The Best of Lucius Shepard (38 page)

Witcover
looked puzzled, but Fierman made a noise that seemed to imply comprehension.
“How’d he die?” he asked. “The handout says he was KIA, but it doesn’t say what
kind of action.”

“The
fuckup kind,” I said. I didn’t want to tell them. The closer I came to seeing
Stoner, the leerier I got about the topic. Until this business had begun, I
thought I’d buried all the death-tripping weirdness of Vietnam; now Stoner had
unearthed it and I was having dreams again and I hated him for that worse than
I ever had in life. What was I supposed to do? Feel sorry for him? Maybe ghosts
didn’t have bad dreams. Maybe it was terrific being a ghost, like with
Casper.... Anyway, I did tell them. How we had entered Cam Le, what was left of
the patrol. How we had lined up the villagers, interrogated them, hit them, and
God knows we might have killed them—we were freaked, bone-weary, an atrocity
waiting to happen—if Stoner hadn’t distracted us. He’d been wandering around,
poking at stuff with his rifle, and then, with this ferocious expression on his
face, he’d fired into one of the huts. The hut had been empty, but there must
have been explosives hidden inside, because after a few rounds the whole damn thing
had blown and taken Stoner with it.

Talking
about him soured me on company, and shortly afterward I broke it off with
Fierman and Witcover, and walked out into the city. The security cadre tagged
along, his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. I had a real load on and
barely noticed my surroundings. The only salient points of difference between
Saigon today and fifteen years before were the ubiquitous representations of
Uncle Ho that covered the facades of many of the buildings, and the absence of
motor scooters: the traffic consisted mainly of bicycles. I went a dozen blocks
or so and stopped at a sidewalk cafe beneath sun-browned tamarinds, where I
paid two dong for food tickets, my first experience with what the Communists
called “goods exchange”—a system they hoped would undermine the concept of
monetary trade; I handed the tickets to the waitress, and she gave me a bottle
of beer and a dish of fried peanuts. The security cadre, who had taken a table
opposite mine, seemed no more impressed with the system than was I; he chided
the waitress for her slowness and acted perturbed by the complexity accruing to
his order of tea and cakes.

I
sat and sipped and stared, thoughtless and unfocused. The bicyclists zipping
past were bright blurs with jingling bells, and the light was that heavy
leaded-gold light that occurs when a tropical sun has broken free of an
overcast. Smells of charcoal, fish sauce, grease. The heat squeezed sweat from
my every pore. I was brought back to alertness by angry voices. The security
cadre was arguing with the waitress, insisting that the recorded music be
turned on, and she was explaining that there weren’t enough customers to
warrant turning it on. He began to offer formal “constructive criticism,”
making clear that he considered her refusal both a breach of party ethics and
the code of honorable service. About then, I realized I had begun to cry. Not
sobs, just tears leaking. The tears had nothing to do with the argument or the
depersonalized ugliness it signaled. I believe that the heat and the light and
the smells had seeped into me, triggering a recognition of an awful familiarity
that my mind had thus far rejected. I wiped my face and tried to suck it up
before anyone could notice my emotionality; but a teenage boy on a bicycle
slowed and gazed at me with an amused expression. To show my contempt, I spat
on the sidewalk. Almost instantly, I felt much better.

*
* * *

Early the next day, thirty of
us—all journalists—were bussed north to Cam Le. Mist still wreathed the
paddies, the light had a yellowish green cast, and along the road women in
black dresses were waiting for a southbound bus, with rumpled sacks of produce
like sleepy brown animals at their feet. I sat beside Fierman, who, being as
hung over as I was, made no effort at conversation; however, Witcover—sitting
across the aisle—peppered me with inane questions until I told him to leave me
alone. Just before we turned onto the dirt road that led to Cam Le, an information
cadre boarded the bus and for the duration proceeded to fill us in on
everything we already knew. Stuff about the machine, how its fields were
generated, and so forth. Technical jargon gives me a pain, and I tried hard not
to listen. But then he got off onto a tack that caught my interest. “Since the
machine has been in operation,” he said, “the apparition seems to have grown
more vital.”

“What’s
that mean?” I asked, waving my hand to attract his attention. “Is he coming
back to life?”

My
colleagues laughed.

The
cadre pondered this. “It simply means that his effect has become more
observable,” he said at last. And beyond that he would not specify.

Cam
Le had been evacuated, its population shifted to temporary housing three miles
east. The village itself was nothing like the place I had entered fifteen years
before. Gone were the thatched huts, and in their stead were about two dozen
small houses of concrete block painted a quarantine yellow, with banana trees
set between them. All this encircled by thick jungle. Standing on the far side
of the road from the group of houses was the long tin-roofed building that
contained the machine. Two soldiers were lounging in front of it, and as the
bus pulled up, they snapped to attention; a clutch of officers came out the
door, followed by a portly white-haired gook: Phan Thnah Tuu, the machine’s
inventor. I disembarked and studied him while he shook hands with the other
journalists; it wasn’t every day that I met someone who claimed to be both
Marxist and mystic, and had gone more than the required mile in establishing
the validity of each. His hair was as fine as corn silk, a fat black mole
punctuated one cheek, and his benign smile was unflagging, seeming a fixture of
some deeply held good opinion attaching to everything he saw. Maybe, I thought,
Fierman was right. In-fucking-scrutable.

“Ah,”
he said, coming up, enveloping me in a cloud of perfumy cologne. “Mr. Puleo. I
hope this won’t be painful for you.”

“Really,”
I said. “You hope that, do you?”

“I
beg your pardon,” he said, taken aback.

“It’s
okay.” I grinned. “You’re forgiven.”

An
unsmiling major led him away to press more flesh, and he glanced back at me,
perplexed. I was mildly ashamed of having fucked with him, but unlike Cassius
Clay, I had plenty against them Viet Congs. Besides, my wiseass front was
helping to stave off the yips.

After
a brief welcome-to-the-wonderful-wacky-world-of-the-Commie-techno-paradise
speech given by the major, Tuu delivered an oration upon the nature of ghosts,
worthy of mention only in that it rehashed every crackpot notion I’d ever
heard: apparently Stoner hadn’t yielded much in the way of hard data. He then
warned us to keep our distance from the village. The fields would not harm us;
they were currently in operation, undetectable to our senses and needing but a
slight manipulation to “focus” Stoner. But if we were to pass inside the
fields, it was possible that Stoner himself might be able to cause us injury.
With that, Tim bowed and reentered the building.

We
stood facing the village, which—with its red dirt and yellow houses and green
banana leaves—looked elementary and innocent under the leaden sky. Some of my
colleagues whispered together, others checked their cameras. I felt numb and
shaky, prepared to turn away quickly, much the way I once had felt when forced
to identify the body of a chance acquaintance at a police morgue. Several
minutes after Tuu had left us, there was a disturbance in the air at the center
of the village. Similar to heat haze, but the ripples were slower. And then,
with the suddenness of a slide shunted into a projector, Stoner appeared.

I
think I had been expecting something bloody and ghoulish, or perhaps a gauzy
insubstantial form; but he looked no different than he had on the day he died.
Haggard; wearing sweat-stained fatigues; his face half-obscured by a week’s
growth of stubble. On his helmet were painted the words
Didi Mao
(“Fuck
Off” in Vietnamese), and I could make out the yellowing photograph of his girl
that he’d taped to his rifle stock. He didn’t act startled by our presence; on
the contrary, his attitude was nonchalant. He shouldered his rifle, tipped back
his helmet, and sauntered toward us. He seemed to be recessed into the
backdrop: it was as if reality were two-dimensional and he was a cutout held
behind it to give the illusion of depth. At least that’s how it was one moment.
The next, he would appear to be set forward of the backdrop like a popup figure
in a fancy greeting card. Watching him shift between these modes was
unsettling.. .more than unsettling. My heart hammered, my mouth was cottony. I
bumped into someone and realized that I had been backing away, that I was
making a scratchy noise deep in my throat. Stoner’s eyes, those eyes that had
looked dead even in life, pupils about .45 caliber and hardly any iris showing,
they were locked onto mine and the pressure of his stare was like two black
bolts punching through into my skull.

“Puleo,”
he said.

I
couldn’t hear him, but I saw his lips shape the name. With a mixture of longing
and hopelessness harrowing his features, he kept on repeating it. And then I
noticed something else. The closer he drew to me, the more in focus he became.
It wasn’t just a matter of the shortening distance; his stubble and sweat
stains, the frays in his fatigues, his worry lines—all these were sharpening
the way details become fixed in a developing photograph. But none of that
disturbed me half as much as did the fact of a dead man calling my name. I
couldn’t handle that. I began to hyperventilate, to get dizzy, and I believe I
might have blacked out; but before that could happen, Stoner reached the edge
of the fields, the barrier beyond which he could not pass.

Had
I had more mental distance from the event, I might have enjoyed the
sound-and-light that ensued: it was spectacular. The instant Stoner hit the end
of his tether, there was an earsplitting shriek of the kind metal emits under
immense stress; it seemed to issue from the air, the trees, the earth, as if
some ironclad physical constant had been breached. Stoner was frozen midstep,
his mouth open, and opaque lightnings were forking away from him, taking on a
violet tinge as they vanished, their passage illuminating the curvature of the
fields. I heard a scream and assumed it must be Stoner. But somebody grabbed
me, shook me, and I understood that I was the one screaming, screaming with
throat-tearing abandon because his eyes were boring into me and I could have
sworn that his thoughts, his sensations, were flowing to me along the track of
his vision. I knew what he was feeling: not pain, not desperation, but
emptiness. An emptiness made unbearable by his proximity to life, to fullness.
It was the worst thing I’d ever felt, worse than grief and bullet wounds, and
it had to be worse than dying—dying, you see, had an end, whereas this went on
and on, and every time you thought you had adapted to it, it grew worse yet. I
wanted it to stop. That was all I wanted. Ever. Just for it to stop.

Then,
with the same abruptness that he had appeared, Stoner winked out of existence
and the feeling of emptiness faded.

People
pressed in, asking questions. I shouldered them aside and walked off a few
paces. My hands were shaking, my eyes weepy. I stared at the ground. It looked
blurred, an undifferentiated smear of green with a brown clot in the middle:
this gradually resolved into grass and my left shoe. Ants were crawling over
the laces, poking their heads into the eyelets. The sight was strengthening, a
reassurance of the ordinary.

“Hey,
man.” Witcover hove up beside me. “You okay?” He rested a hand on my shoulder.
I kept my eyes on the ants, saying nothing. If it had been anyone else, I might
have responded to his solicitude; but I knew he was only sucking up to me,
hoping to score some human interest for his satellite report. I glanced at him.
He was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and that consolidated my anger.
Why is it, I ask you, that every measly little wimp in the universe thinks he
can put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses and instantly acquire magical hipness
and cool, rather than—as is the case—looking like an asshole with reflecting
eyes?

“Fuck
off,” I told him in a tone that implied dire consequences were I not humored.
He started to talk back, but thought better of it and stalked off. I returned
to watching the ants; they were caravanning up inside my trousers and onto my
calf. I would become a legend among them: The Human Who Stood Still for Biting.

From
behind me came the sound of peremptory gook voices, angry American voices. I
paid them no heed, content with my insect pals and the comforting state of
thoughtlessness that watching them induced. A minute or so later, someone else
moved up beside me and stood without speaking. I recognized Tuu’s cologne and
looked up. “Mr. Puleo,” he said. “I’d like to offer you an exclusive on this
story.” Over his shoulder, I saw my colleagues staring at us through the
windows of the bus, as wistful and forlorn as kids who have been denied
Disneyland: they, like me, knew that big bucks were to be had from exploiting
Stoner’s plight.