Ed pulled himself through the pain on his own. On the table in front of him was a cold glass of Pepsi. Ice all the way up to the top, and then the Pepsi poured over it, that was the way to do it. Let the foam settle, and then fill the glass right to the rim, a tiny fountain of carbon-dioxide bubbles dancing briefly in the center. The Pepsi was really cold, and condensation ran down the side of the glass. It sat there untouched. He couldn’t drink it now, because the pain made him nauseous. He would drink it when his leg stopped shaking. He would get an ice-cold drink, he promised himself, when he stopped crawling.
Pain is not the same as damage to your body — just as you can be injured and feel no pain, you can also feel pain even though you have no detectable injury. Pain is just one small part of what’s happening to you. You’d be so much wiser if you could see the whole picture.
Take a look at your healed stump. Pain is useless to it. The time for action is past: it’s too late to avoid or reverse the damage. The muscles have been cut, the nerves have been severed, the bone has been sawn, above the knee in your case, and a flap of skin has been folded and stitched. When they were cut, the nerves first sent out a message of massive injury and then, after a time, they began to put out new fibers. The endings of the nerve sprouts tangle and loop, and they find themselves in a very different area, chemically, than where they used to end. The inflammation is gone. The wound has healed — indeed, it’s been healed a long time. But to the nerve endings, there is still something seriously amiss. They fire repeatedly, sometimes massively. They overreact to ordinary signals. A gentle touch to an unmarked area of skin may stab or burn or throb. Different people will respond differently, but every stump, not just yours, will have areas of exquisite sensitivity.
Look at this map of your brain. See these parts here and here that are working so hard? That one is the sensory cortex and this one is the motor cortex: their nerve cells are especially busy when you’re feeling pain. Now look over here, and you’ll see more action going on, in other cortical areas of the frontal lobes, in the midbrain, in the anterior cingulate, in the hypothalamus, and in the cerebellum. Someone reading a map of your brain might think that you were planning to jump out of the way of something, because of all the activity here in the motor cortex, the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum. But no, you’re just sitting there, suffering the usual steady throb in that damaged nerve.
Memory is not so different. Bits of your life and thought are stored all over your brain and chemically connected to one another. You experience a memory, say the thwack of a football hitting your hand as you scrimmage with your brother in the street on a fall afternoon, and suddenly you can smell the flowers at his funeral, ten years later. The funerals all are linked together — your brother, your mother, your child. Memory gives an innocent stimulus in an unmarked area a chemistry you can neither understand nor erase.
Ed was sitting in a chair, looking at a cartoon in a little movie-box that looked like an upright radio. In the cartoon, a kangaroo sat at a table with a checkered tablecloth. A waitress came up to take his order. The kangaroo said he wanted a Narragansett lager beer. This was bizarre but familiar. He’d seen kangaroos in Adelaide, at the zoo: they really looked like that. Half human, half animal, the ideal subject for a cartoon. Ed was going to be a cartoonist when he finished art school. The cartoon waitress brought the kangaroo his beer and set it down in front of him. There was more dialog, but Ed wasn’t really listening: he was dissecting the cartoonist’s style. Great brushwork, great command of line. This was really good stuff. Then the waitress snapped her gum and said, “Say! How do I know you’re not just a guy in a kangaroo suit?” Ed leaned forward to catch the rest. The kangaroo looked up at the waitress, raised one eyebrow, and said, “You don’t. How do I know you’re not a kangaroo in a girl suit?” Then the Narragansett logo appeared. It was a beer commercial.
Ed wanted a cold beer. A Narragansett would be fine.
His right leg was broken, that was for sure. It just dragged. He could use his left leg, though it was full of shrapnel, as a prod to help push himself forward. He moved like a worm in the mud, inching along in the faint path of the guy in front, the guy who had been wounded in the neck. That guy was getting way ahead of him. Must be easier to crawl if you’re wounded in the neck.
There was no shooting here now, no mortar. The fighting was somewhere else: he could hear it move off. Maybe the mortar fire that hit him had wiped out the guys that were shooting at him. Whose mortar had it been, Japanese or American? The Japanese had captured the gun and turned it on Ed and his buddies as they brought ammunition, and then the mortar started. Maybe the Japanese had been wiped out by their own mortar, mistaken for Yanks because they were shooting a Yankee gun. Or maybe they had run out of ammunition and been taken out by the Yanks, and the shrapnel in his leg was government issue. They should have waited until I delivered the ammo, he thought, before opening fire. The joke was on them.
The joke was on him, too. As he had approached the gun, he had heard it firing, and he yelled, “I’m a marine! Don’t shoot!” The Japs had turned the gun right on him. Maybe they didn’t speak English.
Ed raised his head to see where he was going. Watch your head, he thought. There was a marine nearby, prone in the grass. So still, so quiet, he hadn’t even known the guy was there. Only the guy’s eyes were moving, sweeping from left to right. His gun was pointed in front of him. Snipers? The guy tensed and fired right past him. The shooter didn’t speak or even move as Ed crawled past, following the almost-invisible trail.
He could use a beer, he thought again. Brown long-neck bottle. Cold, just pulled from a tub of ice. There probably wasn’t a tub of ice for 1500 miles. There were drops of water on the outside of the bottle, and it was starting to get cloudy from the humidity. His fingers left prints on the glass. He flipped the cap with his pocket knife. The bottle was so cold. He was about to take a gulp, but he needed to crawl just a little bit forward.
Ed was leaning on wooden crutches that supported him under his armpits. He was standing in a small, bright bedroom. Twin beds, yellow walls, white trim. A girl’s room. Sunlight streamed through the windows. There was a child lying in one of the beds, covered with a cheerful yellow blanket. He’d seen her before — she was about ten or eleven now, with her straight brown hair still in a dutch-boy cut. Her face was puffy, and she was breathing in intermittent gasps. Her skin was almost transparent, and he could see the veins blue beneath it. Katie was sitting on the bed next to her, holding her hand. The child’s gasps came more slowly. Katie’s face — it was Katie, really, he knew — was desolate. There was nothing he could do. There was no way to pull himself past this, or make Katie feel any better, or help the dying child. There was no cold drink that could reward him if he made it through, and there would be no cold drink to reward the little girl.
He was so confused. How had he ended up so far away from the jungle? Could he please get back to the jungle?
When you are injured suddenly, you may not immediately feel pain. You may have higher priorities than caring for your wound. You may need to get yourself out of the jungle, away from the people who are shooting.
This is not an unusual reaction. It is not even necessarily a human reaction. Dogs do it, horses do it, deer do it. You will have plenty of time to feel the pain later, when you’re having dinner with your family, perhaps, or working alone at the drawing board, late at night.