amazing it was that things were often not what they seemed, and what a strange confluence of possibilities it had taken to bring all the troupe together-and the six of uswere the entire troupe, for Vang was never really part of us even when he was there, and though the major was rarely with us, he was always there, a shadow in the corners of our minds…How magical and ineluctable a thing it was for us all to be together at the precise place and time when a man-a rather unprepossessing man at that-walked up from a deserted beach and presented us with a golden square imprinted with a song that he named for our circus, a song that so accurately evoked the mixture of the commonplace and the exotic that characterized life in Radiant Green Star, music that was like smoke, rising up for a few perfect moments, and then vanishing with the wind.
Had Vang asked me at any point during the months that followed to tell him about love, I might have spoken for hours, answering him not with definitions, principles, or homilies, but specific instances, moments, and anecdotes. I was happy. Despite the gloomy nature of my soul, I could think of no word that better described how I felt. Though I continued to study my father, to follow his comings and goings, his business maneuvers and social interactions, I now believed that I would never seek to confront him, never try to claim my inheritance. I had all I needed to live, and I only wanted to keep those I loved safe and free from worry.
Tan and I did not bother to hide our relationship, and I expected Vang to rail at me for my transgression.
I half-expected him to drive me away from the circus-indeed, I prepared for that eventuality. But he never said a word. I did notice a certain cooling of the atmosphere. He snapped at me more often and on occasion refused to speak; yet that was the extent of his anger. I didn’t know how to take this. Either, I thought, he had overstated his concern for Tan or else he had simply accepted the inevitable. That explanation didn’t satisfy me, however. I suspected that he might have something more important on his mind, something so weighty that my involvement with his niece seemed a triviality by comparison. And one day, some seven months after Tan and I became lovers, my suspicions were proved correct.
I went to the trailer at mid-afternoon, thinking Vang would be in town. We were camped at the edge of a hardwood forest on a cleared acre of red dirt near Buon Ma Thuot in the Central Highlands, not far from the Cambodian border. Vang usually spent the day before a performance putting up posters, and I had intended to work on the computer; but when I entered, I saw him standing by his desk, folding a shirt, a suitcase open on the chair beside him. I asked what he was doing and he handed me a thick envelope; inside were the licenses and deeds of ownership relating to the circus and its property. “I’ve signed everything over,” he said. “If you have any problems, contact my lawyer.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, dumfounded. “You’re leaving?”
He bent to the suitcase and laid the folded shirt inside it. “You can move into the trailer tonight. You and Tan. She’ll be able to put it in order. I suppose you’ve noticed that she’s almost morbidly neat.” He straightened, pressed his hand against his lower back as if stricken by a pain. “The accounts, the bookings for next year…it’s all in the computer. Everything else…” He gestured at the cabinets on the walls. “You remember where things are.”
I couldn’t get a grasp on the situation, overwhelmed by the thought that I was now responsible for Green Star, by the fact that the man who for years had been the only consistent presence in my life was about to walk out the door forever. “Why are you leaving?”
He turned to me, frowning. “If you must know, I’m ill.”
“But why would you want to leave? We’ll just…”
“I’m not going to recover,” he said flatly.
I peered at him, trying to detect the signs of his mortality, but he looked no thinner, no grayer, than he had for some time. I felt the stirrings of a reaction that I knew he would not want to see, and I tamped down my emotions. “We can care for you here,” I said.
He began to fold another shirt. “I plan to join my sister and her husband in what they insist upon calling-” he clicked his tongue against his teeth “-Heaven.”
I recalled the talks I’d had with Tan in which she had decried the process of uploading the intelligence, the personality. If the old man was dying, there was no real risk involved. Still, the concept of such a mechanical transmogrification did not sit well with me.
“Have you nothing to say on the subject?” he asked. “Tan was quite voluble.”
“You’ve told her, then?”
“Of course.” He inspected the tail of the shirt he’d been folding, and finding a hole, cast it aside. “We’ve said our goodbyes.”
He continued to putter about, and as I watched him shuffling among the stacks of magazines and newspapers, kicking file boxes and books aside, dust rising wherever he set his hand, a tightness in my chest began to loosen, to work its way up into my throat. I went to the door and stood looking out, seeing nothing, letting the strong sunlight harden the glaze of my feelings. When I turned back, he was standing close to me, suitcase in hand. He held out a folded piece of paper and said, “This is the code by which you can contact me once I’ve been…” He laughed dryly. “Processed, I imagine, would be the appropriate verb. At any rate, I hope you will let me know what you decide concerning your father.”
It was in my mind to tell him that I had no intention of contending with my father, but I thought that this would disappoint him, and I merely said that I would do as he asked. We stood facing one another, the air thick with unspoken feelings, with vibrations that communicated an entire history comprised of such mute, awkward moments. “If I’m to have a last walk in the sun,” he said at length, “you’ll have to let me pass.”
That at the end of his days he viewed me only as a minor impediment-it angered me. But I reminded myself that this was all the sentiment of which he was capable. Without asking permission, I embraced him. He patted me lightly on the back and said, “I know you’ll take care of things.” And with that, he pushed past me and walked off in the direction of the town, vanishing behind one of the parked trucks.
I went into the rear of the trailer, into the partitioned cubicle where Vang slept, and sat down on his bunk.
His pillowcase bore a silk-screened image of a beautiful Vietnamese woman and the words HONEY LADY KEEP YOU COMFORT EVERY NIGHT. In the cabinet beside his bed were a broken clock, a small plaster bust of Ho Chi Minh, a few books, several pieces of hard candy, and a plastic key chain in the shape of a butterfly. The meagerness of the life these items described caught at my emotions, and I thought I might weep, but it was as if by assuming Vang’s position as the owner of Green Star, I had undergone a corresponding reduction in my natural responses, and I remained dry-eyed. I felt strangely aloof from myself, connected to the life of my mind and body by a tube along which impressions of the world around me were now and then transmitted. Looking back on my years with Vang, I could make no sense of them. He had nurtured and educated me, yet the sum of all that effort-not given cohesion by the glue of affection-came to scraps of memory no more illustrative of a comprehensible whole than were the memories of my mother. They had substance, yet no flavor…none, that is, except for a dusty gray aftertaste that I associated with disappointment and loss.
I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, and for want of anything else to do, I went to the desk and started inspecting the accounts, working through dusk and into the night. When I had satisfied myself that all was in order, I turned to the bookings. Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual villages, the occasional festival.
But when I accessed the bookings for the month of March, I saw that during the week of the seventeenth through the twenty-third-the latter date just ten days from my birthday-we were scheduled to perform in Binh Khoi.
I thought this must be a mistake-Vang had probably been thinking of Binh Khoi and my father while recording a new booking and had inadvertently put down the wrong name. But when I called up the contract, I found that no mistake had been made. We were to be paid a great deal of money, sufficient to guarantee a profitable year, but I doubted that Vang’s actions had been motivated by our financial needs.
He must, I thought, have seen the way things were going with Tan and me, and he must have realized that I would never risk her in order to avenge a crime committed nearly two decades before-thus he had decided to force a confrontation between me and my father. I was furious, and my first impulse was to break the contract; but after I had calmed down I realized that doing so would put us all at risk-the citizens of Binh Khoi were not known for their generosity or flexibility, and if I were to renege on Vang’s agreement they would surely pursue the matter in the courts. I would have no chance of winning a judgment. The only thing to do was to play the festival and steel myself to ignore the presence of my father. Perhaps he would be elsewhere, or, even if he was in residence, perhaps he would not attend our little show. Whatever the circumstances, I swore I would not be caught in this trap, and when my eighteenth birthday arrived I would go to the nearest Sony office and take great pleasure in telling Vang- whatever was left of him-that his scheme had failed.
