were choked with images of blazing artillery and bodies half sunk in the sand of a beach
somewhere. We members of the Class of 1943 were moving very fast toward the war now, so
fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, a mind was clouded and a leg was
broken—maybe these should be thought of as minor and inevitable mishaps in the accelerating
rush. The air around us was filled with much worse things.
In this way I tried to calm myself as I walked with Finny’s suitcase toward the Infirmary. After
all, I reflected to myself, people were shooting flames into caves and grilling other people alive,
ships were being torpedoed and dropping thousands of men in the icy ocean, whole city blocks
were exploding into flame in an instant. My brief burst of animosity, lasting only a second, a part
of a second, something which came before I could recognize it and was gone before I knew it
had possessed me, what was that in the midst of this holocaust?
I reached the Infirmary with Finny’s suitcase and went inside. The air was laden with hospital
smells, not unlike those of the gym except that the Infirmary lacked that sense of spent human
vitality. This was becoming the new background of Finny’s life, this purely medical element
from which bodily health was absent.
The corridor happened to be empty, and I walked along it in the grip of a kind of fatal
exhilaration. All doubt had been resolved at last. There was a wartime phrase coming into style
just then—”this is it”—and although it later became a parody of itself, it had a final flat accuracy
which was all that could be said at certain times. This was one of the times: this was it.
I knocked and went in. He was stripped to the waist, sitting up in bed leafing through a
magazine. I carried my head low by instinct, and I had the courage for only a short glance at him
before I said quietly, “I’ve brought your stuff.”
“Put the suitcase on the bed here, will you?” The tone of his words fell dead center, without a
trace of friendliness or unfriendliness, not interested and not bored, not energetic and not
languid.
I put it down beside him, and he opened it and began to look through the extra underwear and
shirts and socks I had packed. I stood precariously in the middle of the room, trying to find
somewhere to look and something to say, wanting desperately to leave and powerless to do so.
Phineas went carefully over his clothes, apparently very calm. But it wasn’t like him to check
with such care, not like him at all. He was taking a long time at it, and then I noticed that as he
tried to slide a hairbrush out from under a flap holding it in the case his hands were shaking so
badly that he couldn’t get it out. Seeing that released me on the spot.
“Finny, I tried to tell you before, I tried to tell you when I came to Boston that time—”
“I know, I remember that.” He couldn’t, after all, always keep his voice under control. “What’d
you come around here for last night?”
“I don’t know.” I went over to the window and placed my hands on the sill. I looked down at
them with a sense of detachment, as though they were hands somebody had sculptured and put