American Romantic by Ward Just Page B

bird and, less distinct, the usual jungle rustle. He saw green everywhere around him and butterflies here and there. The trees were tightly wound with vines and all of it had the aspect of a botanical prison. The other two huts were empty, with nothing left behind except a crumpled cigarette pack, Chesterfields. No food, no water. Dusk came quickly as it always did. He thought of dusk as a shroud pulled by invisible hands and when he looked up he saw a starless sky. He checked his rucksack and saw that his stash of Chesterfields was missing. Furious, digging deeper, he discovered the ambassador’s golden compass where he’d left it. His wallet was undisturbed. The envelope containing one thousand U.S. was there, too, everything present and accounted for except the Chesterfields. Enemy cadres were said to be puritanical, a quality essential to their self-image as liberators and egalitarians, hard-wired, as opposed to the selfish ethics and opportunism of the oppressors, worse than the corrupt French. All the same, Harry decided to count the money and found it all there. Probably they had decided that at some fine ideological level Chesterfields wanted to be free, a kind of indemnification for looking after the American. Where he came from, cigarettes were plentiful and cheap. It was not theft. The cigarettes were communal property. This was well known. Then he remembered they also had his wristwatch.
    Harry had no idea how long he had been sick, surely two days, maybe longer. For all he knew it might have been a week, a decade, the war over and done with. He was Crusoe with no Friday. His gut was still knotted and he continued to sweat, his back and his chest, his stubbled face. When he put his hand to his forehead he knew he had a fever, not high, a low-grade annoyance. Now time moved in slow motion, an eternity between one second and the next. Then time hastened, almost a swoon. Suddenly he was on the ground once again and retching and moments later in deep sleep. Harry woke up a dozen times during the night, hearing strange noises, blackness all around. The jungle vanished. His thoughts were discontinuous, rapid arrivals and departures in all directions. The voice in Harry’s head was not his own, but it was insistent and personal, a warning of the perils ahead. He heard the voice but could not see the face of the speaker. Was it true that vines contained water? The speaker had no idea. He had never seen a jungle. He lived in Connecticut and there were no jungles in Connecticut, only stone walls and fields that rolled off to the west. The speaker shrugged and in a moment was gone, back to wherever he had come from. Harry was alone in an empty house, blood-red walls and bone-white ceilings, no windows. He wondered how he had come to this misfortune and then recollected his reliance on denial. The means by which a young man got on in life day to day, a pretend world of danger and folly that always yielded to illusion, if the illusion was powerful enough. Illusion always defeated fact. He was the piano with the broken string, way up high on the treble clef, the one that promised a melodic lightness of spirit, counterpoint to the ceremony of the bass. Harry fell asleep again, dreaming now of evenings at Fred’s bar, the first mate with the blue parrot on his shoulder, a moment that slid easily into a slender girl with an emerald necklace rattling Liszt’s cage. The applause went on and on, Sieglinde beside him now clapping furiously. So it was evident that Harry was not done with illusion after all.
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    He was awake at first light, mostly clearheaded and without rancor. It occurred to him to brush his teeth. He found another pair of shorts and a clean shirt and stepped into the morning sunlight. The jungle’s green curtain did not move. Harry thought it wore the tortured face of one of El Greco’s saints. A godforsaken face, morose and resigned, and behind it somewhere a Bach fugue, austerity