Connie Willis - Blackout

“My foot,” he said, even though the nun wouldn’t be able to understand English. He tried to raise his head to see it. “It’s bleeding.”

“There, there, you mustn’t think about that now,” the nun said, and she had a British accent, so he must be in England.

But I didn’t think the English had nuns. Hadn’t Henry VIII burned down all the convents? He must not have, because the nun was bending over him, pulling the blanket up over his shoulders. “You must rest,” she said. “You’ve just come out of surgery-”

“Surgery?” he said in alarm. He tried to sit up, but the moment he raised his head off the pillow, a wave of dizzying nausea washed over him, and he fell back, swallowing hard.

“You’re still feeling the effects of the ether,” she said, her hands firmly on his chest to keep him from attempting to sit up again. “You must lie still.”

“No.” He shook his head, and that was a mistake, too. I’m going to vomit all over her white habit, he thought, and swallowed hard. “You said they operated. Did they have to take off my foot?”

“Try to sleep,” she said, covering him up again.

“Did they?” he attempted to ask, but this time he did vomit, and while the nun was gone emptying the basin, he dozed off. And she was right, he must still be feeling the effects of the ether because he had strange drugged dreams-he was on the beach at Dunkirk with Private Hardy. “I’d have been a goner without your light,” Hardy said. “You saved my life,” but it wasn’t true. The boats had all left, and the Germans were coming.

“It’s all right,” Mike told him. “We’ll use my drop,” but it wouldn’t open, and then he was in the water, trying to reach the Lady Jane, but she was already pulling away from the mole, she was already pulling out of the harbor, and when he tried to swim after her, the water was full of flames, it was so hot-

I must have a fever, he thought, waking briefly. My foot must have gotten infected. Why aren’t they giving me antibiotics?

Because they hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had antivirals or tissue regeneration. Had they even developed penicillin in 1940? I have to get out of here. I have to get back to Oxford. And he tried, but the nuns held him down and gave him an injection, and they must have had sedatives in 1940 because he ended up back in the flaming water. He couldn’t see the Lady Jane anywhere, but there was a light, shining this way and that.

It’s Jonathan’s flashlight, he thought, and swam toward that, but he couldn’t reach it. “Wait!” he shouted, but the nun didn’t hear him.

“No, no better, Doctor,” she said. “I fear he’s too ill to be moved,” but he must not have been, because when he woke up, after what seemed like days and days in his dream, he was in another bed, another, larger ward, with two long rows of white painted metal beds, and the nun was different, younger and with a white bibbed apron over her blue habit. But she said the same things: “You must rest,” and “His fever’s up again,” and “Go below and put your shoes on. We’ll be in Dunkirk soon.”

“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-”