In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner Page B

who have no idea what a last day on earth is like. I say, you live every day like you’re gonna live forever. Which means, by the way, stay out of wars. The Thomas Jefferson was an attack transport, so we were shelled. One guy I knew, who later got killed, described it as having a speeding train thrown at you from out of the sky. And I treated some of the kids who came off the beaches at Okinawa. The ones that had prerenal failure or got hit in the liver. It seems to me since then that a person’s a homunculus, and the child is the greater part of the self, and everything that comes after in life is by comparison a veneer. It’s easily stripped away and then the child is right out there, out of its shell, quivering and bleeding. But then those boys were actual children. And the ones who go home feel old whether they can grow a beard or not. They feel separate because the facts of life have come to roost directly in their kitchen window and they know the secret of the universe now, about death and the homunculus. I see it in the hospital, too. There’s a lot of death in the world. The world is a brutal enough place without inviting any more trouble from it. So no, there is no branch of the armed services that’s the way to go. The best branch for you is NIH. Laura told me about your mother, I hope you don’t mind. She told me because I was in a foster home too, and my mother died when I was three. You sure you don’t want to smoke?”
    Doc smoked for a little while. Isidore asked Doc about his mother and Doc said he guessed she’d had enough babies and tried to get rid of the last one with a wire hanger, yours? Isidore said cancer of the stomach, and they both laughed a good laugh about their little punch line, but it hurt Isidore to laugh and Isidore guessed it hurt Doc, too.
    Doc offered Isidore a cigarette again and smoked for a while longer. Then he said, “Have you ever seen an eagle in the wild? You know why an eagle is a war emblem? Because you get the sense a pigeon might get a joke, and a sparrow might make one, but an eagle would do neither. An eagle has no sense of humor. That’s why he’s on the national seal. When I was in California, I saw an eagle eating a fish on the limb of a tree. I’ll never forget him, the way he straightened his plumage and refolded his wings when he was done pulling at the fish carcass, how he retested the wind and prepared himself for the next thing. An eagle has skill. That’s all expertise is, you know? It’s training and knowledge you get because you need it to survive. Nature makes an expert out of you if you want to survive. That’s a war. Just like life. Just trying to survive. You know, I don’t feel awe when I see an eagle. I feel sad. I feel sorry for him. There he is, him and me and you, experts in our jobs, because of the constant threat of extinction. In my view, war is just like life, only more of it per square inch.” Doc examined the end of his cigarette and pulled the ash off bit by bit with his fingers as though he were debriding it. “Well, you asked a simple question a while ago and I told you the story of my life! Forgive me, it’s unlike me. I drank one too many bourbons! And I have only daughters, you know. You seem like a fine young man, is all, and I wouldn’t like to see you go to Vietnam. But you have a deferment.”
    Now Doc sat down on the picnic table, and Isidore sat down too.
    “I think I’ll take a cigarette after all,” Isidore said.
    “Usually I’m pretty good at not scaring off the boyfriends,” Doc said. “Ah well, nobody’s perfect.”
    “If it’s all right with you,” Isidore said, “I’d like to marry Laura.”
    “If it’s all right with me?” Doc said. “Hey hey!” Doc threw an arm around Isidore and raised his glass. “By God, you’re a gentleman and a scholar and a fine judge of whiskey!”
    They drank.
    “You feel better now?” Doc said.
    “Did you know I was going to ask?” Isidore said.
    “Laura