Murphy handed him a towel and helped him down the hallway. The Dolly Parton sign was on the shower door. They both laughed. “Let me just check,” Murphy said. She returned in a moment. “Coast is clear,” she said, turning the sign to John Wayne.
So many questions he hadn’t thought to ask. How long had he been out of it? Bits of memory floated into his mind. Were they real or imagined? He had no sense of time at all. As he thought about these things he let the steaming water cleanse him. Submariners are taught to be frugal about water usage, but Henry indulged himself in the luxury of the hot suds on his skin and in his hair and beard. He could feel the sickness washing away. But the weakness remained.
After he toweled off, he noticed his pallid reflection in the mirror, gaunt and old. His beard was the color of tarnished silver. He accepted the evidence in the mirror that his lingering youthfulness was behind him. But he was alive, and a feeling that he had not known for such a long time spread through him like an infusion. It was joy.
“Are you all right in there?” Murphy asked.
“I’m fine!” Henry said. He wrapped the towel around his waist and hobbled into the hallway. Murphy took his bare arm and guided him back to his berth. She had changed his sheets and put out fresh clothes for him. He had to brush back a tear. He was not strong enough to withstand the emotional assaults of human kindness.
When he was dressed and groomed he joined Murphy on the missile deck. The breeze greeted him with a warm embrace, and the sun nearly blinded him. He looked through slit eyes. There were dozens of submariners jumping into the ocean, whooping and laughing in the delicious air. Henry had not heard such exuberant sounds for weeks.
“We call it ‘steel beach,’ ” Murphy said.
Henry lay on the rubberized tiles on the missile deck with submariners who were drying off from their plunge in the Atlantic. Murphy indicated an officer standing on the conning tower holding an automatic weapon. “For the sharks,” she said casually.
“Did I hear a saxophone or was that a fever dream of mine?” Henry asked.
“Yes, sir, that was the captain. He’s recovering very well.”
His experiment had worked. He immediately began thinking of how it might be scaled up, but he had to consider the potential liabilities of giving an entire country—or maybe the whole world—an injection of the deadliest strain of influenza ever known, however attenuated it might be. Thousands could die to save millions. Millions could die to save billions. Who could allow such a gamble? On the other hand, if it was attenuated to an extreme and shown to still provide protection, it might serve as a stopgap until a better vaccine emerged from the trials. Henry stared out at the ocean, its vastness imposing a sense of eternity and calm.
“Some ships,” he said casually, pointing east. “Way over there.”
“Yes, sir. They’ve been tailing us since Suez.”
“Tailing us? Why would they do that?”
“So, doctor, you’ve come back to life!” The booming voice belonged to Captain Dixon. He loomed over Henry and Murphy, brimming with health, his giant shadow encompassing both of them.
“You as well, I see,” Henry croaked. “Sorry, my voice is still weak.”
“If you’re feeling up to it, maybe you could join my table at seventeen hundred.”
Henry dozed awhile in the sun. He had a marvelous dream. Jill was in it. The kids were really young. They were going on vacation somewhere. Mountains. Maybe his grandmother appeared, he wasn’t sure, in any case there was some other benign presence. His parents were there, and his mother spoke to him. She was wearing the sombrero that shadowed her face. She said, “Beautiful.” He didn’t know what she meant by that. His father called him by name. In the dream, Henry felt very small and other times he was not. It was an imaginary world where dead people were alive. He woke up when he felt a burn coming on.
The vision of his lost family drained his emotions. He knew that mood swings were a sign of recovery, but still he wondered how to contain the extremes—his grief at the loss of the people he loved, his exhilaration at saving the lives of the submariners. So many emotions were colliding inside him, leaving him confused and morose.