The Best of Lucius Shepard (61 page)

“Do
you love your mother?” Vang asked, and before I could respond, he said, “You
have admitted that you have but a few disjointed memories of her. And, of
course, a dream. Yet you have chosen to devote yourself to pursuing the
dictates of that dream, to making a life that honors your mother’s wishes. That
is love. How can you compare this to your infatuation with Tan?”

Frustrated,
I cast my eyes up to the billow of patched gray canvas overhead, to the metal
rings at the peak from which Kai and Kim were nightly suspended. When I looked
back to Vang, I saw that he had gotten to his feet.

“Think
on it,” he said. “If the time comes when you can regard Tan with the same
devotion, well . . .” He made a subtle dismissive gesture with his fingers that
suggested this was an unlikely prospect.

I
turned to the board and hefted another knife. The target suddenly appeared evil
in its anonymity, a dangerous creature with a wood-grain face and blood-red
skin, and as I drew back my arm, my anger at Vang merged with the greater anger
I felt at the anonymous forces that had shaped my life, and I buried the knife
dead center of the head–it took all my strength to work the blade free.
Glancing up, I was surprised to see Vang watching from the entrance. I had
assumed that, having spoken his piece, he had returned to his trailer. He stood
there for a few seconds, giving no overt sign of his mood, but I had the
impression he was pleased.

When
she had no other duties, Tan would assist me with my chores: feeding the
exotics, cleaning out their cages, and, though she did not relish his company,
helping me care for the major. I must confess I was coming to enjoy my visits
with him less and less; I still felt a connection to him, and I remained
curious as to the particulars of his past, but his mental slippage had grown so
pronounced, it was difficult to be around him. Frequently he insisted on trying
to relate the story of Firebase Ruby, but he always lapsed into terror and
grief at the same point he had previously broken off the narrative. It seemed
that this was a tale he was making up, not one he had been taught or programmed
to tell, and that his mind was no longer capable of other than fragmentary
invention. But one afternoon, as we were finishing up in his tent, he began to
tell the story again, this time starting at the place where he had previously
faltered, speaking without hesitancy in the deep, raspy voice he used while
performing.

“It
came to be October,” he said. “The rains slackened, the snakes kept to their
holes during the day, and the spiderwebs were not so thick with victims as
they’d been during the monsoon. I began to have a feeling that something
ominous was on the horizon, and when I communicated this sense of things to my
superiors, I was told that according to intelligence, an intensification of
enemy activity was expected, leading up to what was presumed to be a major
offensive during the celebration of Tet. But I gave no real weight to either my
feeling or to the intelligence reports. I was a professional soldier, and for
six months I’d been engaged in nothing more than sitting in a bunker and
surveying a wasteland of red dirt and razor wire. I was spoiling for a fight.”

He
was sitting on a nest of palm fronds, drenched in a spill of buttery light–we
had partially unzipped the roof of the tent in order to increase
ventilation–and it looked as if the fronds were an island adrift in a dark void
and he a spiritual being who had been scorched and twisted by some cosmic fire,
marooned in eternal emptiness.

“The
evening of the Fourteenth, I sent out the usual patrols and retired to my
bunker. I sat at my desk reading a paperback novel and drinking whiskey. After
a time, I put down the book and began a letter to my wife. I was tipsy, and
instead of the usual sentimental lines designed to make her feel secure, I let
my feelings pour onto the paper, writing about the lack of discipline, my fears
concerning the enemy, my disgust at the way the war was being prosecuted. I
told her how much I hated Viet Nam. The ubiquitous corruption, the stupidity of
the South Vietnamese government. The smell of fish sauce, the poisonous greens
of the jungle. Everything. The goddamn place had been a battlefield so long, it
was good for nothing else. I kept drinking, and the liquor eroded my remaining
inhibitions. I told her about the treachery and ineptitude of the ARVN forces,
about the fuck-ups on our side who called themselves generals.”

“I
was still writing when, around twenty-one hundred hours, something distracted
me. I’m not sure what it was. A noise . . . or maybe a vibration. But I knew
something had happened. I stepped out into the corridor and heard a cry. Then
the crackling of small arms fire. I grabbed my rifle and ran outside. The VC
were inside the wire. In the perimeter lights I saw dozens of diminutive men
and women in black pajamas scurrying about, white stars sputtering from the
muzzles of their weapons. I cut down several of them. I couldn’t think how they
had gotten through the wire and the minefields without alerting the sentries,
but then, as I continued to fire, I spotted a man’s head pop up out of the
ground and realized that they had tunneled in. All that slow uneventful summer,
they’d been busy beneath the surface of the earth, secretive as termites.”

At
this juncture the major fell prey once again to emotional collapse, and I
prepared myself for the arduous process of helping him recover; but Tan kneeled
beside him, took his hand, and said, “Martin? Martin, listen to me.”

No
one ever used the major’s Christian name, except to introduce him to an
audience, and I didn’t doubt that it had been a long time since a woman had
addressed him with tenderness. He abruptly stopped his shaking, as if the
nerves that had betrayed him had been severed, and stared wonderingly at Tan.
White pinprick suns flickered and died in the deep places behind his eyes.

“Where
are you from, Martin?” she asked, and the major, in a dazed tone, replied,
“Oakland . . . Oakland, California. But I was born up in Santa Cruz.”

“Santa
Cruz.” Tan gave the name a bell-like reading. “Is it beautiful in Santa Cruz?
It sounds like a beautiful place.”

“Yeah
. . . it’s kinda pretty. There’s old-growth redwoods not far from town. And
there’s the ocean. It’s real pretty along the ocean.”

To
my amazement, Tan and the major began to carry on a coherent–albeit
simplistic–conversation, and I realized that he had never spoken in this
fashion before. His syntax had an uncustomary informality, and his voice held
the trace of an accent. I thought that Tan’s gentle approach must have
penetrated his tormented psyche, either reaching the submerged individual, the
real Martin Boyette, or else encountering a fresh layer of delusion. It was
curious to hear him talk about such commonplace subjects as foggy weather and
jazz music and Mexican food, all of which he claimed could be found in good
supply in Santa Cruz. Though his usual nervous tics were in evidence, a new
placidity showed in his face. But, of course this state of affairs didn’t last.

“I
can’t,” he said, taking a sudden turn from the subject at hand; he shook his
head, dragging folds of skin across his neck and shoulders, “I can’t go back
anymore. I can’t go back there.”

“Don’t
be upset, Martin,” Tan said. “There’s no reason for you to worry. We’ll stay
with you, we’ll . . .”

“I
don’t want you to stay.” He tucked his head into his shoulder so his face was
hidden by a bulge of skin. “I got to get back doin’ what I was doin’.”

“What’s
that?” I asked him. “What were you doing?”

A
muffled rhythmic grunting issued from his throat–laughter that went on too long
to be an expression of simple mirth. It swelled in volume, trebled in pitch,
becoming a signature of instability.

“I’m
figurin’ it all out,” he said. “That’s what I’m doin’. Jus’ you go away now.”

“Figuring
out what?” I asked, intrigued by the possibility–however unlikely–that the
major might have a mental life other than the chaotic, that his apparent
incoherence was merely an incidental byproduct of concentration, like the smoke
that rises from a leaf upon which a beam of sunlight has been focused.

He
made no reply, and Tan touched my hand, signaling that we should leave. As I
ducked through the tent flap, behind me the major said, “I can’t go back there,
and I can’t be here. So jus’ where’s that leave me, y’know?”

Exactly
what the major meant by this cryptic statement was unclear, but his words
stirred something in me, reawakened me to internal conflicts that had been
pushed aside by my studies and my involvement with Tan. When I had arrived to
take up residence at Green Star, I was in a state of emotional upheaval,
frightened, confused, longing for my mother. Yet even after I calmed down, I
was troubled by the feeling that I had lost my place in the world, and it
seemed this was not just a consequence of having been uprooted from my family,
but that I had always felt this way, that the turbulence of my emotions had
been a cloud obscuring what was a constant strain in my life. This was due in
part to my mixed heritage. Though the taint associated with the children of
Vietnamese mothers and American fathers (dust children, they had once been
called) had dissipated since the end of the war, it had not done so entirely,
and wherever the circus traveled. I would encounter people who, upon noticing
the lightness of my skin and the shape of my eyes, expressed scorn and kept
their distance. Further fueling this apprehension was the paucity of my
memories deriving from the years before I had come to live with Vang. Whenever
Tan spoke about her childhood, she brought up friends, birthdays, uncles and
cousins, trips to Saigon, dances, hundreds of details and incidents that caused
my own memory to appear grossly underpopulated by comparison. Trauma was to
blame, I reckoned. The shock of my mother’s abandonment, however well-intended,
had ripped open my mental storehouse and scattered the contents. That and the
fact that I had been six when I left home and thus hadn’t had time to
accumulate the sort of cohesive memories that lent color to Tan’s stories of
Hue. But explaining it away did not lessen my discomfort, and I became fixated
on the belief that no matter the nature of the freakish lightning that had
sheared away my past, I would never find a cure for the sense of dislocation it
had provoked, only medicines that would suppress the symptoms and mask the
disease–and, that being so masked, it would grow stronger, immune to treatment,
until eventually I would be possessed by it, incapable of feeling at home
anywhere.

I
had no remedy for these anxieties other than to throw myself with greater
intensity into my studies, and with this increase in intensity came a
concomitant increase in anger. I would sit at Vang’s computer, gazing at
photographs of my father, imagining violent resolutions to our story. I doubted
that he would recognize me; I favored my mother and bore little resemblance to
him, a genetic blessing for which I was grateful: he was not particularly
handsome, though he was imposing, standing nearly six and a half feet tall and
weighing–according to a recent medical report–two hundred and sixty-four
pounds, giving the impression not of a fat man, but a massive one. His large
squarish head was kept shaved, and on his left cheek was the dark blue and
green tattoo of his corporate emblem–a flying fish–ringed by three smaller
tattoos denoting various of his business associations. At the base of his skull
was an oblong silver plate beneath which lay a number of ports allowing him
direct access to a computer. Whenever he posed for a picture, he affected what
I assumed he would consider a look of hauteur, but the smallness of his eyes
(grayish blue) and nose and mouth in contrast to the largeness of his face
caused them to be limited in their capacity to convey character and emotional
temperature, rather like the features on a distant planet seen through a
telescope, and as a result this particular expression came across as prim. In
less formal photographs, taken in the company of one or another of his sexual
partners, predominantly women, he was quite obviously intoxicated.

He
owned an old French Colonial in Saigon, but spent the bulk of his time at his
house in Binh Khoi, one of the flower towns–communities built at the turn of
the century, intended to provide privacy and comfort for well-to-do Vietnamese
whose sexual preferences did not conform to communist morality. Now that
communism–if not the concept of sexual morality itself–had become quaint, a
colorful patch of history dressed up with theme-park neatness to amuse the
tourists, it would seem that these communities no longer had any reason to
exist; yet exist they did. Their citizenry had come to comprise a kind of gay
aristocracy that defined styles, set trends, and wielded significant political
power. Though they maintained a rigid exclusivity, and though my father’s
bisexuality was motivated to a great degree–I believe–by concerns of business
and status, he had managed to cajole and bribe his way into Binh Khoi, and as
best I could determine, he was sincere in his attachment to the place.