Second sight, p.8
Second Sight, page 8
“Don’t do that again,” he said in a low, barely audible tone, as if he might be overheard above the din. “Can you hear me?” “Are you the corpsman?” Patchen asked.
“No. I was just passing by.”
“Oh,” Patchen said. “Was that German you were speaking?” “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because German is the only language lions understand,” the man replied.
“Lions?” Patchen said.
He lost consciousness again.
2
PATCHEN’S FRIENDSHIP WITH CHRISTOPHER BEGAN ON THE DAY HE discovered that he was not blind after all. He had spent a week in total darkness, with his entire head swathed in bandages, before a cheerful Navy physician unwound the gauze and let in the light. At first he thought that the indistinct glow filtering through the layers of gauze was an illusion, a trick of the mind, but then his remaining eye, the right one, was completely uncovered and it began registering images—a lamp, a row of surgical instruments laid out on a towel, a poster of a human head with the skin removed so that the muscles and eyeballs were exposed, and the round freckled face of a red-headed man wearing the undersize silver oak leaves of a Navy commander on the collar of his khaki shirt.
“My name is Dick Conaghan,” the doctor said. “I’m a plastic surgeon—in the Navy. In civilian life I was a podiatrist, so I can only do one face. Everyone leaves here looking like Cary Grant. Okay?”
Patchen had not spoken since being evacuated from the battlefield, and he could not speak now. Conaghan shone a penlight in his eye, then examined the left side of his face.
He said, “Do you remember what happened?”
Patchen shook his head.
“That’s okay. Hardly anyone does at first. You were wounded by a grenade. The damage is all on the left side of your body, so you must have reached for it before it went off, or something. It may all come back to you eventually, but then again, it may not. Don’t worry about it.”
Patchen listened in silence, waiting for darkness to descend again. He still believed that he was blind, that he was imagining, rather than actually seeing, the objects in the windowless room. Conaghan seemed to understand this. He gripped Patchen’s unwounded biceps and squeezed it hard.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not going to be blind. You’ve lost one eye, but the other one is going to be okay. I wouldn’t bullshit anybody about a thing like this.”
Patchen cleared his throat. “I believe you,” he said. “I’m just surprised. I thought I was blind until you took the bandage off.”
Conaghan cursed. “You mean nobody told you you still had one good eye?”
“No. What else is wrong with me?”
Without hesitation, Conaghan told him the details: he had taken the full force of the exploding grenade on the left side of his body. His face, his arm, his leg had been badly damaged. His left hand could be used as a claw, but he would never be able to write with it again.
Conaghan said, “Are you left-handed?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. You were lucky,” he said. “They found you right away and got you to an aid station. Otherwise you would have bled to death.”
Patchen remembered something about this, the sensation of being carried by another man. He closed his eye, trying to recapture the details. Conaghan misunderstood his reaction.
“We can fix you up,” he said. “Not like new, but you should be able to live a normal life. What sports did you play in high school?” “Football, baseball, basketball,” Patchen said.
“What I want you to do is write to your mother and your girlfriend, using your right hand—you might as well get used to it—and ask them to send you all the photographs and snapshots of you that they have—all of them, plus your high school yearbook. Okay?”
Patchen nodded.
“Tell them why you need the pictures, so we can fix your face,” Conaghan said. “Tell them what’s happened to you. It’s better that they know the truth right away. Have you got a girl?”
Patchen nodded.
“She’ll be okay,” Conaghan said. “Believe me, the ladies don’t object to honorable wounds.”
“Is that something else you wouldn’t bullshit me about?” Patchen said.
“That’s the last thing I’d bullshit you about,” Conaghan replied.
He rebandaged Patchen’s head, then clipped holes in the gauze for his eye and mouth. Patchen couldn’t walk so Conaghan himself pushed him in a wheelchair. After a swift passage through a maze of corridors, they arrived in the ward. Patchen noticed immediately that he was the only patient whose head and face were completely covered by bandages. In the bed next to the one with his name on it, a blond man with his leg in a cast was reading a book.
“I lied to you,” Conaghan said. “Not every patient ends up looking like Cary Grant. Sometimes I slip. Leftenant Christopher, here, came out looking like Alexander the Great. Paul Christopher, shake hands with David Patchen.”
Christopher, smiling quietly, put down his book and leaned over and shook hands with Patchen. Under his Navy-issue bathrobe, his chest was heavily bandaged.
“Yeats?” Conaghan asked, craning to read the title on Christopher’s book. “Slip me a stanza.”
Christopher, smiling, read the first eight lines of Sailing to Byzantium aloud. His voice was pleasant, but barely audible. Conaghan held a hand behind his ear, like a deaf man; Christopher spoke in a murmur.
“Beautiful,” Conaghan said. “Christopher’s a mumbler, but he’s the only other intellectual in the Marine Corps besides yourself. He even tells war stories in iambic pentameter. Gotta go.”
After Conaghan left, Patchen said, “Did you really have plastic surgery?”
“No,” Christopher replied. “He just noticed me reading poetry one day.”
Patchen knew this faint voice. But how? He did not recognize Christopher’s face or anything else about him. He asked another question.
“Were you on Okinawa?”
“Yes,” Christopher said.
“What outfit?”
Christopher identified his unit. He spoke so softly that Patchen had to ask him to repeat what he said. They had belonged to adjoining battalions in the same regiment.
Without warning, Patchen began to weep. He did not know why this happened, but he was powerless to stop it. Tears welled up in his single blue eye, wetting the gauze that surrounded it; he uttered a series of brief, muffled sobs. Christopher did not avert his eyes or offer to help. After a few moments Patchen stopped crying.
“Do you play chess?” Christopher asked.
Patchen nodded. Despite the cast on his leg, Christopher swung himself out of bed, easily and smoothly, as if the movement was some sort of pleasurable gymnastic exercise, and sat in a chair facing Patchen’s wheelchair. They played on a tiny portable chess set belonging to Christopher. He was an excellent player, but his moves were almost entirely defensive, as if the outcome did not matter to him.
“Why are you doing that?” Patchen said, after the second game.
“Doing what?”
“Letting me win.”
Christopher smiled. “It won’t happen again.”
Those were his last words until lights out. He won six of the next ten games, but Patchen realized that he was still holding back, still was not playing as well as he knew how, as if his skill was a secret he was unwilling to share.
In the morning, Conaghan came by early to examine Patchen again. Christopher was already awake, reading again. He took the book out of his hand and looked at the title.
“Wilhelm Meister by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?” he said. “Lieber Gott—enemy literature. Read something.”
“It’s in German.”
“I know that. You can shout.”
Most of the ward was still asleep. In the same murmur as before, Christopher read:
“Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.”
“Gorgeous. What a genius, even if he was a Kraut,” Conaghan said. “What does it mean?”
“ ‘He who never ate his bread with tears, who never sat on his bed weeping through the sad night, knows nothing of Heaven.’ “
“See?” Conaghan said to Patchen. “I told you this guy was an intellectual. How about you, David—are you fluent in a foreign language?”
“I can count to four in German,” Patchen replied.
Christopher gave him a look of interest, but said nothing. “Great,” Conaghan said. “You can be a sergeant in the other army if the Krauts win the war.”
Although Patchen, at that moment, did not even know why he had said what he had said about being able to count in German—he spoke no German, did not remember the words of the man who had saved his life until months afterward—it was at this moment that he began the long process of remembering what had happened to him on Okinawa.
3
SOON AFTER THE FIRST OPERATION ON PATCHEN’S FACE, HE AND CHRIStopher and a few others were wheeled out to the hospital’s parade ground to be decorated. Patchen received a medal for having wiped out an enemy position in hand-to-hand combat; he had no recollection whatever of the feats described in the citation.
Christopher was given the same medal for having rescued two wounded Marines under heavy fire, at night. According to the citation, read over the crackling loudspeaker system, he had carried the men home in relays, carrying or dragging one inert body twenty yards or so in the direction of the American lines, laying it down, going back for the other, and repeating this process until he brought both wounded men safely inside the perimeter. He had been wounded in the leg by Japanese small arms fire, and then shot in the chest by a U. S. Marine who fired on him when he rose out of the ground in front of the latter’s foxhole with one of the rescued men in his arms.
This man saved Christopher’s life, because most of the eigh .30-caliber rounds fired by the panicky sentry struck his unconscious body instead of Christopher’s. The citation did not mention the circumstances in which the chest wound was inflicted. It was Christopher who supplied this detail later on, in answer to Patchen’s questions.
“Didn’t you give the password?” Patchen asked.
“Yes,” Christopher replied. “But I don’t think he heard me. Nobody ever does.”
“What happened to the guys you brought back?”
“The sentry killed the one I was carrying—he fired a whole clip at us. The other one lived.”
“How do you know?”
“I brought him in first.”
Christopher, limping along beside Patchen’s wheelchair, unpinned the medal from his chest and put it into the pocket of his bathrobe.
Patchen said, “Why did you go out after those guys in the first place?”
“I didn’t,” Christopher said. “I was already out there, coming back from patrol, just like you were. I was carrying one of my own men back when I stumbled onto the other fellow.”
“How did you find him in the dark?” Patchen asked.
“It wasn’t difficult,” Christopher said, giving Patchen a puzzled, sidelong look. “He was making a lot of noise.”
“What kind of noise? The whole island was one big noise. How could you hear him?”
“He was screaming,” Christopher said. “His wounds were pretty bad.”
Something flickered in Patchen’s memory.
“I think I heard him, too,” he said.
4
PATCHEN UNDERWENT ELEVEN SEPARATE OPERATIONS TO RECONstruct the face that Conaghan saw in Patchen’s high school yearbook. When it was over, his left cheek remained paralyzed, but this was noticeable only when he smiled or displayed emotion. His left arm and leg, which had absorbed the main force of the exploding grenade, were stiff, and his left hand was useless.
Christopher remained in the hospital, in the bed next to Patchen’s, for about a month after the medal ceremony. He made conversation in the way he played chess. He volunteered no information about himself. He listened. He understood. He did not interrupt. He never argued or corrected, even when error was obvious. He behaved as if the lives of others were far more interesting than his own, and a better topic of conversation. In the sense that this reticent behavior concealed the facts of Christopher’s life, even his beliefs, from everyone else, it was a subtle form of deception; Patchen understood this even then, but it only made the other man more interesting. He asked him few questions.
“When did you learn German?”
Looking up from a book: “As a child.”
“Where?”
A smile. “In Germany.”
“Are you German?”
“Half, on my mother’s side. My father’s American.”
Christopher went back to his book; he seemed to live for books. He was always receiving them in the mail, and he read two or three a day; many were in German or French, and these he covered with brown wrapping paper to deflect curiosity. He gave away the ones in English, novels and poetry, as soon as he had finished them.
To distract Patchen from his pain after he came back from surgery, he read to him, not stories or poems, but facts. Holding a whole stack of books in his lap, he would read passages that informed Patchen that the amazing valor of the Japanese soldier had less to do with the code of Bushido than with the law of primogeniture, in which eldest sons inherited everything, and younger sons who had no hope of inheriting anything, or even marrying, went into the infantry. Or that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, a tenth-century king of Germany. Or that Squanto, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, had asked for a mug of ale, in English, on his first appearance in the Plymouth Colony; he had traveled to England aboard an English ship sometime before 1620 and developed a taste for the stuff.
Patchen remembered these odd facts for the rest of his life. Christopher’s reluctance to talk made Patchen confessional. After Christopher told him about his mixed parentage, he revealed that he was only half American himself. His father was an Englishman, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps who was shot down over the Western Front in 1918. His father and mother had met at a Nurses’ and Officers’ Ball on July 4, fallen immediately in love, and been married a week later. They had two weeks together in Paris, dining every night at Maxim’s, before he went back to the Front and died.
Every year, on the anniversary of his death, Patchen’s mother had shown him blurry photographs of his father standing beside his Sopwith Camel and documents and souvenirs relating to him—their marriage certificate, written in French in a copperplate hand, a Croix de Guerre with palm, and the letter written by the elder Patchen’s commanding officer after he was killed. Patchen had memorized it. “My dear Mrs Patchen,” it ran, “I am very sorry to tell you that your husband, Captain David Alan St. Clair Patchen, died on the 10th inst. whilst leading a patrol behind enemy lines. His flight was attacked by a larger German force and though he fought gallantly against overwhelming odds his machine was hit by enemy fire. Another officer who was by his side during the whole action reports that Captain Patchen’s wound was instantaneously fatal and he did not suffer; there was no fire. You have my deepest sympathy in your great loss as well as that of every man who served with your husband who was a very gallant and much admired officer. Yours truly, [ILLEGIBLE].”
Patchen’s mother had returned to Ohio to bear her child. He had never met his English relatives; the marriage had been secret.
Christopher’s wounds healed long before Patchen’s, and he left the hospital with orders to report to an infantry unit that was training for the invasion of Japan. Patchen learned this when he woke from an operation and found a goodbye note in Christopher’s peculiar European handwriting. Everyone believed that more Americans would die in the invasion of Japan than had been killed in the whole war so far. Two weeks later the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Patchen was relieved that Christopher would live, but he believed that he would vanish back into whatever world he had emerged from.
He was surprised, therefore, when he met him in Harvard Yard on a balmy Indian summer day a year later. Christopher was walking along by himself, reading a book. His gait was perfectly normal; so normal that he might never have been wounded. Patchen himself was still using a cane. He leaned his weight on it and spoke Christopher’s name.
Christopher looked up from th book and said, “Hello, David.”
He had never seen Patchen’s original face, let alone the new one fabricated by Conaghan, because it had always been swathed in bandages.
“How did you know who I was?” Patchen asked.
“Who else could you possibly be?” Christopher asked, smiling.
5
PATCHEN HAD COME TO HARVARD BECAUSE HIS FIANCÉE WAS IN HER senior year at Radcliffe College. Her name was Martha Armstrong, and like Patchen she was a birthright Quaker; they came from the same town in Ohio. Patchen, who received a disability pension as well as a monthly allowance under the G. I. Bill of Rights, had plenty of money. Martha, who was at Radcliffe on a scholarship, had none, but she planned to get a job as a teacher as soon as she graduated and save half her salary, together with all of Patchen’s pension, toward the cost of their honeymoon, which they had been planning ever since they decided to get married. “Unless,” she said, “I hear the call. Or David does. If that happens we’ll make other plans.”
She meant, Patchen explained, a call from God to do His work. “She’s a hell of a lot more likely to hear it than I am,” he said to Christopher. “It was hard on her when I joined the Marines. But even after she saw this …” he pointed to his face, the only time Christopher ever saw him draw attention to his injuries … “she never reproached me. She’s a good person, Paul.” In any other man these words would have been meant as an apology for Martha’s plainness, but Patchen was as oblivious to her lack of physical beauty as she seemed to be to his wounds. It was obvious that they loved each other. They went for a walk along the Charles together every morning before classes, studied together in the library every evening, and on Saturdays went into Boston to visit museums or go to a Red Sox game. Christopher often went with them, never taking a girl of his own because he felt that this would violate the couple’s privacy. When the three of them were together, both Patchen and Martha were talkative, even gay; in the presence of strangers they were silent.
