What We Have Now
by Jerome Gold
The hospital scenes were particularly hard for Ruth. Small sounds of denial issued from her throat during these and other scenes depicting the degradation of the human body.
For Harry, the hardest parts were the combat scenes—the hyperreal speed with which everything happened, the uncertainty about what actually was happening, the abrupt head and limb movements of the actors, the staccato voices. Toward the end, the scenes of solidarity and renewal were hard, too. Some of those scenes were perhaps the hardest.
Halfway into the movie, Harry took Ruth’s hand. She pressed his in return. As the lights came on he put his hand on her knee. He was not sure what he wanted, but he was unwilling to relinquish the intimacy that had grown between them during the course of the film.
A short time later, after they had found a place for coffee and had sat down, Ruth said she had been looking at her photos from Vietnam and had come across some of the children. She had forgotten that she had worked for a time in a children’s ward. Only recently she had told a friend that she never saw a child when she was in Vietnam, and then she came across those old photographs. She had completely forgotten them, the children. She had put them out of her mind entirely. Isn’t that strange, she said.
One of the photos showed rows and rows of cribs. Only when she saw that photo did she remember that she had worked in that ward. Wasn’t it strange how she had blocked the children from her mind? If she hadn’t seen that photograph she might never have remembered them.
So she had them, these children. All of them were amputees.
In 1969 a patient, a young Marine, died. She never learned his name. Although it was the corpsman who failed to mix the solution before injecting it, the patient was, in fact, hers and she felt responsible for his death. Whenever she went to The Wall now, she looked at the names for 1969. The Marine’s would be one of them.
And so she had him, too.
She still hallucinated, though not so vividly as before. She hallucinated every day, but she always knew where she was now and she always knew what she was doing and she always knew that what she saw on top of what she was seeing was a hallucination. She missed the intensity of her hallucinations as they were when they were new, she said, the brightness, the opacity of how they used to be. She could be driving through Portland and she would suddenly be in Danang; all the lush color of Vietnam masking the dull gray of Portland. If she could have the hallucinations back the way they were by wishing, she would wish for them now. And, of course, the bodily sensations that went with them, that alertness and sense of belonging.
“I remember thinking almost as soon as I came back from Vietnam, ‘I don’t belong here; I’m supposed to be dead,’” Harry said.
She had been suicidal only once, she said, and she had called someone and this person had talked her out of her mood, if it was a mood. She cut herself now, just enough to draw blood. When she bled she found release. Recently she found a piece of glass in her garden. She squeezed it, cutting her hand, then continued gardening, mixing her blood with the soil.
Harry said he had recently seen a documentary about Project Delta, the old Delta, the first Delta, the one that got wiped out in ’66. The film did not identify the unit but he knew it was Delta because he recognized one of the signalmen. Harry had not liked him; he wore his nerves too close to the surface of his skin and Harry never knew which way he was going to jump. Still, Harry had known him. He died in 1966. His name was Dunne.
Seeing him again, twenty-six years old, flapping the yellow panel to bring the helicopter in to extract his team, Harry envied him his celluloid reality. In that reality Dunne was always alive, always signaling the helicopter, waiting forever with his team to be brought out of the bush, while Harry had come back to America. In that reality Dunne lived without thought, without emotion, in time without end, while Harry had yet to die. In Harry’s reality, he envied the dead.
Harry had had a friend who killed herself. She had attempted it once when she was in college. Killing herself had seemed the most reasonable thing to do, she said. “I must have been crazy,” she told Harry. But then, five years later, she did kill herself.
“It’s a release,” Ruth said. “Anticipating it makes you feel good.”
Harry said that looking at suicide as reasonable was something he watched out for in himself. He knew he was capable of it, and that line of thought scared him. It’s like a lateral shift in thinking that results in something that seems to parallel normal thought, but leads to death instead of life.
“That’s what it is,” Ruth agreed.
She grieved for her patients of twenty years ago, she said. But she didn’t think she would ever kill herself now. “Not while I have my garden.”
There was nothing more to say, but neither of them wanted to get up and they sat without speaking. Finally Ruth told him how much it had meant to her to march in the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade a couple of months ago. Which made it fine, even good, for knowing that there could never be anything more between them than what they had now, Harry could relax. He smiled and Ruth seemed to relax also.
She asked if he thought he would ever remarry. Harry said no, that since his divorce he had grown further and further from any idea of marriage. He had been single for a long time now, he said.
He asked if she was living with anybody. No, Ruth said, she wasn’t able to get close enough to anyone to live with her.
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t have what we have,” she said.
“Oh, you have someone then,” Harry said.
“I mean you and me. We can be good friends. I know that sounds like I’m shining you on, but I’m not. I’m trying to salvage something.”
“We can be friends,” Harry said. “We have a connection, I think.”
“We’re both drawn toward death.”
“If it can’t be sex, it can be death.”
Both laughed.
“It’s funny how people find each other. If I hadn’t met you at that reading…”
Harry nodded.
They were able to get up now. Harry walked with her to her car, then went on to his own. She drove by as he was unlocking the door and they waved to each other. Harry thought he would call her again. Soon. A poetry reading. A movie. Dinner. Conversation. If not sex, then death. He laughed at his own witticism again.
Jerome Gold is the author of sixteen books, including Children in Prison: Six Profiles Before, During and After Incarceration, In the Spider’s Web and Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility. Russell Banks said about Paranoia & Heartbreak: “I’ve finished reading Jerome Gold’s terrific book cover to cover without a break… It’s a powerful and very tenderhearted book without a soupçon of sentimentality. Unforgettable!” Mr. Gold’s novels include Sergeant Dickinson, about which the New York Times said: “[It] belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience” and the Asian Wall Street Journal said: “[Jerome Gold’s] novel stands out for the artistry of his prose and the eloquent expression of the brutal realities of war.” Rebecca Brown called his collection of poetry and prose narratives, Prisoners, “a ruthless, powerful book… Gold makes us think about both the individual and the cultural inheritance of violence.”
Mr. Gold received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington. He did fieldwork in Montana and American Samoa. He chose not to pursue a career in academia, but instead worked as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children in Washington State.
His story, “What We Have Now,” is based on a conversation he had with the poet Marilyn McMahon. He resides with his wife on Fidalgo Island in Washington State.