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 fuckups 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.
The pictures taken at Binh Khoi rankled me the most-I hated to see him laughing and smiling. I would stare at those photographs, my emotions over-heating, until it seemed I could focus rage into a beam and destroy any object upon which I turned my gaze. My eventual decision, I thought, would be easy to make. Anger and history, the history of his violence and greed, were making it for me, building a spiritual momentum impossible to stop. When the time came, I would avenge my mother and claim my inheritance. I knew exactly how to go about the task. My father feared no one less powerful than himself-if such a person moved against him, they would be the target of terrible reprisals-and he recognized the futility of trying to fend off an assassination attempt by anyone
