It’s the first they’ve seen of Lovejoy as leader, Lovejoy as military man.
Duane looks to Larry for help. Looks to Philip. But the other Danes are decided.
“Check the shore again,” Duane says, uncertainly, to nobody. “Check the fog.”
His fear of leaving this spot, of trekking farther out from where the plane will pick them up, is palpable.
“Pack up!” Lovejoy roars.
It’s the voice of a commanding officer in the United States Army.
Then he’s off to pack his own gear.
Duane goes to Philip.
“We retired a long time ago,” he says.
“I saw someone,” Philip repeats, and maybe it’s because it’s just the two of them, but Duane seems to listen, really listen, this time. “And those prints—”
“Philip, we don’t know what’s out there, we don’t know—”
Philip plants a hand on Duane’s shoulder. Looks him level in the eyes.
“It’s Ross we’re talking about, man. Ross.”
Duane breathes deep, looks once to the water, then gets to his knees by his own gear.
When Philip is packed, he joins Greer at the edge of camp. The others are still working behind them.
“Do you guys know why Lovejoy was demoted?” Greer suddenly asks.
“No,” Philip says. “And right now I don’t care.”
Greer squints into the sun, into the body of the desert.
“Maybe it’s important for you to know.”
Philip looks back to see that Duane and Larry are packing the second Ampex. Philip has the first.
“Go ahead.”
“Sergeant Lovejoy, once General Lovejoy”—Greer is affecting a proper but condescending accent—“was relieved of his higher rank for . . . fixation on the deceased. The Mad Blond was caught trying to pump the blood of the recently dead into the bodies of the recently wounded.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he borrowed blood pumps from the medical stations without authority to do so. It means he knelt beside bodies in the middle of battle and tried to deliver still-usable blood to those who were losing theirs too quickly to survive.”
Larry emerges from the fog. Then returns to it.
“And it wasn’t just because they caught him doing it, either; it was because he’d proposed the idea to the army first, and they’d said no.”
“How do you know all this?” Philip asks, looking alternately back to the remaining Danes and out to the desert, where he hopes, prays, to see a flash, a shape, a sign of his missing friend.
“My brother was one of the soldiers he saved.”
Philip looks to Greer.
“What happened?”
Far behind Greer, Lovejoy is slipping his arms through the straps of his pack.
“My brother Jeff was badly wounded,” Greer continues. “Gunshot to the right thigh. Dead leg. He said he’d seen a fella’s chin blown off. Another shot through the gut. He said the earth was red with blood. ‘Crayon red,’ he said. Said it smelled like a garage, like he was getting his car fixed. He was bleeding out fast. He started to cry out for help but help was already on its way, in the form of the then–General Lovejoy. When our sergeant emerged from the war-fog, Jeff said he just about shit himself, couldn’t believe a general in the United States Army was out there in the field. Jeff thought he must’ve been death-dreaming. He watched from on his back as Lovejoy signaled blindly over his shoulder and two soldiers showed, dragging a corpse through the mud.”
Behind Greer, Lovejoy is approaching. The sun reveals his reddening scalp, the tufts of blond hair.
“Jeff thought they were gonna bury him and the other guy together. Then he saw the pump. Lovejoy brought his face close to Jeff’s. He said, ‘I’d ask you what blood type you are, but I don’t think I’d get an answer outta him.’ The soldiers jammed the pump into the eviscerated guts of the corpse and Jeff threw up. The tube filled quickly. Lovejoy pointed to Jeff’s wound and the soldiers stuck the other end of the pump into my brother’s exploded thigh.” Greer is rubbing his own thighs anxiously. Philip sees Lovejoy has crossed half the distance to them. He walks slow. He looks to the sun. “But what really scared Jeff was the look in Lovejoy’s eyes, the way he perched on his bootheels, without a helmet, as bullets swarmed his head. Said his hair was waving as if the thoughts inside his skull were made of electricity.”
“Sounds like he saved his life,” Philip says. He’s thinking of saving Ross’s life.
“Lovejoy doesn’t give up,” Greer says. “Ever.”
The sergeant reaches them, then passes. Ten feet farther, he stops and stares out.
Duane and Larry emerge from the fog. They’re dragging the second Ampex the same way Philip has the first, on its plastic lid.
Sleds.
“Philip,” Duane says, the gravity of death in his eyes, “we can’t go home without him.”
“I know.”
Stein joins Lovejoy ahead. He takes a photo of the desert. Then he takes one of Lovejoy, as the Mad Blond calls for the hunt to begin.
They head out.
Philip looks back to the water once and feels a chill. Not because the air is cooler here than it will be where they’re going, but because the sea feels somewhat like a tether, and in the name of finding Ross, they’ve untied it.
24
Philip hasn’t slept. Instead, he weighed.
It’s not only that Szands is mad, it’s that last night Philip recognized the brand of crazy in the doctor’s eyes.
Philip’s seen it before in other musicians in Detroit. Flavors of the moment, beats of the week, bands that get drunk on the little fame they savor.
Dr. Szands is drunk, too. And Philip doesn’t have to look far to determine what it is that he’s drinking.
It’s the way Philip is healing. And the sense of godliness that must come to a doctor capable of making such a recovery happen.
Without rest and restless, Philip has been weighing who to tell. Dr. Szands is crazy. He came to my room last night.
Help me.
But Nurse Delores is as straight as the unit door. The orderlies Carl and Jerry are as loyal and dim as dogs. And Francine is almost as frightening as the doctor.
Who to trust in here?
Of course, there is only one. But the distance between a healthy patient–nurse relationship and that patient defaming the doctor to that same nurse is a big one.
Will she think Philip is the mad one?
If Philip is honest with himself he’ll admit that Nurse Ellen is exactly the kind of girl who would have made him nervous back in Detroit. Pretty, sure, but it’s Ellen’s mind that frightens him. She’s smarter than he is. Probably more honest than he’s been. Probably knows how to have a drink without the night becoming a lawbreaker. Yes, Ellen is the kind of woman Philip would have walked away from at the bar, sure that if he were to talk to her, any words at all, he would be in danger of losing himself.
Is she the right one to tell? Will she believe him? Or will she convince him otherwise?
Now, watching the soup tremble in the spoon, aware that she’s shaking, Philip wonders what she’s afraid of.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
All afternoon she’s been this way. When she came in, her eyes traveled to each corner of the unit and she spent some time staring at the filing cabinet, too.
Philip knows paranoid when he sees it.
But does she have a right to be?
“It’s war,” she says. “And what it’s done to me and what it’s done to you.”
She gets up and walks to the bookshelf. Philip is able to turn his head far enough to see her. She’s looking between the books, under the radio.
Like she’s looking for bugs.
“A daughter,” Ellen says, flipping through the pages of the books, no humor in her voice. “Very young. She was three. People say that means she’ll always be three, but that makes it
worse. I like to imagine her aging.” She looks up at Philip. Back to the pages. “Sometimes even faster than I have. I like to think of her as a very old woman, sitting across the kitchen table from me. She’s got stringy gray hair and an angry look on her face and she’s saying, Will you please hurry up and join me so we can finally have our time together? The time we never got?”
Ellen lost a daughter. Philip understands. But watching her put her hand up the lampshade and feel around is making him edgier than he already is.
So much sound. Everywhere. In Detroit. In the Namib. In here.
“Her father was a clerk. His name was Al. I liked Al because he was funny, he was straight, and he didn’t believe in war.” Her eyes shine, wet, but her voice doesn’t waver. “I met Al in ’44. We dated for a year before we got married. He was a good man. He’d take me to quiet, dark restaurants. He laughed at my jokes. We danced.” She’s behind him now. He hears the lid of the piano bench lifted. “It wasn’t passionate love, but it was kind. And the kindness between us led to a pregnancy. We had a little girl. Jean. I love that name. One syllable. Done. Clean. Jean. But by then, Al was falling apart.”
She’s across the room, in front of him now, kneeling by the filing cabinet. Tugging open the drawers.
“There was World War I and then World War II and oh, we may as well include all the wars before then. Al sure did. He felt like something bad was building. A bad feeling was growing. A pattern. He pointed it out to me. ‘Keeps happening,’ he’d say. ‘And why?’ He was obsessed with the whys. Why do we do this? Why do we continue to do this? Al was in Germany with his brother Jimmy. They fought together. Jimmy was hurt bad. And when Jimmy died over there”—slower now—“Al lost faith in everything. Everything except the pattern.”
Philip remembers Greer huddled around a fire, talking about wheels. Drawing circles in the dirt.
He thinks of the horns and hooves he found in a room buried beneath the sand.
“He’d lock the bathroom door and stay in there for hours. Jean would ask where Daddy was and I’d tell her he was bathing. I’d make her laugh. Because when she wasn’t laughing we could hear Al crying. Jean would look over across the apartment to the bathroom and I’d make another joke. Another face. Just to cover up the crying. But no matter how loud we were, we could always hear Al when he started hollering. He’d say, ‘Jimmy, you’ve already been shot! You just don’t know it yet!’” Ellen pauses, for effect, looks at Philip wide eyed. Then she’s up and searching the window drapes. “He was doing the same thing the day Jean fell from the fire escape. Must have been locked in the bathroom when she fell, because that’s where he was when I got home and I was the first person to tell him she wasn’t in the apartment, me, who had been at work for the past six hours. Me, who didn’t have to go to war to understand it.” She’s on her knees by the cot now. Sweeping her arm beneath it. “I knocked on the bathroom door. I said, ‘Al, where’s Jean? Is Jean in there with you?’ He opened the door, his eyes red, and he said, ‘He was already shot, Ellen. He was telling the rest of us how afraid he was, afraid of getting shot. But he didn’t understand . . . it’d already happened. He’d already been shot.’”
She pops up, facing Philip. She looks like a mother to him now.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I suppose we’re all a bit wounded.”
They stare at one another, connected by the hospital and more.
“I’ll be right back,” she says.
She gets up and leaves the unit.
Philip thinks of Al’s pattern. Of what the platoon started to call Greer’s Wheel.
If there’s one thing that stands out above all others in my research, it’s that history doesn’t sit still. Doesn’t sit silent. It makes noise.
Philip hadn’t noticed the classical music coming from the office until it stops. After a momentary pause new music begins. Philip has this record at home.
Ellen returns.
“It’s not the Danes,” she says. “But it’ll do.”
“What’s it going to do?”
She crosses the unit. Looks down into his eyes. For Ellen it’s the man in the bar who took her drawing. For Philip it’s the fluctuating features of a thief in red.
For now, though, their monsters are put away.
But not forgotten.
“Let’s dance,” Ellen says.
She takes Philip’s hand. She drags her fingertip across his palm.
She steps to the center of the room.
Philip watches from the cot. Imagines he’s standing beside her. No . . . sees himself there.
Ellen is dancing.
And for an incredible, impossible moment, Philip believes he’s dancing with her.
It’s something Philip has needed. Something he didn’t know he needed.
Touch.
Ellen dances, slow, in and out of the increasing shadows, across the unit, her heels echoing in step with the drums, her eyes closed.
Philip is holding her in a bar in Detroit. Gets into a cab with her, takes her home, runs his fingers through her black hair. In the morning he’ll show her his favorite diner, order his favorite breakfast. They’ll spend the day together, see Detroit, visit Philip’s parents, his friends, the Danes. They’ll search for another thrill that night, dancing again, another dance, and create their own wheel, their own pattern, their own sound.
When the song ends, Ellen opens her eyes.
“That was . . . really very good.”
Then she laughs and it’s the laughter of the grieving, but it is not mad.
She needed it, too.
A beat, a break.
A dance.
She turns off the lamp. At the cot again she brings the blanket up to Philip’s chin. Moonlight illuminates her features and the wall beyond her.
“Plans?” Philip asks. And his voice is less wooden than it was when he woke in this place.
Ellen does not wipe her eyes dry. She leaves the tears alone.
“Yes. Big plans tonight. I am going to eat ice cream alone on my couch. And if I spill any I’ll clean it up with a paper towel.”
Philip smiles, but the heaviness remains in this room. Ellen’s daughter. The Danes. Al’s pattern. Greer’s drawings in the desert sand.
“Date?”
“Didn’t we just have one? And don’t we have another one tomorrow?”
Something has happened in here tonight. Something has passed between them.
“Don’t dream of anything too horrible,” she says. “And if you do, just add a naked woman on roller skates. That always puts an end to a bad dream.”
They stare at each other in the half darkness.
“Good night, Philip.”
“Don’t leave.”
“You’re braver than you realize.”
“Don’t leave.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Ellen . . .”
“Yes?”
“Come here.”
She lowers her head close to his.
“Closer.”
She does.
He whispers in her ear.
“Dr. Szands is mad.”
She leans back, looks long into his eyes. She opens her mouth, as if to say something she’s thought herself.
Then she leaves.
The fan is whirring on the bookshelf.
Philip stares at the shadows on the ceiling. In them he sees the Danes. Onstage in Detroit. On an airplane to Africa.
Then, one missing, as the others cross the desert to find him.
Night at the hospital is upon him.
“Evening, Philip.”
It’s Nurse Francine in the doorway. She’s carrying a tray. His medicine.
And the ghosts that haunt Philip’s mind rise again.
25
The sun is going down, but it’s not down yet. And the water is far enough behind them that the waves sound more like whispers.
He’s not dead yet, Philip tells himself, dragging one of the sixty-pound Ampex machi
nes on its plastic lid. He’s missing.
This is more manageable. This keeps Philip’s sanity safe.
Until they see Ross’s body, unmoving, there is no dead.
They’ve reached a row of dunes they’re not going to be able to avoid.
Philip pauses at the base of the one they stand at, sees his shadow on the sand.
Once upon a time that shadow carried a gun . . . then a microphone.
Now it’s both.
Lovejoy plants a boot into the dune and looks up.
“Prints,” he says.
Maybe it’s the combination of the sun and fatigue, but Philip hadn’t seen the prints until Lovejoy pointed them out. He sees them now. Faint hooves. As if they step lighter than the Americans do. Know the desert better.
Know where to hide.
Lovejoy begins the climb up.
Stein snaps a photo of him and Philip can see the picture as if it’s already developed: black and white, the sweating former general leading the platoon on this dark day, the day Ross Robinson went missing.
The rest follow.
When Philip reaches the top, Lovejoy is already there, already looking through the binoculars. He points to a distant dot.
“Is it him?” Philip asks, breathless.
Stein snaps a photo.
From the peak of the dune it’s the size of a black crab.
“A dead body,” Lovejoy says.
Philip takes the binoculars from the sergeant’s hands.
He looks. He sees.
“What is it?” Larry asks. “Is it him?!”
Lovejoy begins the descent.
“Philip?” Larry repeats, because his friend’s verification trumps the sergeant’s.
Stein snaps another photo. Greer is descending now, finding balance where he can.
“I’m not sure,” Philip says. “It looks more like . . . a uniform.”
“A what?”
Magnified, Philip sees what could be a long-sleeved shirt and pants. The arms are raised, as if in self-defense.
“What kind of uniform?”
Philip studies it longer, stares until the distant details begin to make sense.
“It looks like a textbook,” Philip says.
“What does that mean?”
Philip lowers the binoculars.