Fatal Light (8 page)

The medic who took care of me was talking, changing my sheets as I sat in a chair beside the bed.

“You know,” he said, “for years they had no idea what the hell malaria was. You ever hear that story? Walter Reed in Panama, all that shit. Wasn't that where he was? Somewhere down there. Now you, you've got one hell of a case. You know you had a fever up to a hundred and six? Christ, you're lucky you didn't have convulsions. You've been talking, though. God, you've been telling some stories, know what I mean? Well, the fever'll do that. Swells your brain. No, really, I got a theory. It's like LSD or something, swells your brain, you don't know who the hell you are... . Hey, you rest easy now, docs'll be around in a while. They been real interested in you. I think they wanna write an article on you for one of the medical journals. Something about your fever being the highest they ever saw.”

“I killed a man in his own house.”

“You call those things houses? Shit, those ain't more than shacks.”

“People live there. Spend their whole lives there. Raise their families there.”

“That's their problem.”

“His head was nothing but eyeballs and brains. I did what I thought I had to do... . I couldn't see a thing.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“He was unarmed. He could've just said something... thrown himself on the ground, I don't know... .”

“Better not to take chances. I mean, shit, we're fighting a fucking war here.”

The fever breaking ground, scattering, losing its grip and I was up at night in the hospital corridor shuffling toward a core of blue light in my patient's garb, standard military issue: SLIPPERS, HOSPITAL, ONE PAIR; ROBE, MAN'S TERRY CLOTH, HOSPITAL, ONE. In the heat of the disease I had seen a place where the past and the future were one, cleaved together like lovers rolling, turning, wide-eyed on a bed as flat as the sky. I didn't know if I was falling or levitating, and I wanted an escape to the safety of the present, clear of the terror of what had happened and could never change and sat like a leering man in a chair, gazing at me with a head full of regret and cynical wonder. From the hospital window the earth was a groaning body on its side, a face as empty of feeling as the heart of time itself, and I found myself preoccupied with the smell of the ocean in distant gulfs, the light on summer mornings along coastlines. Trade winds of the nervous system, the blind chemistry of need. Out there it was the dance of angels, the sweet dance of life itself where a man who was both too old and too young could reclaim a world as far ahead as he could see. If he could live long enough to get there.

Saigon, the elegant midday half-dark of the Continental Hotel's veranda, and we ordered drink after drink, all of them American-style: Mai Tai, Margarita, Manhattan, Black Russian.

“Have you ever seen a black Russian?” the American correspondent asked me.

“Oh, yes,” the French journalist from
L'Express
answered, “there are quite a number in Moscow. I think many in Georgia.”

“Georgia.” The American grinned. “You can bet they're all over Georgia.”

“I mean the province of Georgia in the Soviet Union,” the Frenchman said, not smiling.

“I know what you mean.”

There was a pause as the moment passed, and the Frenchman asked me how much time I had on R&R. I told him about the malaria, my reassignment to Saigon.

“You have been already in the war?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

The American began to talk about the assignment his paper had him on. He was from a large midwestern daily. “I'm down in these pits,” he said, “talking to these guys the MPs say are
VC shipped in for interrogation. And I mean these guys look like shit. They've been blackjacked and brassknuckled from here to Saturday night. I mean it looks like the MPs had been absolutely all over these poor fuckers. So I wire my paper, tell ‘em I want a go-ahead to investigate the possible torture of American prisoners—”

The first subterranean shock wave interrupted him and he sat straight in his chair, voice collapsing to a dry whisper as the fireball ballooned out of the building across the street. The roof burst off in pieces, an aura of heat bowed the walls and flickered transparently, the windows vomited a palpable light. There was a second grunt under the street—the boiler—and I moved inside and behind the bar and lay down flat on the gleaming parquet. The Vietnamese bartender was already there, chin to hardwood. We looked at each other and waited.

Debris clatter on the veranda. A rising wind, or the sense of one; the sound of fire. A helicopter in the distance. The sirens started, one behind the other, unwinding the sky.

I stood up and from behind the bar I saw most of the drinkers crowded at the French doors, watching the blaze. I moved back to my table, trying to breathe evenly, ease the adrenaline in my blood, settle my stomach. My drink had overturned and pooled over the table's veneer.

The American returned to the table shaking his head. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “that scared the shit straight out of me.” He picked up his drink and turned to look again at the burning building. “Must be a story behind it, though,” he said seriously, sucking his teeth. He rehearsed a byline to himself:
Who's behind Saigon's urban terrorism?

A dog wandered onto the veranda, a soiled waif, meandering under tables, whiffing cuffs. The bartender poured some beer into an ashtray and the dog lapped it eagerly. With its mange and bloody sores and starvation ribs the animal still seemed happy, and when I looked the dog caught my eye and walked wearily to my chair, lay down beside me sighing a vast resignation.

The call came across on a routine watch.

I was standing duty with Perelli, nervous Italian from Philadelphia who chain-smoked and kept busy cleaning the telephones with cotton balls soaked in alcohol. He was wiping a phone when it rang, startled him, rang again. He answered, listened, hung up frowning at me.

I was reading the office copy of
Playboy
. I did not look up.

“Sounds like a guy OD'd,” Perelli said. “We better go see about it.”

I asked Perelli if we really needed two guys for that kind of job.

“What do I know?” Perelli said. “Maybe they need fifty guys. So get off your ass.”

I looked into the back office, told Master Sergeant Weldon we were going out on a call.

“Don't stay out too late, boys,” Weldon said from behind closed eyes. “I'll worry about you.”

Perelli edged the jeep from the garage and I got in on the passenger side. He drove out of the lot saying, “So anyway they don't know what the fuck. They open a goddam broom closet, he's in there lookin' dead.”

“That's it?”

Perelli said, “You want more?”

We went in the front door of the barracks, Perelli carrying the aid bag while I pulled the stretcher. The corridor linoleum stroked back to the dim light of a rear exit, a high buffed shine. Nobody in sight. Silence.

“Christ,” Perelli said. He shouted. No answer.

“You sure you got the right building?” I said.

“Of course I'm goddam sure,” Perelli said.

He shouted again.

“Take it easy.”

“I
am
taking it easy.” Perelli said, opening the first door along the corridor. Paper towels, toilet paper, bars of soap.

Perelli pushed at the next door. A day room, beer and soda cans spread around the floor, overflowing ashtrays,
Sports Illustrated
and pornography slicks on a Naugahyde sofa. A radio was on, turned low, Saigon Armed Forces programming.

I opened the next door, not really expecting to see him folded on the floor of the closet with the brooms and mops, blue face and eyes half closed in lethal heroin nod, lower lip bloated and sagging.

His left arm was still tied off, violet stain at the crook of his elbow, needle on the floor beside his hand.

Perelli knelt to find a pulse. After a moment he looked up at me. “Nada,” he said.

We stood together in the doorway. “Shit,” Perelli said, whispering, “where is
anybody?
”

“Let's get him out of here.”

“Christ,” Perelli mumbled, “what is this, a fucking
murder?
I mean, where's the guy that called?”

“Probably eating dinner. Let's just get this guy over to the hospital, Perelli.”

“Yeah, off-load him over there, forget this ever happened.” Perelli pulled the body out of the broom closet feet first. The skull thumped against the floor.

“Now he's got a broken head too,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up, will ya?” Perelli looked down at the corpse, and said, “Think we'll be in trouble for this? Shit, dead junkie, it's gotta be on our watch. Who is this asshole fucking up my dinner anyway?”

I looked at Perelli, my hands under the body's shoulders, and said, “He's my cousin from Milwaukee and you better give me a little help here.”

Perelli grabbed the ankles. “You're a genuine smartass, you know that?”

We wrestled the weight onto the stretcher, belted the body down. In the corridor we could still hear the low murmur of the radio, the only sound beyond our labored breathing. The corpse's right arm kept falling as we wheeled toward the door. Finally we let it drag, down the steps, into the back of the jeep.

We delivered the body to the hospital emergency room loading dock. Two medics in white suits transferred the corpse from our stretcher to theirs, banged through swinging doors, and were gone. Perelli watched the doors, saying, “They'll probably try to blow him back up in there. Shit for brains in this man's army.”

Back at our watch post Perelli slumped into a chair. “Jesus,” he said. “Everybody dies here. Ain't one fuckin' thing, it's another. Everybody buyin' the farm. You notice that?”

I glanced at him, then away. “I noticed that,” I said.

In his office Master Sergeant Weldon was reading the
Playboy
. “File a report,” he said flatly from behind the centerfold.

Perelli got up and went into Weldon's office, sat down in front of the sergeant's desk, talking to the cover of the magazine. “You hear the latest, Sarge? Dead junkies in broom closets. No shit.”

The cover of
Playboy
featured a blonde in front of a paper moon with her back to the camera, nude except for glistening black shoes, one spike-heeled foot hiked up to rest on the moon's bottom curve. She looked back over her shoulder, smiling at Perelli.

“I can't even eat my goddam dinner,” Perelli said.

Weldon heaved the magazine onto his desk top, sighing. “Perelli,” he said, “your fun has only just begun.”

The river in Saigon was a drift of fruit peel and vegetable waste floating to the sea, children laughing and splashing in the shallows. The vendors began to line the banks at sunrise, cooking in the pink mornings until the smell of burning dung and camp smoke laced the scents of fish and water rat and distant ocean. A grandmother in a black
ao dai
set her stand up a few yards to the south of where I sat, spreading a ground cloth for the woven conical sun hats she sold. They were the hats worn by farmers everywhere in Asia, and she wore one herself. Her face was seamed, tired and beautiful. The Coca-Cola peddler squeezed his bell as he clanked his cart behind me, bottles ringing. I listened to the vendors' shouts grow into the day and watched the water move. A quartet of fighter jets blew over in formation, folding one by one toward the northwest. A Marine Corps helicopter labored past, rotors patting the air as the pilot braked for landing, and I could clearly see the streaked and expressionless faces of two soldiers crouching in the doorway of the aircraft, looking off toward open sky. The helicopter crossed and faded and under it, on the far shore, a group of schoolgirls rode bicycles, filmy white dresses adrift behind them like wings in the
river wind and black waterfall hair swaying across their narrow backs, the high music of their voices traveling the haze and oily water as they rode, passing on south like a flock of mythical creatures in the fresh light.

I met Lwan where she worked, where I was alone drinking Asahi and vacantly watching the street when she sat down and said
You're lonely.
I was wary and said that I was not and when she invited me to her apartment I was hesitant. She courted my hesitancy elegantly, taking me up the fire escape past her cat into the one large room with the moon lying down on the ceiling, and we drank and talked, beginning to fall into the whole heat of taxi horns and bicycle bells and beggar chants ascending to a complete body, a musical politics invisible from a third-story window with the night engines of our arms and legs and the occasional helicopter grinding past at roof level so we waited until it passed to speak, beginning to fall into the space we made love in, falling and unwinding through to where I came back to her when I could and came back again and came back and always came back.

Dear Mary,

The ringing in my ears has finally stopped and it didn't end as I had hoped, a sudden freedom, but slowly, so I couldn't really know if it would ever leave me alone. Or it never ended and is ringing now as I write these words and will always be with me but I will simply be unable to hear it, my brain no longer able to recognize what it carries and cannot purge, the way one survives but is never again truly free. I remember talking to you about Jews who survived the camps and their madness and suicide and I can tell you it happens fast, it's not a dream and history never died. Time will pass and I will be standing on a street corner or standing in line somewhere, looking for all the world like anybody at all, another human being amidst the hundreds, one among the thousands, out on his daily rounds, living his life on any given day. Something will have happened in my life that festered, scarred, finally just sits, a photograph on the spine.

I remember the first time you cried with me, and the first time I saw you naked. And every time after the first times. Such memories are owned by the air. That's real safekeeping.

All my love.