The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [339]
"Men, you might as well lea' me." A few tears worked out of Wilson's eyes. "They ain't no use y' killin' yourself for me." His fever was torturing him again, and it sent a leaden aching ecstasy through his body. He felt consumed with the desire to express something. "Y' gotta lea' me. Gowan ahead, men." Wilson clenched his fists. He wanted to give them a present, and he was frustrated. They were such good men. "Lea' me." It was plaintive, like a child weeping for something it will never get.
Goldstein listened to him, tempted by the same inevitable suite of rationalizations that Stanley had followed. He wondered how to suggest it to Ridges, and was silent.
Ridges mumbled. "You jus' shut up, Wilson. We ain't leavin' ya."
And therefore Goldstein could not quit. He would not be the first one; he was a little afraid that Ridges then would bundle Wilson on his back and continue. He was bitter and thought of fainting. That he wouldn't do, but he was angry with Brown and Stanley for deserting them. They quit, why don't I quit? he wondered, and knew he wouldn't.
"Jus' set me down an' gowan, men."
"We'll git ya back," Ridges muttered. He too was playing with the idea of deserting Wilson, but he pushed it away in a spasm of disgust. If he left him it would be murder, an awful sin if he left a Christian to die. Ridges thought of the black mark it would be on his soul. Ever since he had been a child he had imagined his soul as a white object the size and shape of a football, lodged somewhere near his stomach. Each time he sinned an ineradicable black spot was inked onto the white soul, its size depending upon the enormity of the sin. At the time a man died, if the white football was more than half black he went to hell. Ridges was certain that the sin of leaving Wilson would cover at least a quarter of his soul.
And Goldstein remembered his grandfather saying, "Yehuda Halevy wrote that Israel is the heart of all nations." He lunged along, carrying the litter through habit, not conscious of the torments of his body. His mind had turned inward; he could not have concentrated more intensely if he had been blind. He just followed Ridges without looking where they went.
"Israel is the heart of all nations." It was the conscience and the raw exposed nerve; all emotion passed through it. But it was more than that; it was the heart that suffered whenever any part of the body was ill.
And Wilson was the heart now. Goldstein did not say this to himself, he did not even think it, but the idea worked through him beneath the level of speech. He had suffered too much in these past two days; he had traversed all the first nauseas of fatigue, the stupors that followed, the exaltation close to fever. There were as many levels to pain as to pleasure. Once his will had forbidden him to collapse, Goldstein burrowed deeper and deeper through exhaustion and agony, never quite plumbing the pit of it. But he was in a stage now where all the banal proportions were gone. His eyes functioned enough for him to notice automatically where he walked; he heard and smelled isolated little events; he even felt some pain from his racked body; but all this was separate from him, like an object he might hold in his hand. His mind was both blunted and exposed, naked and stupefied. "The heart of all nations." But for a few hours, after two days and fifteen miles of staggering forward under a tropic sun, after an eternity of wrestling Wilson's body through an empty and alien land, this could be true for him. His senses dammed, his consciousness reeling, Goldstein fumbled through a hall