36

ONLY IN THE MOST general terms had Valerie written to Matt about her children. He knew she had two kids. No mention of boys or girls, let alone ages and birthdays. She’d never forgotten his look of grief the day he’d left Toronto, the renunciation she saw in his eyes, the knowledge that he was abandoning his child. I’ll see you, Matt, she’d replied, but once having said it, she knew she never would.

***

She’d promised herself not to worry about Matthew. Yet worry was quicksand, it swallowed everything, Matt along with Andre and James. What if he were on the plane this morning? He would have had no son to call. No one to say goodbye to.

No, but he had his sister in L.A. He had me.

Matt would have called no one. He would have been terrified by flashing lights, by a swollen moon that took up half the sky.

For years he’d tried to forget his time in Vietnam. He’d prayed for the grace to get off drugs, to live without a past, to disassemble with great care the coiled wires and the fuse of time. He’d had to become a priest, to live apart. He’d feared one memory, one single moment pressing on a nerve, its bullet lodged too close to the heart. It made him afraid to move.

***

Perhaps that long-ago day of their parting collapsed into this morning when a doomed plane veered over the city with its cargo of terrified human beings, with desperate people on their cell phones, frantic to speak to their loved ones for the last time, and Matt’s staring in horror at a flight attendant lying in the aisle with her throat slit. He’s about to die in humiliation, shitting his pants as the plane makes its last, lopsided bank before it smashes into the tower.

How could anyone know what might have followed? What might have gone on in Matt’s mind, had he been on that plane? Now and again he’s hinted at the thing he’d regret until he died. In flight today, he would have wanted to be high on heroin or LSD so he’d die feeling nothing. Only he’d realize that his eternity would be the last dreadful second when his veins were lit up like a shimmering trail through the jungle, when he was loaded up on junk that could kill him quick as a sniper, and he wouldn’t care.

If there were an afterlife, he’d spend it going backwards, rifle at hand, stalking the dazzle of the war, seeing the darkness bright with imagined eyes and flashing bayonets and panic. In front of him was a moon as huge as the earth, the light of it gleaming on mangrove leaves, on the blurred shape of a man’s body, a soldier bathing behind a palm frond, slats of light and darkness rippling over him. It was night and very late, and the bathing soldier turned around, his face as enormous as that moon, the milky light of it gleaming, and for certain it was a mirage, an enemy trick. He was speaking Vietnamese; no, French. Matt couldn’t move, the lit veins of his body were high-voltage wires, and he was burning. The man was going to kill him, this man painted white with dread like a false dawn. It was a trick, this fake grunt turning toward him, saying Matt, Jesus, and Matt was fucking out of his mind wondering how the hell this wet, naked gook knew his name.

The scared phony was a coward. He put his hands up, but Matt started screaming, gripping his rifle, running toward the whiteness, taking aim and yelling, Frenchie, I’m gonna kill you and no one who heard him understood what he meant. Of his victim he remembered only dark hair, frightened eyes, a mouth wide open but no scream, no sound.

***

Matt told me he was in despair, that he’d lost me. He had no idea who he’d killed. The drugs made him lose consciousness before he could turn a weapon on himself. Friendly fire, he wrote to me. That’s all it was.