The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [260]
His eyes stared at the ground two inches away. Time hung still, unmoving about him. He felt the heat of the sun on his back; he dropped, submerged, in the chattering rhythms of the insect life about him, and the square foot of earth he could see became magnified until every grain stood out perfect and complete. The ground was no longer brown; it was a checkerboard of individual crystals, of red and white and yellow and black; his sense of dimension vanished. He thought he was looking from an airplane at several fields and a patch of wood, and the tall grass blurred a few inches from the ground, became nebulous and shifting like cloud vapors. The roots were surprisingly white with thick scaly bark stippled with brown like birch trees. Everything he saw was proportioned to the size of a forest, but a new forest, one he had never seen before, and quite odd.
A few ants meandered past his nose, turned about to look up at him, and then waddled on. They seemed the size of cows, or the way cows would look from the top of a high hill. He watched them pass out of his line of vision.
Goddam, they're cute little buggers, he thought weakly. His head settled on his forearm, and the wood darkened before his eyes, turned upside down as he fainted.
He awoke, he drifted out of unconsciousness perhaps ten minutes later. And lay there motionless, wavering between wakefulness and sleep. Each of his senses seemed to have sprung free of the other; he would stare emptily at the ground, or close his eyes and breathe, only his ears alert, or his head would roll on the ground, his nose twitching over the faint bouquet of earth, the pungent spice smell of the grass roots, or over the dry decay of mold.
But something was wrong. He raised his head, listened, and heard some men talking softly in the field ten yards away. He stared through the tall grass, unable to see clearly. He thought it was someone in the platoon perhaps, and he worked his throat to speak, and then stiffened.
There were Japanese in the field, or at least he heard men talking in a strange guttural, pitched in odd tones, rather breathless. If them Japs get me. . . He felt a choking horror. Tag ends of all the stories of Jap torture flicked his brain. Sonofabitch, they'll cut mah nuts off. He felt his breath escaping through his nose, slowly, with compression, stirring the hairs in the nostril. He could hear them puttering around, their words slicing abruptly against his ears.
"Doko?"
"Tabun koko."
They were thrashing the grass, moving around again. He heard them coming nearer. Absurdly, he began to repeat a jingle to himself. "Doko koko cola, doko koko cola." He buried his face in the earth, mashing his nose against the ground. Every muscle in his face was working to keep from making a sound. Ah gotta git my rifle. But he had left his gun a yard or two away when he crawled deeper into the grass. If he moved to get it, they would hear him.
He tried to decide, and in his weakness he felt like weeping. It was all too much for him, and he burrowed his face into the ground and tried to hold his breath. The Japanese were laughing.
Wilson remembered the bodies he had disturbed in the cave, and he began to argue silently as if he had already been captured. Shoot, Ah was jus' lookin'