Max Collins: The Million-Dollar Wound

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.

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?”