his Camaro and drove away. I wandered around the house, thinking I should just leave. He was behaving as if I came over every Sunday for dinner. As if I'd never been away. And to me, his apartment didn't even look real. I drifted upstairs. I'd have to look at the TV. I think I was still hoping he'd get halfway to whatsername's farm, slap himself on the head, say, 'Oh, what a fool I've been! I need to get back and talk to Kitty. We can take care of these trivial errands later.' But though I strained my ears listening, I heard nothing. I opened the closet door and the smell of his cologne and fresh-pressed clothes drifted out. I lifted a shirt sleeve and sniffed. Before I left, I'd asked him to keep my letters, and I wondered if he had. I didn't expect to find them so easily. But there they were, in a pile, with a rubber band. I picked up the pile, all written on stationery with helicopters and Big Chief tablet-style lines. When I removed the rubber band, I understood why his letters never made reference to mine.
He hadn't opened them. Incredulously, I pawed through the pile. Not one was opened.
I picked them up, tucked them into my purse, and got back into Mom s car. I drove into the countryside, hoping by some coincidence I'd run into them and he could explain. It had been a rainy day, and as I drove down a small dirt road with trees on either side, it rapidly grew darker. I didn't care. I took the curves very fast and ended up plowing through the woods. I was still focused on the letters, and on Duncan, and it took me a while to realize that I wasn't on the road and was heading down a steep embankment. I forgot about braking until the shock of impact hit me, and the fender was crumpled against a tree, the radiator spewing water.
I got out of the car and walked until I found a farmhouse. I called Duncan, and he and Swoozie came to get me, and called a garage.
I didn't ask him about the letters then. But the next day I called a VA hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, and was accepted as a staff nurse almost at once.
I thought what I needed was to get back to work, to get back into the swing of things, to stop dwelling on my problems and help other people.
I was assigned to a drug/alcoholism rehabilitation ward. The alcoholics were mostly suffering from DTs, the drug addicts had hepatitis. The alcoholics told the staff where the druggies were getting their fixes, the druggies told us where the alcoholics were hiding their hottles. I was not popular with my coworkers. I was used to getting myself organized and getting everything done at the start of the shift and waiting for casualties. I found myself getting irritable and brusque with the staff, and I resented it when they asked me to help them with their work. It was boring. I felt no empathy for the patients, and even wearing the amulet didn't help. Their auras were uniformly depressingly gray-green, deep with self-deception and shit-brown with selfloathing. My own was thin and brown. Once I worked on ortho, and was caring for a very nice man with terrible pain in his back. I tried to help him, tried to focus, using the amulet. Nothing happened. I gave him a pain shot, which did nothing either.
The day I got the letter from Charlie Heron, I walked on air. He left a phone number and I called him. He was living on the Coast, he said, in a great place in San Francisco, and he wanted me to come and see him. He sounded different than he had in country, aimless and unemphatic, but I figured he probably couldn't talk to anyone either. Maybe we could talk to each other. I could give him the amulet. He'd trained with old Xe.
He'd know what to do with it.
One of his friends met me at the airport and took me to the house he shared with Charlie. Charlie was wadded up in front of the television with a joint in his hand. The house reeked so badly of pot you could get stoned just breathing normally. I smoked with the two of them, but didn't get two coherent words out of Charlie all weekend. I didn't even consider giving him the amulet then. His aura was only a slight variation on the ones worn by my patients in Colorado.
I worked at the hospital for another month, but finally quit. I couldn't stand it. As the patients sobered up, the yellow in their auras, a tendril of blue, sometimes some other healthier color, would bud along with sprigs of personality, only to be smothered again as soon as they were released. I found myself going home at night and drinking to relax from the misery of it. I crashed my car another time, and was nervous about driving for a long time after that.
I drifted from job to job, trying to work as a night float whenever possible, working first on one ward, then another. I liked the variety and the adrenaline rush of occasionally having dire emergencies to deal with. That made me feel at home, as if I were back in Nam. But what I liked the best was that I didn't really have to get to know anybody. I wouldn't risk contaminating anyone else.
When Nixon ended the war, I was fiercely glad. Our men could come home and the Vietnamese could begin adjusting to having one boss instead of many. I expected the news of the Communist takeover, but the day it came out, I didn't go to work. I stayed in bed and tried to remember what Mai looked like, wondered if having been a patient in an American hospital would affect Ahn's status, and hoped Hue was reinstated in the good graces of the winners. I sat in bed and stared at the TV and ate junk food and held my knees in my arms and watched, and rocked, and wondered. Pretty soon I started to cry, just a trickle at first, and then great gulping sobs, such as I hadn't cried since before Tony crashed us in the jungle. Thinking about Tony and Lightfoot made me cry all over again, until I couldn't get my breath. I didn't go to work the next day either. I didn't have the energy to go anywhere, or to do anything. I couldn't bear to brush my teeth and it was a struggle to drag myself to the bathroom.
When I realized I was out of anything to blow my nose on, pulled myself together enough to return to work. Everybody was talking about this new restaurant or that new movie. If you hadn't been there, you had nothing to talk about. I was home, but I wasn't. Everything here seemed trivial, superficial. Life was not sweet. It wasn't even bearable.
One night I was working the emergency room, in Gallup, New Mexico. There was a long lull between the night's stab wound victim and the drunk who'd been hit and run from. The receptionist and the nurses' aide were chatting about inconsequentialities. A new boyfriend, a new soap opera, the grandparents taking the receptionist's kids to Disneyland, a new crochet pattern. I wanted to scream. I had consoled myself by trying to jump back into everything, into jobs, into love affairs that were little more than one- night stands (I was still trying to find someone to touch me), into the whole pop-culture commercial scene. I spent most of my days in shopping malls charging stuff I didn't need on my charge cards and worrying over paying them off, eating out so I wouldn't have to eat alone. I lived in a singles complex with no old people, children, or pets but lots of predators of both sexes circling the pool like so many sharks, looking to score with the best body with the best tan. And I didn't give a shit about any of it.
I walked out to my car that morning after work and found I'd left the lights on and the battery was dead. I spent a sleepy morning learning about jump starting, and hitched a ride home with the service station attendant. I walked into my cute little studio apartment, around the breakfast bar, and gave the steak knives a serious once-over. I selected a sharp one and took it into the bathroom.
Why not? Duncan didn't love me, my parents would be better off without me, I was no good at my job anymore. Nobody wanted or needed me anymore. From being someone with special power, I had become someone who was another body, in the way, who had spent a yeat of her life doing something that was not to be mentioned in polite conversation. I would kill myself and then they wouldn't have to worry about me. Nobody had ever taken me to Disneyland. And I had always wanted to go, too. Tears ran down my cheeks and over my hands and onto the knife blade as I thought how unfair it was that here I'd fought for my country and nobody had even offered me a lousy trip to Disneyland.
Well, goddamit, I would kill myself, no mistake about that, but I'd do it after I took myself to Disneyland. Duncan hadn't kept his promise to be the man of my dreams, my parents hadn't kept their promise to always make everything all right, no matter what, and the Army sure as hell had never kept any of its promises, but I could keep my own promise to myself. I didn't expect the place to be wonderful. I didn't expect it to thrill me. I knew it would be silly and childish and commercial, but it was something the little girl I'd been before I went to Nam wanted to do, so whatever I thought now, I'd go for her. Like going to the funeral of Hue's mother. To honor her memory. Nobody else was going to.
I called in sick, and packed a bag. I drove to the airport in Albuquerque, and handed over my plastic for a ticket to L.A. Flying over it made me think of Nam: the mountains, the palms, the ocean. It also made me think of the line in the joni Mitchell song about paving paradise and putting up parking lots. I had heard the city put down pretty often, but it looked okay to me. I'd heard one of the patients joke about returning there from Vietnam. 'When you've spent time in hell, L.A. ain't so bad,' he said.
Baggage claim seemed miles from where we deboarded. People were in a terrific hurry and the auras surrounding them looked like a psychedelic nightmare. I decided that before I went to Disneyland I would remove the amulet and stick it in my jeans pocket. I wasn't ready for Mickey Mouse with a black and red aura.
I've become pretty familiar with the baggage claim area by now, but that day I had only an impression of a large room
