Like a lightning flash, it comes to him: the Army rescued him, as that bull walrus Thomas promised. A medic parachuted down with impressive precision to assess Cooper’s injury. “Oh, baby, this looks bad,” the medic said, at which point Cooper, in shamed defense, tried to explain how he had carefully ministered to his wound but to no avail. The medic didn’t seem to be listening. Slapping at the radio on his harness, he said, “We got to get him out of here, man.”
They pulled Cooper up in a rescue harness, into the bowels of a thundering Black Hawk chopper, which had followed the HN-130 Hercules out to the island. Then they flew him straight to Kwajalein. And so—ironically—he arrived at his destination ten days earlier than he had planned. At Kwajalein’s modest hospital, a young internist examined the wound, found it gangrenous, and called for an immediate amputation. An IV’d sedative was already leaking into Cooper’s left arm when the doctor told him, “I’m sorry, buddy, but this is a simple thing. It’s your leg or your life.”
It all happened so fast, Cooper could hardly focus on the urgency of this request. Leg or life. Wasn’t there another choice?
As soon as Cooper signed the waiver, the doctor suited up, the orderly radioed Hono Army Hospital for some virtual consultation, two nurses prepped Cooper, and that was that. While the GP talked to the Hono doctor, sometimes cracking a bad joke (“This time I’m a leg up on you, Chuck. . . .”) Cooper felt himself swinging in the rescue harness. Everything below him—the little island, the islanders, Harold-the-mayor, the big bearded Thomas—grew smaller, as if he were a movie camera receding for the picture’s closing shot, framed between his two dangling feet.
His feet. He tries to look at his feet but can’t raise his head. He is alone, he realizes, in a room whose door is open to the hallway. A strap as wide as a seatbelt holds him to the bed. Two IV bags are dripping into him, one on each restrained arm. He calls for a nurse. His voice seems to rise from behind him, slurred and syrupy.
If he weren’t so stoned, he would yell. But as frantic as he thinks he should be, his mind won’t rise to the alarm. At last a nurse arrives. She says, “It’s about time you woke up!” She goes straight to his IVs and turns them off.
“How long have I been out?”
“Three days!” Now she’s unplugging his arms, pressing adhesive bandages to the holes.
“No fucking way.”
“Way!”
He can’t read her name tag. She is a short, thick-boned blonde, in her late twenties, with a bunny-small nose, full cheeks, and pink-framed eye glasses that look too big for her face. If she were in the States, she’d live in an apartment complex by the interstate. Maybe newly divorced with a kid and dreams of a Carnival Cruise vacation. She says her name is Inez. He asks her what drugs he is on. Morphine, she tells him. Tomorrow it will be Demerol, then a transition to Tylox.
“I’m so fucking high!” he says.
“That’s how it’s supposed to be,” she says. “But you’re all right—right?”
“I’m scared shitless,” he says, “but I don’t feel scared shitless except in a really far-out disconnected way.”
“If you want scary,” she says, “I got plenty of things to tell you.”
“About my leg?” he asks.
“About the world,” she says. “I hear you’ve been on a boat for, like, a year.”
“No, not that long,” he says.
“Maybe you don’t know what’s going on any more.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever really known what’s going on,” he says. It’s supposed to be a joke, but Nurse Inez doesn’t seem to get it.
She says, “Should I tell you all the news?”
“Is it good news?” He attempts a smile and discovers, with alarm, that he can’t feel his face.
“Nothing good happening these days,” she says brightly. “More than 500 of our boys are dead in Iraq so far. Still nobody’s found any weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqis think we’re dominators, not liberators. I bet you didn’t hear about the guy they beheaded.”
“Beheaded?” Cooper pushes himself up a bit. Did he hear right?
“I’ve got the video at home,” she says eagerly. “It’s awful.”
“You’ve got a video of a beheading?”
“I didn’t take it!” she says, holding up one latex-gloved hand as if to swear an oath. “It was all over the news.”
“Who beheaded who? And why?”
“It’s war, Mr. Davies. That kind of thing happens in war.”
“I know we’re at war,” he stammers, “but how in the hell—”
“It’s craziness,” she says. “The Arabs caught an American reporter and cut his head off because they’re angry. Everybody’s angry. Especially about the prison scandal. President Bush gave a speech yesterday and he mispronounced it three times. Even that made people angry.”
“Mispronounced what?”
“Abu Ghraib. Is that so hard to say? Go ahead, say it after me. Ah-boo Gray-b.”
“Abu Ghraib.”
“That’s right. You’re going to be a good patient.” Then she winks at him. “I’ve got pictures of the Abu Ghraib atrocities—all of them—which I downloaded from the internet. If you want I’ll bring them in.”
Has the world slipped off its axis while he was sailing across the Pacific?
“No, thank you! Maybe I should nap,” he says, desperate to get away from her gleeful gloom.
“Okay, Mr. Davies.” She snaps off one glove, then the other. “You want me to read your cards to you?”
“I got cards?” Suddenly he is very hungry. “Someone I know?”
“Who do you know on Kwajalein?” She says this in good humor, but it is a reality check. He can’t quite grasp that he is on an island 4250 miles west of California. He’s been alone on his boat for so long, he has simply assumed that now, landed at last, he would be within reach of anybody, everybody. But he’s not in reach. He’s out here, on a sand speck in the middle of the Pacific.
Nurse Inez reads him the notes, the first from his co-workers, a card whose photo shows a group of orangutans piled onto a hospital bed: “What some people won’t do to get out of work!” the caption reads. “We’re thinking of you, Cooper. Keeping your seat warm in the quad. See you soon. Your A-team.” Then a crowd of signatures. Inez reads every name. Eight in all. The other note—from the Colonel, the island’s “governor”—is handwritten on impressive letterhead, The United States seal in one corner, the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site seal in the other.
“Dear Cooper, we are thankful that you are safe and sound,” the Colonel writes. “The doctor tells me you are going to be fine. We look forward to welcoming you into our little community. I will drop around soon to visit. Until then, I am yours sincerely, Colonel ‘Sandy’ Sanderson.”
Later, after dozing off and on, gazing at the stripes of sunlight across the room, and wondering about his boat, where the fuck is his boat?, Inez returns to help him with the bedpan. Only then, as he leans to one side while she snugs the pan into his crotch, only then does he see his stump, the bandaged nub pressing into the mattress. He nearly pukes at the sight of it. But he doesn’t puke because he’s convinced suddenly that it’s not really him. His leg is still there. He can feel it. So this stump, with its intermittent hotwire of pain, this stump is not his. It’s like a loaner. Until they return his leg.
After Inez