The Bestiary (13 page)

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.

After a long silence, she said, “That’s not a good idea.” I could tell she had been drinking. “I need to be alone for a while. Anyway, I’m not coming back to school anytime soon. Just mail me half our stash.”

When I didn’t reply fast enough, she raised her voice. “Okay?”

“Sure.”

And she hung up.

I wedged the hash into a hollowed-out textbook and packaged it carefully, along with the book of dragons.

Soon afterward, I traded in my Yamaha for a silver 750cc Triumph Bonneville, powerful enough to travel the interstate, and set out for California. Officially I was on leave from school for a semester, so I assumed my draft status—student deferment, II-S—would remain unchanged. I followed an erratic route, south to New Orleans, north to the Dakotas, and south again to the Mexican border. By the time I reached San Francisco, I had grown a beard and smoked the rest of the hash. As arranged beforehand, I crashed with a friend in his apartment near Alamo Park. In mail forwarded to his address I found a letter from Nathalie inviting me to join her on Corfu, and a notice from my draft board with a different sort of invitation. My deferment had been canceled and I was reclassified I-A. Opposed to the Vietnam war, with no desire to kill or be killed for something I didn’t believe in, I dropped methedrine for a week and for two days drank Ex-Lax. When I went in for my physical, I was sleepless, strung out, dehydrated, but still I passed. I could have fled to Canada—or Denmark, where Nathalie insisted I could make a life for myself—but I wasn’t ready to renounce my citizenship and live abroad. For better or worse, I was an American; because I had no family or roots to speak of, giving up that particular connection would be even more painful. So instead of basking in the Ionian sun with Nathalie, I soon found myself in the dark jungles near An Loc. She thought I was insane. In our last phone call before I shipped out from San Diego, she shouted, “I will never forgive you, going over there.” And she never did.

The day before I was released from the hospital in Honolulu, a major with red hair and unblinking eyes paid me a visit, accompanied by an aide who stood at attention. The major’s name tag read
CAPELLO
. I knew why he was there; I had been expecting him.

“Private Atlas,” he said, “it is a privilege to honor your service to our nation.”

The aide snapped open a briefcase from which Major Capello took a small leather box. He pinned a medal to my robe and shook my hand. It was a Purple Heart. Nearly everyone in the ward had received one; if you were wounded in action, it was automatic.

As I studied George Washington’s cameo on the medal, the major surprised me, taking out a second box. He made a little speech, which concluded, “For valor in combat above and beyond the call of duty, in Trang Province, Republic of South Vietnam, on the twenty-second of April, 1972, I hereby award you the Silver Star. Congratulations.”

This was not something everyone got. And when you did get it, you knew why. I had to ask.

Major Capello looked at me skeptically, then leaned closer. I smelled tobacco on his breath and saw the groove on his lower lip where he planted his cigarette. “It was the pouch. You brought it home under fire.”

The pouch. Of course. In the end, Murphy, the motorcycle, the radio, my rifle, even my uniform—everything else I’d set out with that day was gone. I’d stayed alive and I’d held on to the pouch, and they didn’t give you a Silver Star for staying alive. “May I ask what it contained, Major?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

I shook my head.

He hesitated again. “Phoenix,” he whispered, his eyes more unblinking than ever. “There were dossiers…operational details.”

Operation Phoenix was an assassination program run by the CIA. The targets were not soldiers, but citizens alleged to be Vietcong sympathizers. Forty thousand of them had been executed by U.S. Special Forces. By war’s end, twenty thousand more would die. Most CIA informers were petty criminals or corrupt officials on whose word entire families were killed if a single member was accused of aiding the communists. What I had been carrying was a new list of intended victims.

In June 1972 I may have exited Vietnam without shooting anyone, but I knew now that I had assisted in the killing of hundreds of people. Nathalie had been right: just getting inducted, becoming complicitous in something I detested, I was sure to end up tainted—and miserable. I didn’t know just how miserable.

For years I made myself read everything I could find about Operation Phoenix, from transcripts of congressional testimony to the lurid paperback memoirs of assassins. It was my attempt at expiation. But it never gave me relief.

M
OLOKAI WAS ONCE
an island of sorcerers. They tattooed their bodies with the images of beasts. They shaved their heads with sharks’ teeth. They could assume the shape of lizards. Their eyes were smoke. And in the oily smoke of palm fires they divined the future. Because of them, the warriors of Maui and Oahu, perpetually at war, avoided Molokai. The sorcerers’ armies were composed of ghosts. When the sorcerers died off, the ghosts remained, roaming the island.

Molokai is still said to be a haven for ghosts—especially the ghosts of soldiers. I’d come close to becoming one myself, I thought, stepping off the prop plane from Honolulu in a driving rain. As I crossed the island in a rental car, through forests choked with mist, I wondered if I would encounter Murphy’s ghost. If so, would his two halves be rejoined? Would he be a transparent version of himself, or just a coil of that mist, whispering by?

After receiving my medical discharge, I made a reservation on a flight to San Francisco—then thought better of it. I had wanted to get as far from Southeast Asia as possible, to ease back into civilian life, but realized I had a better chance of doing so in Hawaii, where things were more laid-back. I checked into a sleepy motel on the north shore of Oahu. For the first time in ten months, I ate alone, showered alone, and had my own bathroom. I tried not to drink a lot, though I wanted to; I stayed away from weed, which was readily available; and I cut down on the painkillers the doctors had loaded me up with. In my nightmares I was still riding on that motorcycle with Murphy, but he was just a skeleton pressed up against me; or I was back in that field, scrambling as the napalm hit; or sitting on a freezing C-130 transport with hundreds of other soldiers, stiff as statues, forced to return to Vietnam for another tour of duty. These dreams became so torturous that—in vain—I invoked Baku, the Japanese spirit known as the “Eater of Dreams.” With a lion’s head, tiger’s feet, and horse’s body, Baku resembled the chimera or the manticore, but was a beneficent spirit. If a sleeper awoke from a nightmare and cried, “Baku, eat my dreams,” Baku would do so, and the sleeper, relieved of his burden, would drift off serenely.

Mr. Hood, my old history teacher, had invited me to Molokai. He had retired to the island two years earlier and lived in a ranch house on a rough stretch of its southern shore. Catching my name in the newspaper, in a list of newly decorated soldiers, he had sent me a letter, care of the army. I was surprised to learn that he was in Hawaii, and even more surprised that he would invite me to be a houseguest. He had offered me crucial encouragement as a student, but we had never socialized—not even a cup of coffee in the school cafeteria. We met in his office, never his home, to discuss coursework and my research, not personal matters. To the end, he was formal and reserved. So I did not find it strange when we fell out of touch during my freshman year in college.

Approaching his house, I felt for a moment as if I were back in Maine: he was on the lanai, holding a book at arm’s length and puffing a pipe. His dog Polyphemus was asleep at his feet. The dog was thirteen, and I was halfway across the lawn before he rose stiffly, to sniff me out. He was nearly as old as Re when he died. The lawn ended at the beach, about thirty yards away. There was a one-man kayak propped against a tree. And on a low platform, under construction, a forty-foot canoe.

Mr. Hood looked much as he had when I walked into his classroom seven years before. Thin waist, rough hands, powerful shoulders and arms from his daily rowing. The crow’s-feet were deeper beside his blue eyes. His beard was grayer. The crew cut was gone. It was disconcerting at first to see him with longer hair, well over his collar. It too was grayer, with sprays of white on the sides. But he seemed far more at ease. The tropics evidently agreed with him more than the Frozen North. Or maybe he too was just glad to have left the school.

“Welcome,” he said, and we shook hands.

I had been wondering if he had invited me out of loneliness. Or if, having always liked me, he could now befriend me as an adult. More importantly, I had become a fellow vet. Whatever his motives, I was gratified: at school, after all, he had learned a great deal about me, while I knew little about him.

He picked up my bag and led me into the house. The guest room was cool and quiet, with darkly lacquered Chinese furniture. There was an empty antique birdcage. A sliding door opened onto a terrace in the garden. Blackbirds were singing through the louvered windows.

He got a plate of walnuts, cheese, and crackers from the kitchen and set it out on the lanai. Dropping ice into two glasses and pouring us Irish whisky, he saw that I was admiring the canoe under construction.

“I was taught the Phoenicians were the greatest seafarers ever,” he said, handing me my drink. “But they were day-trippers compared to the Polynesians, who roamed the Pacific in canoes like that. Fifteen hundred years ago, they sailed here from the Marquesas Islands, across seven thousand miles of open sea. They believed the first canoe was built by a warrior named Rata. After he rescued a heron from the jaws of a sea serpent, the heron taught Rata the art of canoe-building. Rata visited dozens of islands, passing on his knowledge. As in Maine, I’m only using indigenous tools—an adz, a mallet, a machete—and ironwood and palm from that forest. The Polynesians could build a canoe in five days. I’ll have this one seaworthy in three months.”

“Where will you sail?”

“Only as far as Oahu,” he smiled. “I’ll enlist some rowers in town.”