At odd moments we would discuss spiritual subjects. He was a lapsed Catholic, a follower of the Socialist Eugene Debs, and I was at best an agnostic, and so our discussion had no formal bounds. We talked of death, of life, of reincarnation as preached by the theosophists. He wanted to come back in his next life as the second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. I wanted to come back as a dog. Together we fought to make sense of what had happened to us. He was a good soul with a ruined body and I was a ruined soul with a relatively healthy body. We both found in this irony much to wonder at. And through our discussions, and in our time together, I came to a strange understanding of my life.

There were moments in the night when I doubted I was still alive and only by calling out to him, and having him answer, could my corporeal existence be proven. Magee was my mirror, without him I could not be certain of my own existence. And my mirror began to show me a shocking truth. He often complained of cramping in his hands when he had no hands. He spoke of things he saw though he had no eyes. I similarly could feel my arm as solid as before even as I knew it had been cut off by the surgeons. Illusions all. I began to wonder, was the bed upon which I lay similarly an illusion, was the hospital in which I was being treated, was the war in which I was maimed, was this cursed certitude I held of my own tortured uniqueness? In the night, in the thick of the dark, as I felt my mind empty of all but the rasp of my breath, I could feel something swell and grow beneath me, something unbelievably huge, something as great as all creation. It is impossible to explain what this something was, my child, but I knew it was more than everything and that Magee and I were part of it together. We were like two leaves side by side on the branch of a great sycamore, separate and unique only if we ignored the huge mottled trunk from which our branch and a thousand like it protruded. As two leaves on the same tree, Magee and I were inextricably linked and in that I found great comfort. His goodness was part of me. My evil was shared and thereby diluted. And sometimes, at night, I could feel the linkage grow, as if my existence was flowing through my connection to Magee, reaching out to every other soul, every other thing on the earth and in the heavens. In those nights, I felt myself absolved by the totality of the universe. It was through this linkage that I came to the understanding of my life you may find so strange. Just as a sycamore thrusts out leaves, so this universe thrusts out humanity. Our individuality is mere illusion and we remain, all of us, always, part of the great tree of creation, just as it remains part of us. These are the truths I learned, my child, alongside Magee in Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples, and which I pass on, now, to you

The doctors came in twice a week. They looked at the charts clipped to our beds and discussed our cases as if we didn’t exist. One was old and tall, one was old and short. They bickered among themselves in French. After many weeks they told me my lungs had scarred over sufficiently and my infection had subsided and it was time to send me home. The coughing, they said, would never leave me but would do me no harm. They assured me I would be fine. They told Magee that there was nothing more they could do for him and that he too would soon be home. Our departures were scheduled for the following month.

As soon as they left, Magee began. “Hey, Shaw, will you do it now, please, buddy, now. I can’t have Glennis see me like this. You’re all I got. Have pity on me, Shaw, please, and kill me.”

I told him to save his breath, that now that I knew him and loved him I could never hurt him, but he didn’t stop. His begging was fierce and pathetic. One afternoon, while he was asleep, I wrote Glennis a letter of my own. I described to her Magee’s goodness and bravery and the wisdom in his heart. I also detailed his physical condition, his blindness, his ruined face, the loss of his limbs, his complete physical helplessness. Money would not be a problem, I assured her, as I had access to great sums of money to provide for Magee’s comfort, but he would need someone to care for him exhaustively. I gave it to the sister to mail while he remained asleep.

The days leading to our departure passed. We kept the windows open all day because of the heat. From outside came the sounds of a world spinning along its busy way, disastrously unaware of our injuries. I read the Samson story to Magee again. From the papers I read to him of Germany’s imminent collapse. Glennis’s letters, the ones that passed my own in transit, grew cheerier as the war news brightened. His old job was waiting for him. Christy Mathewson had lately left from managing the Reds to join the army in France. She couldn’t wait to feel his arms around her once again.

“She’s a sweet girl,” said Magee. “A good girl. She deserves better than this.”

“There is nothing better,” I said.

Five days before they were to take us out of the hospital for transport to the boat, her response to my letter arrived

Back from the war, a one-armed cripple, I took long lonely walks around Veritas. I taught my son how to shoot and gave him my father’s gun. The gun is a wide-barreled monster and it will be many years before he can handle it properly, but he clutched it like a rare and precious thing. He once asked me about the war and I told him only that it was a thing of death, not glory. One day I caught him in my room, admiring my Distinguished Service Cross. I snatched it from his hand. I bade him to follow me down the slope to the pond. “This is what this medal is worth,” I told him and then I slung it to the middle of the water. It dropped to the bottom where it deserves to remain for all eternity.

When I felt healthy enough, I took a train to Pittsburgh and then another up to Cincinnati. From the station I rode a cab to the western rise of the city, to Price Hill. Glennis was waiting for me in a trim brick house. Her parents served me a meal of schnitzel and beans and a vinegar potato salad. Her mother cut my schnitzel for me and they talked of their great admiration for Magee. After the meal I met with Glennis alone in the parlor. She was a pretty girl, freckled and red-haired, Magee had been right about that at least. I gave her his tags and his stripes and the commendation from his commanding officer for his bravery at Cantigny. She couldn’t respond, red-faced and misty-eyed from shame. The last I gave back to her was her response to my letter. “He died before it arrived,” I told her. “He never knew.”

At that point she broke into tears and flung her arms around my neck and wept. I patted her on the back and comforted her with false words. I had planned to confront her with her betrayal but some surprising streak of goodness caused me to reassure her instead. As she hugged my neck I realized the cause of my reversal was Magee himself. We had truly become one. He had imparted to me his goodness and had diluted my evil. Just as she cried on my shoulder at her loss, I cried from my gain. Without Magee, my child, I would never have had the capacity to love your mother.

You must be certain that I love your mother, deeply and truly and with all my body and spirit. I saw your mother for the first time in many years during one of my walks. She was standing on the very porch on which I had waited for word of my young beloved nine years before. She showed me a book I had given her when she was a girl. She read to me that day and every day thereafter. There is to her a forgiving grace that I found only in one other soul, in Magee. And, through my love for your mother, I feel the same sense of linkage with the universe that I felt lying in the bed beside his. Many times I wished death had taken me from this life but I was spared, I think, only so I could love your mother. It is the truest thing I have ever done. If I were to believe that I was born to a purpose, that purpose would be to love her fully and completely and unequivocally. If I have done it poorly then that is due to my own weakness rather than any defect of hers. To say that I would die for her is a poor honorific. I would live for her, to love her, to be with her through the rest of my days. You, my child, are the noble egg of that love.