The Million-Dollar Wound

The dayroom stretched out like the deck of an aircraft carrier, eighty feet long by forty feet wide, easy. The same institutional pale green walls dominated, with an expanse of speckled marble floor where massive furniture squatted-heavy wooden tables, chairs, a piano, the smallest stick of this furniture would take two guys to toss around, and maybe not then. That was when I figured it.

I was in the nuthouse.

Hell, where did I expect to be? I didn’t know my own fucking name, right? Of course, I knew who was singing “White Christmas,” as the radio was piped in over an intercom system: Bing Crosby. I was no idiot. I knew the name of the song and the name of the singer; now, for the sixty-five-dollar question: who the hell was I?

If I had any doubt about where I was, the human flotsam sprawled across the heavy chairs cinched it. Hollow cheeks and hollow eyes. Guys sitting there shaking like hootchie-coo dancers. Guys sitting there staring with ball bearings for eyes. A few very ambitious guys playing pinochle or checkers. One guy sat in the corner quietly bawling. Made me glad I held my own tears back. I had enough problems just being minus the small detail of an identity.

Most of the guys were smoking. I craved a smoke. Something in the back of what was left of my mind told me I didn’t smoke; yet I wanted a smoke; I sat next to a guy who wasn’t shaking or staring; he was smoking, however, and he seemed normal enough, a tanned, brown-haired, round- faced man with distinct features. He was sitting along the wall over at right next to a window; this window, like all the other windows, looked out at a nearby faded red-brick building, through bars.

I was in the nuthouse, all right.

“Spare a cig?” I asked.

“Sure.” He shook out a Lucky for me. “Name’s Dixon. What’s yours?”

“I dunno.”

He lit me up off his. “No kidding? Amnesia, huh?”

“If that’s what they call it.”

“That’s what they call it. You had the malaria, didn’t you, Pops?”

Pops? Did I look that old? Of course Dixon here was probably only twenty or twenty-one, but somebody who hadn’t been in the service might peg him for thirty.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I still got it.”

“I hear it’s the ever-lovin’ pits. Fever, shakes. What the hell, you got any other injuries?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about that noggin of yours?”

He meant my bandaged head.

“I did that to myself. In some hospital in Hawaii.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t like what I saw in the mirror.”

“Know the feelin’,” he said. Yawned. “That’s most likely why you’re on MR Four.”

“What’s that?”

“Men’s Receiving, fourth floor. Anybody remotely suicidal gets stuck here.”

“I’m not suicidal,” I said, sucking on my cigarette.

“Don’t sweat it, then. There’s six floors in this joint. Worse off you are, higher your floor. As you get better, you get promoted downwards a floor or two. Hit MR One and you’re as good as home, wherever that is for ya.”

“Wherever that is,” I agreed.

“Oh. Sorry. I forgot.”

“Me too.”

He grinned, laughed. “You’re Asiatic, all right.”

I understood the term; didn’t know why I did, but I understood it. It described any man who’d served long enough in the Far East to turn bughouse. Subtly bughouse, as in talking to yourself and seeing the world sideways.

“You’re a Marine, too,” I said.

“Yeah. That much about yourself you remember, huh, mac? Not surprising. No Marine alive’d forget he’s a Marine. Dead ones wouldn’t, neither. You can forget your name, that ain’t no big deal. You can’t never forget you’re a Marine.”

“Even if you want to,” I said.

“Right! Here comes one of those fuckin’ gobs.”

A medical corpsman in his work blues strolled over; he seemed cheerful. Who wouldn’t be, pulling duty on a land-locked, home-front ship like St. E’s?

“Private Heller,” he said, standing before me, swaying a bit. Something about bell-bottoms makes a Marine want to kill. If there was a reason for that, I’d forgotten it.

“That’s the name they’re giving me,” I said. “But there’s been a fuck-up. I’m no Nathan Who’s-It.”

“Whoever you are, the doctor would like to see you.”

“I’d like to see him, too.”

“Report to the nurse’s station in five minutes.”

“Aye-aye.”

He flapped off.

“Don’t he know there’s a war on?” Dixon growled.

“I don’t wish combat on any man,” I said.

“Yeah. Hell. Me, neither.”

“Is there a head in this joint?”

“Sure.” He dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his toe. “Follow me.”

He rose-he was shorter than I’d thought, but had the solid build that comes from boot camp and a tour or two of duty-and led me out into the hall, into the head, where finally I saw a mirror. I looked in it.

The face, with its white-bandaged forehead, was yellow-tinged, but it was American. I was not a Jap. That was something, anyway. But I could see why Dixon called me Pops. My hair was reddish brown on top, but had gone largely white on the sides. My skin was leathery, wrinkles spreading like cracks through dried earth.

“Do I look Jewish to you?” I asked Dixon.

Dixon was standing at the sink next to me, staring at himself intently in the mirror; he tore himself away to take a look at my reflection and said, “Irish. You’re a Mick if ever I saw one.”

“Micks don’t use words like ‘schmuck,’ do they?”

“If they’re from the big city they do. New York, say.”

“That where you’re from?”

“No. Detroit. But I had a layover there once. I put the lay in the word, lemme tell ya. Now, there. Look. Will ya look at that. That proves it. Once and for all.”

He was covering one side of his face with his hand. Looking at himself with one eye.

“Proves what?” I asked.

“That I’m nuts,” he said, out of the side of his mouth that showed. “Now, look.”

He covered the other side of his face. Looked at himself with the other eye.

“They’re completely different, see.”

“What is?”

“The two sides of my face, you dumb sonofabitch! They should be the same, but they ain’t. My goddamn face, it’s split it in two. This fuckin’ war. Oh, I got a screw loose, all right.”

He turned away from the mirror and put a hand on my shoulder and grinned; there was a space between his two front teeth, I noticed. “We’re in the right place, you and me,” he said.

“I guess we are,” I said.

“Semper fi,” he shrugged, and strutted out.

I took a crap. That’s something I hadn’t forgotten how to do. I sat there crapping and finishing my smoke and thinking about how I wanted to get out of this place. How I wanted to go home.

Wherever the hell home was.