It was over a hundred degrees. I tried to catch my breath, but it was like drawing fire into my lungs.
“They should’ve fucking gotten us out sooner,” Murphy shouted, slapping the mosquitoes from his neck. “There was no recon over Cambodia? No one saw three fucking armored divisions?”
We were scraped and bruised. My lip was cut and I pressed my sleeve to it to stop the bleeding.
“How many assholes were asleep at the wheel in An Loc and Saigon?” he railed.
“Here, Murph.” I had a Snickers bar in my pocket that I split in half.
He shook his head.
“It’s all we’ve got.”
He spat. “You think we’re gonna take on Charlie with these pistols—like Wyatt Earp?” He tore off his flak jacket. “And this fucking thing won’t be worth shit in a firefight.”
I let him go on. It was his way of dealing with his fear. How did I deal with mine? I felt like throwing up. I tried to think about something else—anything. The transistor radio I had as a kid: it was red, with a single earplug that hurt my ear, tiny serrated dials for volume and tuning, and a circle of numerals that lit up. Like Murphy, I was loyal to certain stations. WABC. WMCA. I thought of my favorite disk jockeys: Cousin Brucie, Scott Muni, Jack Spector. I tried to hear the songs they played. Bye Bye Love. Money. You Can’t Catch Me.
“I don’t want no KIA after my name,” Murphy snapped.
Killed in Action. Maybe he was right; maybe that would be the next station we heard: WKIA.
We finished the water in the canteen, refilled it with river water, and dropped in iodine tablets. Then we popped some salt tablets and washed them down. My helmet that weighed five pounds felt like twenty. My flak jacket was like lead. Sweat was streaming down my back.
Murphy jumped up suddenly. “Fuck this, too!” he shouted, flinging his helmet into the river. I saw his eagle tattoo for the last time before he pulled an Oakland A’s cap, green with a gold brim, from his pocket and put it on as his helmet floated away through the reeds.
That had been nineteen hours and about twelve miles ago, across the roughest terrain I had ever seen. And Murphy had been right: his flak jacket and helmet could not have saved him when he stepped on that mine.
I still had the pouch under my flak jacket. And I still had my .38, which I slipped from its holster when that VC platoon descended the ridge and fanned out in my directon, heading for the forest. I had seen men die, but in my eight months in-country I had shot at no one. A bottomless silence was welling up beneath me. Maybe it was this that would carry off my spirit, I thought, when, in a few moments, my body was dead. Before that happened, before they killed me, would I kill one of them? Was that the only choice left me?
They were ninety feet away, moving in a broken line. Their leader was a wiry man with a goatee, bare-chested, a red bandanna knotted around his head. He was carrying a machete and staring at the thicket that concealed me. I’d heard reports of soldiers recently captured and executed, their heads affixed to spikes to frighten villagers who might collaborate. And other soldiers who, prior to interrogation, were stripped and doused with gasoline while their captors tossed lit matches at them. And—the worst—prisoners strung from trees with ropes, a canvas bag filled with rats fastened tightly over their heads.
As the men came closer, it struck me that I had another choice: put the pistol to my skull and—
Red Bandanna jerked his head up and shouted, pointing at the sky. As he turned, I saw the tattoo covering his back, a sea serpent in a storm—my father’s tattoo. Then there was a thunderclap, followed by an explosion that rocked the earth. A wall of fire swept past me. Red Bandanna, his men, the trees—everything was consumed as I flew into the air myself, into the flames, tumbling, flailing, blacking out.
When I came to, I was sprawled out far from what remained of that thicket—a mound of ashes. My uniform was in tatters, my skin black. One boot was gone. Dirt filled my mouth. All my bones felt broken, but in fact it was my left arm and two ribs that were cracked. And there was a hole in my left side—the size of a cigarette pack—caked with blood.
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 vo
ice, 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.
WHEN 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.
My father subsidized all this from afar, relieved, I imagined, just to authorize a monthly check and have me out of his hair. A lawyer in Athens named Pericles Arvanos actually wrote the checks.
Nathalie had black hair cut short and full, combed back—like raven’s wings—over her ears. She was trim, and stronger than she looked. Her eyes were harder than the rest of her face, and her lips were full. She exuded the air of someone who had been around, who could look right through people if she wanted to. She was a wonderful lover. A voracious reader, always ready to stay up all night talking. She liked to wear lizard cowboy boots. Sewn with colored beads on the back of her buckskin jacket was the ravenous wolf Fenrir and his brother, Jormungard, the Norse serpent which, like the Greek uroboros, encircled the great ocean that bounded the world. Shackled with an invisible chain (composed of a stone’s roots, a woman’s beard, a fish’s breath, and the sound of a cat’s footfall), Fenrir was destined to break free at the twilight of the gods, Ragnarøk, to swallow the sun and moon.
Nathalie was sly. An accomplished liar. Capable of stealing, too. Once in a Chinese restaurant when we were short of cash, she lifted a man’s wallet. She was adept at charging long-distance phone calls to defunct
numbers, and managed more than once to secure an airplane boarding pass without a ticket. Her lies were about getting what she wanted, when she wanted it. But sometimes she lied merely to embellish a slow evening when we were with someone she didn’t like. Usually another woman. She didn’t get along well with women. “For what?” she would say. “I like to be with men.”
For one year and seven months that meant me. I had never known anyone like her before. Even more than her worldliness, it was the fact she was unafraid to focus only on what interested her that drew me to her. Wily and fast on her feet, she seemed much older than the other girls I had dated. She was impervious to others’ opinions. In that respect, I wished I had been more like her. But I was thin-skinned; behind my isolating, and the barriers I erected, I cared what people thought about me. A part of me felt guilty about shutting them out. For Nathalie that was never a source of ambivalence.
With Nathalie I learned that you can be in love with someone even when certain things about them repel you—in her case, dishonesty and cynicism. And that such a person can make you happy even if, fundamentally, she is unhappy herself. At the same time, I did not delude myself that Nathalie and I would be together long. I never allowed myself that luxury with anyone.
One day Nathalie got word that her sister had been in a car accident on Majorca. She was in a coma. The family had her flown to Denmark, and Nathalie joined them. When her sister died, Nathalie was devastated. She phoned me at three A.M., her voice scratchy through the static.
“I want to be there with you,” I said.