Shutter Island(37)

“I can take this,” Teddy said. “I mean, I wouldn’t walk out into what’s going on now, start strolling around, but it beats the cold. The Ardennes, Jesus, your breath froze coming out of your mouth. To this day, I can feel it. So cold my fingers felt like they were on fire. How do you figure that?”

“North Africa, we had the heat. Guys dropping from it. Just standing there one minute, on the deck the next. Guys had coronaries from it. I shot this guy and his skin was so soft from the heat, he actually turned and watched the bullet fly out the other side of his body.” Chuck tapped the bench with his finger. “Watched it fly,” he said softly. “I swear to God.”

“Only guy you ever killed?”

“Up close. You?”

“I was the opposite. Killed a lot, saw most of them.” Teddy leaned his head back against the wall, looked up at the ceiling. “If I ever had a son, I don’t know if I’d let him go to war. Even a war like that where we had no choice. I’m not sure that should be asked of anyone.”

“What?”

“Killing.”

Chuck raised a knee to his chest. “My parents, my girlfriend, some of my friends who couldn’t pass the physical, they all ask, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it like? That’s what they want to know. And you want to say, ’I don’t know what it was like. It happened to someone else. I was just watching it from above or something.’” He held out his hands. “I can’t explain it any better. Did that make a bit of sense?”

Teddy said, “At Dachau, the SS guards surrendered to us. Five hundred of them. Now there were reporters there, but they’d seen all the bodies piled up at the train station too. They could smell exactly what we were smelling. They looked at us and they wanted us to do what we did. And we sure as hell wanted to do it. So we executed every one of those fucking Krauts. Disarmed them, leaned them against walls, executed them. Machine-gunned over three hundred men at one time. Walked down the line putting bullets into the head of anyone still breathing. A war crime if ever there was one. Right? But, Chuck, that was the least we could have done. Fucking reporters were clapping. The camp prisoners were so happy they were weeping. So we handed a few of the storm troopers over to them. And they tore them to shreds. By the end of that day, we’d removed five hundred souls from the face of the earth. Murdered ’em all. No self-defense, no warfare came into it. It was homicide. And yet, there was no gray area. They deserved so much worse. So, fine—but how do you live with that? How do you tell the wife and the parents and the kids that you’ve done this thing? You’ve executed unarmed people? You’ve killed boys? Boys with guns and uniforms, but boys just the same? Answer is—You can’t tell ’em. They’ll never understand. Because what you did was for the right reason. But what you did was also wrong. And you’ll never wash it off.”

After a while, Chuck said, “At least it was for the right reason. You ever look at some of these poor bastards come back from Korea? They still don’t know why they were there. We stopped Adolf. We saved millions of lives. Right? We did something, Teddy.”

“Yeah, we did,” Teddy admitted. “Sometimes that’s enough.”

“It’s gotta be. Right?”

An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns.

“You see that?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, ’Wait a second. This isn’t right.’

“’I’m supposed to be over there.’

“’Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.’”

They laughed softly in the dark and watched the island race by like a fever dream.

“So how much do you really know about this place, boss?”

Teddy shrugged. “I know some. Not nearly enough. Enough to scare me.”

“Oh, great. You’re scared. What’s normal mortal supposed to feel, then?”

Teddy smiled. “Abject terror?”

“Okay. Consider me terrified.”

“It’s known as an experimental facility. I told you—radical therapy. Its funding comes partially from the Commonwealth, partially from the Bureau of Federal Penitentiaries, but mostly from a fund set up in ’fifty-one by HUAC.”

“Oh,” Chuck said. “Terrific. Fighting the Commies from an island in Boston Harbor. How does one go about doing that?”

“They experiment on the mind. That’s my guess. Write down what they know, turn it over to Cawley’s old OSS buddies in the CIA maybe. I dunno. You ever heard of phencyclidine?”

Chuck shook his head.

“LSD? Mescaline?”

“Nope and nope.”

“They’re hallucinogens,” Teddy said. “Drugs that cause you to hallucinate.”

“All right.”

“In even minimal doses, strictly sane people—you or I—would start seeing things.”

“Upside-down trees flying past our door?”

“Ah, there’s the rub. If we’re both seeing it, it’s not a hallucination. Everyone sees different things. Say you looked down right now and your arms had turned to cobras and the cobras were rising up, opening their jaws to eat your head?”