“He needs morphine,” I shouted. I felt like I was going to faint, although I knew I wouldn’t. Whatever his injury was I’d seen as bad or possibly worse. But the screaming affected me physically. The screaming was inside my body, it was in my brain, it was moving under my skin.
“Let’s get him stabilized,” the doctor said, or words to that effect. I’m guessing here, because all I remember for certain is that I kept shouting that the boy needed morphine and the doctor kept ignoring me—entirely, I believe, because he didn’t want to be bossed by the nurse—and the boy kept screaming and he screamed and screamed and screamed until he died.
When he died, it was like the whole world went quiet. Of course most of the patients on the ward were pretty bad off, but they were conscious, some of them, and one of them had even started yelling along with the boy, no more able to bear the sound than I had been, I suppose. But when the boy stopped screaming all sound stopped. No one moved. No one breathed. I think I know what we all felt. We were glad he’d died. We were glad he couldn’t scream anymore. Maybe we thought, Thank God, and then we realized, a moment later, that we were thanking God for killing him. I don’t know if the men felt bad about that. I don’t know what brutalities they’d seen or committed, in thought or deed, how far they’d gone from their original notion of themselves. For me, thinking, Thank God, when that boy died—I’d go farther, but I didn’t know that. Then, that was as far as I’d gone.
When sound came back, it was the doctor talking. That stupid goddamn doctor. “Nothing we could have done,” he said.
I looked at him. Nothing we could have done. Can I remember what he looked like? He wore glasses, I know. I would have liked to slap them off his face. “Morphine,” I said. I shook my head. I felt like I was choking. “That’s what we could have done.” I turned away, before I did slap him.
I went about my rounds, checking vitals and so forth. I was even more gentle, more solicitous, than usual, trying to make up for it, I guess. For what I’d thought. Orderlies came and took the boy—the body—away. The doctor—who knows what he was up to. But I can tell you that I’d not quite finished checking vitals when he came up and planted himself in front of me.
“Nurse,” he said.
“Lieutenant Riley,” I corrected. I didn’t look at him.
He ignored me. “We need clean needles and syringes. Go to central supply.”
Oh, I know exactly why he did it. It’s an easy one, psychologically speaking. I’d been right, he’d been wrong, he and any of the patients conscious enough to pay attention knew it, and now he wanted to reassert his dominance, because his need to be in charge was so great it was the reason he hadn’t eased the suffering of a dying boy.
Now I did look at him, the arrogant little punk whose face my memory has erased. “I’ll do that,” I said, “when I’m through here. And I’ll do that,” I said, “when you address me as ‘Lieutenant Riley’ and when you say please.”
He stared at me for a long time, no doubt weighing his options, whether he’d look more foolish if he did as I asked, or if he got in a public fight with me, or if he went to central supply himself. He was a young kid, too, when you think about it, and no doubt terrified underneath it all. You could feel sorry for him, if you wanted to. But I don’t. He let that boy scream himself to death, and I hope wherever he is he hasn’t forgotten that to this day. And if he’s dead I hope it was one of the last things he thought about. This is vengeful and it’s unkind and it’s the truth. I hope he has his prisons, as I have mine.
“Lieutenant Riley,” he said. “Please go to central supply for needles and syringes as soon as you are able.”
“As soon as I am able, I will,” I said. I nodded at him, curtly, dismissing him. Get out of my sight, I wanted to say.
I took my time about finishing up my rounds, but I have to admit it was a relief to get off the ward, to walk quickly down a long and empty hallway, as fast as I could go without running. The trouble was, I realized after a few minutes, that I had no idea how to find central supply. The second I walked off the ward that hospital turned into a maze. How had I found the shock ward in the first place? You know, I can’t remember. I picture myself walking there alone but someone must have shown me the way. At any rate, there was no one to show me now, and I walked down that first hall and turned and walked down another, and then I went down a flight of stairs, and before too long I couldn’t even have found my way back to the starting point.