The Bestiary (12 page)

It was twilight. Many hours had passed. Maybe an entire day. Spitting dirt, I raised myself up onto my right elbow. That was as far as I could go. If any of the VC had survived, they couldn’t be doing much better. Body parts were scattered around the field. The old craters had been supplanted by two others, many times wider. In the largest a severed leg was dangling a sandal. The red bandanna was floating in a puddle of blood.

The bombs dropped—probably from an F-15—had saved my life. But when I thought of Murphy radioing in our coordinates, my terror deepened: had he somehow—by giving the wrong code or having his message garbled—called in an airstrike rather than a search and rescue? If so, no Huey was ever going to come and I was going to die right there in the mud.

I closed my eyes and waited for that stillness to return and carry me away. Instead, a trapdoor opened and I started falling, arms and legs extended, weightless suddenly, down a long shaftway. The walls were on fire. Lights flashed, stars exploded. Then there was nothing but darkness, warm and velvety. I landed in a room with bamboo walls and a slow fan, on the softest feather bed imaginable. It smelled of jasmine. Fruit glittered in a bowl. A caged bird was singing. I turned on my side and that girl in the red dress rolled into my arms. She was naked now, with a hibiscus flower in her black hair. Her eyes were closed. She parted her lips and I kissed her. I felt her breasts compact against my chest. Her fingertips running along my back. I slid on top of her and as I entered her she opened her eyes. They were black glass, reflecting, not my image, but a beast with a long face, wrinkled forehead, and pocked cheeks. In the recesses of its close-set eyes stones were suspended—like holograms.

The Revesby bestiary says a man can foretell the future if such a stone is placed under his tongue.

The stone and the beast had the same name:
yena,
which means “hyena.”
^*1

But the man who dreams a hyena, the Revesby monks noted, has no future: he is so far along the road to death that he doesn’t leave a trace—no footprints, no scent—and soon becomes invisible. Not even his screams can be heard.

I was four months shy of my twenty-second birthday.

A
DRAGON TOWERED
over me. With one claw it had seized a serpent, with the other a fox. A tiger was crouched behind it, ready to spring. A monkey watched wide-eyed from the shadows.

They were jade statues, so lifelike I was sure I detected movement among them: a fluttering eyelid, the twitch of an ear, a ticking tail.

I was in a sprawling basement room. Candlelight flickered off the low ceiling. The floor was packed dirt. No walls were visible, just darkness flowing off in every direction. High above, I heard a bell ringing, muffled but purely pitched. Like a temple bell.

In addition to the animals, there were statues of the Buddha, his mother Maya, the goddess Kwan-Yin, and the Zen patriarchs, Bodhidharma and Huiko. Mara, the Evil One, was carved in cinnabar, as was his army of wingèd demons. And there were myriad statues of creatures in monstrous transition between lives: a beetle metamorphosing into a squirrel, an eel into a lizard, a snail into a sparrow.

Scanning the statues, I discovered I had living company as well: two men in orange monks’ robes sitting on stools with fishing poles. Between them was a basket, a net, and a stick of incense from which smoke threaded upward. Were they crazy? I wondered. Then I heard a gurgle of water and, through the shadows, made out an underground stream that wound across the room.

The monks paid no attention to me. I was lying on a canvas cot beneath a thin blanket. My left side was throbbing. My forehead was hot, my lips cracked. I tried to lift my hands and discovered that I was tied to the cot, like a prisoner.

That bell rang again. I called out to the monks, but still they didn’t move. Then I heard someone come around on my left: it was a panther, walking on his hind legs. His eyes were topaz, his whiskers silver. He had a human smile.

And it was in a human voice, soft and deep, that he addressed me, speaking a language I had never heard before. On her deathbed my grandmother could understand every word this panther said; maybe the fact I couldn’t meant I wasn’t dying.

The panther held up a sheet of black paper, swirling with white shadows, and studied it. Then one of the monks caught something in the stream. It was not a ghostly fish that flashed on his line, but a disk of light that spun across the room and hovered over me, growing so large and bright I had to close my eyes.

W
HEN
I
OPENED
my eyes again, the light was blinding. A machine was whirring beside me. Needles were taped to my arms, and fluids flowed to me from IV bags, one red, one clear. My wrists were fastened. The air was cold. A circle of masked faces was staring down at me, still as statues, only their eyes moving. Their smocks and caps were white.

Through padded double doors, I heard gurneys rattling off an elevator.

One of the surgeons was holding an X-ray up to the light. He was rail-thin, with long fingers.

The anesthesiologist, in a green smock and tinted glasses, appeared and checked his canisters.

“Ready?” he asked.

The surgeon nodded.

A nurse touched my leg reassuringly. “You’re going to be okay,” she said.

The anesthesiologist raised a cup over my nose and mouth. “Start counting backward from one hundred,” he commanded.

“Where are we?” I mumbled.

“Honolulu,” the nurse replied.

“See you in four hours, soldier,” the surgeon said.

It took them that long to pick the shrapnel out of my rib cage and sew me up again. Several pieces lodged in the bone itself remained.

Even now, my ribs ache on cold nights. And I have never been able to sleep on my left side again.

I
HAD BEEN MISSING
for thirty-six hours before the Huey picked me up near Dok Lo. Deep in enemy territory, I was nearly given up for captured, or dead. The Huey was already returning to Da Nang when they spotted me. I had lost a lot of blood, and my dog tags were gone, but I still had that document pouch around my neck.

After surgery, I was in bed for five days, and then a wheelchair for a week. My side was heavily bandaged and my arm was in a sling. The army hospital was overflowing. The fighting had intensified all along the Cambodian border and the worst casualties were being ferried in to Honolulu from Saigon. Men missing arms, legs, eyes, skin. Two beds down, with a catheter up his nose, there was a gunnery sergeant whose jaw had been blown away; beside him, a sniper with hooks for hands whose entire face had to be rebuilt. Worst of all were the men who had stepped on mines and were missing everything from the waist down. Murphy, if he had been a little luckier, or unluckier, might have been one of these. I was aware how fortunate I was just to know I would walk out of that place under my own power. But at night, when everything was magnified—the press of bodies, the stifling odors, the groans and screams—this was small comfort.

The patient in the next bed was a black kid from the Chicago projects named Monroe who had gotten religion. Monroe had lost an eye and a foot. With his remaining eye he scanned the Old Testament prophets and mumbled their words. An orderly gave him a book of Emanuel Swedenborg from which he began copying significant passages:
In Hell we find the most destructive creatures constantly at war: the viper, the scorpion, the rat—and man, first and foremost.

The Tripler Army Hospital is on a bluff in the foothills of the city, just above Salt Lake. When I wasn’t so groggy from painkillers, I liked to be wheeled out onto the cement terrace with the potted palms. Sitting under an umbrella, I cadged cigarettes from the nurses and gazed out over the Pacific, at the big clouds, the distant waves, the twilights in which everything slowly went silver. I had plenty of time to think—maybe more time than I wanted.

Those forty precarious miles I had traveled from L Base to 11°27'49" N, 106°39'08" E were only the last leg in the hectic line my life had followed in the previous years.

In my junior year of college, I was drifting. Taking drugs. Bored, not so much with my studies (not surprisingly, I had majored in history and classical languages) as with studying itself. I decided to drop out to do some serious drifting, to see the world. Instead, I was promptly drafted, and dispatched to a part of the world I had no desire to see.

When I enrolled in college, I gave up the apartment downtown, with its bad karma, and moved across the river to a smaller but sunnier place near Central Square. Eventually a girl named Nathalie moved in with me. She was from Denmark, the daughter of a diplomat. We met in a seminar on ancient exploration that began with Pytheas, the Greek pilot who sailed to Iceland, and Hsuan-tsung, the first Chinese to cross India. Nathalie was a traveler. Using her father’s overseas postings as springboards, she had trekked in the Andes and the Gobi Desert, sailed a ketch solo in the Windward Islands, and kayaked in the Seychelles. I never told her my own father had been a seaman.

However, in the city, Nathalie led a sedentary existence. If she wasn’t venturing into wilderness, she didn’t go out much at all. In this, as in all things, she alternated between extremes. She might work for a month straight, fueled with speed and cigarettes, or be idle for weeks on end, drinking rum late into the night. One constant was her appetite for Moroccan hashish. She obtained top-grade stuff from a friend in Copenhagen, via the diplomatic pouch at her father’s embassy. We broke chunks off the sticky bars imprinted with yellow Arabic letters and smoked them in a hookah filled with crème de menthe. The green liquid bubbled and the smoke filled my lungs with a tightening rush.

We read aloud from De Quincey and Lautréamont. We played recordings of Tibetan chants. I bought her a book with one hundred color plates of Chinese dragons. River dragons, sky, thunder, fire, fish, horse, and treasure dragons. Scarlet dragons that circle the sun and silver dragons that sleep on the mountains of the moon. The one-headed, two-bodied
t’ao t’ieh
that never stops eating and eventually will consume the whole earth. And the reclusive
ti-lung
, which hides among the stars in spring and on the seafloor in autumn. Because the dragon population in China is so large, it is assumed dragons have established their own shadow government. The foremost ministry is the Treasury of Waters; its divisions include a Supreme Council, a Body of Dragon Ministers, and the Departments of Sweet Waters and Salt Waters, which in turn contain countless subdivisions.
^*2

We studied the dragons in the glow of a lamp with a red lightbulb. On the dresser incense burned in the hollow stomach of a brass Buddha. The bedspread was a purple batik cloth that Nathalie had picked up in India. It depicted Vishnu and Lakshmi floating intertwined among the stars in various stages of coitus. Sometimes we stayed in bed for an entire day. The apartment was overheated, filled with tropical plants, the curtains drawn on the sour New England winter that we both hated.