cargo boat with a yellow sail was coming into view around the bend. “I wonder,” she said. “Is it worse to remember those who’ve gone, or not to remember them?”
I guessed she was thinking about her parents, and I wanted to say something helpful, but the concept of uploading an intelligence, a personality, was so foreign to me, I was afraid of appearing foolish.
“I can see my mother and father whenever I want,” Tan said, lowering her gaze to the grass. “I can go to a Sony office anywhere in the world and summon them with a code. When they appear they look like themselves, they sound like themselves, but I know it’s not them. The things they say are always…appropriate. But something is missing. Some energy, some quality.” She glanced up at me, and, looking into her beautiful dark eyes, I felt giddy, almost weightless. “Something dies,” she went on. “I know it! We’re not just electrical impulses, we can’t be sucked up into a machine and live. Something dies, something important. What goes into the machine is nothing. It’s only a colored shadow of what we are.”
“I don’t have much experience with computers,” I said.
“But you’ve experienced life!” She touched the back of my hand. “Can’t you feel it within you? I don’t know what to call it…a soul? I don’t know…”
It seemed then I could feel the presence of the thing she spoke of moving in my chest, my blood, going all through me, attached to my mind, my flesh, by an unfathomable connection, existing inside me the way breath exists inside a flute, breeding the brief, pretty life of a note, a unique tone, and then passing on into the ocean of the air. Whenever I think of Tan, how she looked that morning, I’m able to feel that delicate, tremulous thing, both temporary and eternal, hovering in the same space I occupy.
“This is too serious,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about my parents more than I should.” She shook back the fall of her hair, put on a smile. “Do you play chess?”
“No,” I admitted.
“You must learn! A knowledge of the game will help if you intend to wage war against your father.” A regretful expression crossed her face, as if she thought she’d spoken out of turn. “Even if you don’t…I mean…” Flustered, she waved her hands to dispel the awkwardness of the moment. “It’s fun,” she said.
“I’ll teach you.”
I did not make a good chess player, I was far too distracted by the presence of my teacher to heed her lessons. But I’m grateful to the game, for through the movements of knights and queens, through my clumsiness and her patience, through hours of sitting with our heads bent close together, our hearts grew close. We were never merely friends-from that initial conversation on, it was apparent that we would someday take the next step in exploring our relationship, and I rarely felt any anxiety in this regard; I knew that when Tan was ready, she would tell me. For the time being, we enjoyed a kind of amplified friendship, spending our leisure moments together, our physical contact limited to hand-holding and kisses on the cheek. This is not to say that I always succeeded in conforming to those limits. Once as we lay atop Vang’s trailer, watching the stars, I was overcome by her scent, the warmth of her shoulder against mine, and I propped myself up on an elbow and kissed her on the mouth. She responded, and I stealthily unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her breasts. Before I could proceed further, she sat bolt upright, holding her blouse closed, and gave me a injured look; then she slid down from the trailer and walked off into the dark, leaving me in a state of dismay and painful arousal. I slept little that night, worried that I had done permanent damage to the relationship; but the next day she acted as if nothing had happened, and we went on as before, except that I now wanted her more than ever.
Vang, however, was not so forgiving. How he knew I had taken liberties with his niece, I’m not sure-it may have been simply an incidence of his intuitive abilities; I cannot imagine that Tan told him. Whatever his sources, after our performance the next night he came into the main tent where I was practicing with my knives, hurling them into a sheet of plywood upon which the red outline of a human figure had been painted, and asked if my respect for him had dwindled to the point that I would dishonor his sister’s daughter.
He was sitting in the first row of the bleachers, leaning back, resting his elbows on the row behind him, gazing at me with distaste. I was infuriated by this casual indictment, and rather than answer immediately I threw another knife, placing it between the outline’s arm and its waist. I walked to the board, yanked the blade free, and said without turning to him, “I haven’t dishonored her.”
“But surely that is your intent,” he said.
Unable to contain my anger, I spun about to face him. “Were you never young? Have you never been in love?”
“Love.” He let out a dry chuckle. “If you are in love, perhaps you would care to enlighten me as to its nature.”
I would have liked to tell him how I felt about Tan, to explain the sense of security I found with her, the varieties of tenderness, the niceties of my concern for her, the thousand nuances of longing, the intricate complicity of our two hearts and the complex specificity of my desire, for though I wanted to lose myself in the turns of her body, I also wanted to celebrate her, enliven her, to draw out of her the sadness that sometimes weighed her down, and to have her leach my sadness from me as well-I knew this was possible for us. But I was too young and too angry to articulate these things.
“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 bloodred 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
