DAVID HOLDRIDGE

Grave Pursuits

Paris, 1967

I had my schedule, meant to keep some balance. The garbage men came. Five floors down before first light, they heaved the metal pails back onto the pavement. The day began. No zip-a-dee-doo-dah here, but instead the painful search in the dark for the switch. No instant hot spray. Just a trickle of tepid. No sling pack either. Only a thin slip of plastic with the name of the charcuterie stenciled in black. Into which I put my cotton trunks.
        
Several levels below the pavement stood the familiar large clock with the sweeping black hand, still yet over green water and chlorine gasses. Over twenty meters with several swimmers circling in each lane, I was always on someone's kick or passing into oncoming traffic. The goggles leaked and sometimes needed emptying at the ends. By the time I was done, my body felt as if it had been dipped in a corrosive. Every pore scoured. I turned in the towel at the cage and went back out into the dark. There were rainbows around the streetlamps. This was the best of the day. Zip-a-dee-do-dah. My muscles feeding, my mind bright. I had two shots of Turkish and the day's first drag on a Gauloise.
      
I sat before the dead man's desk and looked down on the synagogue where the dead children had been memorialized. Day had arrived.

It had been a pleasant little rental agent. He called his wife mon chou. He said he had broken the red wax seal three weeks earlier. Apparently, the resident had been dead for weeks before he had been found. The deceased had been careless about the pigeons living in the vent to the toilet.
       
I still loved the furrow of the ballpoint on the soft bond, the indigo on the cream. Running my forefinger down the length of the spine on a hard cover...the tactile pleasures for applied thought...on a single page or a bound notebook. The rainbow around the bulb and the muscles still feeding.

I had my schedule. I was taking a second or two off the swim each successive day. They served the Turkish as I came to the door. I had the pen resting in the bond ready to move as the Turkish kicked in, captivated by the rainbow around the bulb. 
        
I had begun. I had my scribbling from some school papers, the piece from the cafe in Cala Ratjada, some remnants from the past false starts at the Y in Hartford, articulations from the White Stag at Hampstead Heath. I had a large manila envelope stuffed with scraps of paper on which I had jotted good words or important advice as they had spurred my consciousness over the last few years. 
        
Unlike before, I was not now engaged in other objectives -- graduation, escapades, or romance. Two weeks earlier, when I had sat in the corner of the near empty room, with Cowley's Exiles and my writing box, I knew from past efforts I had scant reason to hope, that I had laid little down from which to take off, that my emotional harangue to myself outside the all night diner in Schenectady was no more or less than steam off a kettle. Equally, there was nothing left after this. Without, that is, becoming what I had hated almost since birth and which I did believe was worse than death. Or as Botanicos had pronounced...that my own story was "crap." 
        
Reading Cowley helped. In a way, it was a godsend. It presented company, albeit mythical and legendary, but still some secret colleagues again. And that, with time, thank God, would put me on a first enduring tear -- something quite apart from those short-lived  spurts of creativity I had had before. At the onset, however, I didn't yet live with the pen. Instead, I chose to ruminate, to skip about, to read some of the notorious books from school over again. But this time as a solitary man in a do or die situation.
        
I wanted company. All the characters in Cowley had company. But I was too shy to just "pull up a chair." And I realized years earlier that I could be intimidated by the craftsmen. The precocious students in writing courses. On the contrary, what I sought was a return to the company of the smoking room at Suffield or the cafe life in Paris with Carrick. Still, I took a chance. I had copied an author's address at Shakespeare and Co. and had found his apartment. Like those pedants who could jerk me off my occasional spree at college with their stank for stunk, this man -- who by day was handing his pages out on street corners while his wife clerked to bring in the rent -- took to curling up on his divan while I searched for metaphors that would please him.

No use. Quite ashamed of myself, I was, for my fawning and for my further doubts about my wherewithal. All to resume with my bending over the blank page in the early morning hours. It was not what the instructions call for. That you must have a master plan...a plot outline... a compelling idea...an epiphany even. Rather, it was for me like getting a word or words written and then coaxing them to grow...to put some roots down. But, as in the past, I got stuck...amidst the variety of meanings and sounds. I was picking my way through the fledgling sentences like some sort of prospector. Making the slow tails of the y's and g's while I tried to form the sentence. As in my earlier stillborn efforts at the Y and the White Stag, still nothing poignant ensued. 

There was the usual depression at the trifle. Not just the writing but the trifle of my story against what I had exclaimed before Botanicos over our "all the way" in the diner. I stuck my hand out the window and pulled at my container. They sold sparrows at the charcuterie with green cherries in their beaks. I ate cheese and cold cuts and instant thick as porridge. My folklore was replete with them. They had never studied in little leagues. They had pitched at a tire behind the barn till their father's whistle brought them in... Till 60,000 stood as one, as men like Cy Young left the last batter in the top of the ninth swinging at air. Phonemes. How had the writers been? Could there be a bit of that in me? Or, was I back now to counting on miracles? Stories from the Golden Books at bedside?
        
I was a cold war baby. Fat on the bone. Singing sweet nothings with Miriam, sticking my big toe across the States, then ever so briefly into the Pacific, writing WHY on public buildings. I would write of the forces that conspired to rob me of myth and of being mythical. The leveling of prosperity, the birth of suburbia, the end of great hardship and yearning. Comfort as the scourge of heroes. The future in the hands of technicians. The way the world came through to the pale boy, long ago from the Scottish borders. Mysteries receding. The years of awful winnowing. The heavy hand, the thick wrist, the hairy bodies. The blank faces on the daguerreotypes of children in mining camps, at the factory,  on the plains, on deck, were gone. Mental illness up. Slow dancing under the hydrogen lantern. Sweets for the sweet. Less flesh on flesh, bone to bone. Nature slipping beyond the pale. Technology as the great homogene. Climate control. Festering discontent in the sunbelt. Dying inside. Cold-war baby. Winterborn. Kicking and poking, it sees some light after difficult times. It cozies its cover up next to the masterpiece on the shelf. 
        
And further, is it, rubbing my eyeballs, scratching, the particles of dandruff floating down onto the pad -- the defiance despite the evidence, the fantasy of being Shaman, myth-maker? Describer of truth as myth. The slow and painful separation of myth from professed facts.
        
From truth as what is hollered on the street corner -- Extra, Extra -- to truth as what gets a publisher's jacket. The great love of Bosco Depasquale and Serafina Scaramuzza. Bringing the guest before the crackling fire. Standing on the crate in Jamal Ifna and competing with snake charmers for an ear. The drop of virulence slipped down one coarse hair and amidst the upheaval and the uproar dropped unseen in the darkness of sheets and dresses into the yawning appetite… 
        
But how was what wrinkled the forehead not to be confused by piddling technicians. Like old medieval women who spent a lifetime on ambitious weaves. Who weighed every letter in each word, each word in every sentence, for weight and sound and symbol. Empirical wonderwords. Three and seven as most favored numbers. But who turned the pages on such tricky matters?
        
No. No. it must be about the echoes of primal sounds...how else could humans come to language…strong hard words or mysterious natural music? It should rather be…nature almost beyond the pale. The first sounds. The first sounds. Wolfe's forgotten language. Wind and sea. Echoes from the beginning. The stories around the fire. The charcoal on the walls of the cave. 
        
What life? The sun leaves my window, and I'm writing in a cold room. Writing on speed. On my cup of soupy instant. Coming down at night on booze. The rush between shots to jot it down. Tequila combusting inside. In a chair with a regimen. Pulling up on doors, pushing off from floors. Scrubbing the bowl, washing the horse mackerel from my new moustache. Garbage. Like hunting chickadees as a child with B.B. guns. I left for a long walk, down the hill. 
        
So then the cliché bobbed to the surface  of my mind. Stop your immersion in words...you'll never get a story...just a lot of wonderful words in your pocket and another false start, leaving you empty handed. Shades of the downtown Y. You are what you do. No high-minded contemplation would be the building block. Write. Like push-ups. Do 2000 words a day. Crap or not. The clerk who does ledger entries is more the writer than the well-schooled ruminant. And so I finally pushed off. Rolled over the cloth. Left, out of necessity, the world of careful construct and pushed forward as if writing to a missed friend. Covered the paper and once or twice toward the end made a nice pitch. Never of wrestlers pitted in each other's grip. Rather, thoroughly picaresque. Advancing through the funhouse, the house of horrors, as cut-out pop-ups suddenly appear. Colorfully presented. No past or future. All of them...Hawthorne, Dickie, Big Bob, Anne of Westphalia, Lennie, etc., swinging into view and then disappearing. The book does not keep the reader by calling the shots at ringside, but rather by trailing behind and chronicling the adventures of the road. 
        
My  room was large enough to pace, but that didn't get the weight off. Lennie's eight black fifties on the stainless-steel bar gleaming in the prison yard became the molding on the entrance to the toilet where by mid-afternoon my body needed to be used. Staring at Miriam, hair disheveled, lip rouge on her teeth, I hung from the ledge and lifted, pulled my chin over the top, many times till the veins became swollen and ready to burst.
        
Eventually, another shot of soupy coffee didn't help enough. The pen would get stuck. I took more long walks, aimless, often down the hill to the river. I liked the warrior queens at Luxembourg. Gaul's stock, the good benches around Ugliano, a chair at the zoological gardens. Snooping, words jotted on scraps. Seeing the world fresh, I was coming down from ten days of writing.

A baguette, a glass of wine in some unknown neighborhood. Miles I would travel as the observer. Inevitably past bookstores. Not unlike the way I had been drawn to the street walkers on Kaiser Strasse. I still loved the feel of them in my arms as I carried them home. The gift from a distant unknown. Private thinking. Which eventually got my knees up against my chest on the mattress at night, back propped against the wall with Shakespeare in my lap. A deep draw on my Gauloise and some piping instant and I would read till sleep overtook me. Not a word it had been to anyone all day long save the bonjour and the merci to the man who served me my  first Turkish and the practical exchanges with the waiters and clerks at the shops. 
        
The tourists came. In droves. Banks of busses were everywhere. I walked farther afield to avoid them. Absolutely no redeeming value, I accused, to bringing a busload of flapping suburbanites to ooh and aah at Notre Dame, scramble to memorialize the moment with a pic, and raise Holy Hell over the lack of comforts. "Did you see that bathroom, dear?" America will surely be paid back one day for this invasion, I thought. This disgusting indignity. I sat on benches at Butte Chaumont and watched the poorer mothers wheel their babies by the water. In the background, there were peeling aspic colored buildings...with George Marchais posters slapped upon them and what must have been communist cafes down on the corner. 
        
One day, my back went out. I was pushing hard against the big hand at the pool and something snapped or froze. I visited the American Hospital in the sixteenth. These were hallowed grounds. The swish of muslin in quiet corridors. A robed man in the courtyard learning to walk -- a nurse by his side. Ernest convalescing, I thought. The doctor gave me an old world syringe. Cortisone in the back.

Back at the apartment, I brought my pads off the desk and into the bedroom, and there I began to drift. The wake-up was now gone. At first, the bed was better. Allowed me, that is, to be transported more easily. Even get a couple of early images of life. I scribbled away frantically. Night and day were confused. I went in and out of dreams and Shakespeare and writing till I could not think outside of iambic pentameter. A frail sidekick for the masters...like Ski...sitting in the cab with them for a few miles. Through the histories into vivid dreams and back to writing as I had not done since the clock at Suffield had incited me to dash across pages in a mad scrawl to get it all in before the prof had lifted the paper.

I finished dreams with my pen. Re-created on the pot with the pigeons warbling in my ear. The exhilaration was such that I wouldn't have pulled back for the world. Dust balls shifted like tumbleweeds across the floor. Shadows loomed like my childhood Phantom.

My back was slow to heal. I was reading a history a day and filling a dozen pages. At the end of a week, grudgingly, I went down at dusk and bought enough tinned mackerel and Shakespeare for a month. I locked myself in. Twice, I froze at persistent knocking. I had gotten to the point where I could not manage discussion. There was some swearing and they left. I was at the best I had ever been. Harkening back to my essay on the sun-as-symbol and later to that drunken soliloquy outside Greasy Mike's.

But with one earth shaking difference. There was no pre-ordained limit...no paper to hand in, no professor waiting for me at Nicely Hall. So, it was  digging --  without one ear cocked for the whistle which would end the game -- digging once again into the mind, but for the first time without a foreseeable exit -- the walk home up the drive at 486 Halladay Avenue -- digging furiously without limits  to see as clearly as primitive man. But of course, as forewarned, such glimpses are not rare for nothing. They, like everything else, carry with them their own destruction. Spoil sets in. Brown soft spots. Something caught the corner of my eye. The tail disappearing under the plinth, again. A plate drops, and you realize how taut you're drawn. A dust ball now scurries.

I pulled the sheet up to shield my face. Made a fist around my pen. More Turkish for fewer pages. More tequila to go to sleep. Puking in the bowl. The exercise on the molding dwindles then stops. There is no end to the questions. Each one turns out upon another. Everything is involved. Everything is in question. It is, I had read, The Great Midway. The initial inspiration often gone. The cheers, as you pushed off, out of earshot. Adrift, becalmed. What had begun as a thirty-page survey is now, can be, 100 pages of discourse on the yellow of a toenail.

I hid from more knocks on the door. I who strode through dark neighborhoods. Hawkeye vanishes along with his puzzlements. The upending of his enemy's canoe. I dreamt of the farm girl, swinging on that gate I had passed in Nebraska, now in lavender floating up before my face, smiling. My boyhood orangutan now slamming around in a cage.

There came an insidious inclination to lay on my back and silently abuse Miriam, word by word, for presenting me one hopeful night toward the end with Fleurs du Mal only to allow her  presumed assimilist father in Brooklyn, days later, to separate us so seamlessly. Grasping  for a way out. Time to put bread on the table. But, seemingly, too trapped to move.

I thrashed down the stairs, grabbed a note from the concierge, and left before she could commit me to further inquiry. I walked down the hill blinking incessantly. A mad exile for the tourists. I'd walk it to death. Same as I had done on the soccer field with the deceit of the actress. Exhaust the wherewithal for destruction. Two hours at top speed around the Tuileries in the noonday sun before I was able to sit by the pool and watch the children sail their boats. I was pale as chalk and had a scraggly orange beard like the hair under my father's arms. A woman seated across the water smiled at me lovingly. I must have blushed and looked away. Unless she picked me up in her arms and carried me to her home, it was no use. By the time I looked up again, she was leaving.  
        
The sun went down. The mothers took their children away. I kept my head down and moved off the chair. I trembled. To the extent I could think of nothing, there was respite. But I didn't have the strength to sustain it.  The thoughts (on the surface)  were submerged by the likes of my pigeons and Joyce's rat. Always in the periphery of my vision. Always menacing.

I sat in Le Bowling for three days, sweating bullets. Always dark, drinking rotgut, dozing on the couch, seeing Francoise and the Senegalese dance, Carrick and the queer Bulgarian...in his lair, yearning for repair. At first talking. Talking to myself. To strangers. Not letting them off the hook. Recounting to them how it happened, how I was failing as a writer. I hung onto them, disinterested faces, even past their exit. I was trying to kill it by putting it out in the light of day. Everyone including the toilet woman knew what had happened. Left alone, it became perpetual. The sharp fingernail drawn slowly across the abdomen. Pacing the dance floor and bombarding the senses. Guzzling my wine. Popping a tab. Talking out loud in execrable French. In iambic pentameter. 
         
By the third day, a consensus was building at the bar to get me out. To a hospital. I made them promise not to, but I didn't trust them. They were bored with my situation. Suicide was not uncommon in Paris. Life goes on. So, I went downstairs. How to be as rosy dumb and sure as the toilet woman who only sees real rats sticking their noses up her drain hole. I was draining into the things I touched. Darted frantically on the thin surface of a glass. Got on my knees and helped the toilet woman wash down the floor. Babbled along with her about the work at hand. Till I could stand the light of day.
        
The toilet woman found me upstairs and gave me the envelope that had fallen out while I had been scrubbing the tiles. Half soaked. Ink smeared. The third and last notice, it seemed. "Report or go to jail." My father's scribble: "not to worry." He meant a safe job. Rather in my head it was to be under a crescent moon with Dickie. War paint and stealth. It began to drain. The pain seeping out my feet. Like a plug had dislodged. It took no more than to read it again to the toilet woman: "United States Armed Forces...August 15th...prosecuted and subject to imprisonment…Mike, this is serious...Please call immediately...It'll be O.K." For better or worse, I would ride with the brigade.

The genie, it seemed, had been brought back into the bottle by the news of war. The concocted lump of health was being restored. God, had I hugged that beating heart downstairs? Arms tight around her, had I planted a huge kiss on her incredulous mouth? Emptyied my pockets for her? I had left her thus -- confused, counting her coins and bills.

Still, I took no chances. In one motion, I unlocked the apartment door and ran through the dark for my passport and wallet, Cowley and his narrative, and then back without a breath. Several hours later, I was out on a night flight from Orly, with only the clothes on my back, soon deep in sleep. 

                       
Suffield, 1967

Since Roo was being oriented at her college in Southern California, I had the parents to myself -- full blast. "Men with your education can pick their assignments." I had seen the advertisements. You give them the years, and they keep you in the rear.  A black panther on Major Rutherford's desk. Or it would be two years with the grunts.

I couldn't pick anything in my present state. I needed to be swept along by what I had described to Botanicos as a national movement. Back on the bus out of Chicago, westward with my face to the window, with no personal commitment for the outcome of life. I would go to basic like millions of Americans before me. Be privy to the legends of men going to war -- from Thermopylae to Pork Chop. It made romance seem little more than a period pastime. A cream filled chocolate.

The stench of the battlefield. Of killing and dying. The primal ingredients of the human condition. The hands on the neck. Only man's response to the mysteries was of greater proportion. Of slowly with all your god-given strength snuffing the life out of your fellow man or of lying, bowels cooking in the sun, face up to heaven, beyond pain. The making of an army -- from Appalachia to South Bronx to Suffield, flesh -- the smells and noises of them all, packed into the back of a deuce and a half. My ear on the faint heart of the boy from West Virginia on the rumbling bowels of the man from Chelsea on the pig's snore from Georgia.

So drafted I was and drafted I'd be. My Australian mother proud. She was reverent on Tennyson and unwavering about "Better Dead than Red." She was genuinely grieved  that she could not show them how it was done. This English settlement in the South Seas didn't give an inch at Tobruk or El Alamein.

I told her my mind was not formed yet on whether to go or to return to Paris and write and miss the war.  She stated, while my dad cringed, that if I did, the door to the house would be closed to me, forever. "I did not give birth to a coward." Was that the unspoken deal? The real marriage vow? Men went to war, and women could have the rest.

Henry was less certain. As a booster, there were some obligations to have a son serving. It rubbed off on him. As a businessman, he knew war wasn't all Helen cracked it up to be. There was money involved and cannon fodder.

While I also was partial to Tennyson or Thermopylae,  gunpowder in the air, the mahogany cane, my afternoons with someone named Alison, I was also aware of catheters and wheelchairs. But, as a photo taken of me at the time revealed, I was empty.  I had nothing to lose. I sat on the couch while the excitement swilled around, not a mad artist anymore, but dazed. Someone I was not attracted to. The type who slouched, moved with effort, picked his nose unconcerned in public. Uninterested by invitations for reunions in the city. Preferring to watch reruns of Father Knows Best in the middle of the day.  Ready to fall in step. 
        
The drama returned on the eve of my induction. I knew that my life of skirting around the edges was finished. I was giving myself up voluntarily for man's periodic winnowing of the races. Man's breaking loose from unsatisfying peace. Only words when I and Botanicos last  hashed it out. What made it academic a year ago was our inability to appreciate how little we had to lose.

Through it all, we wallowed in how much we counted. Rather than the way it was: some small pleasures, a bit of pain. You get up because you're not tired; you go to sleep when you are. If I stuck my toes past the covers, I could feel the teeth marks on the footboard of the bed where I was raised. Through the window by my head, I had crawled out and down the roof at night for a rendezvous with Dickie. Imagine a banner for Camp Sloane over my desk where mom had typed the final thesis. Why do they bother? Why not just spawn and feed and fight? Little investments to take the grey off life. Across the hall, Henry was snoring.  
        
The instructions were explicit. I was to bring nothing with me save a toothbrush and razor. Anything else would be sent home anyway.  After breakfast, they took me to the railroad station from where I had made my forays as a teenager. That same locomotive that had brought me on those flights of fantasy.  The slivers of rain on my face in a dark bathroom at the Biltmore. Steps were put down. My father looked away -- that same face I had seen in the tobacco field when he had swallowed my lie about not hitchhiking to California.

My mother was drawn, shadows under the eyes. Doubt apparently had crept in over the night. Sometime before the dawn, the advertisements for war had come under her closer scrutiny.

Imagine Michael Rutherford of yore, of less than a month ago, submerged and sick with his weak art in the great midway as he sought recklessly to glimpse "His hem" in Paris. Or languishing in his parent's home as he waited for climax. Now he fairly whistled from the stop in New Haven to the induction center. Almost bemused amidst the lumpen mass as he raised his hand to swear allegiance and then joined the file to police the parking lot. "All I want to see is assholes and elbows." Even then, stooped, as they muttered their rebellion, his spirit was returning. The inherent glow returned. Shivering at attention before sunrise. The drone of the sergeant in the dark. Until we were right-turned, double-timed, thirty-four of us moving to the same rhythm through the dew, steam rising off the body, breaths trailing. "Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley, have you heard, mama's going to buy you a mockingbird, and if that mockingbird don't sing, mama's going to buy you a diamond ring."
        
Squeezing toward the sun in the bleachers while the sergeant took the rifle apart. "This is my rifle. This is my gun." He had grabbed his crotch. "One is for shooting, and one is for fun." The platoon double-timed off. The jolt of the stock against the shoulder, the report, the smell of gunpowder. The din of hundreds in the mess hall. Chowing down. Dark again. The lowering of the flag. Crapping knee to knee, ten in a line. Hargraves low crawling outside in the ditch. Hick's foot long. Reading the orders to the illiterates. Swinging from the door sill to the bunk. Muttering rebellion after lights out. Dreams of sugar and women. Hardly a thought stirring of the past.

Viet Nam, 1969

A sliver of moon over the shithouse. The boy tucked up inside had pressed "record" and started talking to his mother. A group behind Percy and me was muttering. They were claiming to have called in the world on the hillside. Phosphorous, drums of gasoline, a pissing down of orange tracers. They told about some troop that had been out there on the ridge line all night. The nightmarish screams until he had died just before daybreak. Flares hung like lanterns on the perimeter of the firebase. They agreed they had wanted to pull him back. That the Lieutenant had said he'd hang their ass. Behind Percy, fifty calibers raked the shadows.

Earlier, the C.O. had appeared in starched fatigues and poured us a martini. Later, half full of bourbon, I had taken the amplifier from the singer and had tried to haul it back to her quarters. I had lost my footing then fallen down the incline into the concertina wire. She called down "asshole."

Now, moving toward the end, I was shaking  -- my senses as they might not have been shaken since childhood. More magical then; a drop of water on the pane, a rainbow colored jewel. Stunning now;  a word...a touch...a glimpse...became fixed in me.  

I had known Percy since we had both turned up at the Infantry Officer school in Benning. A Latvian, getting a shot after six years as an enlisted man. Percy, the soldier who had always known what was going on. How to bring the shine up. The natural bark for moving the men, swords gliding, past the stand. A soldier's officer and me the one who couldn't lead and refused to be led.  But at the survival school in Panama, we shared the honors. After, at the Blue Goose, I was with his woman, and he with mine. I declined his invitation to be with our woman together. Percy was surprising me. 

The group moved off, presumably to "off" the Lieutenant. We could still hear the boy going on to his mother. Percy told me he didn't want to go out tomorrow. How now, I thought. On the eve, my friend, the lifer, trying to step back when it was too late. Too late, that is, without the chaplain or the stockade. Hard to forget the face. The round Latvian face stopped in time under the flare. Seconds with the power of years. All else now seemed false and passing compared to that face.

I would see a handful more in the days to come. Faces that still hang around in my mind. My corporal when he came over and sat next to me after the time I  had lost my first man. The thin, blue-eyed point man that lifted my body onto the chopper floor. The corporal's face again like a mask lying in the weeds.

I got my gear together.  Percy was in the showers, a large tent, by himself. He didn't see me until I was almost on him.  He was washing his groin. I stuck my hand into the water.  I was not sure where Percy’s mind was. He looked at me as if we didn't know each other real well and then he shook it.

San Francisco, 1969

May 25th. The C 141 cargo plane was floating down on the air force base outside of San Francisco. Snub-nosed and barrel-belly, it lolled down the concrete until it was parked outside the ambulance pool. 
           
Once set in the queue, the drivers got out on the runway to chat, quitting it only when the massive hydraulics on the tail-ramp began to whine. The plane's ass-end now slowly separating and dropping to the ground, leaving a gaping view into its strange inside, from whence blew an antiseptic wind.
           
For such a giant, its guts were unsubstantial -- flimsy with straps and cords; I.V. bottles and plastic tubes; exhausted nurses and nylon stretchers. Three high they were filed -- some complaining about last night's chow; others staring silently, kept alive intravenously.

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