Sweet Reason (10 page)

“Do I understand you correctly, Captain? You want to know about the photographs I have over my bunk?”

Joyce sat stiffly in the straight-backed wooden chair next to the washbasin. His long, thin face looked longer and thinner because of the shadows in the room.

He and the Captain had already been through the business about Joyce’s friendship with Boeth. “You know why I don’t allow myself to become friendly with the enlisted men, or with anyone for that matter?” Jones had asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s entirely possible we may come under atomic attack some day. You may remember that when a ship comes under atomic attack, everyone gets off the weather decks to protect against radioactive poisoning. Well, Mister Joyce, let me put it to you — what would happen if everyone was inside and the ship suddenly came under attack from enemy aircraft? What would happen is I’d send some men topside to man the antiaircraft guns aft, that’s what would happen. I’d order these men to expose themselves to deadly doses of radioactivity, and I’d do it
without batting an eyelash. Now this may sound callous to you, Mister Joyce, but I don’t want to take the risk that I’d hesitate to send a man to certain death merely because he was my friend.
So I keep my distance”
— the Captain’s eyebrows shot up to underscore the point — “and you’d do well to take your cue from me.”

But quite obviously, Joyce’s friendship with Boeth didn’t interest the Captain as much as the pictures over the Poet’s bunk.

“You understand me correctly, Mister Joyce,” Jones was saying. He swung his legs onto the deck so he could face the Poet. “Among other things, I’m responsible for the morale of this ship —”

“Do you mind if I ask who told you about the photographs, Captain?”

“That’s neither here or there, Mister Joyce.”

“It was Proper, wasn’t it?”

“I said that’s not important, Mister Joyce. What is important is those pictures. Now what about them?”

“It’s really very simple, Captain. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect paperweights. Some people collect barbed wire. I collect photographs of people being killed. I have one showing a soldier getting shot during the Spanish Civil War. His body is being pushed backward by the force of the bullet passing through him. I have another of a South Vietnamese police chief putting a pistol to the head of a suspect and blowing his brains out in the streets of Saigon. I have a shot of the Nazis stringing up some partisans in Yugoslavia. There’s a photograph of a beaming Cambodian soldier brandishing two severed heads. And another of two small children in a South Vietnamese village called My Lai taken just before they were gunned down by American soldiers. There is another I consider a collector’s item—”

“I think I get the idea, Mister Joyce.”

“Do you, Captain?”

“You’re queer for dead people.”

“No, sir, that’s not it at all. I’m terrified of dead people. When my father died I didn’t even go to the funeral because I couldn’t stand to see him like that, laid out in a coffin with his hands folded and a plastic carnation in his lapel. You know something, Captain, I’d never even seen a dead body in my life until Wally tried to pull that one out of the sea today.”

“Then I guess I don’t understand, Mister Joyce. If you’re trying to avoid the sight of dead people, I can see why you prefer the navy to the army. But then why all the pictures?”

“But that’s precisely it, Captain.” The Poet leaned forward, eager to explain. “Out here on a ship or in a bomber, ten miles from the target, it’s easy to forget that there are people being killed when we shoot. It’s all so mechanical, so impersonal. The computers shoot at coordinates on a map. It’s easy to wage war this way because you never see the war. There’s no morality involved. It’s all a game. Everyone gets a certain amount of satisfaction out of playing well — coping with the mathematics and the mechanics involved and hitting a target you can’t even see. But I want to remember all the time that there are people on the other end of this game — and that we’re killing them. I want to feel sick to my stomach everytime I hear a gun go off.”

“Will that help them any, or just make you feel better, eh?”

The two men looked at each other across a vast gulf. Jones reached down and hefted the flashlight, flicking it on with his thumb. He got a feeling of power from being able to touch something across the small room with the beam of light.

“Captain, I haven’t expressed myself very well, I know. Maybe I can tell you a story that will explain how I feel.”

Toying absently with the beam of light, Jones nodded.
“Come ahead, my boy. I’ve heard a lot of things in my time. I suppose I can hear one of your, eh, stories.”

“I remember,” the Poet began, talking earnestly and fast, “I remember once I was with some friends on a picnic. We were eating lunch when this little girl walked by with her mother. They were holding hands and the mother was very angry. I remember she said to the little girl — I suppose it was her daughter — she said: ‘Now that’s no way to treat a butterfly.’ Something like that: ‘That’s no way to treat a butterfly.’ I remember I spent all afternoon trying to guess what the little girl had done to the butterfly — whether she had torn its wings off or squashed it with her foot or swatted it in midair with her hand or pinned it to the ground with a bobby pin.” Joyce lost some of his steam. “Does any of this make sense to you?”

“Frankly, I don’t understand a goddamn word you’re saying, Mister Joyce. I suggest you forget about these butterflies of yours and concentrate on what you were sent here to do.”

“No questions asked, is that it, Captain?”

Jones nodded. “No questions asked. No conscience salved.”

Joyce shrugged. “I won’t argue with you, Captain. I stand corrected — maybe I am salving my conscience. But at least I don’t pull the trigger. I have that going for me.”

“But you communicate, don’t you, Mister Joyce?” The Captain was suddenly very angry.

“Communicate?”

“You heard me. Communicate. As my communications officer, you communicate for this ship, don’t you? And you do it efficiently too. You don’t pull the trigger or give the order, I’ll give you that. What you do is advertise you have a conscience by hanging photographs over your bunk. And when you go back to civilian life you’ll boast that you didn’t
pull a trigger. You leave the dirty work to people like me who have always been there when the country needed them. Of course you’re a fake, Mister Joyce. You receive and decode the messages that tell us what target to shoot at, and you make sure that I see those messages. You’re part of the system and it’s time you realized it. Do you know why I called you up here? Because for a moment there I actually thought you might be Sweet Reason. But you don’t have the guts to be Sweet Reason, Mister Joyce. You’re not worried about the people on the shore; all you’re worried about is what people will think of you.”

Jones waved a hand toward the door. “That’ll be all, Mister Joyce. Just make sure you keep on communicating. And one more thing. Get those goddamn dead people off your bulkhead and put up some good, clean tit pictures, eh? You can consider that an order, Mister Joyce.”

Boeth Peels Away a Shell or Two

“Tit pictures?”

“Tit pictures. He sat there playing with his phallus-flashlight and ordered me to put up tit pictures.”

“Jesus, he’s incredible,” Boeth said, and he shook his head sympathetically and turned back to the hardboiled eggs that the Poet had swiped from the officers’ pantry. He rolled the first one against the side of the computer until the shell was completely cracked. Then he began picking at it with his thumbnail. The bits and pieces of shell that came away he laid out neatly on the deck — almost as if he intended to start in where all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had left off.

In the background the allegro from one of Bach’s Brandenburgs rippled softly through the small room from Boeth’s tape deck.

“Maybe you should feel flattered,” Boeth said, his mind more on the egg than the conversation.

“What do you mean flattered?” Joyce challenged. Obviously in a black mood, he sat with his back against a shore fire control console, his sloping shoulders hunched forward, his legs thrust out in front of him. “This neonautical John Paul Jones insults me and you think I should be flattered. Some logic.”

“You don’t understand.” Boeth shrugged his heavy shoulders. The shrug was his way of giving ground during a conversation. It was something he did grudgingly, but his friendship with Joyce was what made life on the
Ebersole
bearable. “He’s trying to track down the one man on this ship with a conscience and you’re the first suspect he comes up with. So you should feel flattered. That’s all I meant.”

Joyce drew his knees up to his chin, exposing thin, hairless ankles. He reached over quickly and jerked up his socks, which were green. “Wallowitch says conscience is an inner voice that warns you when someone is looking. Out here” — the Poet waved his hand to take in all of Yankee Station — “nobody is looking, so there is no such thing as conscience.”

Boeth finished peeling the first egg. He put it aside, took up the second and rolled it against the side of the computer. “You know something, Poet, the more I know you the more I realize how innocent you are.”

Frown lines formed around Joyce’s eye sockets. He remembered that Mariana had accused him of being innocent too — though she had been talking in a sexual context.

Boeth saw that the Poet was annoyed and shrugged again. “I’m not saying that innocence is anything to be ashamed of. I’m not saying that. It’s only that the world
equates innocence with profundity, and you do too. But innocence has no depth. It doesn’t respond to the complexities of life with complexity of thought.”

“But you haven’t said why the shoe fits me. How am I innocent?”

Boeth looked up from the egg. “No offense intended —” he said with a smirk.

“— none taken,” Joyce laughed. He had told Boeth about how the expression was bandied about in the wardroom and it was a joke between them. “No, listen, seriously, this is straight talk. Say what you think. How am I innocent?”

“Well, for one thing you have a very innocent idea about morality. You think morality consists of taking moral positions, when what it really involves is
defending
them. What I’m getting at is that you’re basically a passive moralist. You wouldn’t knowingly kill someone. But you wouldn’t go out of your way to prevent someone from being killed either.” Boeth bent his head toward the egg and began peeling again.

“You’re a goddamn Jesuit,” Joyce said lightly. “You’re hairsplitting —”

“I’m not hairsplitting —”

“You’re attacking me —” Joyce was agitated now.

“I’m not attacking,” Boeth protested. “Don’t be so fucking sensitive.”

“Okay, criticizing. Is that better? You’re criticizing me for renouncing the use of force as a means of persuasion —”

“As a means of defending morality —”

“Well, I admit it,” Joyce said. “I admit it openly. I renounce the use of force because I can’t be sure — nobody can ever be sure — to what end it should be applied.”

“But don’t you see, you’re being innocent again,” Boeth said excitedly. “That’s not it, that’s not it at all. You renounce force because
you think the world is in order
—” Now Boeth leaned forward. “Think back, Poet. Do you
remember the last contact we had with the big wide world outside the
Eugene Ebersole
?”

“New York. Christmas in New York.”

“And do you remember anything being out of order in New York over Christmas?”

“I remember the sewer — the water gushed out of it and flooded the street. I remember the neon sign sizzling during the day and snapping off at dusk just as the other signs flashed on. And the stoplight. I remember the stoplight frozen in go and everyone fighting to cross the intersection at once.”

Boeth shook his head. “That’s not what I had in mind when I said the world is out of order. What I had in mind was Mariana.” Boeth looked hard at Joyce. “You remember Mariana, don’t you?”

Joyce remembered her very well.

Ensign Joyce’s Curriculum Vitae