The Size of the World Read online

  And how many Vietnamese had I talked to? How many conversations had I had? My circle of local acquaintance was notably narrow. I had talked to the hooker who called herself Miss Mai, the bellhop, and the crippled beggar who came every night to the hotel, with his one sealed eye and his slurred speech.

  INSIDE THOSE LONG DAYS, I was longing for my old girlfriend Kit. And I was thrilled when she wrote, but her letters disappointed me. They reminded me not only that she was married but also what I hadn’t liked about her in the beginning. She was nice but shallow and sometimes downright sappy. I had lied about this to myself when we were together—decided she had her own kind of intelligence or was sharper than her language showed—and it struck me now that this was the sort of lying Ernst was free of. His life seemed very free to me and very clean.

  ERNST KNEW A LOT of details about the war, for a guy who wasn’t in the CIA—where exactly Prime Minister Diem had been murdered by his own generals, how long the DMZ actually was, and what Madame Nhu had really wanted. He said he just remembered what he read in the newspapers. Didn’t I know what I saw on TV at least? His memory was pretty remarkable. He was famous at work for being able to recite the figures on any project without looking.

  And he could describe every shop on a block he’d just walked through. At night, when we made our way back to the hotel, he was the one who kept me from turning down the wrong avenue and getting lost in a tangle of unmarked streets. He could always say which direction the river was in or how far we were from the brick Notre Dame Cathedral. He’s more here than I am, I thought.

  But I liked the country more than he did. I started to have more chats with Can, the bellhop who worked nights; he knew a little English and some French. He offered to sell us drugs, as did the laundress and every cyclo driver we met, but once we were off that topic, he let me ask him the names of all the plants in the courtyard. Of course, he only knew them in Vietnamese, and my attempts at repeating the tones reduced him to a very dignified form of high amusement; he cracked up without making a sound. I tried to describe Florida to him, and my mother’s yard with its croton and yucca and allamanda. He probably had no interest whatsoever but he repeated the words. He had a noble politeness.

  He had three kids, a boy and two girls. I asked how they liked school. “They like school, when there ever is school.” I pantomimed eager students raising their hands, but he didn’t understand me at first. Apparently, his kids were so good they would never rush to answer—“Don’t want to make mistake, and also don’t want to brag.” I was tickled by this idea of comportment and reported it to Ernst. It did make me think of myself. I had been timid and modest for an American boy, much to the dismay of my family.

  Can wasn’t at the hotel for a few days, and I asked at the desk if he was sick. “Gone,” the day manager said.

  “He’s okay?”

  “Gone,” he said.

  It was Ernst who told me he’d heard Can was one of those who’d planted a bomb in an ordinary blue and yellow Renault taxi, and it had blown up in front of another hotel and taken out the lobby and part of the bakery next door. “It was a humongous bloody mess,” Ernst said. “Lot of people in that lobby.”

  I knew that lobby, with its mosaic floor. It was a nicer hotel than ours, where visiting brass sometimes stayed. I’d been there for drinks. Can might have killed me, he wanted to kill people like me. My Can.

  “Wake up, Dorothy,” Ernst said.

  It was an old story, but it was fresh to me. I’d had no inkling, of course, what Can believed or how strongly he believed it or that he had any capacity for sacrifice. He seemed so mild and civil and wryly entertained by the world. And Can’s cadre had been betrayed by someone else (it did not pay to think what duress led to that betrayal)—that was how Ernst knew the story.

  “Can’s gone,” Ernst said, “as in dead.”

  Ernst had his own phrasing, different from a soldier’s. Not so hideously comic (nothing about crispy critters), cooler and flatter. And he was not about to comfort me.

  BUT I WANTED TO BE like Ernst. I wrote home to Kit and to my mother—Pilots took us for a roller-coaster ride, doing loop-di-loops the other morning. Very interesting, I can tell you! I leaned on Ernst even more here than at home. An evening with anyone else—the other tech reps or the fat-cat contractors who hung out in the bars—always had its coarseness. At first I’d thought I was going to change in that direction; I wanted vividness, like anyone. But I wasn’t a real drinker—some people just aren’t—and after a while I didn’t want to be out every night, with all the work we had. And I had my ambitions, unformed lump though I was. I’d chosen to be an engineer, a nerd with a slide rule, partly because I didn’t like the world of business where showing off was part of the code of conduct. I was sort of interested in being a genius (though I knew I was a dark horse for this category), so that people would respect me and leave me to my own methods. I wanted to be like Ernst; I wanted praise and my own corner, both at once.

  We worked very hard, in those weeks. New information kept coming in, data that contradicted itself, and we sat at our desks trying to resolve it. And I saw that I was glad to be indoors, though I had been so dazzled by the streets. The gap-toothed woman who sold pilfered American liquor and toothpaste at her stand, the shoeshine boy with his playful nasal pleading, the old man walking his bicycle loaded with rope bags of melons—they yelled at me to buy from them, to give them money. Why was I there if I was only going to walk along in my towering foreign fatness, my oblivious overfed height? Did I know they were there, did I know where I was, where was my money? I was becoming afraid of all of them. As I had reason to be.

  AND WHAT WAS MAKING the planes fuck up? While we were in Saigon, four planes that flew out from Da Nang got shot down over Dak To, where they weren’t supposed to be. The officer who told us said, “This can’t go on. It can’t.” And we were the assholes who’d let the pilots go down; gone as in dead. Or captured, which was not pleasant to think about. Why were we so slow, what was the matter with us? I looked at Ernst when they called us in. He shook his head, which meant no good, no good.

  We stayed at the office all through the night, trying to make some glimmer of sense out of measurements and charts and maps and whatever we had of radio logs. My high school physics teacher, Mr. Llewellyn, used to say problem-solving was just patience with your own stupidity. Ernst grunted to himself, as he did when he was concentrating. He made the sudden soft sounds people make in their sleep. He was the clearest-brained engineer I’d ever met and he should have been able to get this, if anyone could, the buried glitch, the needle in the haystack. It was a human error, it had to be solvable by a human.

  WE GOT WORD THE NEXT DAY that they needed to send us to the air base in Da Nang. We had to look at more of the planes. I wrote my mother a long, stupidly chipper letter. Even she, who didn’t know much, would recognize Da Nang as a place closer to the DMZ, a name repeated on TV in reports of heavy fighting, heavy losses.

  “We’re moving to a noisy neighborhood,” Ernst said.

  “Wasn’t this just an office job?” I said. “They didn’t mention any extra excursions back at Bydex.” We couldn’t exactly complain to the soldiers around us, since we were the pampered kittens of the war.

  “Au revoir, Saigon,” I said when we were at the airport.

  “See you later, alligator,” Ernst said to the city.

  DA NANG WAS A GOOD-SIZED city too, it turned out, but we weren’t really in it. Our new home was on the air base, off a dirt road near an airfield of yellow dust, with a long, low ridge of mountains in the distance. They had bunked us in what looked like a village of beach bungalows, two-story wooden huts lining the road on both sides, a jerrybuilt stage set.

  Ernst came up with a fact while we were carrying our duffels into our rooms. “This airport in Da Nang, if you count everything in it,” he said, “has the most traffic of any airport in the world.”

  “Big vacation spot,” I said. “Wildly popular.” On
a garbage can next to our hootch someone had spray-painted, NOT MY HOME, JUST A PASSING THRU.

  But soldiers liked us better here. We were now consultants to the Marines, not a group known for their sweet manners, but they were decent to us in the office where we worked. They had a standing joke about fixing up Ernst with a nymphomaniac nurse, a figure whose tastes for bizarre practices grew with each telling, and they liked to insult me about my wardrobe, had my mother picked it out and could they divvy up my shirts if I got shot? They called us the two brainiacs. Having come this far got us credit. We’d been issued flak jackets and helmets, we weren’t just a couple of hot dogs hanging around a hotel pool sipping martinis.

  We were not, of course, in the shit with them. We had by this time some inkling of what the shit was. Well, the whole world knows now, doesn’t it, what we made soldiers do. Not that I ever saw any of those villages. Around us some of the landscape was charred from bombings, and I was doing my best to help our planes char it—that part was all right with me. But I got so I hated to see the men go out from the base. At all hours you could hear overhead the medevac helicopters bringing back the wounded and the dead. We sent them in and then we plucked them out.

  Ernst and I were working eighteen-hour days. If we couldn’t find anything wrong in the guidance systems, maybe the bug was in the navigation systems or even in the control systems that moved the planes around. Ernst, who had never been one to let go of a problem, would hardly leave his office even to eat, and he was a big eater. I got someone to drive me to the settlement of shacks the Vietnamese had built up west of the base on the road to the beach. Ernst wasn’t much of a gourmet but he liked the beef noodle soup one woman made, with the green herbs and the lime juice you threw in as you ate. Their shantytown was quite something, with its hodgepodge of boards and patched roofs, its crowing roosters. Someone had named it Dogpatch, after Li’l Abner’s hillbilly town in the funnies. The soup woman had a sister who sometimes laundered my famous shirts.

  I watched Ernst slurping down the noodles at his desk, and I was glad he had me to look after him. He was probably glad too, in his way. “Thanks for the nourishment,” he said, which was a wild burst of expressive fervor from him. And he shared a government chocolate bar with me for our dessert. We had our comforts, our spots of mellowness. He had bought a cassette recorder at the PX (cassettes were pretty new on the market then), and we listened to a tape of Ella Fitzgerald singing while we worked. The sound was thin and hoarse and miraculous.

  THE NEXT MORNING AT SIX, when we got to our office, a lieutenant colonel was waiting outside for us in the misty brightness. “New development,” he said. “There could be a reason two smart jerk-offs like you can’t find anything.” A Vietnamese worker had been located on the airfield where he wasn’t supposed to be. He was asleep under one of our planes. Maybe sabotage was the answer here to the big mystery. Maybe monkey business had been going on all along.

  I was flooded with relief—that was my first response—it wasn’t my fault, it had never been my fault. Those pilots hadn’t gone down just because I was an idiot. The lieutenant colonel said we might as well keep working, but they would be questioning this individual and would get back to us with what they learned.

  AND THEN FOR A WEEK nobody said a word to us. Ernst kept working as if this new wrinkle hadn’t turned up. I thought he just wanted to occupy himself. We heard from the enlisted men around the office that the guy they’d nabbed was the one called Chu Nam, which meant Fifth Uncle. He was supposed to be the soup lady’s uncle. Maybe they were all related, we didn’t know.

  She disappeared too, and you couldn’t blame her for making herself scarce. It was a very creepy week. When Ernst and I walked back from the office at night, I jumped at any noise, and the night was full of noises. If that guy had managed to get out on the airfield, anyone could be right next to us. “They always could,” Ernst said. He was scornful of my jumpiness. “Keep cool,” he said. I was thinking, not for the first time, that Bydex had picked us to send because we were the unmarried ones. I was very lonely. I hadn’t known I was that lonely.

  By Monday, though we never actually heard anything official, the grapevine gave us as much as we needed. The prisoner had not been cooperative. The lieutenant colonel, who had sent his own good pilots off in those planes, had not been able to get the prisoner to answer and had thrown the man out of a helicopter. The Marine who told us the story made the sort of grim joke Marines made—“He got a free ride back down to his village, express.” I started coughing when I heard this—horror was choking me—I didn’t know what to do in front of the others. Ernst’s eyes had gone blank—I supposed the report fell into a well of darkness Ernst had in him always.

  And why were we so fucking shocked? Didn’t we know what kind of war this was? We knew now. I was angry that the Marine had told us. You always heard that certain things were kept secret. I had come as a consultant, not to be in the war. I was furious with the Marine, while I coughed.

  WE KEPT WORKING. Ernst liked best to be lost in work, and I wanted to be walled up in that thicket with him. He had devised some new calculations, which we went over together and which suggested a new, purely mechanical solution. Ernst wanted to look inside the plane again. It took two days to get one of the men to take apart the inertial guidance system for him; any personnel who could do that were busy fixing damaged aircraft, not hanging around loose to serve our whims. When some overworked, bare-chested guy in shorts finally showed up, Ernst followed him into the cockpit while I stood outside. I wanted to stand by to shout suggestions, hot though it was in the hangar. I was about to go back to the office just when the two of them climbed out.

  “Eureka,” Ernst said, flatly and maybe bitterly. In his fingers was a half-corroded screw that had been in the gimbal of a gyroscope, about to cause it to split and throw the whole navigation system off. Simple as that. He held it out to me in disgust. “Cheap crap,” he said. “Somebody gave the lowest bid. All the gimbals have these lame-ass screws.”

  And we were heroes that night—Ernst especially, though I got some of the glory, despite my disclaimers. I supposed I had helped a little. The lieutenant colonel and two other officers took us out to celebrate at a seafood restaurant along the river in downtown Da Nang. We had hardly been off the base before and kept saying how much better the waitresses looked than the jarheads who usually fed us. The murky waters of the Han River glinted outside the windows. We were toasted with bottles of beer and a speech about how no one ever thought two turkeys like us could come up with anything. The thanks were sincere. “A fucking bright spot for a change,” the youngest officer said.

  “Just doing our jobs,” I heard myself say. The two of us were as stiff and remote as they always figured we were.

  “The goddamn truth is that Ernst is more of a fucking genius than anyone even knows,” I said. “If the Marines had any sense, they’d give him a fat, fat bonus for the kind of work he did.”

  “You got to die to get a bonus,” a sergeant said. He was not laughing.

  Ernst, who didn’t eat seafood, picked at his barbecued beef without looking up. He was in a rage about how someone had cut corners to save money on the screws, how the shoddiness and sloppiness and lying cruddiness of mankind had turned up yet again. He hated the whole armed services for this, everyone at the table.

  The lieutenant colonel was discussing the build on one of the waitresses. How much soup would you have to feed her till she grew breasts?

  I was thinking that if we had found the trouble earlier, Fifth Uncle would still be alive. What had taken us so long? I couldn’t get past that line of thought. I don’t know that I ever have.

  “THEY’LL SEND US HOME NOW,” I said to Ernst at the end of the evening, when we were walking to the row of huts where our hootch was. We’d both had a lot of beer.

  “Send us what?” he said. His hearing was never perfect.

  “A return ticket from Adventureland here,” I said.

  But m
y voice was drowned out by a sudden clap of thunder. “Now it’s going to rain,” I said. “I hate this country.”

  There were more loud claps, one right after another, flashes of orange light, and a bunch of crackling, whistling noises—what a dope I was—they were the trails of rockets. Not a storm. We were in a fucking rocket attack. Streaks of flame were landing somewhere behind us. I looked back at the burning trees and I ran.

  Ernst wasn’t running with me. When I turned my head, I saw that he was standing completely still, a dumb civilian ghost in the dark. Ernst! I shouted at him, and then I dashed back into the smoking night and grabbed his arm and pulled him with me—You have to move! Ahead of us some other men were yelling. He was too heavy to drag, he was much bigger than I was. I wanted to leave him, I didn’t want to die helping him. And then he began to run, he seemed to remember how all of a sudden.

  I THOUGHT WE WERE okay once we got in our building, which was barricaded with sandbags on one side. Ernst at least knew to put on his flak jacket and helmet right away. His face was clenched and blank. We were supposed to go into the bunker but it seemed a better idea to stay put. I looked around for cover and I pulled a mattress down over us. We stank together under that hood.

  “You okay?” I kept saying. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  I wondered if the kapok in the mattress was flammable. Every one of my organs was pulsing, thudding under the skin. And the other, unmoving body with me—Ernst’s body—heaved in and out to get air. Ernst looked, in his sweating blankness, like a staring animal, like a bear sullenly waiting out its panic.

  It unraveled me to see him as he was now. I had never thought of him as pitiable before, though other people did. I couldn’t exactly stand it.

  “You comfortable?” I said. I was trying to make a joke.