Atabrine Tan

A Story

by THOMAS A. MANAR

THE temperature was eighty degrees; the Russians were moving forward; B-29’s from the Twentieth Air Force had bombed Tokyo again; at considerable loss, an Italian river had been crossed; it was well to take a glass of Laxo if one was troubled with stomach acidity.

Listening to the voice on the radio rummage through the morning’s news, Sergeant Rogers wondered if he were the only sane person left alive or if he alone, in a normal world, were unbalanced. He understood that a characteristic of the lunatic is his inability to evaluate the weight of events; by that criterion this fool on the radio was as crazy as a bedbug.

Even the other patients, lounging inattentively about the sunny ward, came in for a share of Rogers’s distaste. How could they remain so indifferent to news from the fields where their fate was being determined? Perhaps this stony selfishness was common to all men. When the last of the race emerged from the last redoubt of the last war, would he look about him and say, “All dead. Too bad, but I am still here"? When the crabs or the sharks, or whatever slimy thing it would be, crept up from the floors of the seas, would he merely eye the females with a certain optimistic conjecture? When the grinning jaws opened, would he be saying to himself, “I am alive, unique, and incorruptible”?

Rogers rarely allowed himself the luxury of such bitterness; in the nasty, prolonged struggle against the pressure of the Army which all soldiers fought (and which was not to be confused with the actual war), one did well to hoard whatever reserves of anger one had. However, it was a sour day for Rogers, the seventh since he had entered the hospital, the sixteenth since he had heard from his girl. His atabrine treatment had ended on Monday and this was Thursday. Almost well, he was immured in one of those little hells of waiting to which the Army habitually consigns impatient men.

A little ashamed of his surge of exasperation, he returned to his textbook. He did not see the ward boy approach the foot of his bed.

“Okay, Rogers,” Marty said in the fierce but weary tone he used toward all the patients. “Let’s get it in gear.”

A second passed before Rogers, panting behind Pettersen over icy mountains of mathematics, realized he was being addressed.

“Let’s go! Let’s go! Get your head out,” Marty said.

Rogers closed his book. Used to obedience, he had risen from the bed and was putting on his bathrobe before it occurred to him to ask the ward boy where he was wanted.

“You got to see the Captain,” Marty said.

“Why?”

“ Don’t ask me, Mac. I’m just a Pfc. Boy, when I think I got twenty-two more hours of this, I figure I must be bucking for a section eight.”

“Twenty-two hours? How’s that? I thought you got off at seven.” The ward boys worked twelve-hour shifts and Marty had come on that morning. Rogers’s question was reasonable enough, but it afforded Marty the sort of opening he liked, and he plunged at it.

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Mac,” he said.

“I’m working straight through, see? From seven o’clock one morning to seven o’clock the next morning. It’s nine-ten now. I got twenty-two hours to go, see? Me and another guy, we swapped shifts and I’m taking his place on the night shift.”

“Oh,” Rogers said. “Well, he didn’t twist your arm, did he?”

Logic always seemed to infuriate Marty. He answered angrily, but obliquely: “You guys think you run this ward. Come on!” he added. “Get on the ball. The Captain’s waiting.”

Rogers ran his hands over his hair, knotted the belt of his maroon bathrobe, and set out briskly for the doctor’s office. Marty, however, called him back.

“Hey, Mac,” he said.

Rogers turned.

“Don’t forget. I want to see you when you’re through there.”

Rogers liked neither small mysteries nor, very much, Marty himself: the boy appeared to take too obvious a pride in being a “character.” There was no particular reason he should want to see Rogers. In any case, Rogers certainly would not escape the ward. Marty would be able to find him whenever he wished. To phrase his request this way might have been simply to emphasize that, as part of the personnel of the medical department, he stood between commissioned authority and the patients. He often assumed a portentous air of jurisdiction over the men. Rogers rather feared that his brusque manner, far from armoring a sensitive and inquiring heart, as legend always has it, might be merely the full expression of a nature weak and callous: bluster often covers a snivel.

Two rows of small rooms faced each other across the hall at the front of the ward. Here were the kitchens, the storerooms, the latrine, the office, and a few rooms with only one bed, reserved for officers or very sick enlisted men. Standing in the hall outside one of these, Rogers saw, was a civilian girl. Theoretically, she should not have been there at all, since hospital regulations precluded visitors at that hour, but there she was, and her presence surprised Rogers a little.

The girl was smoking as she lounged tiredly against the pale wall. She looked in danger of folding up into a dejected huddle, like a dropped puppet. Her rumpled brown slack suit obscured whatever good points her figure might have had. She was very thin. Her best feature must have been her hair, for it was worn long and elaborately dressed, with a towering pompadour in which a white cloth gardenia was pinned. Rogers placed her as the wife of the patient at whose door she stood. As he approached, she stared at him, and he had the sensation that she could not see him at all, that her eyes might register his existence but her mind did not. Uneasy, Rogers looked away.

2

THE Captain was waiting. “Come in, Sergeant,” he said. “ Close the door and sit down. How is it today? Any chills? Any fever?”

The Captain was a large, strong, and friendly man, younger than Rogers.

“I feel all right.”

The Captain tore open a fresh package of Luckies and offered it to Rogers. He took a large kitchen match, struck it recklessly on the bottom of the golden-oak government issue office chair, and they lighted their cigarettes.

“ Well,” said the Captain with distaste, “we’ve got this son of a bitch.” He indicated the information blank lying on the desk before him.

Rogers had already identified it, a four-page case history of the man and his ailments which was filled out anew each time one entered an Army hospital. He had wondered if, for once, he might escape the chore of filling it out.

“I’ve been letting it go,” the Captain said.

Rogers believed he could almost complete the form from memory: —

Sex. Male.

Color. White.

Age. Twenty-nine.

Drink? A little.

Smoke? A pack a day.

Take drugs in any form? No.

Any serious illnesses or broken bones in your childhood? No.

Ever had a venereal disease? No.

Ever wet the bed? No.

Any serious illnesses in your immediate family? None.

Rogers wondered how many such questions he had answered during the past few years — in college, looking for jobs, getting a social security number, and, with infinite multiplication, in the Army. By now every verifiable aspect of his life had been noted and preserved. “They”—Washington, the Army — had it all now, in black and white, that he had been born, and when, and gone to school, and where, worked here, lived there, never married, had learned close order drill at this field, heard the Articles of War at that. How tedious he seemed, this character whose sex was male, whose color was white, whose religion was Protestant, whose blood type was A, who drank a little, smoked moderately, and never wet the bed! And yet there he was, secure in fireproof files in Washington, likely to be around long after his fleshly namesake called it a day; there he lay, shrouded in paper, embalmed in ink, the irreducible Rogers.

“Now,” said the doctor, “you have malaria. Right. How many previous attacks?”

“Three,” Rogers said, and gave him the details.

“Where did you pick it up?”

“In New Guinea.”

“New Guinea,” the doctor said, and entered it on the form. “Pretty rugged over there, huh?”

He considered. It was hot, you were glad you had a job which allowed you to be optimistic about living through the war, you were sick of the stale company of other men, you stumbled through time, somehow confident that some day the key would be turned again, the stopped clock would run.

“Not where I was,” Rogers said.

“See any action?”

“Not really. A few air raids.”

“Marty was over there,” the doctor said.

Surprised, Rogers answered, “Was he? He never told me.”

“Oh, yes. He was there almost a year. Marty’s had it.” The war, he meant, not malaria. “Now tell me what other diseases you’ve had in the Army.”

Loneliness, boredom, and humiliation, Rogers’s mind promptly supplied.

“The times you had to go on sick call,” the doctor said. “I want to know all of them.”

“Well, a cold ’Once or twice. Dengue fever.”

The doctor wrote it down. “Dengue, huh?”

“Yes, I had it in Australia. We all did.”

“How was Austrylia?” the doctor said.

Rogers smiled at the little joke. “Okay,” he said.

“I haven’t been overseas yet.”

Rogers wondered what he was supposed to do. Sympathize ? Congratulate ?

“Well, anything else?”

“No. Oh, once in New Guinea I had a sort of fungus growth on my chest. I don’t know what it was. They treated it with sulfa drugs and after a while it went away.”

“The New Guinea crud,” the doctor said.

Rogers laughed. This was a word that had great circulation in the Army. Rogers did not know its origin. It was applied to any of the loathsome, itching, creeping tropical diseases which, though not serious in themselves, were pretty dismaying when you first met up with them. It was a fine word: the ugly sound of it expressed succinctly the nature of these nasty infections. “I guess so, he said.

“That’s all, then.” The Captain leaned back in his chair.

Well, Captain, no, Rogers thought. He suffered from a shocking and secret affliction, fear. He ticked off the symptoms: his unmanageable apprehension when Margaret’s letters did not appear promptly, though they had to travel ten thousand miles; his distrust of the comfort and care offered him in the hospital, for he was afraid that simple “malaria” would become that fatal thing “my malaria,” the adversary transformed into a pet; his oscillation between two outwardly dissimilar emotional attitudes: on the one hand an unlovely brutal indifference to others, on the other the malady of many ineffectual men, the troubled throat, the misty eye, both of them, to Rogers’s mind, results of a certain emptiness of heart; his notion of the future as an endless unturning corridor; his recurrent fancy that the key had been lost, that the stopped clock would never run.

Thinking over these symptoms, he decided they were absurd, though the disease was not. He did not wish to be forced into a session with the psychiatrists when the relative freedom of normal Army life loomed so near at hand, and some such order might have been the Captain’s prescription. He liked and respected the young doctor, and their relationship was easy, but still he was a doctor, an officer, and therefore a superior being whose reactions were essentially incalculable. Anyhow, what I really want, Rogers thought with contempt, is the touch of Mommy’s soft white hands. Reassurance, not aid. “That’s all, Captain,” he said.

“Well,” the doctor said, “I’ll give you a slip for you to take to the lab. Get up there and have your smears made today. If they turn out all right, you’ll be back on duty in a couple of days. What’s your job?”

“I’m in weather.”

“Like it?”

“Yes.”

“Like the Army?”

“No, sir.”

The Captain smiled. He leaned forward to the desk, screwed the top on his fountain pen. He tossed the questionnaire into a wire basket already full of them. “I spent eight years going to school,” he said. “Four of them at Johns Hopkins. All over the world men are dying. I spend eight hours a day looking up snotty noses.”

He glanced at Rogers and smiled again, a little apologetically. “The Army crud,” he said, reaching out for his stethoscope.

3

AFTER the examination had been completed, Rogers took the scribbled slip (not yet a passport for freedom, but at least the application for one) and went in search of Marty. He found him at the other end of the bay, where a glassed-in porch formed a recreation room. He was about to interrupt a bridge game.

“All right, you guys,” he said. “Break it up.” The players looked up at him.

Marty carried a sheet of paper and a pencil. Rogers was struck with the fragility of his bony little hands. It was hard to remember that Marty was so small. He stood not much over five feet six. And he was thin. He had the spare, tough frame of a man who will cling hungrily to life until he is ninety-six, ninety-seven, and then only release his grip by an act of will. His head was subtly out of proportion to his body; sometimes when he was in a tantrum he had the look of a turtle with no shell to which he might retreat. Yet, Rogers noted, it was a good head, well modeled, and Marty owned a good face, practical and alert, though dour. He wore his thin black hair long and combed straight back from the forehead. Rogers, looking closely at him, saw with renewed surprise another thing about Marty. He was really very young, twenty-one at the most.

Marty explained his business. “Special Services has got the athletic club downtown to let us use their swimming pool this afternoon. They got a big pool down there. You’ll leave at two and be back in time for chow. You don’t need to take nothing with you. For those that don’t go there’ll be a show at onethirty in Ward Six. Now what I want is, you guys that want to go I want your names.”

Three of them signed up immediately.

“How about you, Mac?” the ward boy asked the holdout.

“Well,” said the man, “I’m a black card.”

In the hospital, a colored card placed at the foot of the bed defined the duties and privileges of the patient. He was not only an enlisted man of a certain grade, but also a card of a certain color. Rogers, as a black card, listened with interest to the conversation.

“You can’t go,” Marty said decisively.

“I feel okay,” the man protested.

“That don’t matter. Jeez, can’t you guys read? It’s up on the wall in black and white. ‘Black cards will leave the ward only for meals.’ ” Marty might rail at regulations, but if regulations existed, he wanted them followed to the letter.

“Okay,” the man said. “Forget it.”

“Just use your eyes, Mac. That’s all I ask.”

Just inside the door to the bay, at the very end of that large room, was the bed of a young Negro patient. He was the only man in the ward Rogers envied, for every night from six until eight he had visitors, a Negro girl and woman, his wife and her mother, Rogers assumed. They never missed an evening, and each time they brought gifts a sack of food, a bunch of garden flowers, a roll of comic books. The three of them would withdraw to the screened porch on the south side of the ward, draw three rockers together, and spend the visitors’ hour talking quietly and gayly. When one of the other patients happened to go out on the porch, they would fall silent and look up blankly at the intruder, not at all with hostility, but with the calm self-sufficiency of people who love and trust each other completely.

This boy was now sitting at the side of his bed, rubbing his chest — a favorite gesture — and listening to the plans for the swimming party.

“Hey, Marty,” he said. “I could use a swim. Can I go?”

Marty, pencil poised, turned to him, identified him, rapped the paper sharply with the pencil.

“No,” he said flatly. “You can’t go.”

“I just thought I’d ask. I got a green card.”

“You don’t have to tell me you got a green card,” Marty said. “We just can’t take you.”

“Okay,” said the boy. “I was just asking.”

“You can’t play golf with us, either. And don’t blame us,” Marty went on, with fury and — yes, that was it — misery. “It’s the law of the state.”

The boy rolled back into bed; Marty walked noisily up the aisle; the bridge game was resumed. The boy lifted himself on his elbows and spoke, to no one, in a light high breathless surprised voice. “I ain’t kicked nobody’s tail all this week,” he said. “I sure ain’t.”

Marty approached a group of patients clustered about the radio. Rogers decided not to wait for him. It was past ten and he did not like to delay having the smears made. He tucked the precious slip in his pocket and started to the front door of the ward.

The girl was no longer in the hall. As Rogers passed the door to her husband’s room, he saw her there. As a matter of fact, she lay alongside the boy on the bed, outside the covers. They were kissing. As Rogers went by, they looked up at him with the appalled stare of fish.

Startled, Rogers blundered down the hall. When he reached the door he was laughing to himself. The incident delighted him; it was so contrary to regulations and even decorum.

The many wings of the hospital were widely dispersed. They were linked by narrow and tremendously long corridors. You felt trapped in them, as in the menacing alleys of nightmare. Here was the very architecture of despair. Perhaps these corridors accounted for Rogers’s change of mood as he walked to the laboratory.

That girl in the ward was one of the sort you saw everywhere in the war years — in crowded buses, traveling alone in the transcontinental day coaches; worried, patient, faithful Penelope. Rogers remembered her long, tired, really not very pretty face. Damn her. Penelope sweated out her soldier twenty years; Margaret waited (and did not write) an ocean away in Australia. Why couldn’t this horse-faced little babe, this caricature, confine her silent woes and nasty little intimacies to a private place? Let her try nourishing her love on distance, letters, and memory. She had her husband there, didn’t she? She could touch him, couldn’t she? What did she expect in wartime? Eggs in her beer, Rogers thought, lapsing into meaningless but happily violent Army slang. All these mooning, woebegone, sniveling, waiting women wanted eggs in their beer. They depressed him (and did not write).

4

THE laboratory was neat, orderly, clean, sensible, flooded with sun. He was glad to get there. The boy on duty read the slip.

“Hold out your hand,” he ordered. Rogers did. The boy pricked his finger. A drop of blood welled up and hung there, a soft ruby. The boy transferred it to a glass slide.

“I know you,” he said. “I worked on your slides before. We got the best malaria specimens from you we’ve ever had in the hospital,” he added, and Rogers felt a pleasant glow of distinction. “Like to see one? I’ll show you in a minute.”

He handed Rogers a wad of alcohol-soaked cotton for his finger. He opened a cabinet, found a slide, and inserted it in the microscope. He looked through the eyepiece and adjusted the focus. “There,” he said at last, standing back. “I think you can see it now. They’re the little round things shaped like signet rings.”

A good soldier learns all he can about his enemy; Rogers peered curiously into the instrument. After a moment he discovered them, the minute circular parasites which had invaded his blood. They were harmless-looking, even ornamental, little devils. He felt the dismay of a giant overwhelmed by pygmies.

“We’ll have these out this afternoon,” the boy said, as Rogers thanked him.

His spirits were somewhat higher as he returned to the ward.

The girl had resumed her vigil outside the door to her husband’s room. As if in penance for his unkind thoughts, Rogers stopped and addressed her. “ How is he, your husband?” he asked. “Is he better?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her twangy little voice was walking a tightrope over tears. She was not actually so plain, merely thin and tired. She had an astonishingly fine complexion and wore no powder. There were pale smudges of blue beneath her eyes, not from fatigue but from youth. “They’re in there now,” she said, and nodded.

Rogers glanced into the room and saw the Captain and a major there. The patient lay pale-faced and staring. His hair had been freshly combed.

“He’ll be all right,” Rogers said, baselessly, out of the need to say something, anything. “I wouldn’t worry.”

“Oh, I don’t,” she said, and the brave, patent lie made Rogers smile.

“Good,” he said.

Abruptly, she blushed — so painfully that Rogers felt his own yellow cheeks hot with sympathy. “About a while ago,” she said. “I saw you when you passed. It wasn’t my idea. He just wanted me to. I didn’t want to do it, but he insisted.”

“Sure,” Rogers said. “Don’t bother about it.”

“He’s been overseas two years. We’ve had just ten days together since he got back. He’s been in the hospital ever since.” Her voice was wobbling.

Then the welcome, the blessed, Marty emerged from the kitchen. “Hey,” he said to Rogers, “where have you been ? ”

Rogers gave the girl a false smile of good-bye and turned thankfully to the ward boy. “I’ve been to the lab to have smears made.”

“That’s all right, then. Getting out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so. What did you want with me, by the way?”

“Me? I didn’t want nothing.”

“You said you did.”

Marty remembered. “Oh, that. I wondered if I could take a look at your book if you’re through with it.”

“Book? Pettersen?”

“That Aussie book.”

“Oh.” Rogers had momentarily forgotten that, in the Army, magazines were “books.” “Sure. Why did you bother to ask? Come on back, we’ll get it now.”

And avoiding any further look at the stricken girl, he accompanied Marty down the hall to the bay.

The magazine Marty wished to borrow was a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly. For some reason, this unlikely publication had had a wide circulation in the Army camps of the Southwest Pacific. Often, hungry for print, Rogers had read it from cover to cover, from a wartime recipe for lamb curry to a new and smart way to knit an afghan. He had laughed about it with Margaret; now she occasionally sent him a copy as a reminder.

Marty took the magazine and thanked Rogers for it. He sat down on the bed opposite him.

“This’ll give me something to read tonight.” He shook his head. “Twenty-one bloody hours to go.”

“You asked for it. What are you bitching about?”

“I was a jerk. There ought to be some easier way to earn three and a half.”

Rogers was a little surprised. His own outfit worked rotating shift and there was a good deal of trading, but he had never hoard that anyone asked, or paid, money for the favor. It gave a rather mercenary air to what should be a friendly transaction.

“This way,” Marty explained, “next week I get two days off and I get the dough, too.”

“What are you crying about, then?”

“I need the money,” Marty said sadly, as if this were explanation enough. He glanced at the magazine.

“I ain’t seen one of these in a long time,” he remarked.

“My girl sends it to me.”

“You got a girl over there, huh?”

“Yes. We’re going to be married, after the duration.”

“Some of them were pretty nice, those Aussie chicks. I figured you was over there somewhere first time I see you. You got that atabrine tan. You look as yellow as a window shade with the sun behind it. I had it myself when I come back. I went over in January, ‘42. Jeez, I’ll never forget the day we landed.”

“No. They’re wonderful people.”

“Too right,” Marty said. He fingered the magazine. “Was you ever in Rocky?”

“A couple of times. I just passed through.”

“I was wondering if you ever knew a GI named Krupnick that was stationed there before he went to Guinea.”

“I was only there a few minutes each time.”

“He was a tall, skinny guy with pants that always sagged. He was a corporal. I just thought maybe you might of run into him.”

“No,” Rogers said. “I don’t think I did.”

“Those Aussie chicks they really went for Krupnick. He was married and had two kids but it didn’t bother him none. What a bastard!” he said admiringly. “We used to buddy together. He was a Polack or something like that, I don’t know. I guess he saved my life once; he was always doing some damn thing. He was over six feet. Over there he grew a mustache, great big curly black thing, waxed the ends. Tall guy, always laughing. You must of seen him.”

“No,” Rogers said. “I’m sure. You know how it is. You don’t know many fellows but your friends.”

“Oh, sure,” Marty conceded unwillingly. He added: “I guess nobody much remembers Krupnick now except me.”

His face looked as if his mind were attacking an unsolvable and offensive problem.

“What about him?” Rogers asked.

“Krupnick? Nothing.”

“Where is he now?”

“Oh, he’s dead.”

“That’s rough.”

“As a cob,” Marty said negligently. “Thanks for the book.”

“Marty,” Rogers remembered to ask, “was there any mail for me this morning?”

“No.”

“It’s come?”

“Sure.”

“And I didn’t get anything?”

“No.”

Marty walked down the aisle brandishing the magazine, which he had rolled into a tube, as if it were a stick he was using to ward off an attack by phantom beasts.

Watching him go, Rogers wondered about the mysterious Krupnick, who, unattractive as he sounded, had meant so much to the ward boy.

Then, primed by the familiar names and the use of Australian idioms which had clung like burrs to the speech of the resentful GI tourists, it came; the torrent of memory, longing, and fear he had managed to hold in check all that morning. Contemptuously now it swept over his weak dikes of logic, detachment, and common sense. It had not begun to subside when another patient, robe flying, arms waving, rushed down the aisle of the bay rejoicing at the punctual miracle of the hour: —

“Hey, you guys!” he shouted. “Chow!”

5

THE trees shook music from their leaves, the moon rose with the sound of flutes, the river stirred with the throb of cellos. Tenderly the Boy embraced the Girl; wistfully he sang of his love for her; gently, at the end of thirty-two bars, he kissed her. He kissed her; the trees smiled with the violins, the moon was an exultant trumpet, joyfully the restless river drummed approval.

This tawdry episode brought Rogers to the edge of his seat. As the Boy sang, silently he sang too; when the boy’s hand tightened on the Girl’s soft back, Rogers’s hand gripped the greasy wood of the folding chair in front of him.

That morning he had planned to spend the afternoon reading, but the promise of release from the hospital and his chagrin at receiving no mail had made him restless. He had decided to attend the showing of the movie in Ward Six. He had been overseas nearly two years; he must have seen as many B movies as any man alive, but he needed distraction.

Sitting in the half-dark ward among the other lounging patients, he discovered that his stratagem had succeeded beyond expectation. When the restive camera, turning to Mexico, broke the spell, the dismayed Rogers found stinging sentimental tears in his eyes.

He settled back in his chair. At the end of the reel, he slipped out of the room.

What an extraordinary reaction! he thought. I’m not that lonely. Space can be bridged. War ends some day. He started down the long, empty corridor for his own ward.

He had taken only a few steps before the real cause of his weakness announced itself. His thighs started to ache sharply, and he was for a moment so nauseated he had to stop and lean against the wall for support.

That fool disease! Another night of illness before the atabrine could suppress the parasites. Another week of tedium in the hospital. He had no illusions as to the weight of his contribution to the war — a sergeant in the Air Force was surely the ultimate in anonymity — but his job was interesting, and he had looked forward to getting back to work. No work now; just the job of facing the questionable future, the menacing isolation, without even the weapon of routine. His mind felt as if it had sprawled down a flight of stairs. He began to shiver with the premonitory stirrings of the attack.

He resumed his sluggish pilgrimage to the ward, which now loomed as a faraway haven at the end of the dreadful corridors. Frequently it was necessary for him to stop to regain some slight control of his trembling body.

He had the disordered gait of a drunk as he trudged down the halls. After what seemed to him a week of struggle, he reached the ward and opened the door. This was nightmare. Somewhere he had taken the wrong turning and had come to the wrong place. Baffled, tired, he closed the door.

He glanced around the corridor to orient himself. Doing so, he noticed the numerals on the door facing and discovered that he had been right after all. It was his ward. Puzzled, he reopened the door.

Since all the wards looked alike, it took little to distinguish or disguise them. Rogers found that his bewilderment had been due to a slight change in the appearance of the ward made since he had left for the movies. At one of the private rooms, bright red “No Smoking” signs had been tacked up. An olive-drab gas cylinder stood against the wall. It had taken so little to mislead him.

The significance of the changes did not hit him until he was almost at the door of the room. He looked inside.

The oxygen tent, of rubber, fabric, and plastic, obscured the boy’s face. Rogers had only the impression of tousled hair and half-closed eyes. The patient’s body was bare to the waist. His shoulders were so thin, his flesh so youthfully clear and rosy, that Rogers felt a twinge of anger. He had so little with which to fight disease; why wasn’t he stronger? His slender hands lay half-curled at his sides, like a sick child’s. Why weren’t they fists?

The Captain sat watching the boy. He did not turn as Rogers stopped outside the door.

The girl was nowhere in evidence. Rogers did not worry the thought; he was thankful he could not see her long, piteous face.

Irrepressible shivers reminded him of his own plight. He walked down the aisle to the wonderful bed. There were no other patients in the bay. Still wearing his robe, he lay down and pulled his blanket over him.

Soon the shuddering became uncontrollable and continuous. His body ached. It was icy. His mind seethed with helpless anger. He had been attacked unfairly.

Marty, wandering down the aisle with a dustpan in his hand, was the first to discover Rogers’s condition. He stared at him a moment. Without asking questions, he went away and returned with more blankets, great warm hands of comfort. The doctor appeared. He carried a glass and three of the brilliant yellow little atabrine tablets.

“Take these,” he said.

“I can’t,” Rogers managed to say. His damned teeth were chattering. “I can’t keep them down.”

“You can try.”

That morning Rogers had been on easy terms with the doctor. Now he hated him. The arid, but neat and spacious, world of thought and observation he had built for himself against the terrors of loneliness and despair had, at the first casual nudge of the cold fingers of his malady, collapsed. The doctor was no longer someone to watch, judge, respect. He was impersonal and unreasonable authority. Furious, Rogers obediently swallowed the pills. Seconds later, as he had predicted, he — Rogers the Looker-on, who appeared most often to himself as a free, impartial, and not unintelligent man — was as impetuously sick as a puppy.

“Oh, my,” the doctor said mildly.

Rogers looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had elapsed since he had left the movie — so long does it take to strip a man of his flimsy dignities.

“We’ll try again later,” the doctor said.

“I’ll be all right.” And somehow the certainty that his illness was not at all serious, that really he would be all right, only intensified his exasperation at it.

The Captain left Rogers to Marty’s care.

“Feeling crook, huh?” Marty said in a cheerful voice, apparently more happy at the rediscovery of the Australian phrase than sympathetic toward Rogers.

“Go away, will you?” Rogers said unreasonably. Marty left him.

The chill would continue possibly two hours before the warm tide of fever would first alleviate it and then supersede it with a nastiness of its own. The time stretched before him like an endless ribbon, like the future, like the straight corridors of nightmare.

Marty returned with hot-water bottles. He placed them close to Rogers’s shuddering body. They did well by their patients here: Rogers was covered by eight woolen blankets, the hot-water bottles nestled like little warm dogs at his back and stomach and feet. It was not enough; the shivering continued.

Up the ward a radio was playing, as it always did, at top volume. It was in its way as insistent as the shaking which possessed Rogers. The twentieth century knew music such as Mozart, the jerk, never dreamed of: —

Rogers drew his head under the blankets, a turtle with a woolen shell. Relentlessly, the radio penetrated there: —

Rogers was so miserable that it did not occur to him to ask Marty to change the program (switching the radio off altogether was a concession offered only to death). His shuddering increased in violence until, farcically, the steel bed started to jingle under the weight of his straining body. This offered an accompaniment to the idiot refrain: —

Rogers turned back the covers and looked at his watch. Three minutes had passed.

“Mildred,” the radio suddenly demanded, “have you noticed a change in my complexion lately?”

The garrulous thing answered itself: “Why yes, Leota, I had. It is so fresh, so silky firm. How do you do it, Leota?” “Goodness, Mildred, it’s no secret. I simply take Sabes every day.” “You mean that wonderful new laxative preparation that people everywhere are talking about, Leota?” “Yes, Mildred. Safe, mild and effective, Sabes comes in three different sized packages.” “What did you say the name was, Leota?” “Sabes, the last two letters of U.S.A., the first three of best. You can buy it at any drugstore. Simply ask your druggist for Sabes. Don’t forget — the last two letters of U.S.A., the first three of best. Why, where are you going, Mildred?” “I’m going right down to the drugstore, Leota, to buy myself a package of Sabes.”

Listening helplessly to this colloquy, shivering in the noisy bed, Rogers found laughter.

The other patients returned from the movie and, later, the swimming party. To Rogers their casual voices blended with that of the radio and made a single Voice, an adversary. Presently they left for the evening meal.

It was about this time that the doctor came to tell Rogers that the laboratory had made its report on the smears. The result was, of course, already apparent.

6

THE others came back from supper. Rogers caught part of a conversation: —

“I guess he’s had it.”

“The guy in the room? He’s pretty sick.”

“She’s been through the wringer, all right.”

“Yes. Rough.”

So the girl must be back at her sentry duty. Stupid. What did she hope to accomplish? Patience was irrelevant to the struggle beneath the monstrous helmet. How did she see it? That her own tenacity might flow, a sort of moral osmosis, into the unprepared pink torso? She was wrong, that girl. Actually, it was appalling that she should be allowed to loiter there. It gave you a creepy feeling. Couldn’t she get it through her long head that her husband was going to die? (Rogers, his fever rising, was sure of it.)

Indignant, he scrambled from the bed and lurched down the aisle. The offensive creature stood exactly as he had seen her first that morning, slumped wearily against the white wall. She was not, however, smoking. Her hands were clenched into tight fists.

There she stood, and she was Margaret, she was Penelope, she was all the obdurate waiting women. In common decency, he needed words to tell her that he understood; that when her husband died she would not mourn alone; that he, too, a stranger, was involved in the struggle beneath the helmet.

This maudlin intention was interrupted by a question he did not catch. It was repeated: —

“And just what do you think you’re doing?”

He looked at the speaker. It was a small, squarejawed woman in white who stood directly before him, as unexpectedly as if she had suddenly materialized there. She was a sturdy and businesslike person. He had never, to his recollection, seen her before.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know you. Who are you?”

“I’m the night nurse.” He had seen her every night of the previous week. “You’re Rogers, aren’t you? You’re not allowed up. What are you doing out of bed?”

“I just wanted to see about him,” Rogers said, and indicated the sick man’s room.

“And what good did you think that would do, I’d like to know?”

“No good. No good at all,” Rogers said. The waiting girl had been listening incuriously to the argument. She stared at Rogers now with some surprise, then shrugged her shoulders and went into her husband’s room. Rogers realized that his behavior had been rather erratic.

The nurse had her own explanation. “Listen, Sergeant,” she said. “If you need to go to the latrine, just tell the ward boy. He’ll bring a bedpan.”

Rogers’s inner turbulence boiled into speech: —

“I know. I’m not a child. My name is Sergeant Rogers, I’m a soldier, I’m an enlisted man, I’m a serial number, I’m a card at the foot of my bed, I’m a light case of malaria. I have a first name, and it’s Jerry, but no one knows it. That boy’s dying, and there’s only one little girl between him and death and I want to tell her I’m sorry.”

The nurse listened with interest and no trace of alarm. “The boy is not dying, Sergeant,” she said. “You can lower your voice when you speak to me. And you can get back to bed. You’re behaving like a fool.”

She was absolutely right, and the knowledge did little to restore Rogers’s composure. The aching throat, the misty eye. He hunted for an answer.

The nurse’s temper was rising. “Are you going back to bed, right now, or shall I call the Officer of the Day?”

Rogers denied her a complete victory. The door to the latrine was close at hand. Impulsively he dodged into that sanctuary. He heard the nurse’s footsteps click up the hall toward the office. He wondered if he might have to face a court-martial as a result of the distasteful incident. He rested his head on the littered shelf above the washbasins and fought for self-control.

After a moment, Marty entered the latrine. “Hey,” he said, “you want to get busted? That old bag was ready to throw the book at you, but I talked her out of it. You better get back to bed.”

“I just wanted to know how that boy was. That’s no crime, is it?”

“What’s he to you?”

“Nothing. I don’t even know his name. I just hate to think that he’s being so sick.”

“Jeez,” Marty said. “Get your head out. What of it? Scared he’ll die? Why should you blow your top? They do it every day. Half the guys I graduated from high school with, they’re dead. My girl friend’s two brothers they both got theirs in Normandy the same day. You’re bucking for a section eight, Mac.”

“I’m just old-fashioned,” Rogers said savagely. “It matters to me.” But Marty was right.

Marty went on: “Besides, pneumonia you can pick up in an air-conditioned movie. All over the world guys are getting killed and you stand here stewing over some jerk that probably didn’t have sense enough to get out of the rain. I don’t get it. Save your sympathy for somebody’s got real troubles. Look at that guy I knew, Krupnick, that I told you about. He didn’t have to go on that task force. My name was on the orders when they first come out but the sad bastard talked the CO out of it and got his on because I was about to get shacked up with a babe over there and he wanted to do me a favor. Brother, did he do me a favor! lie got his name on orders one morning, the plane took off that night, and before midnight the Navy was calling up to say they was sorry but they just happened to shoot down one of our ships. No more Krupniek.”

“Oh, God, Marty, I’m sorry,” Rogers said.

Marty slapped his hands together loudly, as meaningful a comment on inexplicable fate as any other.

“So you’re sorry,” he said. “Let’s get back to bed before she gets the OD on both of us.”

And Rogers let himself be led, a captured mongrel, out of the latrine and, before the eyes of the triumphant, sensible nurse, back to his bed.

“About that guy up there,” Marty said. “He’s a lot better. He’ll be all right.”

“Thanks.”

7

MALARIA is a punctual disease. Rogers’s attacks started around two o’clock in the afternoon, reached their climax of delirious fever at nine or ten. By midnight he would be resting fairly comfortably. The next morning only a splitting headache and a nerveless weakness would remind him of the seizure. At two the following afternoon, if the disease was not tended, nausea and mental depression would herald its recurrence.

It was nearly eight when Marty led him back to bed. His temperature then stood at 104 degrees. There it stayed for almost an hour, then resumed its climb, reaching, for a few minutes after ten o’clock, 106.4 degrees; Rogers was then, momentarily anyhow, a very sick man. When the fever fell, it fell rapidly, and before midnight was only a shade above normal.

Rogers was not fully conscious throughout the period. He knew that his temperature was being taken, recognized the nurse, a kindly creature now, as she removed some of the intolerable blankets. Further physical wanderings were impossible. He saw Marty make occasional trips to his bedside and spoke to him, but he had almost completely lost contact with actuality: he was in Peru.

The hallucinatory visions which accompany the fever of malaria are like all other dreams, full of vivid and intricate symbols. Rogers in his reading had picked up the phrase “the Peruvian mountains.” In his fever he journeyed over the jagged equatorial heights, and with him were all the people who had occupied his attention that day: Margaret, the girl in the hall, the nurse, the doctor, Marty.

The stinking, sweating yellow animal that he had become remained in the bed in the hospital: it was an impalpable Rogers who sought lost cities and the truth. He added Margaret and the girl in the hall, and the equation equaled Penelope. Marty cried his bewildered pain to him, the doctor ripped from his strong face a suffocating mask; finally a new day dawned, serene, brilliant, and cool, on the pallid heights. Rogers trembled with wonder and humility at complex miracles which, waking presently, he forgot.

It was almost midnight when he did wake. A soft radiance lay on the ceiling of the ward. It was unreal, a sort of stage trick, merely the reflection of a street lamp, but its artificiality made it, for Rogers, no less enchanting. To lie in the dark bed and gaze at the luminous ceiling was like being at the shadowy bottom of a deep pool looking at the sunlit surface above.

Rogers heard his name whispered. “Rogers, you awake?”

“Yes.”

Marty’s fingers made a fragile cage of coral for his flashlight. “I’ve brought you fresh pajamas,” he said.

The bed and his clothing were damp with sweat. “Thanks,” Rogers said.

“How goes it?”

“I’m okay now.”

“A letter come for you this afternoon.” He dug in his pocket and handed it to Rogers. The flashlight showed the familiar beloved handwriting, the “Par Avion” air-mail sticker.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Need anything else?”

“I could use some ice water.”

“Coming up.”

Rogers changed into the rough, clean pajamas. Far down the ward the radio was still going, turned as low as possible, like the stir of an insect. Its owner slept heedless of the sound.

Marty returned with the water. He handed it to Rogers.

“Seven bloody hours to go,” he said, as Rogers drank.

“Tell me something, Marty,” Rogers said. “Why do you need money so bad?”

“My two days off,” Marty said. “I’m going to see my kids.”

“I didn’t know you were married.”

“I ain’t,” Marty replied with whispered truculence. “They ain’t my kids. They’re Krupnick’s.” He noticed the radio. “Those damn guys,” he said. He went to switch it off, but before he did, listened a moment to a tiny voice retailing the news of the hour. All was going well, the armies were advancing, a battle had been won, the cost was not excessive.