“How? What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Marco looked as though he was just beginning to understand what Raymond was talking about, almost but not quite.
“You have to charge yourself with falsifying your report that led to me getting the Medal of Honor and you’ll have to demand that the Army investigate whether or not that was done in collusion with the men of the patrol. That’s all there is to it.”
“They wouldn’t be able to comprehend such a thing. A Medal of Honor—why, a Medal of Honor is a sacred thing to the Army, Raymond. I mean—I—Jesus, the roof would come off the Pentagon.”
“Sure! That’s what I’m saying! Throw it wide open! If the Army can’t understand, then, what the hell, believe me, Iselin’ll understand. He’ll get you off the hook.”
“No. No, never.”
“It’s got to be done the sensational way just to make sure it’s done and that the Army doesn’t get to sit on another ridiculous mistake and let you stay sick like this. What would they care? You’re expendable. But they made a hero out of me so I’m not expendable. They couldn’t take back a mistake as big as this one.”
“Raymond, listen. If it wasn’t for those Soviet generals and those Chinese in that dream, I’d be willing to be expendable.”
“All right. That’s your problem.”
“But with the chance, just the sick chance that there may be such an enormous security risk involved I have to make them dig into this thing. You’re right, Raymond. I have to. I have to.”
“Why should I have gotten a Medal of Honor? I can’t even remember being in the action. I remember the facts about the action, sure. But I don’t remember the action.”
“Talk about it. Keep talking about it. Please.”
“Well, look. Let’s reconstruct. We’re on the patrol. You’ll be at the center of that line and I’ll be off on their right flank. You know? It will be dark. I’ll yell out to you, ‘Captain! Captain Marco! Get me some light twenty yards ahead at two o’clock!’ And you’ll yell back, ‘You got it, kid,’ and very soon a flare will break open and I’ll pour on some enfilade fire on their column and, as everyone who reads comic books knows, I am a very good shooter. I’ll start to move in on them and I’ll take up one of their own heavy machine guns as I go and I’ll move eight of their own grenades up ahead of me as I move along.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Marco said. “But you don’t remember doing all those things.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Raymond answered irritably and impatiently. “Every time I’m directed to think about the action I always know what will happen exactly, but I never get to the place where it actually happens.”
“Do you remember anything about a blackboard? Chinese instructors?”
“No.”
“Memory drills? Anything about a movie projection room and animated cartoons with a sound track in English and a lot of Chinese guys standing around?”
“No.”
“You must have gotten a better brainwashing than I did. Or Melvin.”
“Brainwashing?” Raymond did not like that note. He could not abide the thought of anybody tampering with his person so he rejected the entire business then and there. Others, told the same set of conjectures, might have been fired into action or challenged, but not Raymond. The disgust it made Raymond feel acted like a boathook that pushed the solid shore away from him to allow him to drift away from it on the strong-flowing current of self. It did not mean that he had instantly closed his mind to Marco’s problem. He most earnestly wanted to be able to help Ben find relief, to help to change his friend’s broken mechanism, to find him sleep and rest and health, but his own participation in what he had started out to make a flaming patriotic crusade when he had first started to speak had been muted by his fastidiousness: he shrank from what he could only consider the rancid vulgarity of brainwashing.
“It has to be a brainwash,” Marco said intensely. “In my case it slipped. In Melvin’s case it slipped. It’s the only possible explanation, Raymond. The only, only explanation.”
“Why?” Raymond answered coldly. “Why would the Communists want me to get a Medal of Honor?”
“I don’t know. But we have to find out.” Marco stood up. “Before I take this first step, before I leave here, I’d like to hear you say that you understand that I’m going to explode this whole thing with a court-martial, not because—not to save myself from those dreams—”
“Ah, fuh crissake, Ben! Whose idea was it! Who gives a goddam about that?”
“Let me finish. This is an official statement because, believe me, pal, I know. Once I get that court-martial started—my own court-martial—it can get pretty rough on both of us.” He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “My father—well, it’s a good thing my father is dead—with me starting out to make a public bum out of a Medal of Honor man. Shuddup! But I have to do it. Security. What a lousy word. I look right into the horrible face of something that might kill my country and the only word for the danger is a word that means the absolute opposite. Security. Well, as you said—with stakes like that I’m expendable. And so are you, Raymond pal. So are you.”
“Will you stop? Who thought it up? Me. Who practically made you agree to do it? Me. And you can shove that patriotic jive about saving our great country. I want to know why a bunch of filthy Soviet peasants and degraded Chinese coolies would dare to confer the Medal of Honor on me.”
“Raymond. Do me a favor? Tell me about the action again. Please.”
“What action?”
“Come on! Come on!”
“You mean go on from where I was?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Well—you will throw up another flare but you’ll throw it about twenty yards ahead of me at maybe twelve o’clock, at maybe dead center of the line, because you will figure I’ll be moving across the terrain up that ridge so—”
“Man, oh man, this is something.”
“What?”
“Each time you talk about the action you even tell it as though it hadn’t happened yet.”
“That’s what I’m saying! That’s the way I always think about it! I mean, when some horrible square comes out of nowhere at a banquet, the paper makes me go too, and he starts asking me about it. Come on, Ben. You made your point. Let’s go meet your girl.”
Marco ran his fingers through his thick hair on both sides of his head. He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. Raymond stared down at him, almost tenderly. “Don’t be embarrassed if you feel like you’re going to cry, Ben,” Raymond said gently.
Marco shook his head. Raymond opened another can of beer.
“I swear to sweet, sweet God I think I am going to be able to sleep,” Marco said. “I can feel it. There isn’t anything about those crazy voices and those fast, blurring colors and the eyes of that terrible audience that frightens me any more.” He took his hands away from his face and reflexively reached over to take Raymond’s can of beer out of his hand. Raymond reached down and opened another. Marco fell asleep, sitting up. Raymond stretched him out on the sofa, brought him a blanket, put out the lights, and went into his office to listen to the river wind and to read a slim book with the highly improbable title of Liquor, the Servant of Man.
Marco was still asleep when Raymond left the apartment the next morning. Eugénie Rose Cheyney called him soon after he reached his office. She asked if Marco had been sleeping quietly. Raymond said he had. She said, “Oh, Mr. Shaw, that’s just wonderful!” and hung up.
Thirteen
RAYMOND’S MOTHER CALLED HIM FROM THE Idlewild Airport. She wanted him to have lunch with her. He tried to think quickly of somebody whom he could say he had to have lunch with but she said he was not to stall her, that she was well aware that he disliked people too much to be stuck for an hour or more at a luncheon table with one, so he could damn well show up wherever they let ladies eat luncheon at the Plaza Hotel at one o’clock. He said he would be there. Beyond having acknowledged that his name was Raymond when she had first spoken, it was all he said to his mother.