The Refugees(32)
“I might go back and finish my doctorate,” Legaspi said in response to a question from Michiko. Fit and slender in khakis and a burnt orange polo shirt, he resembled the college students at Bowdoin whom Carver saw loitering on the sidewalks whenever he drove to town. “But maybe not. I suppose after a while the pure research was not enough. I wanted to apply the research.”
“I’d love to see your robot in action.” Michiko brushed her hand against the mossy flank of a millennium-old wall, varnished black by the centuries. The royal past alluded to was nowhere near as grand as Buckingham Palace or Versailles, which Carver had seen during layovers on the European routes he had piloted for Pan Am, but the tomb had its own melancholic charm. “And the mongoose.”
“How about the day after tomorrow?” Legaspi said. “I can set up a demonstration.”
“What do you think, Dad?” Carver saw once again the crow’s-feet around Claire’s eyes, newly engraved since her departure for Vietnam two years ago. She was only twenty-six. “It’ll be educational.”
“Angkor Wat was pretty educational.” Carver didn’t like being educated on his vacations. “And we visited that terrible war museum in Saigon. I don’t really feel like seeing any more horrors.”
“What you’ll see is the future of demining,” Claire said. “Not people crawling on their knees digging out mines by hand.”
“Won’t this robot put those people out of work?”
“That is not the kind of work people should do,” Legaspi said. “Robots were invented to free people from danger and slavery.”
Carver’s ears twitched. “You said the Department of Defense was funding your adviser’s research at MIT. Why exactly do you think the DOD is interested in these robots?”
“Dad,” Claire said.
“We have to take the money where we find it.” Legaspi shrugged. “The world isn’t a pure place.”
“Famous last words.”
“Jimmy,” said Michiko.
“All I’m saying is not to underestimate the military-industrial complex.”
“I suppose you’d know,” Claire said.
“How about a picture?” Legaspi proposed. Carver groaned silently. He hated taking pictures, but Michiko loved commemorating every occasion, important or trivial. For her sake, he took his place obediently between his wife and daughter, who themselves were flanked by two gray stone mandarins, goateed and with swords on their shoulders. They were shorter even than Michiko and Claire, and Carver assumed they were life-size from the time of this emperor whose name he suddenly could not recall as Legaspi aimed the camera. It was true that this was the third tomb they were visiting on the Perfume River, but it still bothered Carver that he could not remember this emperor’s name, which Legaspi had mentioned several times.
Becoming stupider was a consequence of age for which he was unprepared. With age was supposed to come wisdom, but he wasn’t certain what wisdom felt like, whereas intelligence he knew to be a constant firing of the synapses, the brain a six-barreled Gatling gun of activity. Now his mind was shooting thoughts through only one or two barrels. He hadn’t been this slow since Claire and William were newborns, their nighttime neediness calling him from his sleep. Now his son was twenty-eight, and Carver dated the beginning of his decline to William’s graduation from the Air Force Academy six years ago, one of the proudest moments in Carver’s life. William had also become a pilot, but he was unhappy flying a KC-135, refueling bombers and fighters patrolling the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s boring, Dad,” William had said over the phone during their last conversation. “I’m a truck driver.”
“Truck driving is good,” Carver said. “Truck driving is honorable.”
Most important, flying a tanker was safe, unlike Carver’s own job during his military years when he piloted a B-52, an ungainly blue whale of a plane that he loved with an intensity still felt as a lingering hunger. During different tours in the late sixties and early seventies, he launched from Guam, Okinawa, and Thailand, never finding himself freer than in the cockpit’s tight squeeze, entrusted with a majestic machine carrying within its womb thirty tons of iron bombs, and yet for all that vulnerable as a Greek demigod. Two bombers of his wing had collided with each other over the South China Sea, the bodies of the crews lost forever, while another B-52 in his cell was transformed into a flaming cross as it fell in the night sky, tail clipped by a surface-to-air missile, the two survivors spending the next four years in the Hanoi Hilton. Better to be safe, Carver wanted to tell William, but he refrained. William would hear the lie. As an airman, William knew that if his father could live life all over again, Carver wouldn’t hesitate to crawl once more through the narrow breech in the paunch of the B-52’s fuselage, the entry never failing to make him quiver with anticipation.
The next morning Claire hired a van to take her parents on the two-hour ride to Quang Tri, where she was living and where Legaspi’s demining operation was based. When Claire showed them her studio apartment, Carver was relieved to see only a twin-sized bed, shrouded behind a mosquito net. A window and narrow horizontal slits at the top of the high walls provided ventilation, the air pushed about by a ceiling fan that rotated as slowly as a chicken on a spit. The kitchen consisted of a heat-scarred, two-burner portable gas stove on a countertop with black veins in the grouting, while the bathroom had no separate shower stall, only a drain in the floor next to the toilet, the showerhead on a hose. Posters of rock bands—Dengue Fever, Death Cab for Cutie, Hot Hot Heat—papered the walls above the cinder blocks and wood boards where Claire shelved her clothing.