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Building Seven was a world of its own. It held out a daily choice between its own kind of virtue—staying in bed—and its own kind of vice: midnight crap games, AWOL, and the smuggling of beer and whiskey through the fire-exit doors of its two latrines. It was the stage for its own kind of comedy—the…

BUILDING SEVEN, THE TB building, had grown aloof from the rest of Mulloy Veterans’ Hospital in the five years since the war. It lay less than fifty yards from Building Six, the paraplegic building—they faced the same flagpole on the same windswept Long Island plain—but there had been no neighborlin…

“What’s the trouble, Ken?” he said. “Don’t you think that was funny?”

It wasn’t what he said that mattered—for a minute it seemed that nothing Carson said would ever matter again—it was that his face was stricken with the uncannily familiar look of his own heart, the very face he himself, Lard-A…

Ken didn’t know whether to giggle or vomit; both desires were suddenly strong in him, though his face held straight. For a long time afterwards he would remember how the swabbed black plastic of the table looked between his two unmoving hands, how it seemed the only steady surface in the world.

…

They had slept till noon and gone to the beach after lunch, for Ken didn’t mind the beach when he wasn’t alone, and before long they had picked up two American girls in the easy, graceful way that Carson always managed such things. One minute the girls were sullen strangers, wiping scented oil on t…