Mortal Leap by MacDonald Harris

Author:MacDonald Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-915812-11-7
Publisher: Boiler House Press
Published: 2024-01-31T20:16:52+00:00

Chapter 11

Over the weekend Gore left me alone. On Saturday morning they took the dressings permanently off my hands. The scar tissue had begun to form, and in a basin of tepid water I stretched the fingers tentatively and felt the muscles work under the stiff and thickened skin. Before lunch Waldbach came in to look at the hands. “They’ll be stiff for a while. You’ll have to exercise them in hot water—not lukewarm like that—hot, as hot as you can stand it. It’ll be six months, probably, until you have full movement.” The rest of my burns were almost healed now; he scarcely glanced at them. Only the bad place on the cheek was still tender, although the whole face still looked like a lump of something you find in a butcher shop. I wasn’t surprised that nobody wanted to recognize it; I didn’t recognize it myself. Luckily I had never particularly cared for my face anyhow, so I didn’t feel any desire to go out the window like Bledsoe. In any case my life didn’t seem important enough to me to go to such efforts to end it. Before you could even swat a fly you had to be annoyed at it, and I seemed to have forgotten how to feel even the most rudimentary emotions, the ones that for most people are like reflexes. I didn’t particularly care: would I be any happier with emotions? And what emotions would I feel if I felt any?

Sunday and Monday I spent mostly sleeping and working my hands in the basin of hot water: clench, open, clench, open. I could get out of bed now with the corpsman helping me, but my hands were tender and it was painful to hold on to things. After the weeks in bed I was feeble and I had forgotten how to stand up. Shakily, the corpsman holding me under the shoulders, I walked as far as the bathroom. It was better when I was back in bed, weak and a little dizzy under the cool sheets.

For some reason now I was sleepy all day. Perhaps it was a symptom of convalescence. It was hot in the room and they had opened the windows so that a light breeze came through the steel grill. As I lay half asleep I could hear the planes warming up their engines on Ford Island a mile away, and once in a while the hoarse shaking of a ship’s whistle. I wondered if Bledsoe could hear the planes and whether he remembered everything that had happened, or whether he had retreated into a land of unreal timelessness like me where the past and present were all the same and nothing was very important. I thought probably he hadn’t, that he still remembered and thought about things, and I had no desire to come out of my phantasmagoria and be as he was, alert, conscious, and agonized. It was better as I was, except when Gore came around and I had to answer questions.

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