by Reif Larsen
Eugenia, whose health had begun to decline but whose energy had not, spent her days painting the same Paphiopedilum appletonianum orchid plant. She had set up her easel and paints in the old telegraph room, and though Jean-Baptiste thought it ridiculous that she would squeeze herself into the smallest room in the house when they had so much space at their disposal, Eugenia claimed the tightness of the quarters gave her an urgency that she translated onto the canvas. She was prolific in her output: some days she would produce three or four paintings of the flower, all wildly different, all exactly the same. The paintings began accumulating in the warehouse, next to the racks of latex—shelves and shelves of the same blossom, repeated in every imaginable color, its two sagittal petals outstretched in greeting or malice, depending upon the canvas. When he gave a tour of the plantation to the rare visitor, Jean-Baptiste liked to joke to their guests that they were in the business of modern art making, merely amusing themselves now and then with some light rubber production. This was not far from the truth. More than one visitor left with a surreal orchid rendition tucked beneath his arm—whether out of guilt, appreciation, or morbid fascination, it was never clear.
• • •
“I’LL NEED A VAT of rubber,” Jean-Baptiste informed the Capitaine one day. “About seventy-five liters.”
“Seventy-five? That will take a couple of days . . . weeks, maybe.”
“Is this not a rubber plantation? Are we not supposed to have rubber in bountiful supply?”
“Well, yes . . .” Renoit seemed embarrassed. “We’ll see what we can scare up. May I ask what you will be using it for?”
“To make a rubber mold.”
“Of what?”
“Of myself,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I’m making a dummy. For medical purposes.”
The first rubber mannequins to emerge were white, grotesque beings with elephantine arms and strange leaks spilling from their hips. The clay that Jean-Baptiste was using for a cast could not hold the heated rubber; it seeped and bubbled and broke free from its confines. After this failure, he sent away for a bronzed mold of himself to be made in a navy foundry in Saigon. A month later, he received the molding, along with a note:
Très joli corps. Je l’épouserais volontiers. X
The bronze worked magnificently. He finally managed to find the right mixture of rubber and solution to give the mannequin a lifelike texture. When he made his first fully formed being, it was as if he had given birth. Jean-Baptiste painted the body white, then filled in the details of the face, taking care to get the coloring of the lips just right. For some reason, the lips suggested life more than any other aspect. Once the being had life, he went about giving it death: he painted on the telltale burns and lesions resulting from radiation poisoning. He wrote up a key for the mannequin, explaining each manner of wound, each degree of burn in relation to the amount of radiation exposure. He made four of them, each more convincing than the last, and then sent these radioactive dummies to four of the major French hospitals in the colonies.
“In the event you should have a case of acute radiation syndrome,” he wrote. “These models will instruct you on the symptoms of exposure. They are my gift to your institution.”
He did not have to wait long for a reply. The hospitals wrote back quickly, thanking him for his dummies, effusive about their usefulness. In fact, all four—plus the teaching hospital in Saigon—requested more mannequins, but would he mind not decorating them with any symptoms? The hospitals wanted them for more general purposes, and plain white dummies would suffice.
Jean-Baptiste had found a new calling. The dying plantation briefly came to life again as the source of the region’s rubber medical mannequins. A small force of the workers, including Tien, were trained in casting the mannequins and painting on a face that vaguely resembled a sleepy Jean-Baptiste. Every month, the piles of bone-white bodies were loaded onto a boat that floated down the Mekong with its curious cargo, inspiring strange legends in the villages of a white sorcerer turning men into dolls—particularly after one boat capsized and the dummies were found floating in the river for weeks afterwards. The mannequin trade proved fleeting, however, for soon the hospitals claimed they had enough, that in fact they had too many; they had dummies coming out of the closets, and they were getting in the way of the live patients. Please, they wrote, would he cease and desist his shipments, for the safety of everyone involved? Reluctantly, Jean-Baptiste put the production plans on hold and La Seule Vérité slipped back into its eddy.
Sometimes, in the early evening, before the night grew too thick, Renoit, Eugenia, and Jean-Baptiste would congregate wordlessly in the living room and play a few records on the phonograph. After a few minutes it was always necessary for someone to get up (usually Eugenia, oddly, since she was the only one who could not hear the music) and fan the revolving vinyl so that the record would not warp and melt in the heat. After a while, even she stopped attending to the apparatus, and eventually the records began to melt, one by one, the music evaporating into a nighttime chorus of crickets.
5
Tofte-Jebsen sums it up nicely: “The child, as only a child can do, changed everything in an instant” (122).
After Tien had turned over the baby and left with the other men for the afternoon collection, Renoit and Jean-Baptiste sat on the veranda, sipping the remarkable cognac and staring at the tiny infant. They had placed him in a fruit bowl, because they did not know where else to put him. Perhaps sensing a shift in the mood, Eugenia shuffled outside from her telegraph studio and saw the baby squirming among the tangerines.
“What is that?” she signed.
“That? That’s a baby,” said Jean-Baptiste. “A human baby,” he added.
“To whom does he belong?” She carefully lifted the child into her arms.
“He’s mine, apparently,” said Jean-Baptiste.
“He’s sick,” she signed to him with one hand. “Where did he come from?”
“From there.” Jean-Baptiste pointed to the rubber trees. Or the sky. It was not clear.
“He’s going to die, you know,” said Renoit. “I wouldn’t get too attached. It will only lead to suffering.”
“We’re all going to die.”
“Touché, my friend,” Renoit said, conducting a finger through the heat. “She is brief, this life, and then she leaves us when she realizes her mistake.”
“What shall I call him?” Jean-Baptiste asked.
“Something native,” said Renoit. “Something easily said and easily forgotten.”
“André,” Eugenia said aloud.
Jean-Baptiste was briefly caught off guard by hearing the name of the patriarch spoken in his mother’s curious, flattened speech. André.
He shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “Raksmey.”
“Raksmey?” said Renoit. “Isn’t that a woman’s name?”
“There was a student named Raksmey. Leila often spoke of him. I believe it means ‘ray of light.’”
“Ray of light?”
“He needs a doctor,” Eugenia signed. “I’ll get on the wireless and summon Dr. Moreau.”
“Raksmey de Broglie?” said Renoit.
“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” said Jean-Baptiste.
“Are you listening to me?” Eugenia signed.
“Anything can sound right if you say it enough,” Renoit laughed. “The French have learned this over many years.”
“Then he’ll be Raksmey Raksmey,” said Jean-Baptiste. “He came from himself.”
He looked around for the subject in question, but the baby had already disappeared with Eugenia into the coolness of the great hall.
• • •
FOR THE FIRST WEEK, the child did not eat. Bound to the fate of his discovery, Tien came by every morning to check on Raksmey’s progress. On the third day, he arrived bearing a cradle that he and the others had fashioned from
rubber wood. Leila’s old dressing room, unused for years, was hastily converted into a makeshift nursery. Suong came in the mornings with her cousin to breast-feed the infant, but he still would not take her milk.
“He won’t survive,” she said. “He doesn’t want this world. He’s waiting for the next.”
Yet he did not die. He did not eat, but he did not die. He persisted—a silent newt, wriggling, only now and then emitting his shrieking whistle that raised goose bumps and brought everyone in the house to a standstill. Who was this creature? And from where had he come?
Eugenia’s bond with the little one was instantaneous and deep. She slept beside him on a rickety cot and connected a string between his ankle and the first knuckle of her pinkie. When she felt a tug in the darkness, she would come to him and hum songs without pitch, deep songs, songs that slept in the marrow of her bones. Her previous indifference to Leila’s infecundity melted away as her heart was thawed by that peculiarly intimate distance of grandparenthood. It was true: all she had wanted was this.
“At some point during the first of those long nights,” writes Tofte-Jebsen, “with the string stretched taut between them, the question of who Raksmey Raksmey belonged to, a question that would linger on in the patronymic repetition of his name, became irrelevant. He was theirs. He was hers. He was all she had” (123).
The child floundered at the brink of death’s door, and Jean-Baptiste lost his lifelong ability to sleep soundly through the night. When he did manage to doze off, he found himself dreaming of Bohr inside that humid Copenhagen pub, drops of condensation swelling and descending upon them. Bohr, who had finally escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark in the middle of the war, who had fled to America, where he reluctantly consulted with Oppenheimer on the bomb that was to be dropped halfway across the world, thirty-five hundred kilometers northeast of La Seule Vérité on a bustling port city in southern Japan shaped like the tail of a bird. Jean-Baptiste thought he had felt his teacup tremble that day, felt the earth wobble and wander on its axis. What had gone through Bohr’s mind when he heard the news? When he saw the images of shirts burned into backs, of faces removed, of the miles and miles and miles of torn wood and concrete rubble? Of the single domed building at the epicenter that had somehow managed to survive the godly forces at work? What had he thought then? That the hands of men had banished indeterminacy? That from that point forth, nothing would be left to chance? Once again, we had become the masters of our own world. There was nothing we could not know.
Or maybe he had thought: Now we can know nothing.
One night he was awoken from one of these dreams—of Bohr, of mushroom clouds, of what exactly he could not remember—by the child’s cries. He went to the nursery and found Eugenia still asleep. The string had fallen from Raksmey’s ankle. He thought of waking his mother but instead went to the baby, scooped up all of that uncertainty with both hands. The baby fell quiet. He could feel its warmth, feel its breath against his neck. He thought: This boy is breathing. This boy is alive. One day he will become a man like me. And it was then that the idea first came to him. He held the baby and walked out to the veranda and listened to the insects calling open the night. A flash of heat lightning. He brought a finger to the child’s cheek. Raksmey. Raksmey Raksmey. The idea circling in his mind. After a while, he returned his son to the nursery, retied the string, and fell back into a restless sleep, believing the idea would fade into the darkness.
Except that when he awoke the next morning, the idea was still there. It lingered. And grew. He was haunted by its possibility. He could not look at the child without being consumed by everything that could be done. He paced the veranda, sweating, mumbling beneath his breath. So taken was he that he could not sleep a wink the following night. He knew that the window to make such a decision was narrow, that time was already being wasted, and so the next evening he went to the hilltop where Leila lay beside his father and his grandfather and watched as the first stars appeared. He asked for his wife’s permission. He did not say anything aloud, but asked in his mind. He waited. He heard nothing. Felt nothing. There was no one there. Just him and the stars, emergent. It was enough.
Jean-Baptiste hurried back to his study. Under the light of a single candle, he wrote the following on a sheet of La Seule Vérité letterhead.
I, Jean-Baptiste de Broglie, on this date, 27 August 1953, do hereby declare my intentions for the child Raksmey Raksmey, found on the property of the rubber plantation La Seule Vérité in the French Protectorate and Kingdom of Cambodia:
1) If the child survives, it shall be my ambition to train and nurture him with a singular goal: to become Cambodia’s first native quantum physicist, in the humanist mold of Niels Bohr. This will be an exercise in testing the boundaries of predetermination, and, while being far from conclusive on the absolute nature of free will, shall at least form a body of evidence that will allow us to debate what is bound to chance and what can be dictated a priori.
2) To this end, I shall document my raising of him henceforth in the utmost detail, the sum of which I hope will provide a valuable resource for future researchers. Every bit of input—be it gastronomic, intellectual, or spiritual—shall be entered into the ledger. Time will tell if this equation will eventually lead to the output of a physicist—not just a meddling scientist, but a great one, one who changes the very course of history.
Signed and witnessed by me alone,
JBdB 9/3/195312
He creased the paper twice with his thumb and sealed it inside an envelope using the plantation’s wax stamp. He then placed the envelope into a carved wooden box that he hid beneath a loose floorboard. He went to bed that night and slept soundly for the first time in days.
Jean-Baptiste decided to tell no one of his intentions; he only let Eugenia know that he would be keeping a detailed journal of the child’s behavior.
“His behavior? How can you think about such things when we don’t even know if he will survive?” she signed.
“We all have our ways,” he said. In his notebook, he entered:
09:04, R.R. REFUSES MILK, FLEXES TOES.
The following morning, Tien brought the kru Khmer over to the house. To both of the men’s surprise, Eugenia embraced the shaman.
“Please help us,” she said aloud. “Please.”
She turned to Tien. “Thank you,” she said.
He bowed. When he looked at her again, there were tears in his eyes.
The kru Khmer determined that the baby’s wind had grown cold from a premature birth. He was trying to grow smaller so that he might be able to crawl back into the womb. The forces inside him must be warmed, to reverse this trend and encourage the child to start eating the food of this world. This was done with a hot green liquid smeared across his body and a single needle, exposed to the heat of a flame and then plunged into the bottom of his neck, just above the small lump of his seventh cervical vertebra. Eugenia, clearly taken aback at the sight of the piercing, did not protest. A prayer was intoned. Incense lit. More prayers. Another coin was produced, this time of ambiguous origin, and rubbed in spirals down the child’s back. From somewhere outside, a monkey squawked in surprise. The smoke from the incense shivered and righted itself again.
All of this was recorded in Jean-Baptiste’s little black book. Life happened twice: once in real time and again in the book.
The next day, the child took Suong’s breast into his mouth and began to nurse. This, too, was noted. Eugenia, previously never one for celebration, hiked up her skirts and began to dance with her son in circles, her old body flush with new life.
The kru Khmer returned, but unnecessarily so. The sickness had been lifted. Raksmey grew stronger; his skin shifted from yellow to a shimmering light brown. By the third week, he had gained a voice and begun to cry like a normal infant, on average 16.5 times a day, Jean-Baptiste noted. He also noted at what point Raksmey could follow a finger across his field of vision
(2.5 months), at what point the baby could recognize movement and then a specific object at ten feet (3.5 months), fifteen feet (3.9 months), and twenty-five feet (4 months). He recorded precisely when Raksmey sat without aid (6.2 months), gained independent dexterity of his limbs (7.3 months), began to crawl (9.8 months), stood without assistance (12.5 months), and then began to walk (13.9 months).
He bought an unwieldy German reel-to-reel Magnetophon left over from the Japanese occupation and recorded hours of Raksmey’s sounds. High-pitched squeals, exploratory ohs, and wet, boneless words, not unlike his grandmother’s speech. All of these he categorized according to frequency, length, vowel type. Using this data, he created a massive wall chart of Raksmey’s preverbal musings, a flowing sea of intonation. The chart would survive until the very last days of La Seule Vérité.13
Fig. 4.5. “R.R. Sounds & Noise, 0.5–1.5 years”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 588
When he was not recording, Jean-Baptiste would sit and read to Raksmey from the great novels of his youth. Les Misérables. A Tale of Two Cities. Gulliver’s Travels. When he felt the narratives were growing too fantastical, he would switch to papers on quantum mechanics, though often he could barely grasp what he was reading himself.
“Why read to him like this?” Eugenia signed. “I can understand more than he can, and I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
“Information is conserved,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Everything I say finds its way in there, and everything that goes in will eventually come out. We may not fully understand it yet, but I’m convinced that nothing can be lost.”
“The child cannot even speak!”
“Speech is not a prerequisite for comprehension. I think you, of all people, would be the first to agree.”
“If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that comprehension is not an idea, it’s an act,” she signed, her hands shimmering back and forth. “You must be able to use what you understand.”