The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [179]
The new phase. In the old one he has looked and looked and butted his head against the wall of his own making.
He ducks into a hatchway and lights a cigarette. There is the phrase "I'm seeking for something" but it gives the process an importance it doesn't really possess, he thinks. You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Somewhere in America now were the cities, and the refuse sitting on the steps, the electric lights and the obeisance to them.
(All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the passion for movement like an ant nest suddenly jarred. How do you conceive your own death in all the marble vaults, the brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place?)
It was disappearing now, the water washing almost completely over the land, the long vast night of the Pacific settling overhead. And there was the yearning toward the land that disappeared.
Not love, not hate necessarily, but an emotion when he had expected none at all.
Always there was the power that leaped at you, invited you.
Hearn sighed, went out to the rail again. And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.
A bunch of dispossessed. . . from the raucous stricken bosom of America.
12
Minetta was sent to the Division Clearing Hospital after he had been wounded. It was very small. Eight squad tents, each with a capacity of twelve men, had been set up in a clearing near the shore. The tents were aligned in two rows of four, and around each tent a four-foot wall of sandbags had been erected. That was the extent of the hospital with the exception of a few extra tents at one end of the clearing which contained the field kitchen, the doctor's quarters, and the enlisted men working there.
It was always quiet at the hospital. By midafternoon the air was heavy and the inside of the tents had become unbearably hot from the intense sun. Most of the patients drowsed uncomfortably murmuring in their sleep or groaning from their wounds. There was really very little to do. A few of the convalescents might play cards or read a magazine or at most take a shower in the center of the clearing where a gasoline drum filled with water had been fastened to the top of a platform made of coconut logs. There were also the three meals a day, and the morning round of the doctor.
Minetta enjoyed himself at first. The wound he had received was hardly more than a scratch; it had laid open a few inches of his thigh, but the bullet had not been embedded and the bleeding had been moderate. He was able to walk with a slight limp an hour after he had been wounded. At the hospital he had been given a cot and some blankets, and he lay in bed comfortably and read magazines until dark. A doctor gave him a cursory examination, dressed his cut with sulfa powder, and left him alone until the next morning. Minetta felt weak and comfortable. He was suffering to a slight extent from shock, just enough to make him lassitudinous, but it kept him from thinking about the surprise and pain he had felt when the bullet had struck him. It was the first night in six weeks he had been able to sleep without being awakened for guard and the cot felt soft and luxurious in comparison to bedding on the ground. He awakened alert and cheerful. He played checkers with one of the men in his tent until the doctor came. There were only a few patients, and Minetta had a pleasant vague memory of talking to them the night before in the darkness. This is okay, Minetta decided. He hoped they would keep him in the hospital for a month, or perhaps evacuate him to another island. He began to tell himself that his