American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [61]
CHAPTER TWENTY
When he woke up her arm was no longer on his chest. It was flung above her on the pillow curving around her head as if she were dancing in her sleep. Her face was pointing toward her inner elbow as if there were something written there. He had rolled over and was lying on his front, his face pressed into the pillow. He did not remember or know that he had been lying on his back and that her hand had touched him where the embers burned. He only knew that he was waking with a fear in his ribs and an ache in his solar plexus and a hum of panic in his head. It was as if something terrifying was about to walk through the wall into the room and crush him into the bed.
He felt a sun burning down on him and a weight bearing down on him and then he smelled the smell of flesh and blood hot and sticky against his chest. He pressed his face harder into the pillow. He shut his eyes tight and let out a thin wail but he did not want to wake her she looked so perfect and calm. With each degree of closing his eyes a new image flew toward him: a white sky, a little explosion of dust around a boot and leg, a blob of paint growing closer, a body thrown and jerked in the air by an invisible horse, a head of hair so matted with blood that it looked like a kind of dark sea creature that had attached itself to his chest. Then he saw the whole scene, again, clearly in his mind and he knew that she had found his story.
They say that for some patients the telling and retelling of the story brings relief. For others, it is too much. Milo pressed his face into the pillow for a long time and he wished that he could suffocate the memories. When he thought about them they seemed so banal, just an average wartime disaster, but when he relived them they were his disaster, and that made all the difference. When he thought that Honor now had access to his story he felt ashamed at the paltry nature of his trauma. No massacre, no heroics, no mutiny. Just violence and waiting, mutilation and sorrow, and basic, everyday death. How surprising was that? How special? Was it worth the wait to find out? he wanted to ask her. Did it make him seem even crazier than he was? Wasn’t that just what war was?
But then he heard the questions he was asking himself and he realized that he was being cruelest to himself, that of course a dead comrade lying on top of you for hours would leave a trace, a scar, a wound. So if he stopped being cruel to himself about it, what would he do with all that anger? When he had this thought at first he thought: I must be getting better. This is the kind of thing they have been trying to teach me here. How to forgive myself, how to move on. But then a moment later he had a vision of his own death, and he knew that he would never really get better.
Light came in the room from the window. It was night but there were bright lights shining from someplace. She got out of bed, disoriented, and closed the shade. It took her a moment to recognize the little table, the bed, the body sleeping. She had never before fallen asleep here. She wondered why the nurse hadn’t woken her and told her visiting hours were over but then she remembered which nurse was on duty and knew that it was one who bent the rules. Honor was wearing her clothes: jeans, socks, a long-sleeved T-shirt. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Milo. He was lying on his front with his face pressed into the pillow. For a moment she was worried that he wasn’t breathing. Then she saw the gentle inflation and lift in his rib cage and she could breathe again herself. She talked to him while he slept.