The Great Forgetting (7 page)

It was their little joke. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were impossible to miss, rising from the banking district like religious monoliths. Targets against the sky. An accident waiting to happen.

“Roger,” he said.

“Who's Roger?” asked Sam, looking at him with a touch of concern.

“Never mind. Could you find me something to write with? Some pen and paper?”

“I'll get it, Daddy,” said Jean.

Through the tall windows he saw Jack talking excitedly with Nils on the porch. He knew what they were discussing. Jack thought he was doing something good.

He felt a knot in Virginia's shoulder as he worked the sunscreen across her back. The sky was bright. A cool breeze but hot in the sun. They sat on the shore of Claytor Lake, which was brimming with kids. Running kids. Splashing kids. Kids with Popsicles. The concession stand sold them for fifty cents apiece. Popsicles, not the kids. Jack, age three, was forming an airplane made of sand by their feet.

“Lower,” she said.

“Here, Dad,” Jean said, tapping the sheet of paper she'd placed in front of him.

The Captain took the pen in his hand.

Jack
, he wrote,
get rid of the box under my bed.

8
    Jack said goodbye to Nils and brought the pizza inside. He could tell by their silence what had happened while he was gone. Even Paige was quiet. The Captain stared intently at a piece of paper in front of him. He looked up at Jack and smiled a vacant smile.

“Ah, Dad,” he said. “Where'd you go?”

The Captain held the paper out to him like a present. Jack took it and looked at the short message.

He sighed. “I can't read Vietnamese.”

“O dau Qi?” the Captain asked.

9
    
“Where is Qi?” Walter asked the bartender from the Tennessee. They were running down Tu Do. Everyone was in a panic. It was falling. The city. The country. Capitalism. From an open window he could hear Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” an odd juxtaposition to this chaos—the song was code, their cue to get the fuck out of Saigon. The Hueys were leaving the DAO this very moment. He would go. But first he needed to find Qi.

Duong, the bartender, didn't answer. Didn't even slow down. He was making for Tan Son Nhut as if he had a chance of leaving with the other refugees. Walter ran the other way, a stitch digging into his side. He should have come back sooner, but he'd been pulled into Operation Babylift, flying children out in C-5s bound for Oakland.

Qi!

He'd met her three years ago, in 1972. This fourteen-year-old, dressed in a flowered silk blouse over dark trousers, walked up to him inside the Tennessee, sidled up next to him, and whispered, “Hour for three, GI?” She was a pretty thing. Thin lips, high cheeks, dark, hungry eyes. But her face was still pudgy with baby fat. Younger than the girl, Virginia, who'd taken his virginity back home. Walter shook his head, reluctant to be rid of her.

Qi sat next to him anyway and Duong served her
bac si de
, a strong rice whiskey.

“Clarka Kent,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

“You Superman, GI.”

“Okay,” he said.

And then Evan Sowell wandered in, looking for God knows what, probably looking for this very thing. Evan was a fine mechanic. But he was also a creepy sonofabitch. Evan's skin was this mottled gray and his face was covered in patchy hair and pimples. Twenty pounds underweight, ribs pushing out of his skin like there was a dark mojo eating him up from the inside out. He wore that same black leather jacket, even on the hottest days. Everyone on base knew Evan preferred young whores. “It's not illegal here,” he liked to say.

Evan homed in on Qi right away. He walked up to her, a man on a mission, slipping between Walter and the girl, leaning over the bar to hand Duong fifty piastres. “I'll buy the lady's drink,” he said, eyes already glowing from some cheap hashish.

Duong said something to Qi then, and she turned to Evan and nodded.

“Hot damn,” he said.

Why he'd done what he did next, Walter could never really say. But before Evan could take Qi away, he set a crisp fifty-dollar American bill on Duong's bar. It was money he'd planned to send home—his mother would put half in the bank for him, the other half in her pantry. If pressed, he might have said he'd done it because he couldn't add another bad memory to his mind that day. It was already overfull. But maybe he just wanted to see what would happen next.

“What is this, Walter?” Duong asked. His English was sharp when money was on the table.

“Ransom,” he said. “For the girl. She's not working for a while.”

“What?” Evan asked in a childlike whine.

Qi, not grasping what was transpiring, spoke fearful Vietnamese to the bartender. He whispered something back to her. She looked to Walter, confused.

“No more Uncle Sams,” he said. “Not for you.”

“Hey, goddamn it,” Evan protested. “What are you doing?”

“Take a hike, soldier.”

Until the end of that endless war, Walter did his best to look after Qi. She was, he reckoned, his responsibility from that moment on. He secured a one-bedroom efficiency above a grocery for eight dollars a month. He let her stay there and gave her money for food and clothes on the promise that she would stop hooking and go back to school. Her parents, he learned, had burned to death during the Battle of Hue, and she was alone. He visited often, coaching her in English while she taught him simple Vietnamese. He called her “Qi,” which meant “turtle.” She called him “Clarka,” as in Clark Kent. Sometimes he would spoon her on the bed in their little room, the sounds of mopeds and the market drifting through the screenless window, and they would nap together. That was all the intimacy they shared.

He meant to get her out of this hell.

*   *   *

And it was finally time.

Qi wasn't at the elementary school where she tutored children now, so he ran toward their apartment in the western section of Saigon as Irving Berlin sang to the soldiers a song of retreat.

A block away, the air around him sizzled with the high-pitched doom-wail of an artillery shell. It happened too quickly for him to drop. The shell collided with the side of a concrete bungalow, a barbershop that catered to GIs. The shock wave kicked Walter in the chest like a steel-toed boot, sending him against the side of an appliance store. His ears rang loudly. He could no longer feel the smaller two digits on his right hand. They would remain numb for the rest of his life (a secret he kept from Continental Airlines physicians).

It was another minute and a half before he reached the stairs to Qi's loft. Ten seconds more to make it up the stairs. The door was open. His legs protested. He did not want to step inside. He already felt what waited.

There was blood everywhere and in the center of it all stood Evan Sowell. He was naked and he leaned over Qi's body, which was folded backward over the bed. In his hands was a large killing knife, a Ka-Bar that Evan had stolen off a dead Marine. The man's back was to the door and he was still hacking away, distractedly, as Walter stepped into the room.

They had a term for this in Vietnam, men who killed women they raped. Double veterans, they called them.

Walter tiptoed across the room, and when he was close enough he wrapped his right arm around Evan's neck and squeezed. Evan dropped the knife to the floor. He tried to pry Walter's arm away. But it was too big. It was a python. A tangle of muscle, earned in country.

“Shhh,” he whispered.

Evan tilted his head and looked up at him. He was trying to say something, his mouth working like a goldfish.

Then Evan's face changed, became something else, someone else …

Jack, oh God, it's Jack!

But then it was Evan again and Walter was glad he was hurting. He didn't care to give Evan the last word.

10
    Jack was asleep when the Captain peered in through the open door of the bedroom, his body silhouetted by the light of the moon that fell through the window at the end of the hall. Jack didn't wake until his father's arm was around his neck, squeezing the life out of him.

Jack's first thought was that he had somehow managed to get himself tangled up in his sheets. Then his eyes flew open and he saw the shape of his father over him. He knew, immediately, this was the end.

Please
, he pleaded.
Not like this.

“Kill you,” the Captain whispered, spittle dripping from his mouth onto Jack's forehead.

His arms were pinned by the Captain's legs. Feebleminded or not, the Captain was a big sonofabitch and there was nothing doing. Jack tried to elicit a gargle from his mouth, a raspy cry for help, anything, but his throat was pinched tight. It felt like his father was one foot-pound of pressure away from snapping his neck. That would come next and at least there would be no more pain.

No. Not now. Not here. Not like this
, he pleaded. To whom? He didn't know. But he sent the message out from his mind, into the ether, a Mayday to the universe. He saw sparkles of light in his periphery as his brain consumed the last of his body's oxygen. Sparkles like fireflies, brief constellations.

Suddenly the room was full of screaming. Screaming as he'd never heard before. A high-pitched caterwaul that bit into his ears and momentarily drowned out the pain of his strangulation. He saw her as through tinted glass: Paige at the door in pastel jammies, mouth open as if she were singing.

As a gray veil descended, he saw Jean fly through the door. She pushed Paige out of the way, never touching the ground, her nightgown trailing after her like an apparition's end. She snatched the lamp from the nightstand and brought it over her head in a tight arc aimed for the Captain's head.

11
    “Jack? Jack, can you hear me?”

A bright light was shining in his eyes and for a moment he thought he was dead. Then the light pivoted and he saw the harsh woman in the orange windbreaker leaning over him, penlight in her fingers. Red and yellow strobes played at the window. He heard excited voices downstairs, Jean yelling orders: “St. Mary's! Just get him the fuck out of here!” Paige was crying.

He tried to sit up but couldn't. He tried to speak and was rewarded with fire in his throat. It felt like he'd gargled Everclear.

“Don't try to move,” the woman said. “Don't try to speak. Just blink once for ‘yes.' Understand?”

He blinked.

“Good. Jack, I want you to try moving your fingers for me.”

He pretended to play the piano.

The woman breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. Now, your toes.”

He did those, too.

“Excellent.”

He heard someone running up the steps and then Jean was at his side. “Is he paralyzed?” she asked.

“He'll be fine.”

Jean buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed.

“Jack,” the EMT said in a measured tone, “your head is in a brace. I don't think your neck is broken, but we're going to keep you secure until we get to the hospital. In a second my partner will be here with the gurney and we'll take you downstairs.”

Jack blinked again.

“I thought he killed you,” Jean said.

A moment later the gurney arrived. They lifted him onto it, strapped him down, and wheeled him through the house, out the back, and through the open doors of a waiting ambulance. In another minute they were rocketing down SR 14 toward Robinson Memorial Hospital. Somewhere ahead another ambulance carried the Captain, bound for St. Mary's, an assisted-living home where, Jack suspected, his father would spend his remaining days.

 

THREE

ELEGY

1
    When Jack awoke in the hospital the next morning, there were flowers on the windowsill, daisies from Sam. He watched the TV hanging in the corner for a while and willed himself not to think about why he was there. Halfway through a documentary on Joseph Mengele, Dr. Palmstrum arrived and rolled across the room on a wheeled stool. The man was ancient, with a long, horsey face, white hair pinned back with some gel that smelled like antiseptic. He sucked a Werther's and regarded his patient.

“My dad had Alzheimer's before they called it Alzheimer's,” said Palmstrum. “I ever tell you that?”

Jack swallowed and grimaced at the immediate pain. “No,” he whispered.

“Sometimes he thought he was in a trench in Montfaucon. Nothing you could do to talk him out of it. If you came up behind him when he was like that he would toss you to the ground and smack you around a bit. Gave my mother a black eye. That's when we put him away. A'course back then it was the mental ward.” He sat on the stool with his arms crossed in his lap. Finally, he said something from a part of Jack's childhood that he could no longer place. “Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?”

Jack smiled faintly.

“We know so very little about the human mind,” said Palmstrum. “Everything we are, wrapped up in three pounds of gray matter between our ears. Storage for the memories we create. Memories make us who we are, and when you take even one away, it it changes us forever.”

Jack nodded.

“Give us a look.”

Jack opened the top of his gown. He'd checked it out in the bathroom mirror already: a necklace of bruises, purply around the edges. Palmstrum touched the back of his neck with fingers of loose, warm skin.