The Best of Lucius Shepard (64 page)

Mei,
who did not care for Americans, stared meanly at him, but Tranh, who habitually
viewed them as potential sources of income, told him that we were, indeed,
performers with the circus. Kai and Kim whispered and giggled, and Tranh asked
the American what his friend–skinnier, beadless, dull-eyed and open-mouthed,
with a complicated headset covering his scalp–was studying.

“Parasailing.
We’re going parasailing . . . if there’s ever any wind and the program doesn’t
screw up. I woulda left him at the house, but the program’s fucked. Didn’t want
his ass convulsing.” He extracted a sectioned strip of plastic from his shirt
pocket; each square of plastic held a gelatin capsule shaped like a cut gem and
filled with blue fluid. “Wanna brighten your day?” He dangled the strip as if
tempting us with a treat. When no one accepted his offer, he shrugged, returned
the strip to his pocket; he glanced down at me. “Hey, that shit with the knives
. . . that was part of the fucking plan! Especially when you went benihana on
Little Plum Blossom.” He jerked his thumb at Mei and then stood nodding, gazing
at the sea, as if receiving a transmission from that quarter. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay. It could be the drugs, but the trusty inner voice is telling me my
foreign ways seem ludicrous . . . perhaps even offensive. It well may be that I
am somewhat ludicrous. And I’m pretty torched, so I have to assume I’ve been
offensive.”

Tranh
made to deny this, Mei grunted, Kim and Kai looked puzzled, and Tan asked the
American if he was on vacation.

“Thank
you,” he said to Tan. “Beautiful lady. I am always grateful for the gift of
courtesy. No, my friend and I–and two others–are playing at the hotel. We’re
musicians.” He took out his wallet, which had been hinged over the waist of his
trunks, and removed from it a thin gold square the size of a postage stamp; he
handed it to Tan. “Have you seen these? They’re new . . . souvenir things,
like. They just play once, but it’ll give you a taste. Press your finger on it
until it you hear the sound. Then don’t touch it again–they get extremely hot.”

Tan
started to do as he instructed but he said, “No, wait till we’re gone. I want
to imagine you enjoyed hearing it. If you do, come on down to the hotel after
you’re finished tonight. You’ll be my guests.”

“Is
it one of your songs?” I asked, curious about him now that he had turned out to
be more complicated than he first appeared.

He
said, yes, it was an original composition.

“What’s
it called?” Tranh asked.

“We
haven’t named it yet,” said the American; then, after a pause: “What’s the name
of your circus?”

Almost
as one we said, “Radiant Green Star.”

“Perfect,”
said the American.

Once
the two men were out of earshot, Tan pressed her fingertip to the gold square,
and soon a throbbing music issued forth, simply structured yet intricately
layered by synthesizers, horns, guitars, densely figured by theme and subtle
counter-theme, both insinuating and urgent. Kai and Kim stood and danced with
one another. Tranh bobbed his head, tapped his foot, and even Mei was charmed,
swaying, her eyes closed. Tan kissed me, and we watched a thin white smoke
trickle upward from the square, which itself began to shrink, and I thought how
amazing it was that things were often not what they seemed, and what a strange
confluence of possibilities it had taken to bring all the troupe together–and
the six of us
were
the entire troupe, for Vang was never really part of
us even when he was there, and though the major was rarely with us, he was
always there, a shadow in the corners of our minds. . . . How magical and
ineluctable a thing it was for us all to be together at the precise place and
time when a man–a rather unprepossessing man at that–walked up from a deserted
beach and presented us with a golden square imprinted with a song that he named
for our circus, a song that so accurately evoked the mixture of the commonplace
and the exotic that characterized life in Radiant Green Star, music that was
like smoke, rising up for a few perfect moments, and then vanishing with the
wind.

Had
Vang asked me at any point during the months that followed to tell him about
love, I might have spoken for hours, answering him not with definitions,
principles, or homilies, but specific instances, moments, and anecdotes. I was
happy. Despite the gloomy nature of my soul, I could think of no word that
better described how I felt. Though I continued to study my father, to follow
his comings and goings, his business maneuvers and social interactions, I now believed
that I would never seek to confront him, never try to claim my inheritance. I
had all I needed to live, and I only wanted to keep those I loved safe and free
from worry.

Tan
and I did not bother to hide our relationship, and I expected Vang to rail at
me for my transgression. I half-expected him to drive me away from the
circus–indeed, I prepared for that eventuality. But he never said a word. I did
notice a certain cooling of the atmosphere. He snapped at me more often and on
occasion refused to speak; yet that was the extent of his anger. I didn’t know
how to take this. Either, I thought, he had overstated his concern for Tan or
else he had simply accepted the inevitable. That explanation didn’t satisfy me,
however. I suspected that he might have something more important on his mind,
something so weighty that my involvement with his niece seemed a triviality by
comparison. And one day, some seven months after Tan and I became lovers, my
suspicions were proved correct.

I
went to the trailer at mid-afternoon, thinking Vang would be in town. We were
camped at the edge of a hardwood forest on a cleared acre of red dirt near Buon
Ma Thuot in the Central Highlands, not far from the Cambodian border. Vang
usually spent the day before a performance putting up posters, and I had
intended to work on the computer; but when I entered, I saw him standing by his
desk, folding a shirt, a suitcase open on the chair beside him. I asked what he
was doing and he handed me a thick envelope; inside were the licenses and deeds
of ownership relating to the circus and its property. “I’ve signed everything
over,” he said. “If you have any problems, contact my lawyer.”

“I
don’t understand,” I said, dumfounded. “You’re leaving?”

He
bent to the suitcase and laid the folded shirt inside it. “You can move into
the trailer tonight. You and Tan. She’ll be able to put it in order. I suppose
you’ve noticed that she’s almost morbidly neat.” He straightened, pressed his
hand against his lower back as if stricken by a pain. “The accounts, the
bookings for next year . . . it’s all in the computer. Everything else . . .”
He gestured at the cabinets on the walls. “You remember where things are.”

I
couldn’t get a grasp on the situation, overwhelmed by the thought that I was
now responsible for Green Star, by the fact that the man who for years had been
the only consistent presence in my life was about to walk out the door forever.
“Why are you leaving?”

He
turned to me, frowning. “If you must know, I’m ill.”

“But
why would you want to leave? We’ll just . . .”

“I’m
not going to recover,” he said flatly.

I
peered at him, trying to detect the signs of his mortality, but he looked no
thinner, no grayer, than he had for some time. I felt the stirrings of a reaction
that I knew he would not want to see, and I tamped down my emotions. “We can
care for you here,” I said.

He
began to fold another shirt. “I plan to join my sister and her husband in what they
insist upon calling–” he clicked his tongue against his teeth “–Heaven.”

I
recalled the talks I’d had with Tan in which she had decried the process of
uploading the intelligence, the personality. If the old man was dying, there
was no real risk involved. Still, the concept of such a mechanical
transmogrification did not sit well with me.

“Have
you nothing to say on the subject?” he asked. “Tan was quite voluble.”

“You’ve
told her, then?”

“Of
course.” He inspected the tail of the shirt he’d been folding, and finding a
hole, cast it aside. “We’ve said our goodbyes.”

He
continued to putter about, and as I watched him shuffling among the stacks of
magazines and newspapers, kicking file boxes and books aside, dust rising
wherever he set his hand, a tightness in my chest began to loosen, to work its
way up into my throat. I went to the door and stood looking out, seeing
nothing, letting the strong sunlight harden the glaze of my feelings. When I
turned back, he was standing close to me, suitcase in hand. He held out a
folded piece of paper and said, “This is the code by which you can contact me
once I’ve been . . .” He laughed dryly. “Processed, I imagine, would be the
appropriate verb. At any rate, I hope you will let me know what you decide
concerning your father.”

It
was in my mind to tell him that I had no intention of contending with my
father, but I thought that this would disappoint him, and I merely said that I
would do as he asked. We stood facing one another, the air thick with unspoken
feelings, with vibrations that communicated an entire history comprised of such
mute, awkward moments. “If I’m to have a last walk in the sun,” he said at
length, “you’ll have to let me pass.”

That
at the end of his days he viewed me only as a minor impediment–it angered me.
But I reminded myself that this was all the sentiment of which he was capable.
Without asking permission, I embraced him. He patted me lightly on the back and
said, “I know you’ll take care of things.” And with that, he pushed past me and
walked off in the direction of the town, vanishing behind one of the parked
trucks.

I
went into the rear of the trailer, into the partitioned cubicle where Vang
slept, and sat down on his bunk. His pillowcase bore a silk-screened image of a
beautiful Vietnamese woman and the words HONEY LADY KEEP YOU COMFORT EVERY
NIGHT. In the cabinet beside his bed were a broken clock, a small plaster bust
of Ho Chi Minh, a few books, several pieces of hard candy, and a plastic key
chain in the shape of a butterfly. The meagerness of the life these items
described caught at my emotions, and I thought I might weep, but it was as if
by assuming Vang’s position as the owner of Green Star, I had undergone a
corresponding reduction in my natural responses, and I remained dry-eyed. I
felt strangely aloof from myself, connected to the life of my mind and body by
a tube along which impressions of the world around me were now and then
transmitted. Looking back on my years with Vang, I could make no sense of them.
He had nurtured and educated me, yet the sum of all that effort–not given
cohesion by the glue of affection–came to scraps of memory no more illustrative
of a comprehensible whole than were the memories of my mother. They had
substance, yet no flavor . . . none, that is, except for a dusty gray
aftertaste that I associated with disappointment and loss.

I
didn’t feel like talking to anyone, and for want of anything else to do, I went
to the desk and started inspecting the accounts, working through dusk and into
the night. When I had satisfied myself that all was in order, I turned to the
bookings. Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual villages, the occasional
festival. But when I accessed the bookings for the month of March, I saw that
during the week of the 17th through the 23rd–the latter date just ten days from
my birthday–we were scheduled to perform in Binh Khoi.

I
thought this must be a mistake–Vang had probably been thinking of Binh Khoi and
my father while recording a new booking and had inadvertently put down the
wrong name. But when I called up the contract, I found that no mistake had been
made. We were to be paid a great deal of money, sufficient to guarantee a
profitable year, but I doubted that Vang’s actions had been motivated by our
financial needs. He must, I thought, have seen the way things were going with
Tan and me, and he must have realized that I would never risk her in order to
avenge a crime committed nearly two decades before–thus he had decided to force
a confrontation between me and my father. I was furious, and my first impulse
was to break the contract; but after I had calmed down I realized that doing so
would put us all at risk–the citizens of Binh Khoi were not known for their
generosity or flexibility, and if I were to renege on Vang’s agreement they
would surely pursue the matter in the courts. I would have no chance of winning
a judgment. The only thing to do was to play the festival and steel myself to
ignore the presence of my father. Perhaps he would be elsewhere, or, even if he
was in residence, perhaps he would not attend our little show. Whatever the
circumstances, I swore I would not be caught in this trap, and when my
eighteenth birthday arrived I would go to the nearest Sony office and take
great pleasure in telling Vang–whatever was left of him–that his scheme had
failed.