Marder put him off for a long time and then gave in. He did so because he did not wish to offend Skelly or to be the only American without a bracelet, but in fact he did not take the induction seriously. Unlike Skelly, who was essentially an outcast, Marder had been a member of an intact tribal society for his whole life, having been brought up in a Brooklyn Irish parish under the old ecclesial regime. He thought there was something unpleasantly desperate in the way Skelly had plunged into Hmong culture, and he felt it even more when he discovered that Skelly had taken a Hmong wife, had married with all ceremony a girl name Joong, who could not have been more than seventeen. The other SOGs seemed to accept this Hmongness in Skelly as another of the eccentricities they all exhibited as members of an unconventional army, along with their exotic weapons and uniforms, the quasi-legal supply system, and their relative freedom from the MACV chickenshit that characterized the rest of the war.
What Marder saw, and he thought that perhaps they did not, was that Skelly took it very seriously indeed, that for him the entire war was about the preservation of the Hmong in this village, that this was, in fact, the only honorable facet of the immense waste of life and treasure that was tearing his native land to pieces. Like everyone else who’d been in-country for more than a week and had half a brain, Skelly understood that the Republic of South Vietnam was worthless and unsalvageable. The ARVN was corrupt at every level and completely penetrated by the enemy. MACV was a house of lies, devoid of honor, whose only strategy was throwing hapless draftees out in the bush until they got blasted by the NVA and the remnants of the VC and then sending bombers and artillery to blow holes in the forest in hopes of adding to the (largely fictitious) body counts. Skelly dismissed all that—he knew the NVA, he knew they would never give up, they would sacrifice their entire population before they’d tolerate any foreign soldiers on their soil.
The montagnards were different, though. They were their own nation, and they would fight. They’d been fighting the Vietnamese for centuries—they were like the Indians in America—and with just a little help they could build an independent nation in their mountains that would be proof against any attack and that would inspire the sympathy of the world. The United States would at last be fighting a good fight—even the fucking hippies, even fucking Jane Fonda, would see it was a good fight—and the Americans would support it.
Marder allowed himself to agree with this vision, but he had a lot less faith in the wisdom of America than Skelly did. Although he was a product of an intensely patriotic working-class community and had no connection with the college-kid antiwar movement, Marder had been raised by a couple of Catholic lefties, that rare breed. His father knew what a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight was, and his mother, whose weekly letters kept him apprised of what was going on back in the world, was a Catholic Worker, who’d known and loved Dorothy Day for decades. Marder thought Skelly was a little nuts, but he was also eighteen and not entirely a cynic, and he was willing to dip a toe into Skelly’s deep reservoir of faith.
And he liked seeing Skelly with the Hmong, with Joong and her siblings and cousins; he liked the sweetness of their natures, how gentle they were with their kids, how gentle horrible old Sergeant Skelly was with the wandlike creature he loved. Marder liked how they honored their old people and how those old people tried to keep intact the rituals, the spiritual tendons, so badly frayed now, that kept the Hmong from a dissolution worse than death.
So Marder relented, said he would buy the buffalo and be inducted, and one morning he squatted in the public room of the root, or longhouse, of Baap Can, the headman of the village, and listened uncomprehendingly to Skelly bargain (if that was the word) about the buffalo necessary to the ceremony. It seemed that much had to be done to prepare the spirits for the event. Baap Can had apparently grown ever more conservative with respect to ritual, since it was obvious that the failure of the people to observe every detail of ritual was what had brought about their present calamities. In the past, Marder learned, a single act of violence would have paralyzed the village with cleansing ceremonies for weeks, but now they lived in the midst of continuous violence and the spirits were silent.
It went on for hours, giving Marder plenty of time to think about religion in all its varieties. Did Skelly really believe all this? That the universe was packed with malignant spirits that had to be propitiated with animal sacrifices? That all illness and catastrophe was the action of some sorcery or the caprice of ghosts? Perhaps he didn’t believe it, perhaps it was part of his training, to immerse himself in the culture of the people he sought as allies, not to give offense. Later on, but not then, Marder would come to understand that what Skelly believed in was Training.
The Catcher in the Rye had wandered into the army, and the army had offered him the salvation of eternal boyhood through suffering. If he would torment his body, if he would ascend step by step through the sweaty heirarchy of boot camp, advanced infantry school, airborne, Special Forces, then he would become part of a boys’ gang that couldn’t be beat, that aspired to purity amid the chickenshit of this miserable fraudulent war, that supplied all the brotherhood that a man could handle, that wasn’t phony. Marder had watched them at their play—the roughhousing, the practical jokes, the arrant, gleeful violation of military regulations. He recalled behaving just that way as a kid. And so, when Marder came to think about it, it must’ve been no trouble at all for Skelly to slide into simple paganism—all of them were halfway there already, all more or less worshippers of the Lord of the Flies.
And maybe the girl was part of it. Maybe Joong had converted him—it had happened before. He knew his own father had little or no personal religion, but he went regularly to Mass out of love for his wife, and never a remark about the well-known deficiencies of the one, holy, and apostolic Church. He thought about the girl, Joong. She seemed a blankness to Marder, a sweet, lovely, singing creature who was kind to animals and children. He recalled a conversation he’d had with her once. She was playing with a white cat. Marder had arranged a sentence in his head and tried it. “Do you like cats, Joong? My mother likes cats.”
She looked at him with a puzzled smile and asked whether in America cats were sacrificed as they were among real people. Marder said they were not. She shrugged—it was known that Americans were infected with spirits. This cat would be sacrificed soon to heal her aunt Jieng-Tang. It would take a cock and a cat and perhaps a dog. The cats and the cock would have their throats cut, but, of course, the dog would be burned alive.
The negotiations ended and then they brought out jars of rhööm, sour rice beer, and drank a lot of it through straws. When they came out into the gathering dusk, Skelly said, “You’re all set. They have to do a lot of stuff first, cut some big bombax posts and put bamboo finials on them, all carved up in a special way, and there’s a whole ceremony. I’ll explain it later. It’ll probably go down tomorrow evening or the one after.” He slapped Marder on the back, grinning. “We’ll be tribal brothers. How about that shit?”
But, in the event, Marder never became a member of the tribe, because that very night a reinforced battalion of the 174th Regiment, People’s Army of Vietnam, attacked Moon River.
* * *
Marder snapped out of the reverie to find his daughter regarding him with a peculiar expression.
“What?” he said. His mouth felt clotted and sour, as if he had just finished a gourd of Hmong beer.
“You were mumbling and making funny noises.”
“Was I? I guess I drifted off … some dream or other.”
“No, your eyes were wide open, but you weren’t here.”
“Well, I’m here now,” said Marder brightly, and then changed the subject. “Look, Carmel, I’d like to inter your mother’s ashes in the family tomb at La Huacana as soon as we can catch a break in all the construction work. I assume you’ll be coming.”
“Of course.”
“And I intend to invite your uncle Angel and his family. He’s not in a good w
ay, and I’d like to help him out if I can.”
* * *
Statch said nothing to this but felt something close to irritation, and some shame as well for feeling it. What was so bad about trying to help people, after all? But what her father appeared to be doing seemed a little off, this extraordinary desire to improve the lives of others. It irked her, and she recalled feeling something similar as a child, trying to warm herself on the edges of the great romantic furnace that was her parents’ marriage. And even now that death had ended it, her father was still not quite present. He had not rebounded into another romance, as did so many men in similar situations, but had turned instead to this almost hectic philanthropy.
When she was back in her room at Casa Feliz, after the landing and the convoyed journey—El Gordo was certainly providing good service so far—Statch got out her cell to make some necessary calls. The first call was to Karen Liu. Statch asked what was going on in the lab. Liu’s responses were flat, tinged with what seemed like embarrassment. At last Statch extracted the information that Schuemacher was preparing to pull her off the grant; he had an Indian boy genius on tap as a replacement. Statch got off the line as soon as she decently could and decided that she could not bear talking to any of the other people she had thought of calling. Instead, she opened her laptop and composed a long email to Erwin Schuemacher. She thanked him for all the help he’d given her and wished him success in his vision. She said she was resigning because she didn’t think it was fair for him to hold her assistantship vacant while she was away for an indefinite period. She paused here. Should she try to communicate why she was staying? Did she even know? Dr. Schuemacher was, of course, an expert on every one of the forces known to physics, but she doubted if he would understand the forces now working on her. He would think she had gone crazy.
As she had, in a way, but not like the people who dropped out of MIT engineering because they had actually gone nuts, the kind who stayed in their rooms and never bathed and wrote in tiny letters on the walls. She wasn’t crazy in that way. If you looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could even say that she had gone sane. In an effort to justify herself, to explain herself to her professor, she kept typing, and as the letter became longer, as it turned into something close to a Unabomber screed, she found that she was talking not to Dr. Schue but to Carmel Marder, whoever she now was. The burden of this was that, all things considered, she no longer thought that the future of manufacturing was the development of self-contained factories that could forage for raw materials and shit appliances. People, she had recently learned, could get by with many fewer appliances, or none at all. She wanted to try to use engineering in service of modesty, of scarcity, of getting by with less.
She read this email over. Sweat started on her forehead and trickled down her flanks. Did she really believe this? She recalled Dr. Schuemacher exploding the whole small-is-beautiful worldview, what he called hippie-dippie whole-earth crapola. The future belonged to automated factories using solar and nuclear power, making everything anyone could conceive of essentially for free, distributed by automated systems. Physical labor would become an anachronism, like slavery and religion, and people would increasingly become one with their machines. No one would die, and humanity would reach out to the stars in virtual form at the speed of light.
Carmel believed this as an intellectual proposition, but somehow she’d lost her faith in it, and she couldn’t understand why. There appeared in her mind now the concept of “conversion experience.” She was having one of these, she thought; it had taken her over and had destroyed the life she had known, even though she didn’t really believe in conversion experiences and didn’t know what she was converting to. She didn’t even know whether she believed in the stuff she just wrote. The one thing she knew for sure was that if she pushed the button with the cursor on the send icon on this particular email, it would end forever any chance of getting back into Schuemacher’s kind of engineering.
She read it over, revised it, and paused for a long sweaty moment with her finger over the fatal Chiclet. These irrecoverable acts! She thought about how nice Cambridge was in the autumn, the leaves crunching underfoot, the crisp days, going to the pool and swimming her limbs off, the intellectual stimulation of the labs, the steamy coffee bars, the unforgiving competition, the convenient sex. She sighed, she pressed.
And it was as if the button were also connected to her sympathetic nervous system: chill sweat popped out all over her skin, her belly roiled, her limbs trembled, her heart tripped. Depression descended like a gray mist, and crazy thoughts flitted through her head—write another email, drive to the airport, get on a bus, shoot herself in the head …
She ran out of the room, out of the house, and down to the beach. The beauty of the scene, the balmy air, seemed mocking, demonic, void of comfort; the water itself cried failure, all those countless hours of training a cruel joke.
“What’s wrong, kid? You look like your cat died.”
This was Skelly, encountering her on an aimless ramble down by the boat harbor.
“My career died,” she responded. “Is that worse than a cat dying? If a museum was burning down and you could save only a cat, the Mona Lisa, or your career, which would you choose?”
“The cat. Seriously, though.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Skelly. I just resigned my assistantship, and I feel miserable and liberated at the same time. Does that mean I was fooling myself, doing the work I was doing? I mean, why else feel the liberation?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I felt like that when I declined re-upping in 1975. The army was my life and then it wasn’t. I was supposed to be a command sergeant major, crusty, covered in privilege and perks, and then when I saw myself doing that it was a little puke-making.”
She was all attention: a personal confession from Skelly?
“Why?” she asked, when he didn’t continue. “Why did it stop being your life?”
He gave her a look that was for an instant terribly sad; then it changed and he slipped back into his persona, like a gecko scuttling behind a rock.
“I don’t know—the dry-cleaning bills are huge, for one, and, two, I stopped being sure my country needed to be defended in the way I was trained to defend it. We’re going to the market in a while. Want to come?”
“No, thanks. I want to stay here by myself and obsess and be miserable. I might even have a cry.”
Skelly patted her shoulder and walked off. She watched him go, then stared out at the sea. I could just walk into it and swim out toward Asia until I sink, she thought, and entertained a short stack of similar moronic thoughts. She had her cry, then had a mildly hysterical laugh at her own expense. She waded into the clear water and washed her face in the sea. While she thus engaged, she heard a high voice saying, “Are you coming? It’s time to go.”
Oh, terrific, I’m hallucinating voices now, she thought, and then she felt a small hand clasp hers. She yelped and jumped half a yard backward.
The boy Ariel was standing there, smiling uncertainly. “Señorita? It’s time to go. We’re all going to the market. Don Eskelly is driving us in the truck.”
Don Eskelly? Oh, right, him. It was Don Ricardo and Don Eskelly now around the colonia, and she was La Señorita, or sometimes La Marder, everyone slotted into semi-feudal roles, her new fate. The boy’s smile resumed its joyful blaze, he reached out his hand again and she took it and allowed herself to be led. It was curiously comforting, she found, to be led by a child, she felt that the horrendous decisions were behind her now, no importa madre—a deplorable take on life, perhaps, but one with hitherto unexpected benefits. So she walked along and climbed onto the bed of the Ford, along with a dozen or so other people—Amparo and Epifania, Bartolomeo and Rosita—with the boy chattering away, explaining to her that this was the market where they would buy necessities for the Day of the Dead, the decorations and masks and toys, and the candies! But they were not to eat any of them until the day itself. The last one to
board was Lourdes, who did not climb into the back but into the shotgun seat with Skelly. No one commented on this, and Statch, in her new version, did not register it as significant.
Off they went, swaying and laughing as the truck bumped over the rough causeway road. By the time they reached the plaza, Statch was herself again, although it was a different self from the one who had pressed the send key. Now she wandered through the market in this new self, not in a daze but in the opposite of a daze: a heightened awareness in which the anti-engineering portions of her brain seemed to have regained control. She stood transfixed for long minutes before pyramids of papayas, sapotes, cherimoyas, mangoes, and aguajes, before fans and stacks of bananas in all their varieties, red, mauve, yellow, and green; she walked through the butchers’ aisles and saw the heads of cows and hogs, their violet tongues lolling, their clouded eyes crawling with flies, and felt the absence of gringa disgust; she stopped at a stall and ate a tortilla filled with jumile sauce—a delicacy of the season, made with tomatoes, serrano chilies, onions, and the ground bodies of mountain beetles; it tasted of iodine and cinnamon—something she would not have done in her former being, something even her mother had never served.
The hilarious aspects of death seemed to be a theme of this market, as the boy had foretold: skeleton masks in cloth and papier-mâché, sugar skulls, and elaborate dioramas of the dancing dead, all done in sugar and cake; costumes and shirts, flags, and ornaments, all marked with bones and grinning skulls. Statch bought a straw bag and filled it, buying almost at random—toys, garments, confections—and finished with a present for Skelly, an unlabeled long-necked tequila bottle half full of a habanero chili sauce guaranteeed by the old gentleman who made it to be the hottest in Mexico. One drop, Señorita, please, one drop only; she would be interested to see what Skelly made of it. As she strolled, she sampled foods from the various stalls, resonant of her childhood but in a major key, meat of uncertain provenance and unwashed fruits, knowing the consequences of this but not caring much, then having to find a public toilet and finding herself glad of the urgent evacuations, as if some part of her needed to be washed out; and she thought, irrationally, that this was the last bout of turista she would ever have, that she wanted to go back and eat and drink the foods of this country until she had re-created her physical body to fit her new Mexican self.
The Return: A Novel Page 24
