PORTRAIT OF VIET THANH NGUYEN ©DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY IMAGES. ILLUSTRATION © DALBERA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, HBPRO/SHUTTERSTOCK, DMITRI MA/SHUTTERSTOCK, TANATAT/SHUTTERSTOCK
Viet Thanh Nguyen, who arrived in America as a Vietnamese child refugee in 1975, is an academic who has written on the cultural depictions of the Vietnam War. Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His new collection is The Refugees (Corsair), from which this story is taken. Nguyen says of “The Americans”: “I wanted to test the limits of my empathy by writing a story about someone very different than me—African American, an older man, a bomber pilot seemingly unrepentant about how he had carpet-bombed Vietnam. I hoped to illuminate a paradoxical America that could deliver both freedom and bombs.”
This was how Carver found himself in September in Hue, walking slowly through the grounds of an imperial tomb with Michiko, Claire, and her boyfriend, Khoi Legaspi. Legaspi’s optimism and serenity irked Carver, as did the poor fit between Legaspi’s Asian appearance and his surname, bestowed on him by his adoptive parents. The young man, perhaps sensing this ambivalence, had been solicitous of him throughout his visit, but Carver found Legaspi’s attention patronising rather than helpful.
Before they embarked on their tour through the imperial tombs this morning, for example, Legaspi had attempted to sympathise with Carver by mentioning how his own father was forced to walk with a cane. “That’s worse than your situation,” Legaspi said. The comment irritated Carver, implying as it did that he was somehow whining about having broken his hip three years ago, when he had fallen down the stairway of his own house. Now he was 68 and limping, determined not to be outpaced by Legaspi as he led them through the grounds of the tomb, which more closely resembled a summer palace, its pavilion overlooking a moat filled with lotuses.
“I might go back and finish my doctorate,” Legaspi said in response to a question from Michiko. Fit and slender in khakis and a burnt orange polo shirt, he resembled the college students at Bowdoin whom Carver saw loitering on the sidewalks whenever he drove to town. “But maybe not. I suppose after a while the pure research was not enough. I wanted to apply the research.”
“I’d love to see your robot in action.” Michiko brushed her hand against the mossy flank of a millennium-old wall, varnished black by the centuries. The royal past alluded to was nowhere near as grand as Buckingham Palace or Versailles, which Carver had seen during layovers on the European routes he had piloted for Pan Am, but the tomb had its own melancholic charm. “And the mongoose.”
“How about the day after tomorrow?” Legaspi said. “I can set up a demonstration.”
“What do you think, Dad?” Carver saw once again the crow’s-feet around Claire’s eyes, newly engraved since her departure for Vietnam two years ago. She was only 26. “It’ll be educational.”
“Angkor Wat was pretty educational.” Carver didn’t like being educated on his vacations. “And we visited that terrible war museum in Saigon. I don’t really feel like seeing any more horrors.”
“What you’ll see is the future of demining,” Claire said. “Not people crawling on their knees digging out mines by hand.”
“Won’t this robot put those people out of work?”
“That is not the kind of work people should do,” Legaspi said. “Robots were invented to free people from danger and slavery.”
Carver’s ears twitched. “You said the Department of Defence was funding your adviser’s research at MIT. Why exactly do you think the DOD is interested in these robots?”
“Dad,” Claire said.
“We have to take the money where we find it.” Legaspi shrugged. “The world isn’t a pure place.”
“Famous last words.”
“Jimmy,” said Michiko.
“All I’m saying is not to underestimate the military-industrial complex.”
“I suppose you’d know,” Claire said.
“How about a picture?” Legaspi proposed. Carver groaned silently. He hated taking pictures, but Michiko loved commemorating every occasion, important or trivial. For her sake, he took his place obediently between his wife and daughter, who themselves were flanked by two grey stone mandarins, goateed and with swords on their shoulders. They were shorter even than Michiko and Claire, and Carver assumed they were life-size from the time of this emperor whose name he suddenly could not recall as Legaspi aimed the camera. It was true that this was the third tomb they were visiting on the Perfume River, but it still bothered Carver that he could not remember this emperor’s name, which Legaspi had mentioned several times.
Becoming stupider was a consequence of age for which he was unprepared. With age was supposed to come wisdom, but he wasn’t certain what wisdom felt like, whereas intelligence he knew to be a constant firing of the synapses, the brain a six-barrelled Gatling gun of activity. Now his mind was shooting thoughts through only one or two barrels. He hadn’t been this slow since Claire and William were newborns, their nighttime neediness calling him from his sleep. Now his son was 28, and Carver dated the beginning of his decline to William’s graduation from the Air Force Academy six years ago, one of the proudest moments in Carver’s life. William had also become a pilot, but he was unhappy flying a KC-135, refuelling bombers and fighters patrolling the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s boring, Dad,” William had said over the phone during their last conversation. “I’m a truck driver.”
“Truck driving is good,” Carver said. “Truck driving is honourable.”
Most important, flying a tanker was safe, unlike Carver’s own job during his military years when he piloted a B-52, an ungainly blue whale of a plane that he loved with an intensity still felt as a lingering hunger. During different tours in the late Sixties and early Seventies, he launched from Guam, Okinawa, and Thailand, never finding himself freer than in the cockpit’s tight squeeze, entrusted with a majestic machine carrying within its womb 30 tons of iron bombs, and yet for all that vulnerable as a Greek demigod. Two bombers of his wing had collided with each other over the South China Sea, the bodies of the crews lost forever, while another B-52 in his cell was transformed into a flaming cross as it fell in the night sky, tail clipped by a surface-to-air missile, the two survivors spending the next four years in the Hanoi Hilton. Better to be safe, Carver wanted to tell William, but he refrained. William would hear the lie. As an airman, William knew that if his father could live life all over again, Carver wouldn’t hesitate to crawl once more through the narrow breach in the paunch of the B-52’s fuselage, the entry never failing to make him quiver with anticipation.
The next morning Claire hired a van to take her parents on the two-hour ride to Quang Tri, where she was living and where Legaspi’s demining operation was based. When Claire showed them her studio apartment, Carver was relieved to see only a twin-sized bed, shrouded behind a mosquito net. A window and narrow horizontal slits at the top of the high walls provided ventilation, the air pushed about by a ceiling fan that rotated as slowly as a chicken on a spit. The kitchen consisted of a heat-scarred, two-burner portable gas stove on a countertop with black veins in the grouting, while the bathroom had no separate shower stall, only a drain in the floor next to the toilet, the showerhead on a hose. Posters of rock bands—Dengue Fever, Death Cab for Cutie, Hot Hot Heat—papered the walls above the cinder blocks and wood boards where Claire shelved her clothing.
“Couldn’t you find a better place, dear?” Michiko fanned herself with her sun hat. “You don’t even have an air conditioner.”
“This is better than what most people have. Even if people could afford this place, there’d be an entire family in here.”
“You’re not a native,” Carver said. “You’re an American.”
“That’s a problem I’m trying to correct.”
Recalling a lesson from the couples therapy Michiko had persuaded him to attend, Carver counted down from 10.
Claire watched with her arms crossed, face as impassive as it was when he spanked her in her childhood, or shouted at her in the teenage years when she repeatedly crossed whatever line he’d drawn.
“Enough, you two,” Michiko said. “People are always a little cranky without their coffee, aren’t they?”
Claire’s apartment was situated above a café. Carver sipped black coffee on ice at their sidewalk table, squatting on a plastic stool and watching Michiko spend five dollars buying postcards and lighters from four barefoot children, dark as dust, who bounded up the moment they sat down. After their sales, the quartet retreated a few feet and stood with their backs to a row of parked motorbikes, giggling and staring.
“Haven’t they seen tourists before?” Carver said.
“Not like us.” Claire unsealed a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “We’re a mixed bag.”
“They don’t know what to make of us?” Michiko said.
“I’m used to it, but you’re not.”
“Try being a Japanese wife at a Michigan air base in 1973.”
“Touché,” Claire said.
“Try being a black man in Japan,” Carver said. “Or Thailand.”
“But you could always go home,” Claire said. “There was always a place for you somewhere. But there’s never been a place for me.”
She said it matter-of-factly, without any of the melodrama of her adolescence, when she would come home from school sobbing at a slight from a peer or a stranger, some variation along the line of What are you? Her tears agonised Carver, making him feel guilty for delivering her into a world determined to put everybody in her proper place. He wanted to find the culprit who had hurt his daughter and beat some sense into the kid’s head, but he restrained himself, as he had whenever he encountered the look in people’s eyes that said What are you doing here? In the one-room library of the small town five miles down the road from his hamlet; at Penn State, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship; in flight school at Randolph Air Force Base; in an airman’s uniform; in his B-52 and later his Boeing airliner, he was never where he was supposed to be. He had survived by focusing on his goal, ascending ever higher, refusing to see the sneers and doubt in his peripheral vision.
But now retired, limping out of his sixties, he no longer knew what his goal should be. He envied Claire her sense of mission, teaching English to people as poor as the dirt farmers and sharecroppers of his childhood, their skin as brown and cracked as the soil they tilled, the desiccated earth of summer’s oppressive months. She exhibited a confidence that pleased him as he watched her hail a taxi, give directions in Vietnamese to the English school, and greet the students clustered in the courtyard under the shade of flame trees. When Claire gestured at Carver and Michiko and said something in the local language, the students greeted them in pitch-perfect English. “Hello!” “How are you!” “Good morning, Mr and Mrs Carver!” Carver smiled at them and waved back. Smiling at your relatives never got you very far, but smiling at strangers and acquaintances sometimes did.
"I am home, Mom. It sounds strange, I don't know how to put it but I feel like... I have a Vietnamese soul"A few doors down the colonnade from the courtyard was Claire’s classroom, her wooden desk confronting several rows of short tables and benches. Acne scars of white plaster were visible, the yellow paint of the walls having peeled away in a multitude of places. On the blackboard behind the desk, someone—it must have been Claire herself—had written “The Passive Voice” in big, bold letters. Underneath was written “my bicycle was stolen” and “mistakes were made.”
“How many students do you have, dear?” Michiko said.
“Four classes of 30 each.”
“That’s too much,” Carver said. “You’re not paid enough to do that.”
“They really want to learn. And I really want to teach.”
“So you’ve been here two years.” Carver toed a slab of tile flaking loose from the floor. “How much longer are you planning to stay?”
“Indefinitely.”
“What do you mean, indefinitely?”
“I like it here, Dad.”
“You like it here,” Carver said. “Look at this place.” Claire deliberately swept her gaze over her classroom.
“I’m looking.”
“What your father means is that we want you back home because we love you.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I am home, Mom. It sounds strange, I don’t know how to put it, but I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be. I have a Vietnamese soul.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Carver shouted.
“It’s not stupid,” Claire hissed. “Don’t say that. You always say that.”
“Name three times I’ve said that.”
“When I left Maine for school.” Claire held up three fingers of her right hand and slowly curled each one into her palm as she counted the times, ending up with a balled fist. “When I majored in women’s studies. When I told you I was going to Vietnam to teach. And those are just the most recent ones to come to mind.”
“But those things are stupid.”
“Oh, God, God, God.” Claire beat her fist on her forehead. “Why do I ever think things will be different with you?”
“For Chrissakes,” Carver muttered. Whispering drew his attention to the door, where a handful of the students had clustered. Claire wiped tears from her eyes.
“Look! Now you’ve made me lose face with them.”
“Lose face?” Carver said. “You really do think you’re turning into one of them.”
“Shut up, James.” Michiko pushed by him to offer Claire a tissue. “I think we’ve had just about enough family time together, don’t you?”
While Claire escorted Michiko on a shopping expedition for local textiles, Carver was forced to entertain himself, a problem since there was nothing to recommend Quang Tri to the foreign visitor except its proximity to the old Demilitarised Zone. The city was just a provincial town that had been destroyed in the course of the war and, from all reports, there had not been that much to see before its destruction. Carver passed the time sitting at a bar’s sidewalk patio and watching local boys play soccer on a patch of grass. By the time the monsoon arrived in the afternoon, he had drunk enough 33 Beer to remind himself that nothing had changed since he had drunk it in Thailand over 30 years ago. If you’re going to bomb a country, his roommate in U-Tapao had said, you should at least drink its beer. It was insipid then and it was insipid now. As curtains of rain swept over the road, he ordered a bottle of Hue instead. Watching the water flooding through the gutters, Carver longed for his clapboard cottage on the shore of Basin Cove, autumn waving its metamorphosing wand over the forest’s greenery. That new world of crimson and gold receded even further when the lady who ran the market next to the bar turned up the volume of her radio. Above the relentless hammering of the rain, a woman’s high-pitched voice whined in accompaniment with what sounded like a xylophone, the music pregnant with sorrow, although perhaps it was only Carver who heard a lamentation where there was none.
The demining site was half an hour from their hotel in Quang Tri the next afternoon, far beyond the outskirts of the city. Legaspi had promised to pick them up in a white buffalo, and when Carver had asked him if he really meant a white buffalo, Legaspi had winked and said, “You’ll see.” The white buffalo turned out to be a white Toyota Land Cruiser speckled with measles of rust, its counter reading over 300,000 kilometres.
“Locals call these things white buffalo because they’re as plentiful as white buffalo,” Legaspi said from the driver’s seat. “The foreigners and the NGOs and the UN love the Land Cruiser.”
“Donor money,” Carver said. “All the doughnuts and four-wheel drives you can buy.”
“Pretty much, Mr Carver.”
Michiko and Claire sat in the backseat, Carver in the front. Lining the road outside Quang Tri were one and two storey homes of faded wood and corrugated tin, a few freshly painted and plastered mini-mansions towering over their primitive neighbours, all of them long and narrow. Occasionally a cemetery or a temple came into view, encrusted with dragonesque architectural filigree, as well as a couple of churches, their ascetic walls plain and whitewashed.
The flat fields behind the homes were mostly devoid of trees and shade, some of the plots growing rice and the others devoted to crops Carver did not recognize, their colour the dull, muted green of an algae bloom, the countryside nowhere near as lush and verdant as the Thai landscape visible from Carver’s cockpit window as his B-52 ascended over the waters of Thale Sap Songkhla, destined for the enemy cities of the north or the Plain of Jars. There was a reason he loved flying. Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming ever more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God’s eyes, man’s hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere. But seen up close, from this height, the countryside was so poor that the poverty was neither picturesque nor pastoral: tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, a man pulling up the leg of his shorts to urinate on a wall, labourers wearing slippers as they pushed wheelbarrows full of bricks. When Carver rolled down his window, he discovered that the smell of the countryside was just as unpleasant, the air thick with blasts of soot from passing trucks, the rot of buffalo dung, the fermentation of the local cuisine that he found briny and nauseating. All of the sights, sounds, and smells depressed Carver, along with Claire’s and Michiko’s silent treatment of him, unrelenting since yesterday.
Only Legaspi was attentive, playing Giant Steps on the stereo, undoubtedly informed by Claire of her father’s love for bebop, the way the music flowed directly from his ear canal into his bloodstream. Of all the lands Carver had encountered, he liked France and Japan the most because of the natives’ enthusiastic appreciation of jazz, an admiration they extended to him. He regarded it as fate that he had met Michiko at a jazz bar in Roppongi, she a teenage waitress and he a decade older, on R & R from Okinawa, wowed by the sight of Japanese musicians sporting porkpie hats and soul patches.
“How did you sleep, Mr Carver?”
“Not so well.” Carver was pleased someone cared enough to inquire. “I kept waking up.”
“Bad dreams?”
Carver hesitated. “Just restless. Confusing.”
No one asked him what he had dreamed, so he said no more. They reached the demining site 10 minutes later, half a kilometre off the main blacktopped road, down an earthen track to a small house and a trio of shacks on the edge of a barren acre fenced with barbed wire. As the Land Cruiser pulled up, two teenage boys leaped from hammocks strung between two jackfruit trees. Carver immediately forgot their names after the introductions. They wore oversize shorts and anomalous T-shirts, one emblazoned with the Edmonton Oilers logo, the other commemorating a 1987 Bryan Adams concert tour. The taller one’s prosthetic arm was joined with the human part at the elbow, while the other’s prosthetic leg extended to mid-thigh. Carver nicknamed the tall one Tom and the shorter one Jerry, the same names he and his U-Tapao roommate, a Swede from Minnesota, had bestowed on their houseboys.
“They lost them playing with cluster bomblets when they were kids,” Legaspi explained. Tom and Jerry smiled shyly, their prostheses appearing to be borrowed from mannequins, the café au lait colour of the plastic not an exact match for their milk chocolate skin. What spooked Carver about the detachable limbs was not just their mismatched colour, but their hairlessness. “They guard the site and look after the mongooses.”
“Not mongeese?” Michiko said.
“Definitely mongooses, Mrs Carver.”
The mongoose Tom fetched from one of the shacks was named Ricky, feline in size but with a more luxuriant coat of fur and the angular, wedge-shaped head of a mouse. “We use a mongoose because it is too light to trip a mine,” Legaspi said. “Meanwhile, its sense of smell is acute enough to detect explosives.”
Jerry carried out a pair of robots from another shack. Instead of being the sleek, stainless steel machines Carver expected, the robots were cobbled together from what looked like two tin milkshakes, joined mouth-to-mouth, each milkshake sporting a pair of legs made from rubber hose. Like a draught of horses, the two robots were harnessed side-by-side, braced front and back by iron rods. The forward rod was attached to a round blue disc the size of a Frisbee, with Ricky yoked to the blue disc via a rubber vest, the entire robot-and-mongoose affair no more than a metre long and half that in width.
“I steer the robots with this remote control.” Legaspi held up a palm-sized black box of the type William had used to fly his model planes. “Ricky sniffs for the mines. The blue disc is the impediment sensor, and when it tells the robots something is blocking the way, the robots steer Ricky away from the obstacle. And when Ricky smells a mine, which he can do from three meters, he sits up.”
“That’s ingenious,” Michiko exclaimed.
“My adviser developed it to demine in Sri Lanka. But we’re experimenting with the robot and mongoose here, too.”
“So what are you still testing?” said Carver.
“The legs. It’s very difficult to mimic the locomotion of human or animal legs, especially over rough terrain. Having a robot vacuum your living room floor or climb some steps is completely different from having it deal with sand, or grass, or rocks, or any unexpected thing even a five-year-old knows how to get around.”
The field was planted with defused landmines. At the perimeter of the field Legaspi piloted the robot and mongoose team from under a tent, under which Claire, Michiko, and Carver also stood. Tom and Jerry followed the mongoose as it scuttled over the terrain, Tom with a metal detector strapped to his back, Jerry with a quiver full of red flags. Whenever Ricky stopped and stood up on his hind legs, Tom stepped in with the metal detector to confirm the landmine’s existence, and Jerry marked it with a red flag.
“A human team would take months to clear out this area,” said Legaspi. The back of his linen shirt was stained with sweat, the air humid even though the sky was grey and overcast. “You could bulldoze, but that tears up the topsoil and ruins it for farming. We can clear this in a couple of weeks for a small fraction of the cost.”
Carver watched Legaspi and Claire as the humanitarian jargon of cost efficiency, improvement of the land, moral obligation, employment of local technicians, and so on spooled forth. The light and focus in Claire’s eyes as she watched Legaspi were the same in Michiko’s when Carver told her on their first date about driving from State College to New York City to catch Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Café on St Mark’s Place, where he stood close enough to see the yellow half-moons of Monk’s cuticles against white ivory. The great man’s genius had rubbed off on him enough to shine and catch hold of Michiko’s gaze. It was the same with Legaspi, borrowing someone else’s ideas, and this was enough for Claire.
“Do you even know who you’re dealing with? You ever thought about what the DOD could do with these robots?” Carver said. The look in Legaspi’s eyes was hesitant, afraid, weak, that of someone not ready to face bare-knuckled reality, the clenched iron fist of power. Legaspi’s naivete annoyed Carver profoundly. “Some brilliant guy at a university working on a defence contract will figure out a way to put a landmine on this robot. Then the Pentagon will send it into a tunnel where a terrorist is hiding.”
“That’s the kind of work you would do, Dad. Don’t think everyone’s like you.”
“It’s okay,” Legaspi said. “I’ve heard this before.”
“It’s not okay,” Claire said. “He’s old and angry and bitter and he’s taking it out on everyone he meets.”
“I’m not angry and bitter. What am I angry about? What am I bitter about? That I’m being lectured to by a kid who thinks he’s going to save the world with a tin can robot? That I have a daughter who thinks she’s Vietnamese?”
“I said I have a Vietnamese soul. It’s a figure of speech. It’s an expression. It means I think I’ve found someplace where I can do some good and make up for some of the things you’ve done.”
“I’ve done? What have I done?”
“You bombed this place. Have you ever thought about how many people you killed? The thousands? The tens of thousands?”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“It’s not like you’ve ever listened to anyone before.”
“You don’t understand anything. We coddled you so you wouldn’t have to worry about the things we worried about. Isn’t that right?”
Carver turned to Michiko for support, but she was studying the ragged copse of palm trees at the far end of the model minefield. Legaspi had returned to steering Ricky, while Claire had her arms folded across her chest, daring him to walk away, exactly as he dared her when she was six, clamouring for a blonde Barbie doll in a toy store. You can sit here and cry your eyes out, young lady. She had promptly sat down in the aisle and howled with all the grief and fury only a child or someone on the brink of death could muster. He walked out of the store then, leaving her there, and he had no choice but to walk away now.
The monsoon struck 15 minutes later, when Carver was a few hundred meters away from the demining site, the best he could manage on the rutted road and with his bad hip. Outrage and self-pity propelled his every step. He had never explained to Claire the difficulty of precision bombing, aiming from forty thousand feet at targets the size of football fields, like dropping golf balls into a coffee cup from the roof of a house. The tonnage fell far behind his B-52 after its release, and so he had never seen his own payload explode or even drop, although he watched other planes of his squadron scattering their black seed into the wind, leaving him to imagine what he would later see on film, the bombs exploding, footfalls of an invisible giant stomping the earth.
Claire’s mind wasn’t complex enough to grasp the need to strike the enemy from on high in order to save fellow Americans below, much less understand his belief that God was his copilot. She was his complete opposite, joining Amnesty International in high school and marching against Desert Storm at Vassar, as if protesting made any difference at all. If it did, the help it offered was to the enemy. Although she empathised with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and who would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feeling to him.
The unfairness of this absorbed Carver so much he did not notice the rapid marshalling of storm clouds until the sky grumbled. For a few seconds scattered drops of rain pinged off his forehead. Then came the deluge. Rain glued his clothing to his body, water sluicing down the back of his collar and soaking into his hiking boots. He stopped walking, unsure of whether to keep heading for the blacktop road or turn back to the demining site. The ribbon of earthen road was now the texture of peanut butter, and he sank millimetre by millimetre into its stickiness as the monsoon’s onslaught continued. This was why he hadn’t wanted to visit this country, a land of bad omens and misfortune so severe he wanted nothing more to do with it than fly over it. But Claire had brought him back to this red earth, and he wasn’t about to run to her for help, even if he could. He slogged toward the blacktop, not a human being or an animal in sight, the dull green fields flanking him on either side. It was the middle of the afternoon, but twilight had descended with the storm clouds.
In the distance, behind him, a car honked. He lowered his head and kept walking, the downpour so intense he feared drowning if he looked up to the sky. He heard the car’s old engine as it got closer, choking like a cat coughing up a hairball. With light from the high beams scattered on the raindrops falling before him, he decided that instead of ignoring them, he should raise his head in defiance. He stopped and turned, but somehow he misjudged this simple step, his right foot trapped by mud clutching at his ankle. With the high beams in his eyes, blinding him, he made another misstep, this time with his left foot, the toe coming down straight into the mud, the leg locking at the knee and his body pitching forward into the path of the car. The mud was wet and cold against his belly and face, its odour and taste evoking the soil in the distant yard of his childhood, the one where he had so often lain prone on the earth and played soldier.
It was Legaspi who helped him to his feet and into the idling Land Cruiser, Claire hovering over them with an umbrella. They put him in the backseat, shivering, Michiko using the silk scarf she had bought yesterday to wipe the mud from his eyes and face.
“We all thought you just went to sit in the car, Jimmy,” she said. Legaspi started driving toward the blacktop. “What got into you?”
“I’m 68, damn it.” Carver sneezed. “I’m old but I’m not dead.”
“You’re 69.”
He was going to argue as she scrubbed at the mud around his ears, but then he realized Michiko was right. Even his own years were elusive, time ruthlessly thinning out the once-dense herd of his memories. In the rearview mirror, he saw Legaspi looking at him, and when Legaspi spoke, his voice was not unkind.
“Where did you think you were going, Mr Carver?” When Legaspi turned on the stereo, the title track from Giant Steps was playing. “You don’t even know where you are.”
By that evening, fever had seized Carver. The dream he hadn’t recounted to Legaspi came back to him in his hospital room, where he floated on his back in a black stream, his face emerging every now and again to catch glimpses of his fellow patients in the three other beds, silver-haired, ageing men, tended by crowds of relatives who chattered loudly and carried bowls and other things wrapped in towels. He smelled rice porridge, a medicine whose scent was bitter, the wet dog odour of very old people. When he was submerged in the black water, images flitted by like strange illuminated fish from the canyons of the ocean. The only ones he could clearly recall later were manifested in the dream, where he had woken to find himself a passenger in a darkened airliner. Everyone else was asleep and the portholes were closed. For some reason he knew that no one was piloting the plane, and he rose and made his way forward, his skills needed. All the dozens of passengers were Asian, their eyes closed, among them the street kids and Claire’s students and Tom and Jerry. Strapped to the flight attendant’s jump seat by the cockpit was their tour guide from Angkor Wat, the one who had pointed to a bridge flanked by the headless statues of deities and said, in a vaguely accusatory tone, “Foreigners took the heads.” Fear clutched at Carver, but when he opened the cockpit door, all he saw were the cockpit windows peering out on to the starless river of night, the empty pilot’s seat waiting for him.
“Dad.”
Claire was kneeling by his bedside in the dark room.
“Dad, did you say something?”
“Thirsty.”
"Claire was the right size for him to lean on, her head rising a bit over his shoulder"She unsealed a bottle of water and poured him a cup, holding it to his lips with one hand while propping his head with the other. He drank too eagerly and water dribbled over his lip and on to his gown. Claire lowered his head to the pillow and then wiped his chin with a napkin.
“Michiko?”
“She’s at the hotel,” Claire said softly. “She’s been here every day, but she can’t stay here at night. The floor’s too hard for her to sleep on.”
“How long?”
“Three days. You’ve had a bad fever. You have pneumonia. You have to rest, okay?” Claire sighed. “You are so stubborn. Why did you go walking by yourself?”
He shifted his weight on the mattress, where a lump of foam had worked its way under the small of his back. “I’m a fool?”
“That’s true.”
“Claire.”
“Yes?”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
He put his arms around her neck and held on tight as she leveraged him up from the bed. She smelled of strong soap and a citrus shampoo, with no hint of perfume to mask the tang of sweat. Once he was sitting on the bed with his feet on the ground, he hung an arm around her neck and let her pull him to his feet. Claire was the right size for him to lean on, her head rising a bit over his shoulder, his arm draping comfortably over her back. She kicked aside a bamboo mat on the floor and manoeuvred him down the narrow passage between his bed and his neighbour’s. “Careful, Dad,” Claire said, steering him past a body stretched out on the floor and curled up under a sheet, head turned away from him. “You’ll be okay. You just need some rest.”
What she wanted to say, but wouldn’t, was that he should not be frightened. He was not going to die here. But he was frightened, more so than he had ever expected to be. Before Michiko and the children, he believed he would die in an airplane or behind the wheel of a very fast car, anything involving high velocity and a sudden, arresting stop. Now he knew he would probably die with panic pooling in his lungs, in a place where he was not supposed to be, on the wrong side of the world. He hung on to Claire even more tightly as she clutched him around his waist, navigating him past the first body and around another at the foot of a bed by the door. When he tripped on the body’s outstretched foot, a woman with short-cropped hair raised her head and snapped, “Troi oi, can than di!” To which Claire said, apologetically, “Xin loi, co!”
The woman must be a relative of one of the patients, or maybe a patient herself. Claire must have been sleeping on the bamboo mat by his bed. The realisation burned through the fog of dizziness and fear, delivering a feeling for his daughter so strong it pained him. He remembered her infancy, when Michiko insisted on sleeping with Claire in between them, he so worried about rolling over in his sleep on to Claire that he lay awake restless until he could worry no more, whereupon he climbed down to the floor and slept on the carpet. Not so many years later, when Claire was walking but barely potty-trained, and still sleeping in their bed, she would wake up, slip off the edge and land on his chest, and when he opened one eye, demand to be taken to the bathroom. The trip alone in the dark was too frightening. He would sigh, get up, and lead her down the hall, step by careful step, her hand wrapped around one of his fingers.
“Dad,” Claire said. The bathroom door was a pale green rectangle in the blue moonlight before them. “Dad, are you crying?”
“No, baby, I’m not,” he said, even though he was.
Copyright © 2017 by Viet Thanh Nguyen, extracted from “The Refugees,” published by Corsair, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group
