The Infirmary

Nurse

42 n U r s e her hand on my wrist awakened me—1, 2, 3, 4—my pulse at her fingertips , then her fingertips were between the gauze and my flesh, her other hand at my back. “try to sit up,” she said. “There. now cough.” i looked down at the layers of bandage wrapped around my middle. cough. The sound of the word sent shock waves up from my abdomen. i managed what i hoped would pass for a cough—a wheeze, perhaps. “no,” she said, “that will not do. now cough.” she pointed across the ward of the second surgical hospital where an orderly, big as kansas, was operating a kind of giant shop-Vac machine, running its hoses downthenoseandthroatofasoldierwhowasconvulsingsowildlyyou’d think his lungs were being sucked out of him. i coughed. “Good,” she said. “tomorrow we’ll cough again.” yes. Let us cough again. she walked back across the ward of the second surgical hospital. Later she returned, turned me gently, and slipped a syringe of Demerol into my hip. all night long i flew on the wings of her hands. There were three things, really, those next few weeks—the fact i was alive, the fact of the Demerol, and the fact of her. We had the coughing and the changing of the dressings and the arrangement of the tubes so a thick brown-black liquid could flow freely from my side into a glass bottle, that kind you see on office watercoolers. We had the listening at the wrist, the tapping at the veins. often she moistened my lips with a piece of damp gauze. When she did speak, she spoke efficiently, her words like little soldiers. “There,” she would say. or, “That’s good. That’s better.” and she kept her eyes almost always to herself. once in the evening she came, put her fingers, sweet with water, to my mouth, and told me her name. on another day, a sunday i think, she came in blue jeans and a khaki shirt, disconnected me, and helped kansas hoist me into a wheelchair. she rolled me out through the ward, across a wooden walkway onto a beach, spread a blanket on the sand, and sat down beside me. The air was mild and saturated with spray. We looked out across the south china sea. “tomorrow,” she said, “you’re going to Japan. you’ll be home for christmas.” 43 i think i was stupid with dope. i didn’t say anything. i sat on the sand like a goddamn dune, as if some word or two would have blown me away. “Don’t write,” she said. Then she kissed me on the mouth and left me there. Weren’t they all beautiful, the beautiful nurses, and didn’t we love them all, and those hundreds before us, with our wounds, our Demerol hearts? she was so young. i think of her now—twenty-five years later. War or no more—christ—won’t truth have its way with this: we’d love that one the best we never came to know. ...