But the third, fourth and fifth times he purchased sleeping berths his health was fine, he had no pressing work to do, and he had no ready arguments: he just wanted to be alone. He tried not to subject this deepening desire for cloistered travel to scrutiny, but introspection and honesty were old habits with Peter, and his inner debate soon made its way into his journal: “A scholar-monk traveling in the same style as all these well-to-do Hindu merchants may still be a scholar, but he is hardly a monk,” he wrote one day. On the other hand, “I’ve met Westerners whose health has been broken completely by trying to become ‘Indian’ too fast. It takes time to change a body. A careful transition is justified.”
Justified or not, to sleep and read one’s way through a foreign country in a private, air-conditioned cubicle is to be in no foreign country at all. That he might genuinely fear, at least physically, the very land whose literature and spiritual traditions he’d adored since childhood, that such a fear might imply a never to be assimilated core of foreignness—these kinds of thoughts did not yet occur to him. By reading and working ceaselessly, by emaciating himself physically and by increasing his theoretical knowledge of India even as he decreased his firsthand experience, he was able to continue feeling that he belonged where he was. But the strain had begun to show: “I am trying to live as a contemplative,” he wrote in his journal the last night he ever debated the Sleeper Compartment Issue, “and a contemplative’s work is to renounce worlds, not immerse himself in them.”
But it was not this emphatic statement that ended the debate. What ended it was rereading the statement—and hearing a distinctly derisive snicker rise from the part of his psyche that for seventeen years had shared a room with a tactlessly observant young rabble-rouser named Everett.
“I am weak!” Peter finally wrote, if only to silence the snicker.
He then slammed the diary shut, lay down on his bed, and let the train lull him into a cool but troubled sleep.
2. Loss of a Promising Continent letter from Everett, except for the paragraph by Dostoevsky, which was cut out by Natasha and left in the center of Everett’s kitchen table, then glued by Everett (with raspberry jam) to the second page of his letter to me/Shyashyakook/February/1971
mydearkinkade
just because I’ve been ingesting a few of the small dometopped protuberances that last autumn so protuberated in a nearby cow meadow type ecology system do not for evevn onem oment assume I am in any wayless capable of the most lucid kinf og
well maybe typewritee operation isn’t so easy but do not the less youmagine such techicnal dfidculties implies me the least less trustworthy of being confided in in case tasha happens to have told why or better yet where she is/ //oh yeah/: =”!. = $these deals!&% + * cept I meant comm,a,, ,damn it,,i mean people do trust you kade, and sometimes write or maybe phone and say swear you’ll keep this secret, but if she did, kade pleaseyou’ve got to unswear please
because she left me kade.
my tasha
she left mei don’t even know why be my valentine two days ago she says then didn’t warn me file a complaint give a scowl every time we made love stereo orgasm me babbling more and more wildly about effing marriage for christsake meaning every word with all my heart and her smiling so unbelieveable and saying and i quote a love our size eventually demands that THEN NOT TELLING ME A GODDAMN ANYTHING!?! just leaving me this NOTHING of a,this this FUCK, kade!just look at this farewell fucking nothing of a
If I run away, even with money and a passport, even to America, I will be cheered by the thought that I am not running away for pleasure, not for happiness, but to another exile as bad, perhaps, as Siberia. It is as bad, Alyosha, it is! I hate America, damn it. How will I put up with the rabble down there, though they may be better than I, every one of them. I hate America already! They may be wonderful at machinery, damn them, but they are not of my soul. I shall choke there!
scissored straight out of a 75 cent signet classic conversation between dumkopf and alleyoopa karamazov for godsake and like hell will she choke there she’s got her whole mom’s new golf ranch somewhere in the desert she never got around to telling me and probly fifty old boyfrinds and money and cars and diningclub citizenships and didn’t even leave a goddam phone or clue or frowarding address or the truth or why or anything!
except I guess, now I mention it, neither have i exactlly.
told the truth that is, so her it is:
i am actually not doing so good is the truth kade. like i for starters can’t believe how much less than death did us part and feel like a piece of week-old warmed-over lied-to dogshit and on top of that miss her so bad i want to die is the other worst part, because the other truth is i love her, man, big time, no lie, no way to hide from it or not feel it, and i’d have sworn she loved me too is the part that, how can you, how can I, how could she just walk off and about kill me like this, or try, till luckily i scored the shrooms, man, the mindnukes, the freeze-dried meadow nodules happening here instead and so started staving off the why o why o whys since i don’t know, nam, oops, except wow, man, did you never notice till now how nam backwards is man, man, because of how the men in nem are backwards too, man, which is I’m afriad the sort of noodlyheaded shit i now put my whole mind dick and soul into noticing, for survival purposes, nam, having never been in this position of suckered to the point of i’d have sworn to god tasha loved me, we loved each other, i know she did, so if it’s truth we’re talking, truthfully, sick, actually, to death, man, is how i feel at the,
how many of these canyou before you
sick, god sick, my new continent gone, nam sick
is how i
hey, that you kade?
found this on the floor what is it? three days later? real letter forthcoming instant i finish non-mycological efforts to recalculate what reality is. keep me posted on Winnie no matter what happens. sorry to lay this on you. thanks, man.
shit
Everett
3. Zaccheus
letter from Irwin/Mekong Delta/February/1971
You know how rain zuzzes when it hits the water? That soothing sound the surface makes? Well, that’s what I was hearing, just that zuzz and the drippling of leaves and trees, when it happened. But you wouldn’t believe, Kade, how little things like that, things like rain falling into the Mekong the same calm way it falls into the rivers back home, can stop your heart here. Because this river, remember, is warm as piss, and the air always smells wrong and the trees and vines feel like they’re watching and hating you and ready to kill you, and that’s tiring, understand? The fear here, and the wrongness feeling, they just wear you out. But with my poncho, see, I could block all the wrongness out and frame in this perfect little zuzzing piece of river surface. And soon as I did it slid me right on down by the Columbia, in late fall maybe, all brown and wide and floody, so that my one plan in all of life was to sit there as forever as possible.
And that’s when it happens. That’s when our point, Ducky Gelman, comes slithering through the brush, grabs Sergeant Felker, eases him all hushhush down beside me, parts vines, scopes in a tree just downriver. And by God, there he is. Victor. I see him bare-eyed myself. All in black. All alone. Hunched in plain sight in this big green tree overhanging the water.
Of course without even thinking we feel it’s a trap. You always feel this, even when it can’t be, since in the long run everything about being here’s a trap. Anyhow Gelman’s a big duckhunter back in Real Life, and always has these duckhunting strategies he applies to the situation, so what he more or less says is that the Cong in the tree is a decoy and that a thousand or so VC with 12-gauges are out there in duckblinds praying to the Gook God for us to shoot him and give our position away. While Felker thinks this over I scope Victor in. I can see him perfect. He’s only 150 yards off. I see the rifle in his lap, the radio on the limb behind him, the Chinese lettering on his rubber slipper soles. I even see his jaw working, and for a second think he’s singing. Then his hand goes to his mouth and I re
alize it’s food. It’s eating. He’s just staring at the water eating his damned Vietnamese lunch up there. So let’s go, is my feeling. Leave him his lunch and let’s scram. Then Felker whispers He’s no decoy. He’s recon, same as us, watching for things moving up or down river. And with that he turns to me.
Christ, life is hard to predict, Kade. I didn’t use to worry about it. God provides, I thought, so try your best and don’t worry. So I never worried, back in Boot, how high scores in target-shooting would translate to a place like Nam. I just didn’t see the day coming when some big scary mother like Felker would whisper like he was doing me some huge favor: Okay, Chance. Pop him good and let’s scratch gravel. He can’t be as lonesome as he looks.
It was true, what Felker said. Ducky’s nuts from being on point, too much duckhunting and all, but the Delta really is a place where a hundred of them can jump out of anywhere anytime. And there were six of us. And this scared me right out of my head, Kade. It scared me clean out of remembering who I am. Or was. Just do it and run, I tell myself. You didn’t make the world, I tell myself. Left shoulder blade, Felker whispers, and I think, Don’t shake or he’ll suffer; think, Sorry, Victor, but your time is up; think, Jesus forgive me—if you can believe that. Then I start squeezing. The gun is very quiet in the rain. It sounds like a toy. But the guy in the tree, our nation’s enemy, Victor flips around sideways, crashes down through the branches and ends up on his back on a wide leafy limb. His rifle splashes into the river. So does whatever he was eating. Gelman and Felker disappear, which is what I should do too of course. But I just stand there. I never shot even an animal before, so it interests me. It interests me especially since he was just sitting there same as me, and could of seen and shot me first. Or we could of gone happily on not seeing each other, not shooting each other, enjoying the same zuzz as forever as possible.
Then I notice something else interesting. He isn’t dead. He’s hanging on to a limb with one hand, has a leg hooked over another, and neither the hand or the leg are letting go. I see blood all over his chest though the bullet entered his back, so I know it’s torn clear through him. The blood’s running wet and black out of him, down through the leaves, dripping off his calves and feet, off his hair, off his elbows. He can’t lift himself, he has no idea where the shot came from, he’s not a VC anymore, not a Commie anymore, not a dink, not a threat, not an enemy. He’s just this ruined little person whose body doesn’t want to die any more than mine does. So he won’t let go.
From the bushes somewhere Felker tells me come the fuck on, his friends are probably coming. He’s still alive, I tell him. Then deal with it and come, he says, and I hear them moving out, and know I can’t find my way through ten yards’ worth of this jungle alone. So can you believe it? I do what he says. I deal with it. But I’m sick and shaking this time and don’t know where I hit him, and when he falls another few feet and lands on another big limb he holds on to this one too. And now, I have to tell you Kade, now I hate him. I hate him so bad for scaring me like this and not dying like this that, God damn me to hell, I shoot him again, twice more, in the back or buttocks, I don’t know where, and knock him lower each time. But still he keeps landing on things, clutching at things, grabbing things. He’s on the last limb above the river now, blood all down through the tree, and the limb is sinking, the current’s pulling him hard, his fist is slipping down a thorn vine that must be ripping his palm to shreds, and all this time I’m scoping him, hating him, waiting for some good part of him to show so I can squeeze a round into it too. But then the current spins him, and all I see is mouth. And it’s wide open, Kade, gasping for air, and full of unharmed teeth and a small pink tongue with unchewed bits of lunch still on it. And after all I’ve done to him, when I see this, I can’t do more. So I just watch. I watch his fist run out of vine, watch the limb, flinging blood, sway back up in the tree, watch to see what he does with nothing but water and air to clutch at. But when the current takes him and his head spins under, leaving nothing but that quiet zuzz, something in me spins under too, and I think Sparkle. Because remember the time, that little dog out of the Washougal? Because how in Christ’s Name, Kade, even as a soldier, can I not do for a man what I once did for a damned dog? So I drop my weapon. I drop it and start running to save the same guy I’ve just murdered, and for ten or twelve seconds it’s the most wonderful feeling! For ten or twelve seconds I’m me again, Kade, tearing along like it’s football, doing the first clear and good and hundred and ten percent right thing I’ve done since joining this fucking Army. But I don’t make it sixty yards before I hit jungle thicker than our laurel hedge, which knocks me down, slows me to a crawl, makes me snake toward the river thinking Swim for him then! But near the edge I hit thorn-vines where the harder you fight the harder you stick, and when I finally reach water and break free enough to see, my God, he’s so far downriver. And moving so fast. And I’ve shot him so bad, over and over and over.
So I just hang there. I just hang in the water there, watching him drift and drift, blind now, I realize, since with one hand he’s still clutching at a shoreline an easy quarter mile away. And he never did drown, Kade. He never did quit clutching. And the Mekong is huge. It took him forever to disappear.
It took him so long that by the time he was gone, everything had changed. I didn’t hurt anymore, didn’t feel like hiding anymore, wasn’t scared anymore. Because I wasn’t anything anymore. Not anything I love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are—if doing this to others before they do it unto us is all our lives are—we’re already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I’m dead. The hell with me.
I crawled back to my rifle because it was the one thing on earth I knew where to find. Then I threw it as far as I could out into the Mekong. That left nothing. Which suited me fine. I sat back down, closed my poncho round a piece of river, started listening again to the zuzz. Then, you know me, I tried praying too, asking Christ to do things like bless and save the guy I’d killed and damn me to hell instead if need be. But then that Sabbath School song, “Zaccheus,” got stuck in my head, so I bagged the prayers and started singing it instead. And when I heard the words coming out of me I saw clear as day that Christ already had saved him. He’d saved the Cong I killed, then jammed the song in my head to show He doesn’t need shitheads like me to tell Him His business. Because remember?
Zaccheus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.
And the Lord said, Zaccheus! You come down!
For I’m going to your house today.
So the rain is falling and the river is zuzzing and Zaccheus! I’m singing, or blubbering really, you came down, but He’s going to your house today! when What the fuck are you doing Felker is all of a sudden wondering out of the bushes. Singing Zaccheus, I tell him. Where’s your rifle? he wonders. I nod at the river. Why? he wonders. Defective, I tell him, and so am I defective, and so are you, and so are all of us and this idiot war and our country for fighting it and on and on goes my list of defectives till I sound like Everett almost, so that it’s no surprise when Felker jumps out and slugs me. He was just eating his Vietnamese lunch up there, I tell him. Shuttup, he whispers, and slugs me. I killed Zaccheus, I tell him, bawling loud enough now to wake the whole Delta, so shuttup shuttup shuttup, poor Felker goes, punching me, and I’m spitting blood back in his face and don’t care if we live and won’t move and keep sobbing, and if he didn’t pound me good I’d be there still. So I warn you, Kade, my face is a bit different. The nose mostly. But don’t be a fool. Don’t blame Felker. He risked the shit out of his life for me. Gelman says he’s even trying to wangle me a transfer to a place besides a brig or asylum where my lack of M-16 won’t stick out so bad.
But listen, Kade. Please listen. Don’t you ever come her
e. Study yourself blind like Pete, lop off a toe like Papa, hightail it like Everett, go to jail, do what you have to. But don’t you come here no matter what. Because it’ll kill you, this place. If the Cong don’t, your own heart will.
Can’t sign off. Don’t know what to call me. Don’t scare Linda or the twins with this, okay?
4. Boiled Eggs
After Natasha had performed, by vanishing, a kind of quack bisection of Everett’s heart and wittingly or unwittingly taken the happy half with her; after the winter rains kept pouring and the memory of his lovely new continent sank like a stone and the landscape sagged back into its prehistoric greens and grays and even Chekhov née Booger seemed to grow a little depressed or confused after he’d munched through the cedar shingles and clear into the two-by-fours on the corners of several vacation homes, to find that no longer would anyone come rushing out to thwack him;
after Everett had stood for six hours in the rain in Shyashyakook’s vandal-savaged but only phone booth spending his once-great faith in telephones and his last dime chasing down his beloved’s old boyfriends and girlfriends and registrars and priest and faculty to learn only that she’d dropped out of her master’s program at Washington in order to maybe visit her mother in Arizona (address unknown) or father in New York (address unknown) or some daft draft-dodger up in Canada (“Yeah, I knew him once,” said Everett);
after he’d driven to Victoria to hawk most of his clothes, all of his fishing tackle, his wristwatch, his Russian literature and accessories, his beloved stereo, his even more beloved rock-’n’-roll record collection and even the tire iron, jack and spare tire from the trunk of his car, merely to win another sodden day in the ravaged phone booth calling random people with the last name of Lee in Phoenix, Brooklyn, Knoxville, Tucson, the Bronx, Chattanooga and so on, only to ask, in a voice clogged by mucus née boogers from the terrible cold he’d caught, questions like “Is this the Lee with the niece or daughter named Laurel or Natasha? No? No obscure branch of the family tree with one small Laurel on it? You’re sure? Then is this by chance a psychic Lee, or a detective Lee, or a Ouija Lee who can help find my missing Laurel? It’s not. I wonder, then, if—no, ma’am, not drunk, just cold, and I—please! One last favor! Just look out your window, it’s not asking much, and tell me whether you see her right now—she’d be the beautiful one, auburn-haired, green-eyed, old jeans that fit like ballet tights, with the little red thing that looks like raw hamburger pinned like a brooch to her blouse—that’s half my heart, that thing. So if you do see her, I beg you to—hello? hello?”;
The Brothers K Page 52
