He fell silent, and when at last he spoke, it was not in the resonant tones with which he entertained our audiences, but in an effortful whisper.
“We came to the firebase in…company strength. Tenth of May. Nineteen sixty-seven. The engineers had just finished construction and…and…there was still…” He paused to catch his breath. “The base was near the Laotian border. Overlooking a defoliated rubber plantation. Nothing but bare red earth in front of us…and wire. But at our rear…the jungle…it was too close. They brought in artillery to clear it.
Lowered the batteries to full declension. The trees all toppled in the same direction…as if they’d been pushed down by the sweep…of an invisible hand.”
His delivery, though still labored, grew less halting, and he made feeble gestures to illustrate the tale, movements that produced a faint slithering as folds of his skin rubbed together; the flickerings in his pupils grew more and more pronounced, and I half-believed his eyes were openings onto a battlefield at night, a place removed from us by miles and time.
“Because of the red dirt, the base was designated Firebase Ruby. But the dirt wasn’t the color of rubies, it was the red of drying blood. For months we held the position with only token resistance. We’d expected serious opposition, and it was strange to sit there day after day with nothing to do except send out routine patrols. I tried to maintain discipline, but it was an impossible task. Everyone malingered.
Drug use was rampant. If I’d gone by the book I could have brought charges against every man on the base. But what was the point? War was not truly being waged. We were engaged in a holding action.
Policy was either directionless or misguided. And so I satisfied myself by maintaining a semblance of discipline as the summer heat and the monsoon melted away the men’s resolve.
“October came, the rains slackened. There was no hint of increased enemy activity, but I had a feeling something big was on the horizon. I spoke to my battalion commander. He felt the same way. I was told we had intelligence suggesting that the enemy planned a fall and winter campaign building up to Tet. But no one took it seriously. I don’t think I took it seriously myself. I was a professional soldier who’d been sitting idle for six months, and I was spoiling for a fight. I was so eager for engagement I failed to exercise good judgment. I ignored the signs, I…I refused…I…”
He broke off and pawed at something above him in the air-an apparition, perhaps; then he let out an anguished cry, covered his face with his hands, and began to shake like a man wracked by fever.
I sat with him until, exhausted, he lapsed into a fugue, staring dully at the ground. He was so perfectly still, if I had come across him in the jungle, I might have mistaken him for a root system that had assumed a hideous anthropomorphic shape. Only the glutinous surge of his breath opposed this impression. I didn’t know what to think of his story. The plain style of its narration had been markedly different from that of his usual stories, and this lent it credibility; yet I recalled that whenever questioned about his identity, he would respond in a similar fashion. However, the ambiguous character of his personal tragedy did not diminish my new fascination with his mystery. It was as if I had been dusting a vase that rested on my mantelpiece, and, for the first time, I’d turned it over to inspect the bottom and found incised there a labyrinthine design, one that drew my eye inward along its black circuit, promising that should I be able to decipher the hidden character at its center, I would be granted a glimpse of something ultimately bleak and at the same time ultimately alluring. Not a secret, but rather the source of secrets. Not truth, but the ground upon which truth and its opposite were raised. I was a mere child-half a child, at any rate-thus I have no real understanding of how I arrived at this recognition, illusory though it may have been. But I can state with absolute surety why it seemed important at the time: I had a powerful sense of connection with the major, and, accompanying this, the presentiment that his mystery was somehow resonant with my own.
Except for my new program of study, researching my father’s activities, and the enlarged parameters of my relationship with Major Boyette, whom I visited whenever I had the opportunity, over the next several years my days were much the same as ever, occupied by touring, performing (I functioned as a clown and an apprentice knife thrower), by all the tediums and pleasures that arose from life in Radiant Green Star. There were, of course, other changes. Vang grew increasingly frail and withdrawn, the major’s psychological state deteriorated, and four members of the troupe left and were replaced. We gained two new acrobats, Kim and Kai, pretty Korean sisters aged seven and ten respectively-orphans trained by another circus-and Tranh, a middle-aged, moonfaced man whose potbelly did not hamper in the slightest his energetic tumbling and pratfalls. But to my mind, the most notable of the replacements was Vang’s niece, Tan, a slim, quiet girl from Hue with whom I immediately fell in love.
Tan was nearly seventeen when she joined us, a year older than I, an age difference that seemed unbridgeable to my teenage sensibilities. Her shining black hair hung to her waist, her skin was the color of sandalwood dusted with gold, and her face was a perfect cameo in which the demure and the sensual com-mingled. Her father had been in failing health, and both he and his wife had been uploaded into a virtual community hosted by the Sony AI- Tan had then become her uncle’s ward. She had no actual performing skills, but dressed in glittery revealing costumes, she danced and took part in comic skits and served as one of the targets for our knife thrower, a taciturn young man named Dat who was billed as James Bond Cochise. Dat’s other target, Mei, a chunky girl of Taiwanese extraction who also served as the troupe’s physician, having some knowledge of herbal medicine, would come prancing out and stand at the board, and Dat would plant his knives within a centimeter of her flesh; but when Tan took her place, he would exercise extreme caution and set the knives no closer than seven or eight inches away, a contrast that amused our audiences no end.
For months after her arrival, I hardly spoke to Tan, and then only for some utilitarian purpose; I was too shy to manage a normal conversation. I wished with all my heart that I was eighteen and a man, with the manly confidence that, I assumed, naturally flowed from having attained the age. As things stood I was condemned by my utter lack of self-confidence to admire her from afar, to imagine conversations and other intimacies, to burn with all the frustration of unrequited lust. But then, one afternoon, while I sat in the grass outside Vang’s trailer, poring over some papers dealing with my father’s investments, she approached, wearing loose black trousers and a white blouse, and asked what I was doing.
“I see you reading every day,” she said. “You are so dedicated to your studies. Are you preparing for the university?”
We had set up our tents outside Bien Pho, a village some sixty miles south of Hanoi, on the grassy bank of a wide, meandering river whose water showed black beneath a pewter sky. Dark green conical hills with rocky out- cropping hemmed in the spot, and it was shaded here and there by smallish trees with crooked trunks and puffs of foliage at the ends of their corkscrew branches. The main tent had been erected at the base of the nearest hill and displayed atop it a pennant bearing the starry emblem of our troupe. Everyone else was inside, getting ready for the night’s performance. It was a brooding yet tranquil scene, like a painting on an ancient Chinese scroll, but I noticed none of it-the world had shrunk to the bubble of grass and air that enclosed the two of us.
Tan sat beside me, crossed her legs in a half-lotus, and I caught her scent. Not perfume, but the natural musky yield of her flesh. I did my best to explain the purpose of my studies, the words rushing out as if I were unburdening myself of an awful secret. Which was more-or-less the case. No one apart from Vang knew what I was doing, and because his position relative to the task was tutelary, not that of a confidante, I felt oppressed, isolated by the responsibility I bore. Now it seemed that by disclosing the sad facts bracketing my life, I was acting to reduce their power over me. And so, hoping to exorcise them completely, I told her about my father.
“His name is William Ferrance,” I said, hastening to add that I’d taken Ky for my own surname. “His father emigrated to Asia in the Nineties, during the onset ofdoi moi (this the Vietnamese equivalent ofperestroika), and made a fortune in Saigon, adapting fleets of taxis to methane power. His son-my father-expanded the family interests. He invested in a number of construction projects, all of which lost money. He was in trouble financially when he married my mother, and he used her money to fund a casino in Danang. That allowed him to recoup most of his losses. Since then, he’s established connections with the triads, Malaysian gambling syndicates, and the Bamboo Union in Taiwan. He’s become an influential man, but his money’s tied up. He has no room to maneuver. Should he gain control of my grandfather’s estate, he’ll be a very dangerous man.”
“But this is so impersonal,” Tan said. “Have you no memories of him?”
“Hazy ones,” I said. “From all I can gather, he never took much interest in me…except as a potential tool. The truth is, I can scarcely remember my mother. Just the occasional moment. How she looked standing at a window. The sound of her voice when she sang. And I have a general impression of the person she was. Nothing more.”
Tan looked off toward the river; some of the village children were chasing each other along the bank, and a
