The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [317]
And Goldstein remembered his grandfather saying, "Yehuda Halevy wrote that Israel is the heart of all nations." He lunged along, carrying the litter through habit, not conscious of the torments of his body. His mind had turned inward; he could not have concentrated more intensely if he had been blind. He just followed Ridges without looking where they went.
"Israel is the heart of all nations." It was the conscience and the raw exposed nerve; all emotion passed through it. But it was more than that; it was the heart that suffered whenever any part of the body was ill.
And Wilson was the heart now. Goldstein did not say this to himself, he did not even think it, but the idea worked through him beneath the level of speech. He had suffered too much in these past two days; he had traversed all the first nauseas of fatigue, the stupors that followed, the exaltation close to fever. There were as many levels to pain as to pleasure. Once his will had forbidden him to collapse, Goldstein burrowed deeper and deeper through exhaustion and agony, never quite plumbing the pit of it. But he was in a stage now where all the banal proportions were gone. His eyes functioned enough for him to notice automatically where he walked; he heard and smelled isolated little events; he even felt some pain from his racked body; but all this was separate from him, like an object he might hold in his hand. His mind was both blunted and exposed, naked and stupefied. "The heart of all nations." But for a few hours, after two days and fifteen miles of staggering forward under a tropic sun, after an eternity of wrestling Wilson's body through an empty and alien land, this could be true for him. His senses dammed, his consciousness reeling, Goldstein fumbled through a hall of symbols. Wilson was the object he could not release. Goldstein was bound to him by a fear he did not understand. If he let him go, if he did not bring him back, then something was wrong, he would understand something terrible. The heart. If the heart died. . . but he lost the sequence in the muck of his labors. They were carrying him on and on, and he would not die. His stomach had been ripped apart, he had bled and shit, wallowed through the leaden swells of fever, endured all the tortures of the rough litter, the uneven ground, and still Wilson had not died. They still carried him. There was a meaning here and Goldstein lumbered after it, his mind pumping like the absurd legs of a man chasing a train he has missed.
"Ah like to work, Ah ain't a goddam fug-off," Wilson mumbled. "If you're job, do goddam thing right, that's what Ah say." His breath was gurgling again out of his mouth. "Brown and Stanley. Brown and Stanley, shit!" He giggled feebly. "Little ol' bugger May when she's a kid, always crappin' her pants." He rambled through a cloudy memory of his daughter when she was an infant. "Smartest little devil." When she was two years old she would drop her faeces behind a door or in a closet. "Goddam, step in it, git dirty." He laughed, only it sounded more like a feeble wheeze. For an instant he recalled vividly his mixture of exasperation and merriment when he had discovered her leavings. "Goddam, Alice'd git mad."
She had been angry when he had seen her in the hospital, angry again when they discovered he was sick. "Ah always say a dose ain't gonna hurt a man a goddam bit. What the hell's a lousy little dose? Ah had it five times an' it never came to a goddam thing." He stiffened on the litter and shouted as if arguing with someone. "Jus' get me some pyrdin whatever the hell y' call it." He twisted about, managed almost to prop himself on an elbow. "If goddam wound gits y' opened maybe Ah won' need the op-per-ration, jus' gits rid of all the pus." He retched emptily, watching through dimmed eyes the blood trickling and spattering out of his mouth onto the rubber fabric of the litter. It was so distant and yet it sent a shudder through him. "Whadeya say, Ridges, does it git rid of it?"
But they hadn't heard him, and he watched the blood fall in droplets from his mouth and then lay back again moodily.