The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  The bigger of them—chubby, red-faced guy about my age, maybe thirty-five, thirty-six—returned a fishy stare; but the younger one, who was thin and tanned and weaselly handsome, perked up and said, “Hey, you’re the guy was in Stoner’s outfit, right?” I admitted it, and the chubby guy changed his attitude. He put on a welcome-to-the-lodge smile, stuck out a hand, and introduced himself as Ed Fierman, Chicago Sun-Times. His pal, he said, was Ken Witcover, CNN.

  They tried to draw me out about Stoner, but I told them maybe later, that I wanted to unwind from the airplane ride, and we proceeded to do damage to the whiskey. By the time we’d sucked down three drinks, Fierman and I were into some heavy reminiscence. Turned out he had covered the war during my tour and knew my old top. Witcover was cherry in Vietnam, so he just tried to look wise and to laugh in the right spots. It got pretty drunk at that table. A security cadre—fortyish, cadaverous gook in yellow fatigues—sat nearby, cocking an ear toward us, and we pretended to be engaged in subversive activity, whispering and drawing maps on napkins. But it was Stoner who was really on all our minds, and Fierman—the drunkest of us—finally broached the subject, saying, “A machine that traps ghosts! It’s just like the gooks to come up with something that goddamn worthless!”

  Witcover shushed him, glancing nervously at the security cadre, but Fierman was beyond caution. “They coulda done humanity a service,” he said, chuckling. “Turned alla Russians into women or something. But, nah! The gooks get behind worthlessness. They may claim to be Marxists, but at heart they still wanna be inscrutable.”

  “So,” said Witcover to me, ignoring Fierman, “when you gonna fill us in on Stoner?”

  I didn’t care much for Witcover. It wasn’t anything personal; I simply wasn’t fond of his breed: compulsively neat (pencils lined up, name inscribed on every possession), edgy, on the make. I disliked him the way some people dislike yappy little dogs. But I couldn’t argue with his desire to change the subject. “He was a good soldier,” I said.

  Fierman let out a mulish guffaw. “Now that,” he said, “that’s what I call in-depth analysis.”

  Witcover snickered.

  “Tell you the truth”—I scowled at him, freighting my words with malice—“I hated the son of a bitch. He had this young-professor air, this way of lookin’ at you as if you were an interestin’ specimen. And he came across pure phony. Y’know, the kind who’s always talkin’ like a black dude, sayin’ ‘right on’ and shit, and sayin’ it all wrong.”

  “Doesn’t seem much reason for hating him,” said Witcover, and by his injured tone, I judged I had touched a nerve. Most likely he had once entertained soul-brother pretensions.

  “Maybe not. Maybe if I’d met him back home, I’d have passed him off as a creep and gone about my business. But in combat situations, you don’t have the energy to maintain that sort of neutrality. It’s easier to hate. And anyway, Stoner could be a genuine pain in the ass.”

  “How’s that?” Fierman asked, getting interested.

  “It was never anything unforgivable; he just never let up with it. Like one time a bunch of us were in this guy Gurney’s hooch, and he was tellin’ ’bout this badass he’d known in Detroit. The cops had been chasin’ this guy across the rooftops, and he’d missed a jump. Fell seven floors and emptied his gun at the cops on the way down. Reaction was typical. Guys sayin’ ‘Wow’ and tryin’ to think of a story to top it. But Stoner he nods sagely and says, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of that goin’ around.’ As if this was a syndrome to which he’s devoted years of study. But you knew he didn’t have a clue, that he was too upscale to have met anybody like Gurney’s badass.” I had a slug of whiskey. “‘There’s a lot of that goin’ around’ was a totally inept comment. All it did was to bring everyone down from a nice buzz and make us aware of the shithole where we lived.”

  Witcover looked puzzled, but Fierman made a noise that seemed to imply comprehension. “How’d he die?” he asked. “The handout says he was KIA, but it doesn’t say what kind of action.”

  “The fuckup kind,” I said. I didn’t want to tell them. The closer I came to seeing Stoner, the leerier I got about the topic. Until this business had begun, I thought I’d buried all the death-tripping weirdness of Vietnam; now Stoner had unearthed it and I was having dreams again and I hated him for that worse than I ever had in life. What was I supposed to do? Feel sorry for him? Maybe ghosts didn’t have bad dreams. Maybe it was terrific being a ghost, like with Casper…Anyway, I did tell them. How we had entered Cam Le, what was left of the patrol. How we had lined up the villagers, interrogated them, hit them, and God knows we might have killed them—we were freaked, bone-weary, an atrocity waiting to happen—if Stoner hadn’t distracted us. He’d been wandering around, poking at stuff with his rifle, and then, with this ferocious expression on his face, he’d fired into one of the huts. The hut had been empty, but there must have been explosives hidden inside, because after a few rounds the whole damn thing had blown and taken Stoner with it.

  Talking about him soured me on company, and shortly afterward I broke it off with Fierman and Witcover, and walked out into the city. The security cadre tagged along, his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. I had a real load on and barely noticed my surroundings. The only salient points of difference between Saigon today and fifteen years before were the ubiquitous representations of Uncle Ho that covered the facades of many of the buildings, and the absence of motor scooters: the traffic consisted mainly of bicycles. I went a dozen blocks or so and stopped at a sidewalk cafe beneath sun-browned tamarinds, where I paid two dong for food tickets, my first experience with what the Communists called “goods exchange”—a system they hoped would undermine the concept of monetary trade; I handed the tickets to the waitress, and she gave me a bottle of beer and a dish of fried peanuts. The security cadre, who had taken a table opposite mine, seemed no more impressed with the system than was I; he chided the waitress for her slowness and acted perturbed by the complexity accruing to his order of tea and cakes.

  I sat and sipped and stared, thoughtless and unfocused. The bicyclists zipping past were bright blurs with jingling bells, and the light was that heavy leaded-gold light that occurs when a tropical sun has broken free of an overcast. Smells of charcoal, fish sauce, grease. The heat squeezed sweat from my every pore. I was brought back to alertness by angry voices. The security cadre was arguing with the waitress, insisting that the recorded music be turned on, and she was explaining that there weren’t enough customers to warrant turning it on. He began to offer formal “constructive criticism,” making clear that he considered her refusal both a breach of party ethics and the code of honorable service. About then, I realized I had begun to cry. Not sobs, just tears leaking. The tears had nothing to do with the argument or the depersonalized ugliness it signaled. I believe that the heat and the light and the smells had seeped into me, triggering a recognition of an awful familiarity that my mind had thus far rejected. I wiped my face and tried to suck it up before anyone could notice my emotionality; but a teenage boy on a bicycle slowed and gazed at me with an amused expression. To show my contempt, I spat on the sidewalk. Almost instantly, I felt much better.

  Early the next day, thirty of us—all journalists—were bussed north to Cam Le. Mist still wreathed the paddies, the light had a yellowish green cast, and along the road women in black dresses were waiting for a southbound bus, with rumpled sacks of produce like sleepy brown animals at their feet. I sat beside Fierman, who, being as hung over as I was, made no effort at conversation; however, Witcover—sitting across the aisle—peppered me with inane questions until I told him to leave me alone. Just before we turned onto the dirt road that led to Cam Le, an information cadre boarded the bus and for the duration proceeded to fill us in on everything we already knew. Stuff about the machine, how its fields were generated, and so forth. Technical jargon gives me a pain, and I tried hard not to listen. But then he got off onto a tack that caught my interest. “Since the machine has been in ope
ration,” he said, “the apparition seems to have grown more vital.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked, waving my hand to attract his attention. “Is he coming back to life?”

  My colleagues laughed.

  The cadre pondered this. “It simply means that his effect has become more observable,” he said at last. And beyond that he would not specify.

  Cam Le had been evacuated, its population shifted to temporary housing three miles east. The village itself was nothing like the place I had entered fifteen years before. Gone were the thatched huts, and in their stead were about two dozen small houses of concrete block painted a quarantine yellow, with banana trees set between them. All this encircled by thick jungle. Standing on the far side of the road from the group of houses was the long tin-roofed building that contained the machine. Two soldiers were lounging in front of it, and as the bus pulled up, they snapped to attention; a clutch of officers came out the door, followed by a portly white-haired gook: Phan Thnah Tuu, the machine’s inventor. I disembarked and studied him while he shook hands with the other journalists; it wasn’t every day that I met someone who claimed to be both Marxist and mystic, and had gone more than the required mile in establishing the validity of each. His hair was as fine as corn silk, a fat black mole punctuated one cheek, and his benign smile was unflagging, seeming a fixture of some deeply held good opinion attaching to everything he saw. Maybe, I thought, Fierman was right. In-fucking-scrutable.

  “Ah,” he said, coming up, enveloping me in a cloud of perfumy cologne. “Mr. Puleo. I hope this won’t be painful for you.”

  “Really,” I said. “You hope that, do you?”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, taken aback.

  “It’s okay.” I grinned. “You’re forgiven.”

  An unsmiling major led him away to press more flesh, and he glanced back at me, perplexed. I was mildly ashamed of having fucked with him, but unlike Cassius Clay, I had plenty against them Viet Congs. Besides, my wiseass front was helping to stave off the yips.

  After a brief welcome-to-the-wonderful-wacky-world-of-the-Commie-techno-paradise speech given by the major, Tuu delivered an oration upon the nature of ghosts, worthy of mention only in that it rehashed every crackpot notion I’d ever heard: apparently Stoner hadn’t yielded much in the way of hard data. He then warned us to keep our distance from the village. The fields would not harm us; they were currently in operation, undetectable to our senses and needing but a slight manipulation to “focus” Stoner. But if we were to pass inside the fields, it was possible that Stoner himself might be able to cause us injury. With that, Tim bowed and reentered the building.

  We stood facing the village, which—with its red dirt and yellow houses and green banana leaves—looked elementary and innocent under the leaden sky. Some of my colleagues whispered together, others checked their cameras. I felt numb and shaky, prepared to turn away quickly, much the way I once had felt when forced to identify the body of a chance acquaintance at a police morgue. Several minutes after Tuu had left us, there was a disturbance in the air at the center of the village. Similar to heat haze, but the ripples were slower. And then, with the suddenness of a slide shunted into a projector, Stoner appeared.

  I think I had been expecting something bloody and ghoulish, or perhaps a gauzy insubstantial form; but he looked no different than he had on the day he died. Haggard; wearing sweat-stained fatigues; his face half-obscured by a week’s growth of stubble. On his helmet were painted the words Didi Mao (“Fuck Off” in Vietnamese), and I could make out the yellowing photograph of his girl that he’d taped to his rifle stock. He didn’t act startled by our presence; on the contrary, his attitude was nonchalant. He shouldered his rifle, tipped back his helmet, and sauntered toward us. He seemed to be recessed into the backdrop: it was as if reality were two-dimensional and he was a cutout held behind it to give the illusion of depth. At least that’s how it was one moment. The next, he would appear to be set forward of the backdrop like a popup figure in a fancy greeting card. Watching him shift between these modes was unsettling…more than unsettling. My heart hammered, my mouth was cottony. I bumped into someone and realized that I had been backing away, that I was making a scratchy noise deep in my throat. Stoner’s eyes, those eyes that had looked dead even in life, pupils about .45 caliber and hardly any iris showing, they were locked onto mine and the pressure of his stare was like two black bolts punching through into my skull.

  “Puleo,” he said.

  I couldn’t hear him, but I saw his lips shape the name. With a mixture of longing and hopelessness harrowing his features, he kept on repeating it. And then I noticed something else. The closer he drew to me, the more in focus he became. It wasn’t just a matter of the shortening distance; his stubble and sweat stains, the frays in his fatigues, his worry lines—all these were sharpening the way details become fixed in a developing photograph. But none of that disturbed me half as much as did the fact of a dead man calling my name. I couldn’t handle that. I began to hyperventilate, to get dizzy, and I believe I might have blacked out; but before that could happen, Stoner reached the edge of the fields, the barrier beyond which he could not pass.

  Had I had more mental distance from the event, I might have enjoyed the sound-and-light that ensued: it was spectacular. The instant Stoner hit the end of his tether, there was an earsplitting shriek of the kind metal emits under immense stress; it seemed to issue from the air, the trees, the earth, as if some ironclad physical constant had been breached. Stoner was frozen midstep, his mouth open, and opaque lightnings were forking away from him, taking on a violet tinge as they vanished, their passage illuminating the curvature of the fields. I heard a scream and assumed it must be Stoner. But somebody grabbed me, shook me, and I understood that I was the one screaming, screaming with throat-tearing abandon because his eyes were boring into me and I could have sworn that his thoughts, his sensations, were flowing to me along the track of his vision. I knew what he was feeling: not pain, not desperation, but emptiness. An emptiness made unbearable by his proximity to life, to fullness. It was the worst thing I’d ever felt, worse than grief and bullet wounds, and it had to be worse than dying—dying, you see, had an end, whereas this went on and on, and every time you thought you had adapted to it, it grew worse yet. I wanted it to stop. That was all I wanted. Ever. Just for it to stop.

  Then, with the same abruptness that he had appeared, Stoner winked out of existence and the feeling of emptiness faded.

  People pressed in, asking questions. I shouldered them aside and walked off a few paces. My hands were shaking, my eyes weepy. I stared at the ground. It looked blurred, an undifferentiated smear of green with a brown clot in the middle: this gradually resolved into grass and my left shoe. Ants were crawling over the laces, poking their heads into the eyelets. The sight was strengthening, a reassurance of the ordinary.

  “Hey, man.” Witcover hove up beside me. “You okay?” He rested a hand on my shoulder. I kept my eyes on the ants, saying nothing. If it had been anyone else, I might have responded to his solicitude; but I knew he was only sucking up to me, hoping to score some human interest for his satellite report. I glanced at him. He was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and that consolidated my anger. Why is it, I ask you, that every measly little wimp in the universe thinks he can put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses and instantly acquire magical hipness and cool, rather than—as is the case—looking like an asshole with reflecting eyes?

  “Fuck off,” I told him in a tone that implied dire consequences were I not humored. He started to talk back, but thought better of it and stalked off. I returned to watching the ants; they were caravanning up inside my trousers and onto my calf. I would become a legend among them: The Human Who Stood Still for Biting.

  From behind me came the sound of peremptory gook voices, angry American voices. I paid them no heed, content with my insect pals and the comforting state of thoughtlessness that watching them induced. A minute or so later, someone else moved
up beside me and stood without speaking. I recognized Tuu’s cologne and looked up. “Mr. Puleo,” he said. “I’d like to offer you an exclusive on this story.” Over his shoulder, I saw my colleagues staring at us through the windows of the bus, as wistful and forlorn as kids who have been denied Disneyland: they, like me, knew that big bucks were to be had from exploiting Stoner’s plight.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We want your help in conducting an experiment.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “Did you notice,” he said, “that after Stoner identified you, his image grew sharper?”

  I nodded.

  “We’re interested in observing the two of you in close proximity. His reaction to you was unique.”

  “You mean go in there?” I pointed to the village. “You said it was dangerous.”

  “Other subjects have entered the fields and shown no ill effects. But Stoner was not as intrigued by them as he was with you.” Tuu brushed a lock of hair back from his forehead. “We have no idea of Stoner’s capabilities, Mr. Puleo. It is a risk. But since you served in the Army, I assume you are accustomed to risk.”

  I let him try to persuade me—the longer I held out, the stronger my bargaining position—but I had already decided to accept the offer. Though I wasn’t eager to feel that emptiness again, I had convinced myself that it had been a product of nerves and an overactive imagination; now that I had confronted Stoner, I believed I would be able to control my reactions. Tim said that he would have the others driven back to Saigon, but I balked at that. I was not sufficiently secure to savor the prospect of being alone among the gooks, and I told Tuu I wanted Fierman and Witcover to stay. Why Witcover? At the time I might have said it was because he and Fierman were the only two of my colleagues whom I knew; but in retrospect, I think I may have anticipated the need for a whipping boy.