Connie Willis - Blackout

“I can’t go to Dunkirk!” he told her as she pulled the blanket up over him, but they were already there. He could see the docks and the flames from the town and the enveloping black smoke. “You have to take me back!” he shouted. “I’m not supposed to be here! It’s a divergence point!”

“Shh, you’re not going anywhere,” the nun said, and when he opened his eyes he was back in the bed, and she was standing next to it, holding his wrist, and the nausea and the splitting headache were gone.

“I think the effects of the ether have worn off,” he said.

“I should imagine so,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll fetch the doctor.”

“No, wait. How long-?” but she had already disappeared through the double doors at the end of the ward.

“Three weeks,” someone said, and Mike turned his head to look at the man in the bed next to him, or rather, boy-he couldn’t be more than seventeen. His head was bandaged, and his left arm was in a cast held up at an angle by pulleys and wires.

“You mean three days?” Mike said.

The boy shook his head. “It’s been three weeks since they operated on you. That’s why Sister Carmody smiled when you said you thought the effects of the ether had worn off.”

Three weeks? He’d been here three weeks? But that didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t the retrieval team come and gotten him?

“You’ve been rather out of it, I’m afraid,” the boy was saying. “I’m Flying Officer Fordham, by the way. Sorry I can’t shake your hand.” He raised his right arm, also in a cast, to show Mike, and let it fall back at his side.

“You said they operated on me? Did they amputate my foot?”

“I’ve no idea,” Fordham said. “I’m not in a good position to see much except for the ceiling, which has a water stain in exactly the shape of a Messerschmitt, worse luck.”

Mike wasn’t listening. He tried to raise his head up to see if his foot was still there, but the effort made him so dizzy he had to lie back and close his eyes to stop the spinning.

“Wretched angle to have an arm stuck at, isn’t it?” Fordham was saying, gesturing at the arm in the pulleys with his right hand. “I look as though I’m saluting der Fьhrer. Sieg heil! Decidedly unpatriotic. It may keep the Nazis from shooting me when they invade, though. Till they find out who I am, at any rate.”

“What day is it?” Mike asked.

“No idea of that either, I’m afraid. It’s easy to lose track in here, and unfortunately there’s no stain in the shape of a calendar. The twenty-ninth, I think, or the thirtieth.”

The thirtieth? That would make it a full month. He must have heard him wrong. “June thirtieth?”

“Oh, I say, you have been out a good while. It’s July.”

“July?” That’s not possible, he thought. Oxford would have sent a retrieval team as soon as he failed to return after the evacuation. “Have I had any visitors?” he asked.

“Not that I know of, but I’ve been out of it a good deal as well.”

And the retrieval team wouldn’t know where he was. They wouldn’t know he’d gone to Dunkirk or that he was in a hospital, and it would never occur to them to look in a convent.

The nun was back with a doctor. He wore a white coat and had an antiquated stethoscope around his neck. “Has he told you who he is yet?” he was asking the nun.

“No,” she said. “I came as soon as I saw he was awake-”

“What day is it?” Mike demanded.

“Awake and talking,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?”

“What day is it?”

“August tenth,” the nurse said.

“Good heavens, as late as that?” Fordham said.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked again, and the nurse cut in, “What’s your name?”

“There wasn’t any identification on you when you were admitted,” the doctor explained.

So the retrieval team wouldn’t have been able to find him even if it had occurred to them to look here.

“It’s Mike,” he said. “Mike Davis.”

The doctor wrote it on the chart. “Do you remember what unit you were with?”

“Unit?” Mike said blankly.

“Or your commanding officer?”

They think I’m a soldier, Mike thought. They think I was rescued from Dunkirk. And why not? He’d been on a boat full of soldiers, and the fact that he hadn’t been in uniform wouldn’t mean anything. Half of the soldiers hadn’t been either. He tried to remember what had happened to his papers. They’d been in his jacket, and he’d taken it off when he went in the water.

But why hadn’t they realized he was an American? He remembered talking in his delirium. Maybe his L-and-A implant had stopped working. Implants sometimes went haywire when an historian got sick.

The doctor was waiting, his pen poised above the chart.

“I-” Mike began, and then hesitated. If his implant wasn’t working, he shouldn’t tell them he was an American. And if this was a military hospital, he shouldn’t tell them he was a civilian. They’d throw him out. But military hospitals didn’t have nuns.

“Never mind,” the doctor said before he could come up with a good answer. “You’ve had a difficult time. Do you remember how you came to be wounded?”

“No,” Mike said. It must have happened when the explosion blew the dead soldier’s body free of the propeller-

“He was hit by shrapnel,” the nun said helpfully, and to the doctor, “He was in the water attempting to unfoul his ship’s propeller when the ship came under attack, and he heroically dove in and freed it.”

The doctor said, “Sister, may I speak to you for a moment?” He and the nun walked away, their heads together.

“… Memory loss…” Mike heard him say and “extremely common in cases like this,” and “… concussion from the blast… don’t press him on it… usually returns after a few days…”

Jesus, Mike thought, they think I’ve got amnesia. But maybe that was a good thing. It would give him a chance to figure out if his L-and-A had stopped working and whether this place only took military patients, and now that he’d told them his name, he might only need to stall for another day or two, and the team would come and get him out of here and safely back to Oxford. If it wasn’t already too late, and they’d amputated his foot. If they hadn’t, it could be repaired with nerve and muscle grafts and tissue regeneration no matter how damaged it was, but if they’d already cut it off-

The nun and the doctor had finished conferring. “Let’s have a listen to your chest, shall we?” the doctor said, handing the chart to the nun; he stuck the ends of the stethoscope in his ears and pushed the blanket down and Mike’s hospital gown up, baring his chest.

“Did you have to take my foot off?” Mike asked, careful to keep his accent neutral, neither English nor American-sounding.

“Take a deep breath,” the doctor said. He listened and then moved the stethoscope to a different spot. “And another.” He looked up at the nun, nodding. “A bit better. Not as much involvement in the left lung as there was.”

“Do I have pneumonia?” Mike blurted out, and his implant was obviously working now. His pronunciation of “pneumonia” was unmistakably American.

The doctor didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at the chart. “Has his temperature come down at all?”

“It was thirty-nine this morning.”

“Good,” he said, handed the chart to the nun, and started to walk away.

“Do I have pneumonia?” Mike persisted. “Did you amputate my foot?”

“You let us worry about the medical side of things,” the doctor said heartily. “And you concentrate on-”

“Did you?”

“You shouldn’t think about any of that now,” the nun said soothingly. “Try to rest.”

“No,” Mike said, shaking his head. Mistake. The movement made him violently sick. “I want to know the worst. It’s important.”

The doctor exchanged glances with the nun and then seemed to come to a decision. “Very well,” he said. “When you were brought in, your foot was badly damaged, and you’d lost a good deal of blood. You were also suffering from exposure and shock, which meant we couldn’t operate as soon as we would have liked, and by the time we did, there was a good deal of infection-”

Oh, God, Mike thought. They had to amputate the whole leg.

“And after the first surgery you contracted pneumonia, so we had to wait longer than we wished to operate again. There was also considerable damage to the muscles and tendons-”

“I want to see it,” Mike said, and the nun glanced quickly at the doctor. “Now.”

The doctor frowned and then said, “Sister Carmody, if you’d help him to sit up,” and bent over to turn a crank at the foot of the bed.

The nun put her hand behind his back for support as the bed came up. His head swerved and spun. He swallowed hard, determined not to vomit. “Are you feeling dizzy?” she asked.

Mike didn’t trust himself to shake his head. “No,” he said, watching as the doctor pulled back the blanket and sheet, revealing his pajama-clad leg and his ankle and beyond it, a knobby lump of gauze in the general shape of a foot.

They didn’t cut it off, Mike thought, weak with relief. He lay back limply against the nun’s arm. The foot bones are still there, and the rest can be repaired as soon as I get back to Oxford.

“It will take some time to heal, but there’s no reason you won’t be able to walk again, though it will require additional surgeries. But just now you need to work on resting and regaining your strength. You’re not to worry.”

Easy for you to say, he thought. You’re not a hundred and twenty years from home with an injured foot and primitive medical care and in an environment you haven’t researched and that they will throw you out of as soon as they find out you’re a civilian.

And why didn’t they know that? They knew about his unfouling the ship’s propeller, which meant the Commander had brought him in. Then why hadn’t he told them his name?

He might not have remembered it, Mike thought. He’d immediately christened him Kansas and called him that from then on, but that didn’t explain why he hadn’t told them he was a reporter.

Mike drifted off to sleep still trying to figure it out, and dreamed of the drop. It wouldn’t open. “It can’t,” Private Hardy said. “It doesn’t exist.”

“Why not?” Mike said and saw it wasn’t Hardy, it was the dead soldier who’d been tangled in the propeller. “What’s happened to the drop?”

“You weren’t supposed to do it,” the dead soldier said, shaking his head sadly. “You changed everything.”

Mike woke drenched in a clammy sweat. Oh, God, what if his actions had altered events?

Saving a single soldier can’t change the course of the war, he told himself. There were 350,000 soldiers on those beaches. But what if Hardy was supposed to have saved an officer’s life there on the beach, an officer who’d be crucial to the success of D-Day? Or what if he was supposed to have been rescued by some other boat, or by one of the destroyers? What if he was the man who’d spotted the U-boat that would otherwise have torpedoed it, and without him it would be lost with all hands? And what if that destroyer had been the one that had sunk the Bismarck? What if they didn’t sink it, and we ended up losing the war to the Germans?

That’s why the retrieval team hasn’t come, Mike thought, shivering uncontrollably. Because-

“Oh, God,” he said to the dead soldier, “who won the war?”

“No one as yet,” the nun on night duty said cheerfully, “but I’ve no doubt we will in the end. Having a bad dream?” She took a thermometer out of her starched apron pocket, put it under his tongue, and laid her hand on his forehead. “Your fever’s back up.”