I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  “Can I go out and play?”

  “Complete your experiments first,” said Jean-Baptiste, shaking his head. “You can make a lion out of words, you know. More powerful than any beast in the jungle.”

  “Yes, Papa,” said Raksmey.

  The years passed, marked only by the notches in the trees and the cyclical monsoons that broke the heat for three months every year. Eugenia’s vision began to fade and Jean-Baptiste fell and broke his ankle, which slowed him considerably. He and Renoit would limp around the plantation and bicker at each other. In other ways, time stood still at La Seule Vérité, as it always seemed to do. Tofte-Jebsen puts it rather elegantly: “If you stared at a river long enough, you started to believe that the water, and not the earth, was the one true thing” (160).

  Much to Jean-Baptiste’s delight, Raksmey began to show a natural inclination for the sciences, moving through advanced textbooks with ease. Their science lessons were conducted in Jean-Baptiste’s basement laboratory, the same laboratory that had housed his many failed experiments. Raksmey, unlike his father—who was impatient and often allowed his mind to wander—was a born experimentalist. The two of them took up Jean-Baptiste’s old radiation research, dusting off the jars of radium, even building a linear particle accelerator that utilized new superconductive technologies Raksmey had discovered in a science journal. While his father had been interested primarily in documenting radiation’s destructive effects, Raksmey became fixated on the beneficial powers of the radiation beam in decreasing tumor size. His methods were much more disciplined than Jean-Baptiste’s—there was always a control, always a second and third retrial, even if the results were favorable. In short, he was not just curious—he was a scientist. After a while, Raksmey was making observations about radiation treatment that Jean-Baptiste had never come close to considering, tuning frequency, wavelength, and fractionation to the specific types of cancerous tissues. Jean-Baptiste noted each of Raksmey’s discoveries in his notebook, and next to one he could not help writing an overeager underline: Ça se passe.

  Still, everything that Raksmey did, even if procedurally defined by great discipline, was also inflected by a sleepy indifference, a weary adherence to the rules, as if he were performing for an audience that had not shown up. He would go about his work with quick, precise movements, but there would be no joy on his face, no excitement at the possibility of discovery.

  Jean-Baptiste also noticed that Raksmey had a habit of whispering to himself while he worked. Eventually he realized that Raksmey was actually communicating with Rasey, who had not been banished by the blossoming of Raksmey’s intellect, but instead had morphed into a subtle, constant presence, a benign sounding board of knowledge. Watching his son move with equal parts meticulosity and insouciance, Jean-Baptiste found himself oscillating between awe, frustration, and jealousy, as if Raksmey knew a secret that none of them were in on.

  “Do you enjoy this?” he finally asked his son one day. Having donned lead smocks, they were exposing a rat’s splenic tumor to radiation from Raksmey’s linear accelerator while modulating the degree of fractionation by quarter steps.

  “Enjoy what?” Raksmey asked, intent on aligning the beam.

  “The lab? Our work? Science?”

  “What is it, Papa?” Raksmey looked up. “Have I done something wrong?”

  “No. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just want to know your desire. What do you want to be?”

  “I want to be like you.”

  “No, you don’t. You have a much better chance than I do.”

  “Chance for what?”

  Jean-Baptiste sighed. “Maybe it’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “For you to go away.”

  “Away?”

  “To school.”

  “Are you angry with me, Papa?”

  “I fear I can no longer give you what you need.”

  “Papa!”

  Raksmey ran to his father and hugged him. Their embrace, weighed down by the clumsiness of their lead aprons, felt oddly disembodied. Later, Jean-Baptiste would comb through his notebooks and confirm what he had suspected in that moment: it was the first time he had ever hugged his son. He had no rational explanation for this, only that maintaining the necessary distance between the observer and the observed—the fact that he always carried notebook and pencil in hand so as to be ready to capture life’s spontaneities (like an embrace) in real time—had prevented him from actually embracing his son in real time. He did not note this absence in his notebook.

  The rest of that day, Raksmey was unusually quiet, glumly stalking through the house. In the afternoon, Jean-Baptiste saw Tien and Raksmey paddling across the river to their island.

  “What did you say to him?” Eugenia signed.

  “That it might be time for him to go to school.”

  “To school? But you were against sending him to the lycée!”

  “Not just any school. To Saigon. To my school. They’ve changed the name to Collège René Descartes, but it’s still the same place.”

  “Saigon?” she said aloud. “Is it safe?”

  “Of course it’s safe. It’s Saigon.”

  “The Americans have moved in.”

  “The Americans will make it safe.”

  “The French did not make it safe.”

  “The French are fools. The Americans are much more practical.”

  “You really think they are any different from us?”

  Jean-Baptiste, caught in the quicksand of his thoughts, did not respond.

  At dinner that night, Raksmey broke his silence.

  “I’ll go,” he said. “I want to go.”

  Eugenia let her soup spoon clatter into her saucer. She flipped her hands on the edge of the table, palms down, a gesture that could’ve meant “stay,” or “death,” or nothing at all.

  “It’s for the best, I think,” said Jean-Baptiste, nodding. “You’ve outgrown us. Sooner than I thought. They have resources that we don’t have here.”

  Raksmey was staring at his grandmother, who was staring at her hands.

  “Will I make friends?” he asked.

  “Of course you’ll make friends,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Everyone makes friends someday.”

  “But what if they don’t like me?”

  “The only reason they wouldn’t like you is if they’re jealous of you.”

  Eugenia abruptly got up from the table and left the room.

  “Did I say something?” said Raksmey.

  “She’ll miss you. She doesn’t have much in her life, and when you leave she’ll be alone again.”

  “You’ll be here.”

  “It’s true. Sometimes I forget about me.”

  Raksmey was quiet. Then he said: “Tien said the world is a big and small place.”

  “Did he?”

  “He said as soon as you think you’ve seen everything, you realize there’s much more to see and you’ll never see it all. And as soon as you think you’ll never see anything, you realize everything’s the same,” he paused. “Is that true?”

  “Tien can be a wise man when he wants to be,” said Jean-Baptiste.

  “But he said he’s never left here. So how does he know all of this?”

  6

  There were no openings at Collège René Descartes.

  “But in the tropics,” writes Tofte-Jebsen, “no never means no” (173). Given Jean-Baptiste’s unique legacy as one of the school’s best pupils, and given his generous offer to fund a new library, the rector was able to make an exception and set aside a place for Raksmey Raksmey de Broglie. (The last name had been added on the forms to gently remind the administration of his heritage.)

  Inquiries were also made about the safety of the journey down the Mekong. News of the security situation, received from boatmen and garbled reports
over the wireless, was unreliable and dependent on whoever was doing the reporting. There had been rumors of government instability since President Ngo Dinh Diem’s assassination the previous year, of American planes dropping bombs in the north, of Chinese troops amassing at the Laotian border, of Vietnamese Communists attacking monks, of Khmer insurgents attacking supply routes—but then, there had always been rumors. If repeated often enough, a rumor could become truth; if repeated still more, the news would drift back into the uncertain realm of rumor. “Reality,” Tofte-Jebsen wrote in a 1976 letter to Orientering, “has little bearing on truth; truth is instead a confluence of time and story.”14

  It was decided that they would all make the trip together, as both Eugenia and Jean-Baptiste realized they had not left La Seule Vérité in the decade since Raksmey’s arrival. Eugenia, who had just turned seventy-nine, was not in particularly good health, and Jean-Baptiste thought she should stay behind, but she would not hear of it. She insisted on seeing Raksmey delivered safely from the jungles with her own eyes. Secretly, she also wanted to revisit the city of her childhood one last time so that she could make a kind of peace with it. Her parents were long dead; her sisters, having left for Paris decades before, were also dead. The city was not the same city that had tortured her so, but she still wanted it to see her, to see how she had survived and outlived them all. She thus requested that they stay at the Hôtel Continental, her family’s old establishment, now under the ownership of a shady Corsican mafioso and renamed the Continental Palace.

  At the docks on the morning of their departure, Tien held Raksmey close. He pressed something into his hand and bowed to the little boy, who solemnly returned the gesture.

  “Rak,” he said.

  “Rak,” Raksmey agreed.

  When they were on the boat, Raksmey signed to Eugenia, “Rasey is staying here with Tien so he won’t get lonely.”

  As they made their way down the huge, muddy river, weaving past nameless islands, the channels splitting and splitting and coming together again, Raksmey spent the entire trip perched on the bow, watching the landscape slip past. He saw workers hunched thigh deep in rice fields, herds of weary, low-backed buffalo, men tossing nets into the shallows, packs of children waving frantically as they passed. It was his country, yet he had never seen it. He knew the half-life of radium 225, but he did not know the curves of the Mekong, the scent of rotting cassava, the sweeping glint of sunlight across the floodplains of Kampong Cham. Hundreds of villages dotting the vast basin. Specks of people fanning out across the paddies, swaying against the heat of a flickering horizon. A long, spindly bamboo bridge filled with bicyclists and women with fruit on their heads. Raksmey asked no questions, merely watched, the faintest of smiles hanging on his lips, the spray from the river occasionally leaping over the bow and wetting his brow.

  They reached the wonder of Phnom Penh in the late afternoon. The ringed spires of the wats and the Royal Palace rose through the thin layer of smoky sweat that hung across the city. The smell of something metallic and unburnable, burning nonetheless. After docking their boat, they shuffled through the throngs amassed along the riverfront to a four-story guesthouse on the boulevard near the place where the Tonle Sap spilled out into the Mekong.

  That evening, Raksmey held fast to Eugenia’s hand on the way to the restaurant as bicycles and motos sped past, clipping at their heels. Having known only the rhythm of the rubber trees, he was paralyzed into a kind of awed silence by this swarm of fluctuating humanity. There were more people here on a single street than he had seen in his entire life. Hawkers wielding dripping pig heads yelled out prices to an indifferent crowd. A boy, not much younger than Raksmey, tore by them after a loose chicken, diving beneath a car to snatch at the terrified bird. Loud pop music played from an open window. A crowd of young monks in orange robes enveloped them and then moved silently on: an oasis of calm amid the urban hustle.

  “What do you hear?” Eugenia signed to him as they wound through the city.

  Raksmey closed his eyes to listen, and promptly tripped over a curb.

  “Careful,” Jean-Baptiste said. “In a place like this, you must keep your eyes open. Always open.”

  Raksmey stopped, listening. He tried to pick out one sound, but there was simply too much.

  “I hear everything,” he signed to Eugenia. Then: “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Yes,” she signed. “I know what you mean.”

  Later he sat at the window of their guesthouse, staring at the twinkle of streetlamps. A lone firework exploded above the river. Someone moaned from another room. Cars honked and zipped by along the boulevard. The scent of spilled gasoline wafted up from below. Next to the window, a strip of sticky flypaper whispered in the breeze. A fly had recently gotten stuck and was buzzing loudly in short, frequent intervals.

  “There’s so much,” said Raksmey.

  “Try to get some sleep,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Tomorrow will be even longer.”

  “It’s funny to think this place was here this whole time,” said Raksmey, touching the trapped fly.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, they departed before dawn, pushing out into a misty river that prevented them from seeing more than half a kilometer ahead. Soon the fog burned off, but the current—unsettled by some unseen force—became choppier. The river appeared to be flowing both ways, so their progress was slow and laborious. At one point they rounded a bend and came across a Buddhist wat in flames, the temple rippling against the jungle heat, the monks running to the river for water.

  “What happened?” Raksmey asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jean-Baptiste.

  When the monks saw their boat, they began to jump up and down, calling out for help.

  “We should help them,” said Raksmey. He looked down and saw ash floating on the surface of the river. A half-burnt page.

  Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “We can do nothing.”

  “Why?”

  But his father gave no answer.

  After an eternity, the river opened and parted into the salamander islands of the delta. They passed clusters of floating markets teeming with long-tail boats, bunches of fish hanging from their sterns. They passed a large container ship that had become beached on a sandbar, its crew lazily playing cards on the deck. One of the men formed an imaginary gun with his hand, aimed, and shot at Raksmey as they went by.

  Finally, as the sun began to sink behind them, they could see it: the place where all things went, the great expanse of the South China Sea.

  Raksmey turned to his grandmother. “You cannot see the end,” he signed.

  “We must have faith,” she signed. “If there was no end, then all of the water would flow out and the ocean would be empty.”

  The wind picked up. It began to rain. They sought shelter in the boat’s little cabin, listening to the raindrops hammer at the thin metal roof. Raksmey curled up in Eugenia’s lap and quickly fell asleep to the lull of the motor and the roll of the waves against the hull. A leak from the roof began dripping onto Eugenia’s head, but she did not move, fearing she would disturb the child. The water collected and ran down her neck. She put her hand on the bulb of his cheek and smoothed his hair.

  “Little one,” she signed against his skin. “How do you say goodbye?”

  Hampered by a steady headwind and a whipping rain that increased in intensity as they worked their way up the coast, they arrived in Saigon late that night, cold and hungry, caught in the middle of a tropical downpour. It was too late to head to the collège as planned, so they hurriedly loaded their luggage into the back of a tuk-tuk, clambered into another, and directed this little caravan directly to the hotel.

  Much was as Eugenia remembered it from her youth, though the facade now read CONTINENTAL PALACE in an art deco sans serif and the street signs were all in Vietnamese, an attempt by the state to shed the language of its colonizers.
They stood, waterlogged, in the bright white-marble lobby, blinking at the legacy of Pierre Cazeau’s audacity. A group of American officers emerged from the elevator, holding their hats in their hands. One of them delivered a punch line and the rest burst into laughter.

  “This is where your grandmother grew up,” said Jean-Baptiste. “She was high society.”

  “High society?” Raksmey repeated. “What’s this?”

  Eugenia wobbled, steadied herself, and then tumbled over their luggage and onto the floor.

  “Grandma!” Raksmey yelled.

  The American officers came rushing over to help.

  “I’m fine,” she signed, shooing them away. “It’s been a long trip.”

  They did not understand her signs, so they lifted her up and placed her in a plush chair next to a palm plant. She was annoyed at all the attention, but her face had drained of its color and she’d begun to shiver uncontrollably.

  “Someone should call a doctor,” one of the officers said loudly.

  “I’ll do it!” yelled another.

  “Does she speak English?” asked another.

  “She does not speak. She’s deaf,” Jean-Baptiste said in English.

  “Deaf, eh? My old lady’s deaf,” said the officer. “Selectively deaf.”

  “Let’s get you upstairs, Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “You shouldn’t have come to Saigon.”

  “I’m fine,” she said aloud, but her voice quavered, and she did not protest when a bellhop brought over a wheelchair.

  When they got her into the room, it was discovered that she was already running a high fever. The doctor arrived, bearing pills and a hot water bottle. Swaddled inside the blankets, a shell of herself, Eugenia was too weak to complain.

  Raksmey sat by her bed, staring at his grandmother, lying prone beneath a headboard of two ornamental dragons locked in combat.

  Eugenia moved her hands from beneath the covers. “Don’t look so worried,” she signed. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Your father owned this hotel?” he signed.