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Mirror M*A*S*H: Through the Mirror, Part Sixteen
This is by way of being a sequel to MirrorM*A*S*H.

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 Sixteen



Sleep, and no nightmares. Please, dear Lord.

But Sidney was still there. Mulcahy knew he was awake. “What,” he said out loud, laboriously, “what did he tell you?”

“You knew he did torture,” Sidney said. “You knew and you didn’t tell anyone. Did you – though I’ve seen you find a way around it when someone stole pencillin and told you about it in confession – did he confess it to you?”

“Sidney, are you all right?” Mulcahy yawned. “Pardon me.” He was trying to keep a completely impassive face. He couldn’t. Yawning helped.

“You knew,” Sidney said. “Why didn’t you tell me? No, I’m not all right. I nearly lost a patient,”

Mulcahy opened his mouth. He shook his head, not sure what he was denying. “Hawkeye – I mean, the other Hawkeye – he’s not your patient – ” His mouth was drying up. “Sidney, is he dead?”

“No,” Sidney said. “We didn’t manage to stop him cutting his wrist, because I hadn’t expected him to go directly to the infirmary in the monastery – ”

“It’s a convent,” Mulcahy said. “A monastery is for religious with vows of stability – ” He caught Sidney’s eye. “Not that it matters.”

“No,” Sidney said again. He was staring at Mulcahy. “Tell me, Father – Francis – what did you feel when I told you he isn’t dead?”

“Of course I didn’t want him dead.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Sidney said. “But what did you feel?”

“I don’t want him dead,” Mulcahy said.

“I’m sure that’s true, as well,” Sidney said. “But I asked you – what did you feel?”

Mulcahy turned away. He pressed his hands against his mouth. His throat hurt. He wanted to be sick. “Sidney, please go away.”

He was bent over, dry-retching from an empty stomach: he couldn’t hear anything past the noise his own throat made in his ears. But he knew Sidney hadn’t gone. Wouldn’t go.

“I don’t know.” Mulcahy gulped air. He was choking.

“Was it that bad,” Sidney asked, “what you felt? It’s only what you felt. Not what you did.”

“Go away,” Mulcahy got out, in one breath between retch and gasp. “Oh please God, go away – ”

“I can go,” Sidney said. “But even if you never tell me, even if you never tell anyone – ” his voice was still even, apparently unmoved “ – you still know what the answer is. Don’t you?”

“No,” Mulcahy got out. He stayed where he was, head down, eyes full of tears and his mouth full of sour liquid, wanting to hear Sidney leave.

Nothing happened. For a long time. Mulcahy moved his arms and legs, testing them. He had been lying on his face, the shape of Trapper’s stiff organ still perceptible within him, leaking disgusting fluids from every orifice, when Hawkeye had knelt between his legs, touched him –

Mulcahy felt himself shudder, clench in on himself. He had known Hawkeye was going to sodomise him then. It didn’t seem to make any difference that Hawkeye hadn’t.

I can’t. I can’t. Don’t make me. I can’t do it.

“What can’t you do, Father?” Sidney asked.

“Stop him,” Mulcahy said. His voice was thin and rusty. “I would have let him. I didn’t want to stop him.”

“What did you feel when I told you he isn’t dead?”

From flat accustomed greyness, buoyancy: like a boat with the tide coming in beneath it, lifting it up.

“I can’t tell you,” Mulcahy said truthfully. He moved his arms and legs again. He wasn’t chained. He was free to move. He stood up. Greyness overwhelmed his vision. He wasn’t conscious of more.


When he came to, he was lying on his cot, and Sidney was sitting in the chair beside him. His throat still hurt. Sidney was watching him.

“This is the second time you’ve fainted, to my knowledge, in twenty-four hours,” Sidney said. “Has this been happening to you often?”

“No,” Mulcahy said. And then, more honestly, “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think… I’m not sure where I am.”

“Have you been eating regularly?”

Mulcahy lay still. “Mostly,” he said, after a moment. “I haven’t been… sometimes I haven’t felt very hungry.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I had fish and rice with kimchee at the orphanage, yesterday. I went there to say…. To say goodbye.”

“Where are you supposed to go today?”

Mulcahy opened his mouth, and closed it again. He had been sent orders to report to the Chaplaincy Unit in Seoul. He had focussed his mind so sharply on going there, walking through that door, finding where they had assigned him a bunk, where his next assignment would be, eating army food for supper in the big plain refectory, that he had managed to achieve the philosphical feat of not thinking about why he was not thinking at all about going to the Jesuit convent.

“How – how is he?”

Sidney shrugged. “He’s alive. His wrist was cut so deeply that he may lose the use of several fingers on his right hand. He lost a lot of blood, but the Fathers were doing cross-matching among themselves when I left. He wasn’t conscious. He was supposed to be flown to Spain today, I gather, but it was clear he wouldn’t be fit for it.”

I told them that the only reason I escaped was because you saved me, and that the Jesuits owe you for that. The Monsignor responsible for sending me agrees. So the Jesuits will help you, wherever you – whatever you decide to do.

Mulcahy lifted his hand and pressed it against his mouth: Am I ever going to see you again? Hawkeye had said, repeatedly, in response to Mulcahy’s attempt to calmly and detachedly outline what lay in store for him.

Am I ever going to see you again?

“No,” Mulcahy whispered. His mouth felt and tasted foul. He could smell stale blood, feel hands clutching at his head, holding him, as hot thick flesh thrust inside his mouth – “No, please – ” He sat up, leaned over the edge of his cot, and retched. Thin liquid came up his throat and out, not relieving he inner turmoil.

Sidney steadied his head until he’d stopped. The cup he brought Mulcahy had stale warm water in it.

“I can’t forgive him.” Mulcahy said. “I can’t forgive Hawkeye, I can’t tell them apart – I can’t.”

“Because he was a torturer?” Sidney asked.

Mulcahy shook his head, almost surprised at Sidney. “He never wanted – Hawkeye never wanted to do that. You know that.”

“Do you know what he did?”

“Yes,” Mulcahy said. Radar had told something; Klinger’s confession had told him more: BJ’s and Hawkeye’s conversation had confirmed what Mulcahy had hardly been able to believe.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sidney asked.

“Hawkeye didn’t want me to tell anyone,” Mulcahy said. Who else knows about me? Here. Anywhere. Who else knows? “There didn’t seem to be any good reason to break that confidence.” You didn’t tell anyone?

Haawkeye’s stammering desperation had been half pitiful, half awful: he could barely get the word torture out of his mouth. He was so little like himself that Mulcahy could hardly bear to reassure him.

“Don’t you realize – ” Sidney’s voice broke off. He was staring at Mulcahy. He was so completely controlled that even when he laughed it always sounded as if he had planned his reaction to the other person’s joke. The break in his voice was almost as unexpected as another man’s shout.

Mulcahy sat up, carefully. He took the cup out of Sidney’s hand, and drank the rest of the water. Sidney was still watching him, intent and silent.

“You didn’t want me to help him,” Sidney said. There was almost satisfaction in his voice, seeing the answer to a puzzle. “You didn’t want to talk to me, and you didn’t want me to talk to Hawkeye.”

“How could I have stopped you?”

“You didn’t tell me he existed,” Sidney said, ignoring the deliberate attempt at confusion. “You told me that you might be able to talk to me next week, which puzzled me then, but it was because you thought next week Hawkeye would be out of the country, nowhere I could speak to him.”

Mulcahy put the cup down, and felt the edges of his cross mark his palm. The small sharp pain was comforting. Dear God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins…

“And you didn’t tell me what he’d done.”

“No,” Mulcahy said. He wondered if he would vomit again, but his throat felt as if it had closed. “I couldn’t.”

“Even though you knew – you must have known – that Hawkeye would be suicidal, if he’d – having been made to do that?”

Mulcahy’s throat opened up: he laughed, thick and choking. He wasn’t made to do what he did to me…

And then it was as if his eyes opened and he saw he was hanging over a very high space, poised high above the the murky fire below. I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell. He had said it, he had thought he meant it, he had not understood it. His besetting sin had always been pride.

To me.

Dear God, with the help of Thy grace, I cannot do it without –

He did not expect an answer. He bent over himself with a shudder, and said through a mouth gone clumsy, “Sidney, can you drive me to Seoul? To the convent?”

“I can,” Sidney said after a moment, “but I don’t know if I should.”

“Can you?” Mulcahy managed to straighten himself. His insides still felt terribly uncertain. “I don’t think I should – ”

“No,” Sidney cut in.

“But it’s been a very long night for you.”

Sidney looked tired, but his voice was as calm as usual. “I can manage the drive again, if I can get some of the 4077th all-night coffee. Why do you want to go to the convent?”

“I need to make my confession,” Mulcahy said, and heard the bitterness in his laugh. “What do you think?”

“Why now?”

“I can’t explain,” Mulcahy said. “It may not do any good. But I suppose – ” He was shuddering, he realised: possibly with cold, though it couldn’t be that cold. God, help me. He cackled, almost crying. “If I can, I should, and I can’t – I certainly can’t do it here.”


In the end, leaving the 4077th – which he had dreaded and longed for – was as anti-climactic as falling asleep. Most people weren’t even awake: Igor filled a flask of coffee, and muttered goodbye. There was hardly anything to pack, even: looking round, the only things Mulcahy saw he had forgotten were two chapbooks, the Jerusalem translation of the gospel of John and the French dictionary. They belonged to the convent library, and should go back there.

There was an underground joke in the seminary, Jesuit to Jesuit: the only way to answer Loyola’s challenge was to die. Hate even your own life. Carry your own cross. Renounce all you have. “Except your own cross,” he muttered out loud, the punchline of a joke no longer funny.

Sidney glanced across the car at him. “Are you all right, Father?”

Mulcahy felt for and held the small silver model of a crucifixion. After this, sleep, and no nightmares. Dear God, please. “I’m all right,” he said, belatedly. The jeep was uncomfortable, but he could have gone to sleep in it. He had almost gone to sleep that other long jeep ride, clutching Hawkeye with both arms and all his strength, his face buried against Hawkeye’s chest. He remembered thinking – with maddening confusion and a relief that feared to trust – that he had been rescued. Somehow. At last.


The gates of the convent were closed, but not locked: by habit Mulcahy got out to open them for the driver. The brother assigned to the door was saying his Office: he looked up as Mulcahy came in, and Mulcahy had an impulse to sit down beside him and begin to say the psalm of the hour with him.

Sidney had come with him. Mulcahy set off towards the infimary, hoping he would get there before someone with the right to demand an explanation could stop him.

I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace.

Father Joseph was in the infirmary: Father Tomas was lying on the other bed. Mulcahy stopped in the doorway. The room smelled of stale blood. Hawkeye was lying on the far bed, his face white, his right arm heavily bandaged. His eyes opened and he stared at Mulcahy.

I firmly resolve, Mulcahy heard himself repeating inside his mind, over and over again. No one else in the room was quite real. I firmly resolve, firmly resolve…

He had to walk over to the bed and say so that Hawkeye would understand and believe him: I forgive you.

He couldn’t move. He wanted to retch. Stale blood, and hands holding him, and – only fellatio. No pain, only disgust.

I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life.

He had to walk over to the bed and say, out loud – without throwing up – I’m sorry I felt as if what you did to me was worse than what you were made to do to others.

He had to walk over to the bed and say I’m sorry I couldn’t forgive you before. I forgive you now.

Hawkeye’s mouth moved. Unsteadily, Mulcahy made his way towards him. He bent down to hear. Almost inaudibly, Hawkeye said. “It’s not a lobster, is it.”

“No,” Mulcahy said. He was taken aback. He straightened, staring down at Hawkeye.

“You might have let me go home,” Hawkeye said. He sounded very tired. The words were distorted.

“No,” Mulcahy said, almost by reflex.

Hawkeye’s mouth slid outwards in a terrible grin. “You should have left me in the temple.”

to part 17