The Size of the World
Page 25
I WAS A LODGER in Pearl’s bed again, and we lay awake at night talking about Lincoln. “He could have come out of this in a lot more terrible shape,” I said.
“You didn’t see the hospital,” she said. “You think I don’t know?”
It was the hospital that had undone her, and it was a decent hospital, clean enough, with okay nurses. The massiveness of it had been its horror, as far as I could tell, the floors upon floors of other people’s sons.
“You think you know things but you just know your own little corner,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
LINCOLN HAD DEVELOPED a new sentimental fondness for American TV (he spent hours watching Laugh-In and reruns of Rawhide) and he ate nonstop, which we thought was good. At his request, I made crusty pans of mac and cheese and tuna noodle casserole. He hadn’t really eaten that with Pearl, but he certainly wasn’t going near any chicken feet or jellyfish now. He said he hated the smell of sesame oil, and pushed away the stir-fried beef with green onion that Pearl brought home. “Just don’t,” he said. “Don’t bring it anywhere near me.”
Okay, okay. Whatever he wanted. My sister Corinna, who phoned when she could, said, “He wants to be home. Not tasting Asia.” I got along better with Corinna these days. “So he’s not like me,” Corinna said. “Always wanting to be two places at once.”
I MADE EFFORTS not to get in Lincoln’s way those first weeks. But sometimes he wanted company. He’d hover around me in the kitchen or he’d ask what I was reading. We were the two unemployed males in the house. When I said I was going for a walk on the beach, he said he wanted to go with me.
Ocean Beach was foggy and cold, with the shoreline smell of brine and drying kelp. We looked out into the silver-gray water, toward the jagged shape of Seal Rock. Lincoln could walk on the sand with his crutch, but not well, so we just stood gazing.
“You used to have money,” Lincoln said. “They took your money away?”
“Yep,” I said. “Screw those screws.” (I didn’t say: I did it to save myself. I did it so I could stand to be around you and not fall to my knees.)
“Fuck,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not starving.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve seen starving and that’s not what you’re doing.”
“In southern Siam people in the more remote villages—this was a long time ago—got around fine without any cash at all. They grew stuff, they fished, they traded. What did they need coins for? You would have liked that part of Siam.”
“Well, in Vietnam they used money,” Lincoln said.
I thought of how I must appear to Lincoln, the geezer with his Technicolor tales of the fabled East, his mother’s faded benefactor. I was still thinking about the Siamese villages and the way the families used to come out to see us when we arrived by the river, people walking out of their houses, the children yelling, men and women in sarongs and tucked trousers and none of them with pockets.
Lincoln was leaning on a post and poking the sand with his crutch, drawing doodles in it. He drew a naked woman, the same figure with humongous breasts and wild pubic hair that all boys draw. I didn’t actually think the reason Lincoln had been returned safe was because something had forgiven me. But people like thinking that sort of thing, I couldn’t help it.
The sight of Lincoln still flooded me with joy. If he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him, if he’d lost the sly look he’d had as a teenager and his snappy walk would never come back, at least he was here. We weren’t asking what he’d seen, what he’d done. I thought of him on the ship, sweating in the reflected heat, surrounded by the blue South China Sea, and I thought of him as a dazed boy in the port of Saigon, peering at the rows of shop-houses, with people calling to him in the streets.
On our California beach the wind was coming up, blowing our jackets against us. Enough of the fog had burned off so the water below the horizon was darker than the white sky. Beyond that was Japan, if a person could see far enough. The line between air and sea got clearer as we looked.
“No wonder they thought the world was flat,” I said.
“From up in a plane you can sort of see more curve,” Lincoln said. “Ever notice?”
I said I thought I had. I could feel the horizon staring back at us, daring us to say we knew what was on the other side. Lincoln, who must’ve felt something similar, set his cane against the post, and made circles out of his thumbs and index fingers and held them up to his eyes, fake binoculars. “I’m watching Honolulu,” he said. “There’s a girl in a grass skirt. I don’t want to tell you what she’s doing.”
“Wave to her for me,” I said. “It encourages them.”
In fact we were looking into the most abstract of landscapes, dove-gray sky, steel-gray water, pale sand. A flatness you could fall right off of, the edge of the earth—how could it really be a curve that ran in a loop for more than twenty-four thousand miles? But it was. “Aloha, okay?” Lincoln said into the wind. I was trying to think of the size of the world. More than I could think about, more than I could imagine, necessary to imagine.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
IN “ENVY,” THE MONK S BIOGRAPHY THAT TOON READS is Venerable Acariya Mun Bhuridatta Thera: A Spiritual Biography, by Acariya Maha Boowa Nanasampanno, translated by Bhikkhu Dick Silaratano (Udorn Thani, Thailand: Forest Dhamma, 2004).
While the characters in “Paradise” are my own invention, information about the life of a tin prospector has been drawn from Impressions of the Siamese-Malayan Jungle: A Tin-Prospector’s Adventures in Southern Thailand, by Hans Morgenthaler, first published in 1921 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1994). I have also been greatly helped by Village Life in Modern Thailand, by John E. deYoung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955); Friendly Siam: Thailand in the 1920s, by Ebbe Kornerup (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999); Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South-East Asia in the Twentieth Century, edited by Charles Allen (London: Futura, 1984); and History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani, by Ibrahim Syukri, translated by Conner Bailey and John N. Miksic (Athens, OH: Ohio University, 1985).
For “Loyalty,” my understanding of life in Sicily during and after World War II has been informed by Sicily as Metaphor, by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by James Marcus (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1994); Sicilian Lives, by Danilo Dolci, translated by Justin Vitiello with Madeline Polidoro (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily, by Carlo Levi, translated by Angus Davidson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958); Sicily on My Mind: Echoes of Fascism and World War II, by Joseph Cione (1stBooks, 2003); and the excellent essays on language and history in bestofsicily.com. Special thanks also to Chuck Wachtel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR SAGE ADVICE AND UTTER GENEROSITY DURING ALL stages of this manuscript, I want to thank Myra Goldberg, Chuck Wachtel, and Andrea Barrett. Kathleen Hill and Rattawut Lapcharoensap gave invaluable final readings. I am very fortunate to have Carol Houck Smith as editor and friend, and her presence throughout this project has meant a great deal to me. I am ever grateful for the good luck of having Geri Thoma as my agent. Special thanks as always to Sharon Captan for her friendship. And thanks to the MacDowell Colony for a residency during the writing of this book.
Parts of this novel have appeared previously in magazines. A section of “Envy” appeared (under the title “War Buddies”) in Land-Grant College Review and was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007. “Allegiance,” in slightly altered form, appeared in Ploughshares.