Mirror M*A*S*H: Through the Mirror, Part Fourteen
This is by way of being a sequel to MirrorM*A*S*H.
Please note this is Part Fourteen, which comes after part thirteen.

Part one, Part two, Part three, Part four, Part five, Part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part ten, part eleven, part twelve, part thirteen, part fourteen and part fifteen are here.

Part Fourteen

“When I left here – I mean, two months ago – I meant to be gone just a day. I had my confession to make, and I was looking forward to hearing someone else say Mass, and there were some errands I had to run for the orphanage. And Klinger had asked me to match some thread for him. I went to the convent, and found my regular confessor was away. I could have asked anyone at the convent, but I had some – some matters I thought then were more than usually difficult to talk about – and there were some visiting scholars – Well, anyway, though I asked – I did ask one of them to hear my confession – we ended up talking all night about the work they were here to do.

“I volunteered. I was younger than any of them, and in good health – not that I was supposed to stay for long. There was a kind of gate, you see: they had worked out how to open it, and they had put animals through and retrieved them, so they knew I could survive – but a rabbit can’t say anything about what it saw. So I was to go. And come back – return at once, they said: just tell us what you see. Only what I saw, on the other side of the gate – it wasn’t anything. Just a temple, uninhabited, disused – it didn’t seem to tell us anything.

“But I shouldn’t have left the temple. I’m still not sure what I was arrested for – they never seemed to make that clear. Once I was under arrest – once they had searched me – I suppose just what I had in my pockets would have been a good enough reason. I was sentenced – though I don’t think it was ever explained –

“I was sentenced to imprisonment in a very bad place. I was there for weeks. I couldn’t get out or away – I found it quite difficult to move, they had me fettered all the time, even when I was being washed –

“It was horrible. It was worse than anything. And he got me out of there. You got me out of there. When I first saw him, and for quite a while afterwards, I thought he was you. I didn’t know how you’d got there, but I thought somehow you’d found me and rescued me. From something worse than despair. Despair is a mortal sin, but in that place I couldn’t think or pray or – I was worse than dead.”

“He got me out of there. What happened after that wasn’t good. Not for me. Not for him. But the worst for me then was that I wanted to die, and it would have been worse to have been left there. In that room. I could still be there. My body would still be there. I don’t know where my mind would be.”

“I don’t want you to blame yourself for what he did to me. I wish he’d never told you about it. It happened in another world.”



“He didn’t tell me about that,” Hawkeye said. “He said you would tell me, if you wanted me to know, and if you didn’t, he wouldn’t.”

“You said – ”

“He told me some crazy stuff. But not about you. I told you I knew because I thought you’d talk to me if you knew you didn’t have to keep what happened to you a secret.”

Mouth opening: silence coming out.

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye said..

“Dear God. I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins – all my sins – ”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“ – because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee – ”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“My God, Who are all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”

“Father! Listen to me – you didn’t do anything wrong. Except going through that gate in the first place.”



“Of course I had to go. I’m a Jesuit: it’s what we do. Ad majorem dei gloriam. If any one comes to me and does not hate even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. To the greater glory of God. I would have gone even if I had known – that Christianity isn’t – it isn’t respected there. I suppose the Society will send others – now they know…

“I had to go. But if I had known – that it’s a kind of shadow world, that each of us has another self there – if I had known what those other selves were –

“I never met myself. I only heard about him. He was a priest, too. And in that world – he might have died, eight years ago.

“When I first saw you in that place, you – he – got me unchained, and gave me his jacket to wear, and I walked out with you and saw the others –

“It wasn’t just you. I saw Burns and Winchester and Tr-Trapper – McIntyre – I saw them standing there, all together, and I thought –

“I can’t remember what I thought. But it felt like being in a nightmare, and not being able to wake up. And the nightmare was real. Everyone –



“Trapper was there?”

There was a long pause.

“Oh God, Hawkeye, please just – just shut up and let me tell it – ”



“The place I was in – that I was sentenced to, after they marked my neck – it was a kind of brothel. I wasn’t raped once. It happened more times than I can remember. Or think about. I was there for weeks.

“No one seemed to speak English. I do recall being very grateful at first when I was allowed to wash, the first time since I was arrested. But afterwards I had nothing to wear, and I was put in a room – quite a pleasant room, I do remember thinking that, the first time – and a man came in and –

“He tried to force me. I don’t think he began by force, but I kept saying aniyo, aniyo, no, no, and pushing him away, and –

“We had a fist fight. I couldn’t stop him any other way. But I did stop him. That time.

“Afterwards the proprietor came in. He was very angry and quite astonished. I tried to explain to him, and at the time I didn’t think he understood a word, but now I wonder – because I was chained up and moved, a few hours later, to another place. The men who came to the other place were mostly Koreans, I think. They didn’t talk to me. Mostly soldiers. Some of them weren’t Korean – they were foreign soldiers. I tried at first to ask everyone who came into the room if he spoke English. I kept thinking – I kept believing that if I could just find the right words, I could – convince someone I ought not to be there.

“I don’t think now I could ever have convinced anyone. When I told them I was a priest – Trapper, and Hawkeye, and Winchester, they were horrified – they were angry, because harbouring a priest was something they could have got into trouble over. And bewildered – confused, very confused, that I was – was not behaving as if I knew being a Christian was something to be ashamed of, something to conceal.

“I understood I could die for being a priest. And once I knew that he – that the other Hawkeye wasn’t you, that I was still in this other world, that there was no rescue – no way for me to go home – I wanted to die. I didn’t know – whatever the other Hawkeye told you, about what he and Trapper did – ”



“What Trapper did?” Hawkeye’s voice was thick, and Mulcahy halted.

“I don’t think I should be telling you this.”

“For crying out loud, don’t stop now. What did I do to you? What did Trapper do to you? Charles and Ferret-face were there? What did they do? What sort of place was this?”

“It was a military surgical unit. I was there for just a few days. Trapper and Hawkeye were both kinder to me than they needed to be.”

“He raped you.” That came out as a kind of whisper. Hawkeye was crouched on his knees, leaning forward. “How could I do that? Don’t tell me I was kind.”

The metal of the crucifix was hard and warm against his palm. Whoever does not bear his own cross…

“God, help me.” Mulcahy shut his eyes, and swallowed, hard. His voice seemed creaky. “He never sodomized me. He could have, but he didn’t. He got drunk and got me drunk and held me so that Trapper could sodomize me. He made me – he touched me with his hand so that I – it was the only time I – I loathed him. I loathed myself. I wanted to die. That was the worst thing he did to me. He never hurt me deliberately. He tried to be kind. It was an anteroom to hell, and he tried to be kind to me.”

Mulcahy opened his eyes again. Hawkeye was looking away. After what felt like a long time, he said, in a voice that hardly seemed his own, “I see why you want to go. But we need you.”

“All I ever do around here is pray,” Mulcahy said, after a moment. “If you need my promise for that, you have it. I’ll pray for you for the rest of my life.”

Hawkeye looked back at him, briefly. “Okay.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “What – where are you going? After this?”

“I don’t know. I’ll – I don’t know. The scholars who sent me through – wanted the Society to assign me to their project – I suppose they might ask the military to transfer me there. I don’t really care.”

“If I’d let you alone – when you came back – if I hadn’t been a meddling ass, would you – would you have stayed?”

“If you could have done that,” Mulcahy said, out of the depths, “you wouldn’t have been you.”

“I thought you couldn’t tell us apart,” Hawkeye said. He sounded like he was trying to make a joke.

“I can’t,” Mulcahy said.

Awkwardly, as if all his joints were creaking, Hawkeye stood up. He didn’t say anything, though his mouth opened as if he was trying to think of something to say. After a long moment, he turned away and went out, closing the door gently behind him.



The door opened, and Mulcahy jerked to his feet. Some part of him almost expected to see Hawkeye in the doorway, dressed in the civilian clothes the Jesuits had found for him. Or someone sent to fetch him for last rites or confession –

Sidney Freedman looked very tired. He came in and closed the door. “Did I wake you?”

“I went to sleep,” Mulcahy said, confused. He looked at his new watch. It would be dawn soon.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Sidney said. “I have a question to ask – a professional question.”

“I never meant to see you again,” Mulcahy said, feeling slow.

“You must have known I meant to see you again,” Sidney said, quite sharply for him. “Father, I took Hawkeye to that Jesuit house in Seoul and let him go in, but I have to ask you – ”

I want to sleep, Mulcahy said, not out loud. Oh dear Lord, I want to sleep…

“Ordinarily, when someone tells me he intends to kill himself, I have a professional, as well as a moral obligation to help him change his mind.

“Ordinarily, there are a hundred strands to pull someone back to life. But if the story he’s told me is true, none of them are there for him in this world. He has no family. He has no friends. He has no life ahead of him – and worse than nothing behind him. What’s your professional view, Father? Do we let him die? Is there any reason he should live?”

Dear God. Sleep, and no nightmares. Please.


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