What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Fan-ta,” she said in a deep voice after swallowing, then giggled. He recognized the advertising tagline from the television, something his own children imitated at home. He felt a deep pang at the thought of his children.

  “I’m looking for my friend,” he said. “The man I was here with the other night?” He lifted a hand to his head, rolled a pinch of his own hair between index finger and thumb. “Sie som. Have you seen him today? Is he in that room?” he asked.

  She looked over in the direction he indicated and shook her head.

  “No one in there now. I don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes slid away as she said it. Was she lying? She looked back at him. “You buy my bar?”

  How quickly the giggly-sweet veneer scratched off, revealing the grasping beneath. But it was only fair to pay her for her time—and talking to her would keep other girls from bothering him. He looked at his watch. Four o’clock. He didn’t need to be home for two hours. Robert pulled a bill from his wallet.

  “Only seven,” she said, looking at it.

  “Um, keep the rest,” he said.

  “Okay thank you,” she said, folding the bill into a packet and magicking it away into her dress. She took his hand, led him to a table. When they got there, he dropped her hand under the pretext of pulling out a chair for her. She smiled and perched on it, but when he took the chair opposite, she moved over to sit beside him. She drank a little more Fanta, gave a delicate orange-scented belch, then covered her mouth and broke into giggles.

  “Do you like working here? Is it hard work?” he asked. He thought of the coin dance. “I mean—” What did he mean?

  “Dance, talk, okay, easy,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “Clean floor sometime hard.”

  “You have to clean the floors?”

  “Sometime.” She mimicked gagging and put her tongue out, then grimaced, and he realized she was saying that sometimes people threw up on the floor. “Not nice.” Not naiii. A tiny frown crimped her features, then dissolved into her default smile.

  “I suppose not,” he said. He didn’t know how to ask the questions crowding into his mind, some of them stupid, all of them intrusive: Did she have to sleep with the customers? Was she sorry to have left her job with the Prestons? Across the bar, the door to the special room remained closed. “Do you have family here?” he asked.

  “Many family,” she said.

  “Do they live here in Bangkok?”

  She shook her head, pursed her lips again to suck at the straw of her soft drink, and looked up at him through her lashes. Like the other girl had done. Did they realize the seductive effect of that look, had someone taught that to them?

  The music subsided from a whining nasal solo to a number that sounded like children shouting. The dance floor livened up accordingly, became a mild mayhem of people jumping around. The dancing Robert had grown up with was partnered and orderly. Society itself then had been partnered and orderly. This chaotic dancing had come to the States before they’d left; he’d thought it a fad, something ephemeral, like the Teddy Boy craze when he was young. It didn’t seem to be passing, though, and neither did the societal havoc that accompanied it: glimpses of America from newspapers and television news clips showed a citizenry of scruffy vagrants, long tangled hair on the men as well as the women, giant puffs of hair on the black people, who now seemed to be everywhere.

  “Children how big?” Ruth said, putting a flattened hand table height, as if measuring Laura or Philip.

  “Bigger,” he said, putting his own hand out, showing Bea’s height. “Beatrice is twelve now. Sip-song.” As he said it he could hear Laura’s voice, counting while she skipped rope.

  “Sip-song,” Ruth repeated with wide disbelieving eyes, looking at Robert’s hand as if she could see the girl standing under it.

  He took out his wallet, flipped it open. “These are from last year.” Ruth leaned close against him to look. The children didn’t look like themselves in the school photos, uniformed and neatly combed and brushed. “Philip’s lost another tooth since then.”

  Ruth slipped her finger under the page, flipped it over to show Genevieve’s picture. She smiled, as though this were not the face of the woman who’d fired and forgotten her. “Beautifun,” she said. Her smile dimmed. “Mai mee khwam-suk.”

  “Excuse me?” Robert said.

  “Not happy,” said Ruth. “She not like Thailand.” With deep sympathy, as if speaking of a terrible illness. “Madame want to go home.”

  “I want to take her home,” he said forcefully. Something he had never acknowledged to Genevieve. And then he said something he had never admitted to anyone. “But I can’t.”

  * * *

  Robert had never meant to strand the family in Bangkok, and he’d certainly never intended to become a spy. Family expectation decreed that he’d go into law. His father had indulged him when he chose to attend university in the colonies, and as an undergraduate at Harvard he’d dabbled, taking anthropology classes, chemistry, engineering, knowing they didn’t matter: the endpoint would be the same.

  “You don’t have to be a lawyer,” Genevieve had said one night at dinner.

  She’d taken the bus from Wellesley, as she had done almost every Friday night since they’d met at a party more than a year before, for an early dinner at a restaurant and then a walk, sometimes a movie before he’d see her onto the return bus, back in the dorm by curfew. Wherever they went together, passing men appraised her and nodded their approval to Robert.

  “What might you like to do instead?” she said. “Quick, without thinking.”

  “I’d like to build things,” he said, surprising them both.

  He realized it was true, though; he’d enjoyed his engineering classes, and building was practical, satisfying work, delightfully lacking in nuance. A structure would fall or stand, a wall hold or crumble, each circumstance predictable, governed by physical laws.

  Genevieve was silent after the confession, and he imagined what she was thinking. A builder. How grubby it sounded. A step away from manual labor. This would likely mean the end of the Friday-night bus from Wellesley. He felt sadness, mixed with a bit of relief: finally the other shoe had dropped.

  When she put her hand on his, he realized that he had been sliding his cutlery forward and then back, adjusting by millimeters the dinner fork, the spoon, the dessert fork across the top, laboring to achieve a precisely symmetrical frame of his plate. A wave of cold shame passed over him: she had seen. He lifted his eyes to hers, was surprised to see the affection there.

  “I think the world may need builders more than it needs lawyers,” she said. And smiling: “The world certainly does not need a lawyer who wishes he were a builder.” He felt an enormous burst of love. She added in meek afterthought, dropping her eyes, “You must do what you like with your life, of course.”

  His pulse quickened; he chased her withdrawing hand with his own, trapping it. “I was hoping,” he said, “that it would be our life.”

  A long beat.

  “Well,” she said, one warm acquiescent syllable, the full blue of her gaze rising again to envelop him. “I always hoped to settle near my family in Washington.”

  That gentle push spun them together on the axis they now shared. Genevieve’s father knew someone at an architectural firm in Washington’s Dupont Circle; Robert accepted a position there as a draftsman with a good chance for advancement. In a whirl after graduation, Robert married, bought his first array of non-hand-me-down ties, his first house, his first new car. Following those chockablock accretions were the more sentimental arrivals of three children, the middle one a boy, which assuaged most of his parents’ objections to all the rest.

  Genevieve chose the house, a 1920s Tudor that stood on a small dead-end street surrounded by slightly newer upstarts. It seemed dropped into the landscape from some grander place and then forgotten, the landscaping overgrown and the double lot wild from neglect.

  When the unobtrusive man came to him, Robert was
approaching his ninth wedding anniversary. The neckties in his closet had all been chosen by his wife, the garden around the Tudor had been brought to heel, and his third child was sleeping through the night.

  He was playing absently with a Slinky, which was to be a present for his elder daughter. At the sight of the man in the doorway, Robert dropped the toy into his desk drawer and shut it quickly.

  The man didn’t acknowledge having seen the Slinky as he approached Robert’s desk, and launched a bewildering chain of questions: Was Robert happy here? Did he find the work challenging? What kinds of projects did he enjoy most?

  “You’re asking me to come work for you,” Robert interrupted as understanding dawned.

  “That’s right,” said the man.

  “Well,” said Robert, “they keep me pretty busy here.” His glance fell onto the closed drawer and his face went hot as he remembered the Slinky.

  The man nodded at the drawing on Robert’s desk. “What’s that, a bridge?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Robert.

  “You can build much more important bridges than that,” the man said. Something in the man’s voice or eyes, some hint of mockery, pricked Robert.

  “I like these bridges,” said Robert, not mentioning the sorry truth that this bridge in all likelihood would never come off the paper; he was a very junior member of the firm.

  “It is critical that everyone give their special talents in this time,” the man said.

  He didn’t need to explain what he meant by this time: It was 1968. America was at war, abroad and at home. Riots had shut down the city just a few weeks before, the arson and looting and gunfire like something from a third-world country. The fires downtown had been so extensive that the Prestons had been able to see the smoke from their house.

  “I don’t have any special talents,” said Robert.

  “Oh, but you do,” said the man. He leaned forward over the desk and dropped his voice.

  Robert listened to the man’s speech with an odd sense of nostalgia. Something about its rhythm was striking. The ellipses, the escalating content, the emphatic punch word… He recognized that the man was using a method of persuasive technique as observed by Robert himself as an undergraduate, nearly a decade before.

  “You’ve read my senior thesis,” Robert interrupted.

  “I have.”

  Robert knew that a copy of “The Elements of Persuasion,” the linguistic study of argument that had won him honors and capped a small flourish onto an otherwise unremarkable academic career, had been bound and added to the stacks in the great campus library along with all the other theses. He had never imagined that anyone might go in search of it, might find and open it with a crack of age-stiffened crimson leather. He wasn’t even sure where his own copy was; perhaps in one of the boxes in a basement storage room of the Tudor, nestled among the softening sheaves of paper, the handwritten notes and forgotten syllabi and other detritus of a liberal arts education.

  “Is this about Columbia?” Robert asked. Perhaps they wanted him to help with negotiations in the student protest that was currently making headlines.

  “Bigger than that,” said the man, and Robert understood.

  “I don’t want to go to war,” said Robert.

  “You’re already at war,” the man said. “Every American is.”

  “My father is English,” said Robert. “I spent my youth in England.” Not meaning it wholly as it sounded, as a sniffy disclaimer of responsibility for the current antics of the colonies, but yes, partly exactly that.

  “But you are American,” said the man, his voice sharp. “Courtesy of your American mother.”

  “I have wonky knees.”

  “We don’t need your knees,” said the man. “We have plenty of knees.” He looked furious. Robert had seen the television images, everyone had: the parachutists jumping from airplanes, brown mushrooms scattered against the sky. “We should already have won this war.”

  “Are we losing?” Robert spoke with incredulity. America didn’t lose wars. No matter what dismal statistics appeared in the news, victory was inevitable. Everyone knew that.

  “It’s not a fair fight,” said the man, sounding defensive. “They don’t even wear uniforms most of the time. They hide from us like rats. They’ve built whole cities underground, grandmothers digging with teaspoons.” His jaw was grim. “Ordinary warfare won’t win against them.” His unblinking eyes on Robert. “We need a different kind of weapon. We need you.”

  “I know very little about guns,” said Robert.

  The man’s expression changed fractionally, as if he were adjusting his original estimate of Robert’s intelligence. “I’m not talking about guns.” He hesitated, then said, “You must not share anything of what you are about to see and hear.”

  Robert nodded, and the man took something from his inside jacket pocket, held it hidden in his palm. Robert had the wild thought Grenade? He had no time to do anything but clench his teeth and squint a wince before the click. But no explosion came: Instead the room filled with an unearthly noise. Hooting and wailing, creaking and moaning. Robert’s heart paused, then gave one giant beat, and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  Another click and the noise stopped; the man returned the unseen device to his pocket.

  “What the hell was that?” said Robert.

  “A psychological weapon,” the man said, with not a little relish at Robert’s expression. A psychological weapon: the phrase made no sense.

  “I mean the thing in your hand,” said Robert. It had to be a recording device of some kind, but any tape recorder he’d ever seen was far too large to be hidden in a person’s hand. Reel-to-reel tapes were the size of a briefcase; even the recently introduced compact cassette tape player was far too large to fit into a pocket.

  “Never mind that,” said the man, irritated. “The sound you just heard is the weapon.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Robert.

  “There’s a Vietnamese superstition that if a person dies and is not buried near his home, his soul will suffer and wander forever. We took Vietnamese funeral music and added voices to it, the spirits of wandering souls, urging soldiers to go home and save themselves from the same terrible fate.” Robert hadn’t heard any words, just unintelligible moans. “First we pop off a tiara grenade—a canister of phosphorescent marker gas—and then deploy the recording. It’s an incredible effect.”

  “Does it work?” said Robert.

  The man looked aggrieved. “It enrages them,” he admitted. “It makes them shoot the hell out of everything.”

  Of course they would shoot, thought Robert. Even if they believed in the spirits, they weren’t stupid enough to shoot at the spirits themselves. They’d shoot at the enemy who had brought them. I could do so much better than that, he thought, surprising himself.

  “We’ve tried guns and bombs,” said the man. “We’ve tried fear. We’ve dropped enough chemicals to make the whole country bald. I think we need a new tactic. I think we need to try to persuade them.” A pause. “And you’re uniquely suited.”

  Robert understood that all he had to do was say no. He had no reason to change anything about his life; he was on a good path, a gradual climb to a comfortable career plateau, fifteen or twenty years of that before retirement. He opened his lips to say no and put an end to this strange conversation.

  And then he realized with a stab of alarm that if he said no, that might well be the end of it. In another few years, this crisis would be over. No one would be interested in his unique suitability or his potential then. He would no longer have potential then; he would have become the thing he was doing, and the nondescript path he had chosen on a blind impulse, into which he had settled as a consequence of inertia, would be the only path he ever saw.

  “I wouldn’t have to kill anybody,” Robert said, the question mark faint at the end of the statement. A triumphant light appeared in the other man’s eyes.

  “There is always k
illing in a war,” the man said. With a short mirthless laugh, he added, “But no. You wouldn’t have to do it.” He added casually, “You would have to move to Asia, but that’s no hardship: year-round summer, all the pineapple you can eat. Paradise.”

  “I have children,” said Robert. “Three small children.”

  “They’ll be quite safe,” said the man. “You’ll be living in a different country entirely, far away from any actual fighting. Safer than here.” With a glance at the window, where the horizon still smoked. “We can brief you on enemy culture, and you’ll find the weak points and devise ways to penetrate them. Depending on how well you do, things should wrap up in a year.”

  “What would I tell my wife?”

  “You could tell her the truth,” said the man. “Or,” he amended quickly, seeing Robert’s expression, “you might tell her that your company’s taken on a humanitarian project, building a dam in the north of Thailand. We can arrange it to look that way.”

  With surprisingly little difficulty the family relocated across the world to a rental home near the center of Bangkok, with a swimming pool and a large garden all surrounded by a high wall. As the unobtrusive man had promised, Robert did not have to do any actual killing; he toiled instead in a penumbra outside the conflict, unstained by the frankness of blood. The work wasn’t as glamorous as he been led to expect by the unobtrusive man’s flattering speech. Robert was a small cog in a machine, one he never saw the whole of: he made minor innovations on established projects or smartened up already-written text. But the other promises held: there was plenty of pineapple to eat in the perpetual summer, and his children did seem safe.

  Genevieve didn’t question the cover story, that the engineering firm had lent Robert to the government project for a year; she pronounced it a good barter, a year abroad for a career advance, and she threw herself into the planning. She thought of details he would never have considered, down to the five light sweaters she packed into her suitcase, three of them sized for the children’s estimated growth by year’s end. To wear on the airplane home, she’d said. Who knows if you can even buy a sweater over there.