I flushed the shitter, went over to the sink, and threw some water on my face. Then I went out to meet the doctor.
He was waiting for me outside the nurse’s station; he wasn’t in military apparel. White coat, white pants. He seemed young for a medic, probably early thirties. Trim black hair, trim mustache, pale, kind of stocky.
He extended his hand for me to shake.
“Pleased to meet you, Private Heller,” he said.
“If that’s my name,” I said.
“That’s what I’d like to help you determine. I’m Doctor Wilcox.”
Civilian, apparently. “Glad to make your acquaintance, Doc. You really think you could help me find my way back? Back to my name. Back to where I come from.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I like your confidence,” I said, walking next to him down the hall. “But I always thought when a guy went bughouse, it was pretty permanent.”
“That’s not at all true,” he said, gesturing with a hand for me to enter a small room where two chairs and a small table waited; not a straitjacket in sight. I went in. He went on: “Many mental disorders respond well to therapy. And those due to some intensely stressful situation, such as combat, are often easier to deal with.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the trauma can be more or less temporary. Be grateful your problem isn’t a physical one. That it isn’t chronic.”
I sat down in one of the chairs. “You going to give me truth serum?”
He remained standing. “Sodium amatal is one possibility. Shock treatments, another. But first I’d like to try to knock your barrier down with simple hypnosis.”
“Haven’t you heard, Doc? Vaudeville is dead.”
He took that with a smile. “This is no sideshow attraction, Private. Hypnosis has often proved effective in certain types of battle neurosis-amnesia among them.”
“Well…”
“I think you’ll find this a less troublesome route than electric shock.”
“It cured Zangara.”
“Who’s Zangara?”
I shrugged. “Damned if I know. What do I have to do, Doc?”
“Just stand and face me. And cooperate. Do exactly as I say.”
I stood and faced him. “I’m in your hands.”
And then I was: his hands, his warm soothing hands, were on my either temple. “Relax completely and put your mind on going to sleep,” he said. His voice was monotonous and musical at the same time; his eyes were gray and placid and yet held me.
“All right, now,” he said, hands still on my temples, “keep your eyes on mine, keep your eyes on mine, and keep them fixed on mine, keep your mind entirely on falling asleep. Now you’re going into a deep sleep as we go on, you’re going to go into a deep sleep as we go on.”
His hands dropped from my temples, but his eyes held on. “Now clasp your hands in front of you”-I did; so did he-“clasp them tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, they’re getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and as they get tighter you’re falling asleep, as they get tighter you’re falling asleep, your eyes are getting heavy, heavy…”
My eyelids weighed a ton; stayed barely open, his eyes locking mine, his voice droning on: “Now your hands are locked tight, they’re locked tight, they’re locked tight. Can’t let go, they’re locked tight, you can’t let go; when I snap my fingers you’ll be able to let go, when I snap my fingers you’ll be able to let go, and then you’ll get sleepier, your eyes getting heavier-”
“Now your eyes are getting heavier, heavier, heavier, you’re going into a deep, deep sleep, going into a deep, deep sleep, deep asleep, far asleep, now closed tight, closed tight, deep, deep sleep, deeply relaxed, far asleep… you’re far asleep…far asleep…now you’re in a deep sleep, no fear, no anxiety, no fear, no anxiety, now you’re in a deep, deep sleep.”
I was in darkness now, but his hands guided me, as did his voice: “Now just sit down in the chair behind you. Sit down in the chair behind you.” I did. “Lean back.” I did. “And now fall forward into a deep, deep sleep. And now falling forward, going further and further and further asleep. Now when I stroke your left arm it becomes rigid, like a bar of steel, as you go further asleep, further asleep.”
My arm, as if of its own will, extended, rod straight.
“Going further, further, further asleep. Rigid.”
I could feel him tugging at my arm, testing it.
“Cannot be bent or relaxed. Now when I touch the top of your head, when I touch the top of your head, that arm will relax and the other will become rigid. You’ll go further asleep. In a very deep sleep.”
His hand, lightly, touched the top of my head; my left arm relaxed, right one went sieg heil.
“And your sleep is deeper and deeper. Now when I touch this hand my finger will be hot. Now when I touch this hand my finger will be hot, you will not be able to bear it.”
Searing pain! Like red-hot shrapnel!
“Your arm is rigid. Now when I touch your hand you will no longer feel any pain there. Will be normal.”
Pain was gone, no trace of it.
“Now your arm is relaxed and you’re further and further and further asleep. Now you’re deep asleep. Going back. Going back now. Going back to Guadalcanal. Going back to Guadalcanal. You can remember. Everything. You can remember everything. Back on Guadalcanal. You see everything now, clearly. You remember it all, now, every bit of it coming back. Tell me your story. Tell me your story, Nate.”
Through the haze I could see it, the island, “the Island” we’d soon call it. A red-tinged filter of dawn, like a soft-focus lens on an aging movie queen, worked its magic on the cone of land ahead, seducing us into thinking a Pacific paradise reclined before us, a siren lounging in a cobalt sea, waiting, beckoning, coconut palms doing a gentle hula.
Even then we knew we were being lied to. But after a month of duty on Pago Pago-that grubby barren no- man’s-land we’d come to call “the Rock,” in honor of Alcatraz-the vista before us made us want to believe the come-on.
“It looks like Tahiti or something,” Barney said.
Like me, he was leaning against the rail, sea breeze spitting pleasantly in both our faces. We, and the rest of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, were so many sardines in a Higgins boat, a landing craft without a ramp, meaning soon we’d be going ass over tea kettle over the sides into the foam and onto the beach.
“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “You’ve heard the scuttlebutt.”
“Only it ain’t scuttlebutt,” a kid squeezed in just behind us said.
The tropical paradise beckoning us was, we all knew, the site of the bloodiest fighting to date in the Pacific Theater. We of the 2nd Marine Division were on our way to spell the battle-weary 1st Division, who since early last August had been struggling to hold on to and preserve Henderson Field, our only airfield on the Island, named after a Corps pilot who fell at Midway. Outnumbered and outsupplied by the Japs, the 1st had held on in the face of air attack, Naval shelling, and jungle combat, the latter enlivened by mass “banzai” charges of crazed, drunken, suicidal Japs. We also heard about the malaria, dysentery, and jungle rot afflicting our fellow leathernecks; the sick were said to outnumber the wounded. Scuttlebutt further had it you couldn’t leave the battle lines unless your temperature rose above 102.
That was no travel poster come to life, stretched out before us like Dorothy Lamour. It was green fucking hell.
I looked at Barney, an aging bulldog loaded down in battle gear. “Another fine mess,” I said.
“Semper fi, mac,” he said, grinning, not seeming nervous at all. But he had to be.
