The Size of the World Read online

  The timing could not have been worse. We had a baby on the way. The money to Lek had drained the reserves from our savings. When I told Toon, she said, “Was a surprise?”

  “It sure as fuck was,” I said. Her features were pinched in a stiff and tender look that I suddenly realized was pity. She had a husband who was a sap, whose flapdoodle overestimation of his genius had made him blind. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that expression on her face either. How did she live with me, then, if that was what she felt? That Toon, of all people, had to keep up a disguise—had to lie to live with me—made me think Ernst had been right about the corrupt nature of all love.

  “Lots of better jobs in the world,” Toon said.

  I did not do well at the few interviews I had. The Bangok I moved in wasn’t that big, and wherever I went, people knew I’d been fired, was married to a Thai, and had been in Vietnam. I could feel, from the questions, a fear that I was a loose cannon, a wimp who’d gotten sour from what he’d seen in combat (though I tried to tell them I had not been in combat). I’d been heard to say inflamed and bitter things about the bombing of Cambodia. I seemed to trust no one, how could I work for anyone?

  I’D BEEN OUT of work for six months—watching Toon change shape, ranting about why Lek couldn’t pay back a single baht, asking Toon over and over why she wouldn’t think for a second about moving to the U.S.—when Lek showed up saying he had a job for me. At the hotel: I could help book day tours for Westerners. He gleamed with officious pleasure to be offering this favor.

  I was an engineer—what the fuck was he saying? The two of us were alone at the table with our shots of Sang Som. I had a fucking degree in engineering. I wanted to throw the table at Lek, like an insulted cowboy in a western. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if I disappeared altogether, no one could do much about it. I could slip out of this dream. Bangkok could turn back into a cloud of smoke along a ribbon of river, seen from the air. No one back in the States would blame me either. I thought this long enough to calm myself, to keep a decent coolness in front of Lek. I kept cool. I asked him what he thought they were paying for this job.

  SO I WORKED AT the hotel, sending tourists on guided jaunts to the Imperial Palace and the Snake Farm and the ruins of Ayutthaya. The work did not pay well and we had to move to a smaller place farther on the outskirts, in Pravet, and I wasn’t all that good with people, especially people whose peevish needs I had to cater to, but it was okay, after I got over being mortified. Toon’s mother was always saying how lucky we were to have Lek to help.

  Toon helped me through the first weeks. Her own comfort was reading the spiritual biography of a famous monk—books like this sold in the thousands and Toon actually liked them—and she’d translate bits of it to me. I was dazed enough so that this was welcome. She began with a report of how in his younger days the monk’s mind would shoot out to the sky or go down to the earth when he was meditating and it was tough work for him to force it to reenter his body. So then I started asking her, “What’s your monk guy doing lately?” Ajahn Mun lived three years in a cave, learning to master fear; he meditated away a painful, deadly illness and he shamed a huge black murderous spirit into behaving well. These accounts soothed me, for reasons I didn’t fully understand. They were lessons in fortitude, of course, but even more than that they were examples of a stream of clear water outside the meretricious swamp I mucked around in. Ajahn Mun did not care at all who was rude to me or how much I earned. My engineering degree meant fuck-all to him too. He was elsewhere; there was an elsewhere.

  I WAS SCARED OUT of my wits when my son was born. Propped up on pillows in her hospital bed, Toon had a swollen, melted face and eyes like black pits—she looked like a woman who’d been tortured, which she was, and the baby was too small to be a human. What had we done? I stood wincing in panic, but because of Toon’s monk it occurred to me to try to beat down the roiling waves of fear, to fling myself against them, which I perhaps would not have done otherwise. It seemed now like a thing a person did.

  Once we got him home, our son was surrounded by doting females. I could not keep my eyes from his face as he yowled or gurgled his opinions. How had a separate being just grown out of nothing like that? My son the globule of consciousness. I tried to imagine what constituted thought for him. What was he puzzling over, when his eyes were unfocused and he frowned at air? On the baby’s one-month birthday, I sent a photo to Ernst: See the good work I’ve done converting energy to matter.

  We named the baby Buell, for my father, and I had everyone call him Billy. He was a poky, contemplative little kid, absorbed in his own investigations. Our rooms didn’t have much sound insulation, and wherever I went, I’d hear the others cooing and clicking and clapping to get a response out of him. He and I had a different rapport; he’d cozy up and fall asleep in my lap because I was good at staying still. We had an excellent understanding.

  I was happy with my boy, but there was too much noise, too much coming and going and chattering and crying around me, except when Billy was sleeping. I had not known the apartment would be so crowded, so noisy. I bought us a decent stereo and I’d sit in the bedroom with the headphones on, listening to Bud Powell or Ella Fitzgerald, and for a while I sort of liked Jefferson Airplane. I did what anyone asked, but I was with people all the livelong day and I didn’t have much use for them by the time I got home.

  I lived in a city where a student demonstration was crushed so brutally the police left hundreds dead on a college campus. Toon and her family talked on and on about it, scared and wary and too fast for me to follow, night after night—after the crackdown, a leftist cousin slipped away to a northern province—but I stayed out of it. I stayed tuned in to my music.

  I believed (or wanted to believe) that Toon was not going to leave me as long as I didn’t treat her badly. She had other intimates around her, she could let me be. Sharp and modern as she was, the old system served her. I floated on my own pond of separate sound, fogged in with secret noise. I did my best to be alone without leaving. In the cool of the evenings, I tried to make my own Walden. I had to.

  Ernst would have scoffed at these strategies I devised, Toby the goon with headphones. My home life and my work life too would have seemed like enslavements to him, traps that had snapped around me. We could have used more money, and Toon talked about going back to work, but I wanted her to wait until Billy was in school. He was just about to start when Toon got pregnant again. She was really very excited, and Billy was beside himself.

  I WAS THINKING about Billy, how I would describe everything so he could remember, when I walked into the hospital room this time. Toon was holding the baby and telling me we had a girl, in a barely audible voice. “Hello, hello, girl,” I said in English. I stroked her tiny shoulder, and when she moved her small, dimpled arm, I saw there was no hand at the end of it, just a ruddy knob of skin over the bone.

  “She’s fine,” Toon said, in that peeping whisper. “Just one hand only not there. Nothing else wrong. Don’t worry, Toby.”

  “Agent Orange,” I said.

  It was a stupid thing to say at that moment. Later I was very sorry I hadn’t said how beautiful my daughter was—she had a sweet fat chin and a wispy cap of dark hair—or asked Toon how she felt or made a joke about how we’d have to convince Billy a sister was what he wanted. I was scared the hand wasn’t all that was unformed or missing. How could they know what was inside her? I did remember to tell Toon I couldn’t wait to get them both home. I did say that at least.

  THE WAR HAD ALREADY been over for a couple of years, but word was out long since about Agent Orange. No one had sprayed it on me. But I’d hung out on airfields with planes that did the spraying, I’d been not all that many miles from the “mist drift,” I’d eaten fish and water spinach from local ponds. The ponds did not bear thinking about. Who knew? No one knew. At home some guys already had cancer and some soldiers’ babies were born with spina bifida, but that was all they knew. Even now they don’t
know much, or say they don’t. So maybe it wasn’t that.

  Toon, who worked in hospitals and had seen much worse, said we’d never know. But I saw that the war wasn’t as over as I’d thought. It didn’t matter that I’d repudiated it. It was still always above me, my own smelly cloud, like the thought-balloon above a man in a cartoon. At home we played with the baby as if she were any baby; she crowed when we dandled her and got indignant when she was hungry. We hoped it was only hunger that made her scream.

  I tried to watch out for Toon; that was all I could think to do. The first night home, when she wanted to bathe, I carried her into the bath. I sponged her back, I washed her hair. “Toby, is that you?” she said. “I think is someone else’s husband.” Neither of us had ever seen me do such a thing before. It wasn’t that hard really. How worried we were then, how full of dread. When the baby cried in the next room both of us gasped and shrieked. When Toon got up to nurse her, I tuned the radio to the crappy Thai pop station she loved and I didn’t. Oopy-doopy music, I’d always called it. “Louder,” she said. At least I knew one thing: in war you have to have a buddy, or you’re really fucked.

  WHEN I WENT BACK to work, I found myself wondering which of these executive wives I was sending on the royal palace tour was married to a liar from Dow or Monsanto or Hercules or one of the other chemical companies. All those lies for profit. Why was I being nice to these people? It made my job weirdly artificial. I wanted to wear a sign in front of all of them: GREED KILLS.

  But who was I to wear such a sign? A person who’d earned an elevated salary in Da Nang, who’d gone to war without even risking his skin. And no one had made me go.

  I didn’t want to be afraid around my daughter. The last thing she needed was a scared jumpy father, a spooked worrier. Fear was the reason the U.S. had charged into a place like Vietnam (fear of Communists taking the world from us), fear escalating to frenzy. Ajahn Mun used to send his monks on walking meditation at night in tiger-infested forests, to teach them not to be afraid.

  Meanwhile, my daughter was a bright-eyed, alert baby. Toon picked the name the monks gave her—she was Lawan, which meant Beautiful, but everyone at home called her Jiap, which meant Baby Chicken. I lived in a country big on nicknames. She hardly seemed to mind not having a left hand—as Toon pointed out, how would she know otherwise?—and waved all her limbs with the same abandon. Billy’s idea was to absolutely not let anyone mention her non-hand; he would shout in a long bellowing blast if anyone said a word, a really quite effective strategy.

  WE WATCHED HER CLOSELY, waiting, as Americans say, for the other shoe to drop. She learned to do things—sitting, standing, walking—in the same thrilling sequence that Billy had, and her prattling turned into speech much earlier. She was a gabby three-year-old when Toon found a job in a pediatric clinic. By that time we had Billy, who was the moody, difficult one, in a school that cost money.

  Billy was the one I stuck closest to. He was intent and deliberating and stubborn. If he got mad at you, he wouldn’t speak. In the fancy international school he went to, he never liked sports that involved teams (was it possible to have a kid who wouldn’t suffer fools?). I taught him to swim and we’d splash around the hotel pool. He made fun of me for getting fat, though I wasn’t that fat.

  I wrote to Ernst: Christmas greetings from the ever-amazing father of two. The little prodigies are working me hard. Let’s hope they support me in my old age.

  They let us use the pool because although I was staff, I was Caucasian. I was ashamed of the hotel for this. I’d grown tired of my office, with its framed clichés, its photos of saddled elephants and Khmer ruins with ribbed towers and monks in orange robes, its beauties trimmed and cut for outsiders who were barely interested anyway. It had only one corny poster I could stand to look at, a lone fisherman paddling a narrow boat on a river at dusk. The boat appeared to be the sole human artifact in miles of blue. Of all the people in the hotel who had ever glanced at this poster, I was probably the only one who wanted to be the fisherman.

  SOMETIMES I BROUGHT Jiap to the pool too. I walked through the glass doors, holding her good right hand, and I’d see a guest smile at us—what a cute kid, in her flounced swimsuit—and then I’d see the expression change when anyone saw the knobbed arm. What happened? What took the hand? I could tell you stories, I’d feel myself thinking, a long chain of stories, spiraling out to there, more than you want to know. Meanwhile, Jiap waded and splashed and thought she was cool.

  I GOT A LETTER ONE DAY with a return address from Bydex in Phoenix, and I had a crazy moment of thinking Ernst had written to me at last. But it was from Rob Frye, another engineer, whom I barely remembered. He wanted me to know that Ernst Ringerman—he understood we had worked together some years ago—had recently passed away. He’d drowned in a river in Washington State, while he was camping by himself one weekend.

  I was sorry that my last note to Ernst had been so idiotic and sourly cheery. Ernst must have thought I’d gone over into the ranks of the resigned, the hearty cowards of domestic life. I wanted to write him a better letter. How could he be gone? He was my phantom adviser, my invisible pal. He knew things no one else knew. It was a mean trick, to have someone I’d asked so little of be dead from me.

  Only the one sister, the letter said, had come out for the funeral. He’d never married or had a dating life anyone knew about. With someone like Ernst, you had to ask yourself: When had his life ever begun? But swimming in a cool, fast-running river in the midst of a piney mountain range wasn’t the worst way to go. He might have died in Da Nang, in an ugly way no one would choose, so it was possible to see his death (in a majestic landscape, when he was no longer young) as a good enough deal, not a cheat. I tried to see it that way.

  Was it any kind of life? I, who’d respected him more than anyone did, felt disloyal even asking. I said to Toon, “He was only forty.” I could wish Ernst a better shake on the next karmic round. I could ask Toon to. Toon said, “So sorry, Toby.” I thought of the soldiers’ tagline in the war—Sorry about that—uttered in useless, cynical shame when friendly fire killed their own. And I was thinking of Jiap’s missing hand, my life’s version of accidental rain on a wrong target. Toon’s mother was afraid that kids in school were going to pick on Jiap because she was marked by this sign of bad karma. Ernst would’ve laughed himself silly at this karma crap. Toon said, “I think your friend was always glad you writing him.”

  I DIDN’T REALLY know why I missed him more once he was gone. But I had dreams about him, and I hadn’t had them before. In one he was sitting at a desk designing the atomic bomb (which he probably could’ve done if he’d been born twenty or thirty years earlier). He was explaining it to me, but I didn’t understand a single word. Nothing! When I woke up, I was sure he hadn’t been speaking English.

  Meanwhile, my daughter made her way through school. She was a graceful kid, quick by nature, and very good at takraw, a volleyball-like game mostly played without hands anyway. She could serve with her one good hand, and she swiveled and swung her leg and did pirouetting kicks and butted with her head when the rattan ball came at her. She practiced at home, to gain status with the girls who were mean to her, and Toon thought it worked, but Toon wanted to think that.

  Only Toon’s mother still fretted over Jiap, and her worry (it turned out) was that Jiap would never marry. “So what?” I said. Toon blanched, as if I’d insulted her on purpose, as if marriage were nothing to me. I tried to argue that Jiap could have a rewarding fate that did not involve pleasing males. I was suddenly the feminist in my family. Toon’s mother suggested I try to be more optimistic.

  WE HAD A BAD YEAR when Billy was twelve. He was flunking math, his best subject, out of an aggrieved boredom, which caused me to wonder why I did anything either. This was the year I went to a therapist. Toon thought this was odd on my part, and the therapist thought it was odd that I did not talk more to my wife. The therapist was American. He maybe helped a little. We could hardly afford him and he seem
ed to want to discuss why I had not stayed a well-paid engineer, was that a choice? “What if depression,” I said, “is just another penalty for a past life? What if a person with big karmic debt—who’d been a murderer, say—should just focus on making merit this time around?”

  “If only,” the therapist said.

  This answer got me so irritated that I went around finding some NGO, some Western foundation—of which there were many in Bangkok at this time—who needed an engineer to work in a refugee center or a reclamation project or some goddamn thing that needed doing in what my father used to call a world of shit. I wasn’t an engineer who knew about roads or bridges or water systems but I could become one.

  AND THAT WAS HOW I got work improving the efficiency of pit latrines and rain catchment in a slum of Bangkok, a district ever more crowded with indigent farmers come down from the northeast. Boy, did that local improvisation of a sanitation system need an overview. The hotel manager thought I was a fool to leave my job, and my kids were embarrassed when they heard what the work actually was. Toon would not let Billy go around saying I was a turd engineer, though I had made that joke myself. I thought Toon was proud of me, in her way, even though I’d managed to get yet another job with an unimpressive salary. Lek gave me dire warnings about going into that neighborhood, which I told him was safer than Miami. Miami Vice was viewable on the hotel TV then, so he thought I was tough when I said this.

  I worked with two Dutch guys I liked a good deal, and the early days were saturated with an intensity I had not been inside for a long time. I was up till all odd hours working at my calculations and my sketches. At dawn I went down to the river, where an entire group of urbanites washed their dishes and clothes and their half-wrapped selves in its murky flow. I heard the Dutchmen tell stories of other cities’ eco-messes and I chuckled knowingly, though I knew very little. How to filter the rainwater, if it was too polluted to drink? I could not sleep at night from the headiness of being useful.