Free My Life as a Man by Philip Roth Page A

a day in the sack for making you feel good all over. ” Nor was the doctor on sick call much more sympathetic; I convinced no one, not even myself. The “ floating ” or “ ghostly ” sensation, the aura of malaise that served as my warning system was, in truth, so unsubstantial, so faint, that I too had to wonder if I wasn ’ t imagining it; and then subsequen tly “ imagining ” the headache to justify the premonition.
    Eventually, when headaches began to flatten me regularly every ten or twelve days, I was admitted to the post hospital for “ observation, ” which meant that, except if I was actually in pain, I was to walk around in a pair of blue army pajamas pushing a dry mop. To be sure, when the aura of a headache came upon me, I could now retire immediately to my bed; but that, as it turned out, worked only to forestall the headache for another twelve hours or so; on the other hand, if I were to remain continually in bed … But I couldn ’ t; in the words of Bartleby the Scrivener (words that were with me frequen tly in the hospital, though I had not read the story for several years), I preferred not to. I preferred instead to push my mop from one ward to another and wait for the blow to fall.
    Rather quic kl y I came to understand that my daily work routine had been devised as a combination punishment and cure by the hospital authorities. I had been assigned my mop so as to be brought into contact with those who were truly ill, irreversibly and horribly so. Each day, for instance, I went off to mop between the beds of patients in “ the burn ward, ” young men so badly disfigured by fire that in the beginning either I had to turn away at the sight of them or else could not withdraw my gaze at all. Then there were amputees who had lost limbs in training accidents, in automobile collisions, in operations undertaken to arrest the spread of malignancies. The idea seemed to be that I would somehow be shamed out of my alleged illness by the daily contact that I made on my rounds with these doomed mortals, most of them no older than myself. Only after I was called before a medical board and awarded a discharge did I learn that no such sub tl e or sadistic th erapy had been ordered in my case. My internment in the hospital had been a bureaucratic necessity and not some sly form of purifying and healing imprisonment. The “ cure ” had been wholly of my own devising, my houseclean ing duties having been somewhat less extensive than I had imagined. The nurse in charge of my section, an easygoing and genial woman, was amused to learn from me, on the day of my discharge, that I had been wandering through the hospital from nine to five every day, cleaning the floors of all the open wards, when the instructions she had given me had been only to clean up each morning around my own bed. After that I was to have considered myself free to come and go as I wished, so long as I did not leave the hospital. “ Didn ’ t anyone ever stop you? ” she asked. “ Yes, ” I said, “ in the beginning. But I told them I ’ d been ordered to do it. ” I pretended to be as amused as she was by the “ misunderstanding, ” but wondered if bad conscience was not leading her to lie now about the instructions she had given me on the day I had become her patient.
    In Chicago, a civilian again, I was examined by a neurologist at Billings Hospital who could offer no explanation for the headaches, except to say that my pattern was typical enough. He prescribed the same drugs that the army had, none of which did me any good, and told me that migraines ordinarily diminish in intensity and frequency with time, generally dying out around the age of fifty. I had vaguely expected that mine would the out as soon as I was my own man again and back at the university; along with my sergeant and my envious colleagues, I continued to believe that I had induced this condition in myself in order to provide me with grounds for discharge from an