“What buttholes,” Mi Sher said in the voice of Cosmic Traveler. He grinned in his beard, stuck the dead rose over his ear, and walked off toward the train station, whistling Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
Part Two
ICE CREAM
PHOENIX
Chapter Fifteen
The former American embassy compound had a washed-out look to it. Mark attributed it to the blinding sunlight of afternoon, and not the flaking stucco and missing roof tiles. Summer monsoon was late to hit the Mekong Delta this year. It made everything look oppressed and gritty.
The Wild Cards Affairs office was in a bungalow off to one side, seemingly shouldered there by the huge embassy building proper, which was currently headquarters to the Vietnam State Oil Company. “I’m Mark Meadows, Ph.D.,” Mark told the plump and horn-rimmed woman behind the desk. “I’m an ace.”
She beamed. She had started out beaming, and she didn’t stop doing so. “That is very nice,” she said in chipper musical English. “The Socialist Republic of Vietnam welcomes all victims of the wild card who seek refuge from the unconcern and persecution of the capitalist world.”
That nasty Takisian-born part of him thought that latter statement had the flat copper tang of a memorized speech. Mark wished he could do something about that cynical streak.
The woman wore a lightweight dark dress with flowers printed on it. She was the first person he had dealt with in any official capacity since arriving in Cong Hoa Xa Hoi Chu Nghia Viet Nam, if he had all the syllables right and in the right order, who wasn’t in a uniform. He found that reassuring, a humanizing touch. He knew that the revolutionary socialist world, or what was left of it, had been getting some bad press of late. All those uniforms had caused the unhappy suspicion there might be something in it.
“I’m a biochemist,” he said. “I, uh, I don’t have copies of any of my diplomas or anything. But it would be easy to verify.”
“First you must have a blood test, to show that you have the wild card,” she said, squaring a stack of papers.
“Yeah. Fine. But, like, I have some skills that could be very useful, and I’d like to use them to benefit the jokers.”
She beamed. “First the blood test.”
“Roll up your sleeve, please.” the orderly said in English. He wore a tan tunic that reminded Mark forcibly of a Nehru jacket, over double-knit blue-herringbone bells. Mark thought of 1971 with a nostalgic twinge.
Mark was sitting in an uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chair that must have been sold to the former Republic of Vietnam as surplus by the California public school system, because he was dead certain he’d sat in it in elementary school in 1958. It made it natural to do as he was told. Still obedient, he knotted a length of rubber tubing around his biceps and gazed raptly around at the posters on the walls, some of which showed obvious doctors in white coats exhorting peasants in conical straw hats, and others dudes in pith helmets waving guns and yelling. He wished he could understand what they said. He wanted to, like, get with the program.
Then he noticed the orderly picking up a syringe that had been lying beside the rusty sink, drying on a square of gauze. It had obviously been used before. More than once, Mark guessed.
“Make a fist, please,” the orderly said mechanically, advancing and waving the hypo in the air.
Mark gave it the fish eye. “Don’t you, like, have another one of those?” he asked. “A newer one?”
“We are a poor country,” the orderly said peevishly. “We cannot afford luxuries such as extra hypodermic needles. If your government sent us aid, we would be able to provide such services. Give me your arm, please.”
Oh, no. When Mark had blown America, the public was still being mega-dosed with AIDS hysteria, courtesy of the government and complaisant, sensation-loving media. Millions of people imagined themselves at risk who were in more danger of being hit by a meteorite.
On the other hand, if you really, truly wanted to contract HIV, getting stuck with a well-used hypodermic needle in the depths of the Third World was an excellent way to go about it. If only this were Haiti, it would be perfect.
Mark jumped up and backed away from the man. “I’ll write my congressman just as soon as I get out of here.”
The orderly stopped and folded his arms. “If you do not have the blood test, you cannot register as a wild card. Then no food, no ID, no place to stay in Saigon. Giai phong.”
“Maybe if I, like, kicked in a couple bucks, I could get a new needle?”
“It is against regulations.”
Mark sighed. “Look. You got a scalpel anywhere? I can draw my own blood with that. I’m not afraid to cut myself.”
The orderly looked mulish. Or I could bounce your jug-eared head off the counter a few times, you crummy little jackboot quack, a voice said at the back of Mark’s head.
J. J.! he thought, shocked and appalled. Since Starshine died, he had noticed it was harder to keep down the Flash’s antisocial impulses. The two seemed to have counteracted one another.
The orderly was staring at Mark’s face His own was the color of wood ash. “Very sorry,” he said. “Of course I will find a scalpel at once. Of course.”
“Why, thanks, man,” Mark said, thinking, See, J. J.? Give peace a chance.
For some reason J. J. Flash just laughed.
He left the bureau with a piece of official paper announcing his status as a provisional ace and wild card refugee — on his own recognizance, so to speak, pending the test results; a booklet of ration coupons with pictures of sainted Ho printed on them in blue; and another form assigning his quarters in Cholon, the district of Ho Chi Mirth City set aside for wild cards, with instructions on how to get there scrawled on the back.
Walking into daylight was like walking into a wall, a phenomenon he was getting used to in South Asia. He paused a moment, letting his eyes adjust.
When he started across the yard a whistling scream drew his eyes up into the dazzling pale-blue sky. An airplane was passing over with its flaps and gear down, heading for a landing at Tan Son Nhut, a fighter, lean and predatory with delta wings and twin tail fins. He felt a weird sense of sideways nostalgia, of adventitious déjà vu: his father had often flown fighters into that very base, more than twenty years ago. Despite his years of professed pacifism, Mark easily recognized the airplane as a MiG-29, one of the latest generation of Soviet military aircraft — he had always harbored a secret, guilty fascination for warplanes.
As he left the compound, some skinny brown kids in shorts threw stones at him, shouted obvious insults at him, and ran off, their tire-soled Ho Chi Minh slippers clacking against their feet like motorized novelty-store dentures.
Fortunately their aim was bad. Watching them go, Mark shook his head sadly. “They sure must still hate Americans around here,” he said. Not that he could blame them.
Some of Cholon looked pretty good — more prosperous than the rest of what Mark had seen of Ho Chi Minh City, and more lively. The wild cards quarter wasn’t in that part.
He felt self-conscious sitting in the shade of the little fringed awning on top of the cyclo bicycle cab, resting while the driver pedaled his heart out in the sun. It didn’t seem consistent with socialist equality. All the same a lot of putatively good socialist Vietnamese seemed to be riding around in the things, so who knew?