Notes

insa pale, still welled and snappal in the wind. I knew I was not in Saigon. I was not a hospital volunteer. It was no green 1968 but 1978. Yet Talso knew, as I passed a wall of smoked- glass windows, that I would see the quick movement of g camouflage fatigues, and I knew. I knew the medic insignis on his uniform and I knew, I knew, what I would see next, His face, nor the face before the explosion, but the face after, motionless in a liquefied red that poured from a tangle of delicate veins. "Oh God, oh God, oh my God!" people cried. crew The doctor, the medic, and the operating-room killed in a cramped, buttered room reinforced by rows of military. green sandbags. The calm of Saigon had always been unre liable, narcotically unreal. Who could have known before the man was cur up that an unexploded grenade, fired from a launcher-not a dead bullet-had lodged in the hollowness of his stomach?

"Look." Bobbie said. "See how it pops in your hand?" Bobbie was my best friend from high school. She was squeez- ing a rubber toy shaped like a bowling pin with a round mouth and two round eyes that bugged out with each squeeze like a pair of snake eyes. A toy that doubled as a physical therapist's rehabilitation tool, it could make my mother laugh, and at the same time would exercise her left hand. "Good for a weak hand," she proclaimed.

Bobbie had no subverted interior and would never see the things I saw. I could feel the sharp, unsubdued scent of chem- icalized smoke sertle in my nostrils as I watched her meander among a collection of toys. The very idea of a gift shop in a hospital, with stuffed rabbits and teddy bears and fresh roses and carnations, was new to me. Despite the immediacy of illness, an American hospital, after all, was still a place where one could succumb to the perplexing temptations of hope.

This is Arlington Hospital. I reminded myself. There, be yond the door, sen die evenly paved lor, in perimeurs unen- closed by barbed wire or sandbags. Visina mingled in the Jobly, I had been taught to avoid the front portion of buildings. In Saigon, it would have been a danger zone, as was any zone that a hand grenade could conceivably reach if thrown from a pauing vehicle.

My mother was still in her bed, a cranked-up baby bed reinforced with piles of pillows pushed against the fully ex- tended metal railings. She lay with one arm diagonally shield- ing her face, breathing hard. I avoided looking too closely at it, her red blotchy face that had been burned by a kitchen fire years ago, As she told it, she had been preparing cara- melized pork when flames from one of the burners had caught on a silk scarf loosely wrapped around her neck. This web of tender skin that she referred to as The Accident had been diagnosed as permanent, and, worse still, she seemed to accept it as such without question. French night cream I bought was simply put away on the bathroom shelf, behind my moisturizers and cleansing lotions. Cucumber and tomato treatments I prepared remained in the refrigerator for days, until they soured and thickened and had to be discarded. I knew the wound could flare into a lurid red, because it was at those moments that strangers adopted an attitude of po- lite abandon and courteously dropped their eyes, as I too dropped mine.

She had once been beautiful, in an old wedding picture years ago, her skin the smooth, slightly flushed alabaster of a mere fifteen-year-old bowing happily before the family altar. Even now, the delicate feline features showed, in spite of the singed and puckered flesh.

The nurses moved in and out, coaxing a needle into my