirement. They couldn’t find someone to do my job if they paid twice the salary. Which would still be shit.”
“Look,” says Cooper warily, “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”
The man raises his flaking, freckled brow in surprise. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“Did you think that was funny?” Cooper asks.
The old man sits wearily on the bed, lays down the paper he pulled off the EKG, then shakes his head in dismay or disgust. “I know I’m a fucker, Cooper. I’m not having a good day. And I know you’ve had a hard time.” He sighs: “I’m sorry.”
Cooper searches for something reassuring to say but can think only of sleep. His ass aches from sitting too long in the sling of the wheelchair. He elbows the arm rests to readjust his position but it doesn’t help. His arms itch where the IVs were, his mouth tastes as if he’s been sucking a handful of rust, and his right thigh is beginning to send him a deep, throbbing signal of distress.
When he looks up finally, he sees the liaison watching him as it seems everyone has been watching him today, to see what he’ll do next.
Wiping one freckled hand over his forehead, Art says, “I’m not exactly giving you the official version, I guess you could tell.”
“Fire away, Art. I want the straight dope.”
A bit of sunshine glows from the liaison’s face. Without preface, he begins: “Fact one: for at least 2,000 years the Marshallese have lived from hand to mouth, day to day—taking what they could from the lagoons and the plant life—on flea-speck atolls whose aggregate size would fit inside Washington, D.C., but whose ocean territory is as vast as half the continental United States.”
“Okay,” says Cooper dutifully. “They’re tough and resourceful, these people.”
“You miss the point, son. These people have no place to go. Do you know the ocean’s rising? Highest elevation out here is twenty-eight feet—and that’s the old missile launch-mound at the other end of this island, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Actual average elevation is more like four feet. Before they’re done, they’ll all be living in public housing outside Los Angeles.”
“Four feet?” Cooper asks.
“Maybe six, what difference does it make?”
“All right,” says Cooper. “I’ll give you eight feet and still they’re screwed.”
“Now you get it.” Art nods his approval and Cooper finds this reassuring, as if talking with his own father, who has always possessed the right answer.
“Fact two: The Marshallese have evolved into one of the most compliant, self-effacing people in the world because how else could they have survived together on these tiny rafts of sand? Unfortunately, their amiability has made them thoroughly exploitable. Spain, then Germany, then Japan, and now the United States have all held the ri-aje hostage in one form or another.”
“You said they don’t like to talk about themselves.”
“That’s right.”
“And they don’t wear shorts.”
“Don’t get fixated on the details, Cooper. I’m talking big picture right now.”
“There’s a lot to keep in mind, big picture or small,” Cooper says.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Then you’re my Jiminy Cricket?”
“Your what?” he barks.
“You know, my conscience. Like in the Disney cartoon?”
“I need you to focus, Cooper. If you’re too drugged up, just tell me and I’ll come back.”
“I’m fine. I can listen to this. It’s fascinating.”
The liaison eyes him briefly, then nods as if to confirm that Cooper is sincere. “Okay,” he says. “Fact three: the Marshallese never developed a sense of time or consequence as Westerners know it, since everything out here remains relatively constant, and certainly they never developed the notion of future, since there was little or nothing to work toward, nothing to possess, and therefore nothing to save.”
“Nothing to save?”
“For these people there is no reason to save, do you hear what I’m saying? There’s no winter here, no reason to hunker down and wait it out. A typhoon’s not going to last but a day or two before it moves on. This sense of ongoingness—”
“Infinitude?”
“Fine, infinitude—it has its effects, Cooper.”
“Like the Australian aborigines who believe we live in a world unbounded by time?”
“No, not like the Australian aborigines,” Art says. “There is time here, just not Western time. Not consequential time. Not deadline time.”
“So that’s why Americans think they’re lazy?”
“That goes without saying.”
Cooper closes his eyes and thinks of lazing in the rope hammock on Lillian’s redwood deck after the sun has burned off the Montara fog finally and a warm breeze rises from the meadow across the street, carrying with it the salty scent of ocean waves and the sweet smell of rotting grass. And somewhere behind him he can hear Lillian singing an old show tune—”Good mornin’! Good mornin’!”—while she makes her chocolate chip, walnut-oatmeal cookies; and he knows Bailey is nearby too, in the down recliner, listening to old folk rock through her headphones and reading “Wuthering Heights” for the tenth time. Do they need a dog? he wonders as he swings there ever so slightly. A yellow lab? Would this complete their happiness?
