arms and legs, Jimmy looks like a sixty-year-old roofer who has seen better days, his face sunbrowned to a squint. He wears green scrubs, his stringy gray hair contained by a net. He reeks of cigarette smoke.
He says, “You’ve had some wild time, haven’t you, pal?”
“I’m still having a wild time, aren’t I?” Cooper says.
Jimmy grins and nods his head.
“I want you to see the view from the lounge,” Inez says cheerily, walking ahead. “Hospital’s one the tallest places on the island. You can see the lagoon!”
Lagoon: what a romantic word! How heroically brave, heroically sad, heroically misunderstood Cooper felt when sailed from Half Moon Bay without Lillian and Bailey three months ago. He’s not sober enough to take a measure of his regret. But he pictures himself trying, like a deckhand dropping rope into the water to measure fathoms.
“Where’s my boat?” he asks.
“I’m sure your boat is in the water, where boats belong,” says Inez.
Jimmy parks Cooper in front of the three windows, each as big as a beach towel. Cooper surveys the island for the first time: he sees whitewashed cinderblock duplexes and triplexes amid a clutter of palm trees and too-green greenery. The place looks run down and overgrown. Beyond the furzy green lies the turquoise expanse of too-blue water. Then he sees an old gray-metal transport plying away from the island.
“Where they going?” he asks.
Inez leans into the window. “That’s the afternoon ferry to Ebeye.”
“Ebeye?”
“Where the natives live.”
When Cooper doesn’t answer, she adds, “You know, the Marshallese?”
My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone. My leg is gone.
But he can still feel his leg.
“There’s our celeb,” a young doctor greets him.
“You’re the guy!” says Cooper. He means to say, You’re the guy who took my leg!
“Yeah, I’m the guy!” the doctor says with good humor. Then he wheels Cooper away.
Inez calls, “Later, gator!”
“You’re the talk of the town,” the doctor says.
“There’s a town?”
The doctor chuckles. “No, not at all. We have a department store that looks like a bargain barn, a snack bar attached to one side, the post office attached to the other. Then there’s a kind of hardware store in a prefab building. That’s your downtown. Oh, and we have a grocery store half a mile from that. We call it Surf-way. Isn’t that cute?”
Cooper likes speeding through the wide hallway, strangers nodding and smiling at him. Maybe he is a celebrity.
Celebrity fuck-up is more like it. He is so shamed by what has happened, he doesn’t want to call his parents, though he knows they’re waiting to hear from him. He last talked to them via Skype from Honolulu. And Lillian, would she care to know?
The doctor wheels him into a rectangle of sunlight in front of his desk. He’s younger than Cooper remembers, a short athletic man with a weak chin and wavy dirty-blond hair. He pulls his desk chair around so that he can sit nearly knee to knee with Cooper. He’s wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, wrinkled khakis, and classic Jack Purcells.
“I’ve visited you many times, my friend, but I’m not sure you remember.”
Cooper tries a smile. “Inez says I was out for three days.”
“We weren’t going to let you stay down any longer than that,” he says. “There’s a lot to do.”
“I am,” Cooper begins. Happy to be alive? Grateful that you saved me? Scared out of my fucking mind? “I am a little confused right now.”
“We have a counselor you can talk to.”
“Where’s my leg?” The question surprises Cooper as much as it seems to surprise the young doctor.
“Cooper—”
“I’m just curious. What do you do with a leg?”
A piece of him loose somewhere in the world—it’s an unsettling thought.
The doctor eyes him as if to search out a symptom. At last he says, “Nobody’s sorrier about what happened than I am. It was the last thing any doctor would want to do.”
Cooper nods his understanding. “I would have died. I know that.”
The doctor nods yes. “It was a difficult procedure, but I was careful and I had help.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, doc.”
The doctor’s name, Cooper remembers, is Boxer. He wears a wedding band. Is everyone on Kwajalein married? The place must be crawling with kids.
Boxer looks disappointed or hurt, his thin lips pale, his eyes narrowed and unfocused as if he’s withdrawn into himself.
The voice in Cooper’s head says, Half a leg is better than no leg. Half is better than none.
Then he hears Boxer say, “It’s gone, Cooper,” so directly, so surely, that there’s nothing more to say.
Gone.
Something—maybe the drugs—allows Cooper to say, “You did a great job, I’m sure.”
Boxer nods a silent thank-you, then describes with increasing enthusiasm the business of rehab, which will be “slow and painful.” Through it all Cooper nods dutifully, like a soldier hearing his assignment. There is so much to do, he doesn’t try to keep it straight. All he knows right now is that he wants to get out of his chair. He wants to walk. And get to his boat. He’s got to get to his boat.
When the orderly returns him to his room, Cooper meets his first visitor: a big-bellied, bald man who looks to be sixty and is dressed in a white T-shirt, dirty khaki trousers rolled up nearly to his calves, and rubber flip-flops—like a hip summer kid from the States, though Cooper suspects the old man has been dressing this way for decades. He has a big hound-dog face, thin legs, and the mottled complexion of a man who should but consistently fails to avoid the sun. In fact, he’s blocking the sunlight at Cooper’s window. It appears that he’s been here some time, perhaps picking through Cooper’s fruit basket, smelling the flowers, reading the cards.
He offers his small hand, which Cooper takes with some effort. “Art Norman, Cultural Liaison. If you’re too tired I can come back.”
Cooper regrets his own weak grip. He wonders how bad he looks.
“I’m fine.” He waves away the glum orderly, then returns his gaze to the visitor. “Come back for what?”
“Your orientation. Haven’t you checked your schedule?” The liaison lifts a sheet of paper from atop the EKG at the side of the bed and waves it at him as if it were wet. His close-set eyes give him a shrewd look; his downturned mouth suggests a fretter.
“I rate a personal visit from the Cultural Liaison?”
“We don’t want you starting without knowing some basics about the Marshallese people.”
Cooper nods agreeably. His first day out of bed and already he’s getting lectures? “Why isn’t a Marshallese person telling me this?”
“They don’t like to talk about themselves. You will not find a more modest people. They don’t wear shorts, you’ll notice. Do you know what iọkwe eok means?”
This