Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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students in sweatshirts and Nikes, in various attitudes of study.
Rank received him in a room full of overstuffed furniture, lace doilies on the arms of the couches and chairs. It had the empty formality of a funeral home. Rank came forward from the window, shrugging his shoulders in a loose-fitting khaki suit. He seemed to have aged in the three months since Lindstrom had seen him—his high, narrow forehead was creased like parchment, his beard had more gray. On his feet he wore black cloth shoes, which struck Lindstrom as an affectation.
“Sergeant,” Rank said absently. He took Lindstrom’s hand in a loose-jointed grip while he checked his friend’s body for damage. “How is it every time I see you, you look just the same, while everyone else keeps getting older?”
“It’s part of an experiment,” Lindstrom said. “The doctors want to see if certain methods of torture perfected by the Viet Cong retard progression through the normal stages of life. So far it’s been successful.”
Rank’s reaction was shy, and yet there was something smooth and practiced about him as he brushed off the joke and showed Lindstrom a chair. Rank was eerily comfortable with what Lindstrom had always taken to be a collective sort of grief. He had first noticed it in Vietnam, where Rank was nicknamed Oracle, a spiritual consultant of sorts for the recon marines. He had made them believe they were all on a pilgrimage, that the East would heal their psychic wounds and they would all go back to the world knowing a purer way to live. Rank himself was ambivalent—that was part of his draw—but after Lindstrom got home he’d started to see something vaguely unsavory about him. He’d begun to think that Rank might not be so pure after all, or that his purity had been a catalyst to violence.
“To be honest,” Rank said, sniffing reflectively, “I was a little surprised when you agreed to come.”
Lindstrom sat down heavily, peering through the curtains at the lawn. “I met your girlfriend at the bar. She reminded me a bit of my wife.”
Rank’s breath made a whistling sound, and he placed a finger under his nostrils to stay it. “You mean Charlotte? She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Well, whoever she is, you can’t tell me she doesn’t remind you of April.”
“Maybe a little bit, physically, but only in an approximate way. You’re not still on that, are you?”
“It just seemed like one of your tests, Alan, to see how human beings react.”
“I can’t arrange a woman’s physical appearance, Jack.”
“That’s not what we thought in Vietnam.”
Rank grinned, and the trimmed, white hairs of his beard parted, revealing the scar beneath his lip. Inflicted by the one grunt who had thought that Oracle was a fake, it became a sort of stigmata when the man who did it was killed the next day. “In Vietnam it was good to believe those things. It kept your mind open and your instincts sharp. But now we’re back in the world.”
“It feels more like ’Nam to me.”
Rank cocked his head and tugged at his beard.
“My instincts, by the way,” Lindstrom told him, “turned out to be better suited to a shithole like Vietnam than to anywhere else. When I got back home I tended to see things that weren’t really there. Then I willed them to be true. You look worried, Professor.”
Leaning forward, Rank parted the curtains with his fingers. Outside, the lawns were misty and dark. He sighed, and Lindstrom felt his own sense of drama overtaking events. “China is a frightened and tragic country, Jack.”
“Isn’t that why you love it so?”
Rank’s fingers bunched the lace as he gazed at the tower of the Jingling Hotel. When he looked back at Lindstrom, his expression was plaintive. “It’s not the same as Vietnam,” he said with a tremor of conviction. “Here we’re dealing with a communism that’s hardened, gotten older, the same way I gather we have.”
“You mean they don’t believe in anything at all?”
Rank let go of the curtain and settled back in his chair. He studied Lindstrom with avuncular concern. “Is that how you are, Jack?”
Lindstrom threw it off with a laugh. The room smelled of mold. “My grandfather made me believe that you couldn’t have a meaningful life unless you gave it away first to some ideal. In his case, God. I didn’t find out what bullshit that is until I lost the one thing that was good for me.”
Rank watched him evenly. On the wall above his wing chair hung a few courtly, hand-colored prints that resembled cartoons. “You’ve got to move beyond her, Jack. You’ve got to take steps.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
Rank’s teeth shone for a moment, before he reacted to the sound of the latch. “Ah,” he said, uncrossing his legs, “here we are.”
The door to the hallway opened silently, and through it came the sounds of typing and hushed, earnest talk, the odor of a men’s room. A woman entered with a tray of porcelain cups and a large jug of tea.
“Thank you, Suki,” Rank said, rising formally. “Jack, this is my wife, Su-ki.” The second time he pronounced her name precisely, as if to emphasize his mastery of the language. “Su-ki, this is John Tan. His grandfather built the church in Anhe.”
“So this is what you mean,” Lindstrom said. As he took in her figure, the blue dragons on the teacups shook just enough to make a musical sound. Suki’s beauty made you search for it, as if you weren’t supposed to see it all at once, but once it entered Lindstrom’s mind it remained there like the sun. She made Rank look ravenous, old.
“You are pals,” she said, staring at the teacups. Her idiom made her seem fey.
“Is that what Oracle told you?”
She nodded unsurely and looked at her husband.
“Oracle is a name the men had for me in Annam,” Rank explained.
Suki took a deep breath as if about to recite. “My husband has told me that the war was a very important time for his life,” she said, looking up as she poured the tea.
Lindstrom blanched his irritation by burning his palm on the side of the cup. “It certainly had an effect on him,” he said. “Alan was observing just before you came in that your country is much different from Vietnam.”
Rank was checking the strength of his tea, and he nodded, his pendulous nose cupped by steam. It was a signal between them, and Suki turned to go.
“Many Chinese people go to Annam,” she said, backing out the door, “but their talent for business is not appreciated there. Good-bye, John. Some time I see you in the States.”
“I hope so,” Lindstrom said, but he doubted it would happen. He couldn’t imagine her in Morningside Heights, serving tea to Rank’s students, another object in the old Orientalist’s collection.
“Jack,” Rank said in a suspended tone of warning. “You’re flirting with my wife.”
“You really married her?”
“I love her,” he said. “We just had a kid.”
Lindstrom couldn’t conceal his astonishment. When he’d returned from Vietnam the second time, he had known what he’d thought was an older man’s wisdom, but it hadn’t progressed at all and everyone else had passed him now. “Good for you, man. I mean that.”
“I recommend it,” Rank said. The steam had moistened his brow. “Since we’ve been married, I’ve constructed a little garden of contemplation. Would you like to see it? You may remember I’m an amateur poet.”
“An amateur something, anyway.”
Rank pointed at the joke.
“When we talked in Frisco, Alan, I didn’t know that . . .”
Slowly,