The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney
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your unit.”
“I owned a tavern for thirty years. I guess behind a bar is where I’m most at ease. You can guess the name of the place—“Cap’n Irv’s.” That’s what I’ve gone by all those years.”
“Were you actually a captain?”
“In a different way. Not of a ship. I can’t even swim! No. Back in the First War. Artillery. I can tell that you were there, too.”
“Indeed.”
“You were gassed.”
“Yes.”
“I hear you at night, when you’re out walking. I know that cough”
“Yes.”
“There are so damn few of us, left at this age, and all these damned women. I’m seventy-six. I don’t feel half that.”
Percy takes a sip from the drink. It’s very sugary, and he has never been one for sweets.
“I’m just letting you know you’re always welcome at Cap’n Irv’s anytime. In fact, I could use a man like you.”
Percy knows he won’t go away until the drinks are done, so he puts the coconut shell to his lips and sucks it all down. He hands the empty cup to Cap’n Irv.
“Thank you,” Percy says. “I most certainly will consider that.”
Afterward, in his apartment, Percy sits in his chair feeling in his head the swirl of the drink, for he has never been much of a drinker.
8. The eventful morning in which he is both delivered and condemned
Those who’ve gotten the worst of the gas are laid out in the field hospital, nothing more than an open field set far from the trenches. Percy is on his back. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, small relief, and tries hard just to keep breathing. All around him he can hear the grasping of boys who, like himself, have gotten it badly. The eyes burn beyond anything he could have imagined, just as he had heard the officers describe the effect in their briefings; he is enraged at himself for not having put on his gas mask, even if there had been no order to do so. He knows, from seeing other soldiers gassed, that right now there is nothing anyone can do for him, even as his lungs shrink down like slowly burning paper.
“Phosgene,” he hears one of the officers saying. It is a new and different kind of gas than the chlorine they had expected. Nobody knows what happens after.
On the fourth day he is on his way back to England. He and the others, eyes still covered by gauze wrapping, walk in a chain, each man with his right hand on the right shoulder of the man in front of him. They are loaded onto lorries to a temporary military hospital far from the front lines. Within a week of the battle, when the eye gauzes are removed and he tests his dim and squinting vision, he is put on a ship back across the Channel.
He is delivered to Oakwood Hospital, Rotherham, where he is surrounded by boys who have been wounded, many far worse—lost limbs, complete blindness, deep shrapnel wounds. He hears that virtually all the boys of Accrington, the Pals, are dead. Percy feels guilty in that there is not a scratch on him, only the deep burn under the ribs. Everyone is exceedingly cheerful, the ward clamorous with the laughter and badinage. In the newspapers there are long columns of the dead, organized by regiment. His neighbors, the Walker brothers—Fred, Ernest, and Charles—have all died. Sixty thousand British men have died on that single day. Wesley is listed, the date of death actually two days after. Percy feels none of that euphoria of escape that resounds around him.
9. Some adjustments as they relate to the efficacy of one’s own bodily capabilities
His wife looks at him always with a face of perpetual surprise, even after five years. The face he first saw at the hospital the night of her stroke, his uncertainty matched by her own mild but frozen-quizzical countenance, which has never changed. They’re in Florida now, 1959, so much cheaper than the North, year-round grass to cut. Summers were difficult at first, but with the fans going all the time it became tolerable, the hot nights softened, the white-heated days somehow embracing. A little bungalow with burned-up grass and scraggly orange trees in the back.
They have no friends here, never tried. He has intuited in these years that she can’t stand to be looked at, can’t stand to be the person she now is, fettered inside the slack corporeal reality. Percy understands. They live in nearly complete quiet, even as the explosions in his head seem to have risen, coming back more often after the younger years in which he thought they were eradicated. He wakes up coughing, night after night. He wakes up from a drowning depth that frightens him, yet is always familiar, and not the only fear he truly feels in the spooling days of these late-middle years. He doesn’t want to think of that creeping gas, that lunar battlefield. He doesn’t want to think of his dwindling time. He doesn’t want to think about Martha dying, but he likewise doesn’t want to think about what will become of her if he is gone.
10. A decision ventured, without excessive or foolish delay
The convention of the event is that one accedes to the invitations that come one’s way. Mrs. Gottlieb happens to be advancing such an invitation, and Percy allows himself to be swept into the swirl of the square dance. Staff takes turns calling the dance as the record plays behind. Mrs. Gottlieb smiles demurely. As he turns and pivots, his hand light and chary on hers, the opportunity is such that he can contemplate what would be so awful about a degree of relenting, some sort of acknowledgment that he just seems to be going on and on, and that some sort of plan does not invite the wrath of indeterminate gods.
“Percy, did you used to be a cowboy?” Mrs. Gottlieb says flirtatiously, and he can feel himself flush.
“Only tonight,” Percy says. “Only tonight.”
He can feel himself relaxing into something, a thought he rarely allows himself. That he might become friendly with a woman (these ladies, many of whom had no idea who he was, seem surprised and enthralled with his British accent: Tillie, he tawks just like Cary Grant!), and in that friendliness that he could begrudge himself some time in the world with some company, no matter how overdue he has become.
They dance on, changing partners, reconnecting, then veering off to the farther reaches of the Ocean Breeze clubhouse. Every so often, the needle skips on the square-dance record, and Eileen or Nancy from Staff interrupts their hand-clapping to push the tonearm forward, making everybody on the dance floor go into a momentary convulsive step to reposition their feet to match the beat. As it begins to feel as if the record will never end, Percy can feel the screaming need for his lungs to find more air. He is in a situation.
He can see Mrs. Gottlieb looking at him with a face turning toward horror. Ocean Breeze is not a stranger to various heart attacks, aneurysms, and simple weary passing, but not at a square dance—more often, people simply stay unmoving in their lawns chairs until someone notices they’re still sitting out there in the dark. Keeling over at an Ocean Breeze social is, for the most part, simply not done.
Time has funneled down to that pointy notion, one in which he has to consider the idea that he is not going to make it through this dance, through the next lap of the second hand; but he wants to, wants so badly to complete this act and by doing so move toward the moment after that, in which something might be said, or ventured. The lungs feel as if they can seduce no oxygen at all. He wants, so much, to go on.
He cannot. He pushes off from Mrs. Gottlieb, whose face is instantly flushed and hurt, and he tries to maintain a controlled walk toward the fire exit. Pushing through, he is in open air, pulling hard into his lungs, his shrunken-leather lungs curled up under his ribs like dead leaves. He is alone in the dark, gasping in his pain, defeated once again, surviving once again.
11. Particular memory that presents itself on a somewhat recurrent basis
It starts at Rotherham, in that little recuperative bed, first as a flash of reconstitution. The first shards of the pieced memory, the most obvious things primary: the noise, the fear, the swimming struggle of body inside woolen uniform, of boots falling