indigenous noncombatants gave us food and we drank polluted water from streams or puddles. We weren't supposed to break ranks but we did anyway. We had to have water. It was worth the chance, no two ways about it. A lot of men were shot or bayoneted getting water. One of the guards was singing a song, walking along beside us in the hot sun smiling and singing a song. A sergeant named Ritchie, a demo expert with one of the anti-transit security outfits, broke ranks then and jumped the guard from behind and knocked his weapon into a ditch. Then he straddled the guard and started tearing at his throat. I don't think he particularly wanted to kill the guard. He just wanted to get inside him, open him up for inspection. Then two other ginks came trotting up the line and shot Ritchie in the back. We got to Orani and it stank even worse than Balanga. Just outside the town though, about a mile outside, I saw something so strange I thought it might be a vision, something brought on by the hunger and malaria. Under some trees at the edge of an empty field was a swing, an obviously homemade swing, just a board and two ropes fastened to a treelimb. Sitting on the swing was a gink officer and maybe it was the glare of the sun or maybe just the distance but he seemed to be a very old man, he seemed almost ancient, but at the same time I was sure he was wearing the uniform of a gink officer. He was looking at us, gliding very slowly on the swing a few inches forward, a few inches back, his small legs well off the ground, looking at us and singing a song. At first I hadn't realized he was singing but now I could hear it coming across the field, a slow and what seemed a very sorrowful song. Maybe it was my imagination and maybe just my ignorance of the language but it seemed to be the same song the guard was singing before Ritchie jumped him. And he just sat there, moving a few inches either way, singing that beautiful slow song and then making a gesture with his hand as if to bless us, but in a circle, a strange blessing. If it was a vision, then it was a mass vision because all of us looked that way as we went along the road. But nobody said anything. We just looked at him and listened to the song. A little ways further on we passed one of the village depaci-fication centers set up by Tech II and Psy Ops before the enemy terminated the whole concept. We were in Orani about a day. Then we walked to another town, where they stuffed us in a warehouse. There must have been thousands of us in there, crushed and elbowing and going out of our minds. Nobody could sleep. I was dying for some mouth wash. Barrels of it for everybody, green and foamy. We were all locked together and the stink was worse than ever because we were indoors. From here we walked to a rail center where they had trains waiting for us. Some of us were given food here and some weren't. We all looked forward to the trains, some dim and still functioning part of our minds thinking of god knows what childhood times we had spent on trains, the Twin Cities Zephyr if you were from the Midwest, or the San Francisco Chief or Afternoon Hiawatha; some dim vision of going across the Great Plains on a Union Pacific train and everything is vast and wild and mysterious because you're ten years old and America is as wide as all the world and twice as invincible. We looked forward to the trains but we should have known better by this time. They put us in boxcars. Whatever position you found yourself in when you were pushed into the boxcar, that was it for the whole trip. There were no windows and the doors were closed. It was the warehouse again, this time on wheels. A few minutes after the train started, somebody began to moo. That set us off. Soon we all began mooing and snorting, making noises like sheep, cows, horses, pigs. The Psy Ops people never told us about this kind of environmental reaction. Nobody laughed. We weren't fooling around. This was no comic celebration of the indomitable human spirit. No protest against inhumanity. We were cattle now and we knew it. We were merely telling ourselves that we were cattle and we shouted moo and baa in absolute seriousness and total overwhelming self-hatred. We were livestock. How could anyone deny it? What else could we be but livestock, locked up as we were in boxcars and stepping in puddles of our own sick liquid shit. We didn't hate the ginks. They hadn't gotten us into this. We had, or our generals had, or our country which treasured the sacrifice of its sons, making slogans out of their death and selling war bonds with it or soap for all we knew. The ride seemed to take years. It seemed a trek across Asia. When we were all off the train we walked to the POW camp, where they processed us with one of our own incremental mode simulators. The march was over and I tried to get back to the small white beauty of her breasts and the two girls so beautifully flabby my fingers wanted to melt when I touched them. And the third child about to be born. But I couldn't return. West End Avenue. It seemed that everybody who lived there was taking music lessons. Harkavy the country squire drinking Jack Daniel's on the rocks in his star-spangled pajamas. And my mother (what was her name) dusting the old house like a pharaoh's widow come to clean the tomb every Thursday morning. Alexandria. Our wedding on the lawn. It was all in a dark part of my mind and I had to get back there because it was in Balanga that they forced us to bury the dead. It was in Balanga that they forced us to bury the dead. It was in Balanga that they forced us to bury the dead and I was throwing dirt onto the body of a Filipino when he suddenly moved. Poor little blood-faced indigenous Filipino soldierboy. When he started to rise from the ditch. Dozens of dead men around him covered already with maggots, completely covered so that the ground, the earth, seemed to be moving, rotting bodies everywhere and the whole saddle trench about to erupt. When he lifted himself on his elbow. I dropped my shovel and leaned way over the edge of the trench, all those billions of ugly things swarming into the mouths of my dead buddies and their dead buddies and their buddies' buddies and the tough-little brown-little indigenous military personnel. When he tried to extend a hand to me. I leaned way down and then felt something jab me in the ribs. It was a guard jabbing me with his bayonet in a light, casual, condescending and almost upper-class manner like a bloody British officer of the 11th Light Dragoons poking an Indian stable boy with his riding crop. When he tried to rise. I pointed to him, trying to rise, and then the guard did some pointing of his own. He pointed his bayonet at the shovel on the ground and then at the boy in the ditch. It was rather a deft piece of understatement, I thought. He wanted me to bury the little wog anyway.'
'What are you stopping for?' I said.
'That's all there is,' Glenn said.
After he left I looked up Owney Pine's number in the local directory. He said he'd try anything once and we made a date for the next day.
If I could index all the hovering memories which announce themselves so insistently to me, sitting amid the distractions of yet another introspective evening (ship models, books, the last of the brandy), I would compile my index not in terms of good or bad memories, childhood or adult, innocent or guilty, but rather in two very broad and simple categories. Cooperative and uncooperative. Some memories seem content to be isolated units; they slip neatly into the proper slot and give no indication of continuum. Others, the uncooperative, insist on evasion, on camouflage, on dissolving into uninvited images. When I command snow to fall once again on the streets of Old Holly, my father's hands curled about a shovel, I can't be sure I'll get the precise moment I want. A second too soon and there is mother sitting in the rocker; too late and the memory subdivides, one part straying into fantasy: dull knife clamped in my teeth, I dog-crawl through the jungle, belly dragging, toward Dr. Weber's house. We are what we remember. The past is here, inside this black clock, more devious than night or fog, determining how we see and what we touch at this irreplaceable instant in time.
'How long have you been practicing medicine, doctor?'
'Let's see, I make it twenty-four years. Does that jibe with your figures?'
'It's not important,' I said. 'Where did you intern?'
'Interned first at Brooklyn Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat. Then at Pelham Senile, the New York City Mortuary, Jewish Discount, and Blessed Veronica Midwife. Followed by a brief stint on the coast at Pasadena Neuroland and Roy Rogers Lying-in. Mind if I smoke?'
'Not at all, doctor. And after your internship?'
'Private practice in Westchester. I was beloved out there. You can check that out with anybody in town. I was beloved by my parishioners. I mean my patients.'
'Let's discuss the disease that's on everyone's mind today.'
'The Big C. Love to.'
'Would you tell the camera the different ways in which it might manifest itself.'
'Look out for lumps of any kind. Look out for irregular bleeding from any orifice of the body. Look out for changes in color of moles or warts. Look out for persistent coughing, pain in your bones, indigestion, loss of weight. Look out for diarrhea. Look out for constipation. Look out for that tired worn-out feeling. Look out for painful urination and beware when you cough up blood or mucus. Look out for sores on the lips. Look out for aches in your lower back. Beware of swelling. If you develop a sudden distaste for meat, you're in big trouble. Look out for bloody stool, urinary retention, lumps in the throat, sputum flecked with blood, discharges from the nipple, lumps in the armpit. Beware of wens, canker, polyps, expanding birthmarks. We all have it to some extent. Oh yes. Cells expanding, running wild. Bandit cells. Oh yes. Massage the prostate. Whirl the poor bastard's urine at high speeds.
