all. I thought it.”
Mull shakes his head no.
“You made a sound, Private Tonka. And I heard it. Am I wrong? Did you not think it was a chord?”
Philip looks from bandmate to bandmate, finally back to Mull.
“I did,” he says. “I heard a chord.”
As the other Danes debate what they heard, Philip stares Mull in the eye.
You made a sound, Private Tonka. And I heard it. Am I wrong?
Philip breathes deep and thinks of Africa. Thinks of two platoons, unable to find a sound that changes how a man feels, changes how he listens, changes how he speaks, too.
“Three hours,” Mull says, rising, handing each a small pile of documents. The military man’s number is written in pen on the papers. “Three hours to tell me whether or not you’re going to Africa.” He removes the reel from the machine and tucks it into the inside pocket of his suit coat. “I’ve already told Private Tonka that we plan to pay you for this mission. But perhaps I failed to say how much.”
The Danes, still recovering, wait.
“One hundred thousand apiece,” Mull says. “Four hundred thousand for the band.” He adjusts his suit coat. “I’m not one for theatrical exits, but the stakes here are rather high. If it is a weapon, maybe the four of you can stop it from being used.” He steps to the door. “Three hours, gentlemen. We expect a decision by then.”
Ellen watches Philip from behind the glass of the nurses’ station. She’s observed him every day for six months, and it’s still shocking to see him this way. Awake. Blinking. The subtle movement of his lips. The sweat at his black hairline. When the orderlies Carl and Jerry wheeled him into the Observation Room, Carl mentioned that Philip was in a rock ’n’ roll band. The Danes. Jerry said he never heard of them.
But maybe Ellen has. The name rings a bell, sparks something, but she can’t think of what it is. Maybe it’s just because Presley has a hound dog.
The Danes.
Ellen thought he was going to die. It’s how the nurses view most of the patients who’re brought to Macy Mercy. Comatose. Or near. And near death, too. So close you can feel it when you walk the halls, day or night; a black fog, formless fingers reaching for the doors of each unit, capable of opening them, prepared to pull the life from the still, barely, living. Why, just the day before Philip woke, the patient in Unit 9 died. His vital signs had looked promising; the chances of a recovery were being considered. The nurses agreed he was looking much better than Philip himself, and yet … those fingers. Some days Ellen felt the full hands of Death in the halls of Macy Mercy Hospital. Impatient, greedy, perverted.
When Philip was first brought in, the nurses ogled the X-rays that showed fractures in so many bones of his body, as if someone had intentionally set out to hurt him, premeditating the unbelievable construct of jagged lines, the chaos of fissures, a lack of logic, of plausibility, of survival.
And yet, Ellen is no stranger to the weird. Almost every patient who arrives at Macy Mercy is in an anomalous condition. And as long as Ellen’s been employed here she’s had to juggle the sensibility of a modern woman of 1957 with the understanding that those who run the military hospital know more than she does. It’s part of her occupation, keeping questions to herself. And like most employees the country over, Ellen wouldn’t be here were it not for the money. Living alone in an apartment on Carter Street, she needs this job. And she likes the work. And sometimes, but not always, she even finds herself trying to solve these mysteries that come through the front door of the hospital.
Like this man. Philip Tonka. The one she watches now through the glass of the nurses’ station. The sight of Philip’s X-rays will never be removed from her memory, and it’s difficult, even now, to observe him without thinking of those broken lines, some small, most not, knowing that they exist in some form beneath the incredibly bruised and discolored flesh.
Christ, it’s like watching an episode of that television show Science Fiction Theatre.
Philip blinks.
The skin around his eyes is especially badly bruised, but not too much more so than the rest of his body. Barring a quantum leap in cosmetic surgery, his features are forever distorted. His face is dented, his chest asymmetrical, and yet … there is a kind of cohesiveness to him. Ellen wonders if it’s because there’s no one else in the world quite this … color.
As she takes notes, minor scribbles marking the blinks, his tongue across his lips, she can’t help but wonder what he once looked like.
Which side of his crooked face is the real him? Is either?
Ellen uses lined paper; a white that rivals her uniform, gives her a sense of illumination here in this nurses’ station furnished with gray filing cabinets, brown drawers, and black desks. Behind her, Nurse Francine is preparing medicine for Philip. She’ll administer it, as she and Delores always do, twice a day. It’s Ellen’s job to mark the physical progress of the freshly woken patient. After an injury such as his, even a blink counts.
But aside from his eyelids and his lips, he hasn’t moved yet. He hardly speaks at all, and when he does it sounds like his throat is sandpaper dry, whether or not she’s just given him water to help.
“Amazing,” Francine says, looking through the glass with Ellen.
“Yes,” Ellen says. “Didn’t think we’d be tracking movement with this one, did we?”
“No, ma’am,” Francine says, her nose less than inch from the window. Ellen sees the older nurse reflected, her black-rimmed glasses superimposed over the heavy wrinkles of her wide face. “Not a chance in hell.”
Then they’re silent. No jokes from Ellen. No hypotheses from Francine. They don’t guess as to what happened to Philip because they’ve already done that, six months of it, leading up to yesterday’s surprise awakening. Some of those speculations were too incredible to fathom, and yet something incredible must have occurred. Delores wondered if it was the work of one man; the patient’s injuries, it seemed, had to be intentional, designed. Francine thought a fall from a cliff could’ve done it. The orderlies, Carl and Jerry, talked about bomb blasts. But Philip’s body is devoid of shrapnel. And there isn’t a surface abrasion on him.
The bruises, the endless spread of purple and orange, mud brown and yellow, are from the injuries within.
Philip lies on his back, stares to the ceiling, his chest, arms, and hands exposed.
For Ellen, the answer lies somewhere in that skin. Sometimes, when forced to touch it, removing or applying the IV, she’s felt a certain falseness there, a rubbery replacement. As though Philip’s skin had been exposed to something powerful enough to change it. Ellen didn’t think it would ever fit right again. The word she didn’t want to use was the same one all the nurses had avoided for six months running.
Nuclear.
In this day and age? Who knew. It was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine, on the mind of
