One year before the selection process
Inside the hospital corridor's everything was so still you could hear a pin drop.
The town was calm by then, and tired.
Daniel and Linda were completely on their own.
It was late.
The emergency room was pale, yellow, unpleasant. Linda was nineteen, had short, black hair and a perfect face, like an ancient statue of a Greek goddess.
She and Daniel came into one of the many rooms used to visit the patients in private.
Messner caressed her cheek, then kissed her.
In those days he had short hair, no beard and was paying for his studies by working as a male nurse.
Torrence wasn't a big town and Messner's idea about fucking the wife of the chief physician turned out to be a very bad idea: rumors started spreading almost immediately.
When the two separated from each other, her eyes were bright with tears, as if she would start crying at any moment.
She looked at him.
He asked himself the real reason of her look. He asked himself if inside those unfathomable azure stars – that were her eyes – there really was love... Or something else, like fear.
Messner moved away from her.
He stayed still for a while, as if waiting for something from her.
Then said:
“The baby of eleven p.m. won't survive”
That kind of unfathomable torpor she was lost in after the kiss, that kind of magic in her look immediately faded away, and became surprise on her face.
Why had he said something like that in a moment like this? He had no idea.
He had just said something about work in a moment when they should only have been talking about themselves, about what there was - or wasn't - between them.
“It's horrible” said Linda.
Then she took his hands and held them.
They stayed like that for a moment, facing each other.
But after a while, Messner understood that something was wrong.
And as a matter of fact, she said:
“It has to be over, Daniel”
I knew it – he thought
The worst moment was the first.
The words got into his head with an effect like a blow.
And yet he knew... He had felt it coming for days. He expected it, but something inside of him died anyway.
Then he started reacting.
In some way, the pain started flowing inside him, and evolving.
In some way it became manageable and he was able to receive the blow and react.
In the real world, he barely swallowed and moved his look away from her, but other than that, his face showed no sign of it.
He looked at her body for the last time.
For the last time, he allowed himself to give her that kind of look men give to things that belong to them... Even if, sometimes, there are things you own so much that in the end it's you that belongs to them, not the contrary. It's a strange mechanism, that no one has ever completely understood, but that's the way it is.
Messner looked at the high-cut neckline.
He looked at her shoulders, high and bare, the thin, long neck and his eyes never felt impudent, not after what there had been between them, and while he was doing it, Messner knew that this was going to be the last time he could do it.
Linda was wonderful.
Daniel embraced his lover and held her tight.
He closed his eyes and rested on the side of his neck.
She returned that embrace, holding him to her.
She softly put her hands on his hair, over his head almost to hold it, and the two stayed tight for a long time.
“It must be over, Daniel”
“I love you”
She then tilted her head, to lower her look to his.
“Look at me, Daniel. This is over”
The heat in her voice had faded and it gave way to pride inside Messner's mind.
“It's obvious that it has to end, I am fully aware of it. What do you think?”
Messner felt as if he had been treated like a child.
Nevertheless he didn't want to break loose from her. It probably was going to be the last time he would embrace her.
Then he tried to take control over himself.
All things considered, it was normal for him to have thoughts about death during a moment like that.
The only difference between him and anyone else, was that he had spent one year in Vietnam, and he had seen so many people dying that the idea of killing someone didn't seem so odd to him.
“Are you ok?” she said.
“Yes”
“Okay then. Okay.”
She pulled away from him.
She straighten her white coat, pulling it down with her hands.
She pulled out a little mirror from a pocket, opened it and checked her make up in it.
Then she was ready to leave.
She put her hand on the exit door but she stopped just like that, with her hand on it.
And when she said her last words, she didn't even turn to him.
“I will miss you”
Then she left.
Messner found himself alone in the room.
He looked at the large clock hanging from the wall: his shift was going to end in just fifteen minutes.
He was undecided between ether or morphine.
In that hospital the doses of those substances were very vaguely registered: the procedure was easy to cheat and the risk of being caught was really low.
The real problem was that there could be an emergency right during that last fifteen minutes of his shift and working stoned would be a problem for him.
Messner took a syringe from the drawer, then he opened a closet.
The transparent jars were all perfectly lined up like little toy soldiers.
Messner took a little jar, he pierced it with the needle then put it in one of his pockets.
He then went to the toilet and locked himself in.
That night he was rather heavy handed with that stuff.
At the end of the shift he stayed a while in the office to get over his hang over, then he left the hospital.
The parking lot was almost empty.
He went to his car.
He switched the engine on, he left, but after just a while he pulled up at the side of the road, and decided to get high again.
He really needed to get high for good, that night.
He stuck the needle in his arm, felt the physical pleasure rising up and for a while he felt happy.
But after that starting moment of pleasure, he felt sad again.
It was in that particular moment that he decided to join the army again.
All in all, during the year that he had been over there, in Vietnam, he had felt like he belonged to something bigger.
Every fucking day spent in that fucking field hospital, he and his medical staff fought against something tangible, and they did it all together, with no second thoughts, no indecisiveness, no rivalry.
Shouting soldiers were carried in burnt, concussed, crushed to a pulp or spraying blood.
For a whole year he and his colleagues had struggled - better – had really fought in their own way against death, an enemy even worse than the Vietcong themselves.
An enemy whom fighting against was really fair.
And this made sense, to Messner.
Satisfactions had never been many, but some he had had for real, and that was enough for him: lives saved, young men saved from the wheel chair, amputations avoided... No matter how few, when those kinds of satisfactions came, they were the best.
They were even better than sex.
Then he thought that all things considered in Vietnam he had never risked that much.
He had always seen and heard about everything, but he had never really run any serious risk.
Yes, he helped a lot of disembowelled people destined to kick the bucket anyway. He did practically nothing else for a whole year but, all in all, little changed.
We are all going to die, sooner or later. Aren't we?
What really matters is to live well the time we have left, and he wasn't living it well, not at all.
And had he become a doctor, he would have lose his two most important things.
His only two real loves: Linda and the morphine.
Linda, because he and she wouldn't have been colleagues anymore.
The morphine, because had he become a doctor, he would never have fetched the doses himself anymore, but an assistant. And this would have deprived him of the very special relationship he always had with the medicine cupboard.
So, that night, he definitively decided to re-join the army.
He thought that living the military life again could be a good thing for him.
And, while he turned the engine on again, he decided that simply rejoining wasn't enough for him.
He would try to join the special forces too.
Because we only live once, for fuck's sake – he thought.
And maybe, over there, he would finally find what he was really seeking from his life.