Joe Bonham wakes up to the sound of a phone ringing at the bakery in Los Angeles where he works. He feels like he’s waking up from a hangover. When he goes to answer the phone, he learns that his father has died. Joe goes home to see his mother and sees men are taking away his father’s body. All of a sudden, he hears another telephone ring and remembers that his father is already dead. Joe realizes that he’s really been hallucinating. In fact, he was gravely injured while fighting in World War I, and he’s now stuck in a hospital.
Joe continues struggles to tell the past apart from the present. While in the hospital, he dreams about his childhood in Shale City, Colorado, and later, his time working in the bakery in Los Angeles. For the most part, Joe had a happy childhood, but his mind still lingers on certain events, like the time he and his friend Bill Harper accidentally lost Joe’s father’s treasured fishing rod or the time that Joe and Howie went to work on a railroad crew in the desert, only to quit after one day of arduous work. One of Joe’s most bittersweet memories is spending the night in the arms of his girlfriend Kareen on the day before he shipped off to war.
Meanwhile, in the present in the hospital, Joe begins to learn the full extent of his injuries. Not only is he missing both his arms, but he’s also missing his legs and most of his face, with a feeding tube going into a giant hole where his eyes, nose, and mouth used to be and a cloth mask covering the hole. His condition means he can’t see or hear, either. Barely able to even move without exhausting himself, at one point Joe feels himself being eaten alive by a rat. He eventually wakes up, believing the rat was a dream, but in his current condition, it’s hard to distinguish between dreams and reality.
Eventually, Joe decides that the best way to take control of his situation is to find out a way to measure time. Although he initially fails, struggling to keep the right numbers in his head, eventually, he manages to work out a calendar based on the coming and going of nurses and the changes in temperature throughout the day. Keeping track of time helps Joe’s mind stay more focused, and several years pass in this new system.
One day, Joe gets the idea of trying to communicate to his nurses with Morse code. The first time he attempts this with a nurse, however, she doesn’t understand what he wants. Eventually, to stop Joe’s tapping, one of the doctors gives Joe painkillers, causing him to have wild hallucinations about meeting Jesus in person.
One day, Joe finds that he has a new nurse. The nurse draws the letters “MERRY CHRISTMAS” on Joe’s chest, and Joe realizes that he’s finally found someone to communicate with. Not wanting to waste his chance (in case the nurse is just a substitute for the holidays), Joe immediately starts tapping out a message in Morse code. Eventually, a doctor who can understand Joe’s messages comes in to talk with him. The doctor asks Joe what it is that he wants. The questions stumps Joe at first—he was so thrilled to finally be able to communicate with other humans again that he didn’t even stop to think about what he might say. After considering the doctor’s question, Joe says he’d like to go leave the hospital. He would like to go out in public—to schools and government officials—so that people can see him and understand what happens to soldiers during war. But the doctor says that it’s against regulations for Joe to go outside the hospital. Then Joe feels the doctor prepare to inject Joe’s arm with painkillers.
As Joe waits for the painkillers, he thinks of how unfair it is that he’s stuck in the hospital against his will. He hopes that people will be able to look at him one day and recognize the horrors of war—and that eventually, the common people on the ground who fight wars will stop pointing their weapons at each other and start pointing them at their real enemy: the people in power who start wars in the first place.
