I would never

have recovered; never; would never have Renaissanced from the bottlenecked burn ward in Belgium
-- l'Hopital Saint Dunstan -- have been resuscitated from the ten-patient room with the oil-painting view of the bearskin rugs of the neighboring fields of wheat; fruity booms of whooping cough. From nurses' sterling voices in starling clockwork chorus: "--quartered apples, steamed asparagus, braised mutton for lunch," from war widows, their steady saline bleating from the waiting room -- too goddamn many clocks -- thousand thread-count sheets with thorny warning smells of live, but panicked meat; the mineral bouquet of peroxide, cotton swabs, cotton masks, iodine -- flamboyant trickles, and rich whorls, of brassy caramel-sauce urine on vanilla-bean tile: leaked steamy and fevered from pulpy bladders boiled thin from inflammation, from infection, from incisions, boiled away, cooked down into infertile bloodless mash not unlike the Eucharist after three seconds in saliva.

I would never have recovered, had the veteran done so.

The nurses wheeled him in post-op. Unconscious, and prone, but tomcattish and box-bodied. Soldier's shoulders have a means of visibility even under pounds of blankets. He was not a small man, but still heavied and vulnerable from anesthesia, curled babyish, a petulant cheek pillow-squashed under a cashew beard. (only temporarily, two weeks at the most, he was told when he awoke -- only until the soldier ward in Brussels could catch its breath.) His injuries were enviable. His legs, only, mostly: calves and hams, clipped Achilles, portions of oxish ass and back. Four meters north of a kettlecorn landmine. One of six of formerly twelve. Clapping hands and thunderbolts distressed him.

He was singular, in the ward, in having neither headdress, nor helmet, nor halter, nor kerchief, nor cowl nor bridle nor bonnet nor boa nor ballgag of plaster and gauze and medicinal lard about his jaw nor neck nor eyes. His legs, mostly. And those would smooth up pinkly soon. Each and all of us, there, bedridden -- yes, and the veteran, too -- but only the veteran to talk with the veteran. The rest of us inert. Insensate, in other places; or invalid: legless, cauterized, etherized, or unwilling, only the veteran for the veteran. He was too whole to be there.

He was mostly healthy and his appetite reflected that: breakfasts of cold cuts, porridge, butter and black currant jam, toasted rye, a pitcher of cream he would sip from directly and unmanneredly. Then followed two cigarettes, self-rolled, with ballroom choreography, from assertively Turkish tobacco kept in a braided buckskin pouch on his bedside table. Always, for the nurses -- while they cracked the window for him to chute his smoke, teasing This is the burn ward, you know, removing so tenderly the tacky bandages like peeling a peach, unperturbed by the smell, commending his hardiness when he winced, noting and surveying the cookedness of his legs -- for them the veteran would give intensive reports of the prior night's dreams. Never had he had them before, never, but since his first night in the ward he claimed a gauntlet of bittersome nightmares: Enemy airstrikes, massacred friends, German troops that swallowed bullets and shells out of air, like lobbed grapes; a whole forest of mustard gas around and inside his home, his very own home, in Eysines. He told his stories with his hands. He spoke, too, of course, but the story was mostly in his hands: moving florid, eager, clear as calligraphy, like mimes and magicians try, like salesmen would kill to -- cutting deft through bare air, across eunuch proximity -- collaring tight sailor's knots to any hold in his listeners; pulling them in. A true soldier. Rare and pitied is the soldier unsublime at telling stories.

The truthful one, perhaps, even rarer; and so while the veteran's nightmares were smoothed by cashmere sympathies of any seasoned bedside manner, the nurses could weigh them only as heavily as children's.

There were visitors for him, at first. Often. Never family or wives, no, always much more splendid things: postures curt, polished, like phoenix statues; august, certain, decisive things; courtly Anglo armor, badge-mosaicked Bishops and Rooks, checkerboard chests, uniforms trim and iced and piped like display pastries. How was he healing? How long would it take? Was the pain very bad? (pocketchange compliments on his service, here, typically; his healthy complexion, at the least; collection plate wishes for his swift return.) Dupuis and Cantes were already up, already high-chinned on a train back to Bruges -- they had never seemed more heartful -- and a horse doctor from Münster had salvaged all of Chevalier's arm, all, even his fingers, and thumb. Although Roux was now deaf. Why, he hadn't already finished his breakfast, had he? But he had hardly touched his ham! (the veteran, himself, would ask of any vacant beds in Brussels.)

Something about hospitals: there are no calendars. No calendars. Not in view of patients, anyway. None. Mondays, Mays, and the 21sts of June are all artifacts, stiff, yellowed, chalky pottery in the dirt. Glass-cased museum things -- mythical things -- thunderbirds, minotaurs, fairy mounds, maybe. As dusty and distant as your favorite bedtime story. You can expect to know the date, so long as you expect it whispered in your ear by Oberon. Unless seated in the waiting room, or the receptionist's desk, or otherwise the shallower wards kept for patients of imminently anticipated dismissal, you will see no calendars.

Clocks? Yes. Yes, oh my, oh plenty of clocks. Clocks on walls and bedside tables, wrists of nurses. Clocks over each and every exit and entry. If Pagans make their luck by nailing horseshoes over doorways, in hospitals they nail clocks. If your blacksmith neighbors tacks up Christmas wreaths, then your doctor neighbor will tack up a clock. If the Hebrews slathered theirs with lamb's blood then their shaman must have tried with a sundial. I have a theory: Big Ben, and Father Time -- during sabbaticals, post-lunch siestas, or simply days when business may run slow -- intermittently seek, find, and fuck one another in hospital broom closets and bathrooms the world over, by avenue of precisely juxtaposing their pulpy distended pendulums at just-such an angle, one that allowed for amorous tantrummings at a perfectly rhythmic clattering counterpoint until either of the two fruitfully, inexplicably -- miraculously! -- strikes estrus. A Virgin Marty, if you would.

Hospital clocks -- should they be, in fact, be some breed of otherworldly tryst-affirming lovechildren -- would then at least have a semblance of reasoning for their steady and unceasing and incessant descent from the five-meter plaster heavens. Like fucking manna.

(something about clocks: they teach you of, and keep you on your schedules: pilltime, bathtime, bedtime, breakfast.)

(something about calendars: they tell how long you have had these schedules.)

Without a calendar I could never know precisely when, but at some point, cold cuts quietly vanished from the veteran's breakfast. The rye toast, next. The butter after that. The black currant jam. The cigarettes -- singularly -- were doubled.

Simply residual stress, tightens the stomach, he explained, when the nurses expressed concern, Perfectly normal. It meant he was healing well, he said. It had happened before, in Warsaw: enemy sniper had picked and nicked at his ribs, like Easter ham, he told them. (the jacket he had worn then was kept close, by his bed; he held it up for their inspection like a schoolboy with a rainbow trout: a bomber's jacket -- cotton -- bullet-peppered thickly at the ribs, just as he had said; blood-salted. gunmetal, in color.) He told them he had healed quite well then. No trouble.

Of much greater concern, the veteran insisted, were the nightmares: His father's skull, crumbling like a single peppercorn beneath the hoof of a six-legged Thoroughbred; his brother new and dewy carrion in the neighbors' onion patch; his wife: oh so sweet-skinned and vanilla-young and veiled at the altar, Zinfadel blush, doelike demure, Noël lips even in the midriff of spring -- then her, turning to him, terrible smile, propositioning his mouth with schoolgirl's plaits of shark teeth.

Stress, said the veteran. He spilled Turkish crumbs on his chest as he rolled his fifth cigarette.

If the ward in Brussels had wanted to catch its breath, then it seemed to have choked to death: there was no more talk of it. But at some point the topic had become a foreign one regardless. Irrelevant, too abstract; intangible. Immaterial to the things of much deeper distraction to the veteran: Packs of black dogs with smoking fur and human hands that left no tracks in mud or snow, horizon to horizon of enemy soldiers with bald pudding faces, rubbing elbow to elbow with allied soldiers with bald pudding faces, bloody coffee, crucifixion, monsoons of sulphur, doors that opened only into ogres' mouths, dirty and docile and watchful children that said nothing as they were sardined crackingly into furnaces and boilerrooms like far too much laundry, boa constrictors, army ants, neckties that turned to eels, brass buttons that turned to fat jungle spiders, floods of pitch, red-eyed oxen, snow composed of thistle and alkaline, rifles melting mudlike in his arms into purple, screaming, humid newborns, his own funeral procession with six pallbearing Satans.

When he began to refuse even porridge, the nurses spoonfed him.

What might they know of hags, he asked, witches? Banshees? Sleep things? Night things? Le croque-mitaine? He said often, when he jerked awake, he could not talk or move, and his eyes opened only a little -- just a little, just enough to see her next to him, reaching scabby and hideous -- though he could feel the evil force of her pushing down on his chest. Paralyzing him, he said. Like an elephant's foot.

The nurses told him gently no, no, that was simply one of his medicines; it kept him still at night, so that his legs could heal faster.

At this the veteran whipped his head backwards and away, mooing Nooooooo, didn't they understand? Did they not hear these stories, here in Belgium? That was what hags and banshees did: they waited until you were asleep, and then came, and magicked you to the feeble deadweight of the day of your birth; helpless.

Then, said the veteran, his storyteller's hands in flowery full-mast, porridge dribbling his beard, then, they pull your mouth open, wide open, with their scabby devil's hands. He yanked mulish at his beard, like it wasn't playing fair. And that is when they make you eat the dreams. The nightmares. Piece, by. Piece.

He fed himself terrible, invisible things, morsels of monster. He watched their faces forreactions with corrosive urgency.

Yes, the nurses said, yes, of course, they knew quite well. One pinched a beak out of a napkin and plucked the porridge from his beard.

He asked to be flipped over, at bedtime. Flipped fully, on his stomach. He explained that the banshee could not sit on his chest, then; perhaps that way he could breathe and then move, he explained. The nurses gave no response other than to oblige, shrugging to each other faintly; if nothing else, changing bandages at breakfast would be simpler.

Something about bandages: they crossbreed with the ones our own bodies make. And so they stick together, unnatural -- inbred -- and they hate us for it, they wish to punish us; this is why when we pull one bandage from another, they bite and pluck and sting (though, in fairness, this part, with the biting -- your body's hatred of you -- most every, all of us, most each of us all know). Removal, then, takes a very tender and wary technique -- wary, moreso than a safecracker, moreso like some shape or shade of aimless, desperate wood-thing, lost and needing, rolling their dice on an iced lake; patience; precision; like husking hand grenades, maybe; lip pinched in teeth to keep quiet against sour vinegar pricks of stirred-up scab -- wary technique that I, myself, had practiced and pigeonholed, invested in, and heavily, terribly heavily -- perhaps something like an elephant's foot.

Peeling peaches is no trial.

Something about my injury: It was my legs, mostly. Everything else, too, of course, including speech, and an unsound, unsteady head -- the last two, in which they gave wafer-thin chances of possible recovery. But my legs mostly. The both of them, on my arrival: chewed, baked red, couch leathery, cracked and black and dragonish, like Christmas roasts: Long-Term Patient: Near-guaranteed permanence of mutism. Near-guaranteed instability. Near-guaranteed invalidity. Invalidity. Incapacitation.

Two meters of air between two beds is a fantastic dream -- a hellish dream, when you are an invalid.

"Bed to bed" would not fit at all -- something more like Sun to Moon. Fantastic. Hellish. And more importantly: impossible. Impossible, but, for me -- me? -- we? we -- for us, the two of us; us; it was only time. Time, we needed; mostly. Us two: me, and the veteran; him. The veteran heavied and vulnerable with sleep, unconscious, prone, corkboard butterfly helpless, curled babyish and candlelight fragile with little shriveled dead skins of dried porridge still stuck in his uncropped purgatory beard -- feeble thing -- foul, healthy thing -- and his legs, mostly, his enviable injuries, smoothing pinkly like a peach, him and his unnatural, unfair, inhuman wholeness, unbelonging in there, the bastard -- the child -- the veteran; him.

It was him, then. It was the veteran all along. Not time; not "us;" most certainly not me: Moon, drunk by sun: perhaps like a pitcher of cream.

The veteran pulled me to him -- reached out florid, picturebook hands, magician's hands, hangman's hands, tying sailor's knots with urgent, corrosive tightness -- and he pulled me to him.

He did. All him.

Only half unwrapped, my arm, only half -- took over twenty minutes, at the absolute quickest, on all the goddamned clocks -- and with that, that uselessness, that hand, how could I have pulled him to me? Pulled him away? Pulled anything, much less pulled away? Impossible. Not with that thing. Sour pricks of open scabs, stubborn puffs of gauze, swollen skin red and wrathful like a mother hen. New skin, somewhere underneath, unready pink.

That hand could not have pulled. The veteran's, only: the veteran's, who saved me. The veteran the candlelight. The veteran who rescued me, from the burn ward in Belgium, the veteran the sun; my martyr. The veteran I stroked tenderly, so gently, from scalp to nape to mouth with my banshee's hand.

"Your mother's eyes," (his ear looked so soft and fine, so fetal, inches from my teeth, tearable, a sliver of pear) "self-stitched shut, like a scarecrow, with the strings of her violin. Her skin is split and cracked like dead, thirsty dirt, the crows have already found her, she is meaty-yellow with blisters; cysts. Your children are three-eyed wolves."

He was only partly awake, enough so to see the hag's hand. Even if his eyes were closed, though, he could feel it; could feel its texture, its intent. His whimpers were hot against my fingers as I tapped his lips to feed him.

"They are down, at the foot of your bed. You cannot move. They swallow you whole."

Until my release--upon proof of my mobility, and soundness, and speech--(until the veteran's transfer to the battle-trauma ward; in Brussels)--I made these visits to him. Nightly. It became easier, with time.