“Rak!” Raksmey yelled.
“What did you say?” Jean-Baptiste called.
“I think you may have a little athlete on your hands,” said Renoit, coming up from behind him.
“No,” said Jean-Baptiste, shielding his eyes from the sun. He made a notation in his book. “We do not have a little athlete.”
“He climbs like a monkey.”
“Bodies wither. Intellect persists.”
“All I know is you can’t keep a good man down. If he wants to be a climber, he’ll find a way to be a climber.”
“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Be careful up there, Raksmey!”
“Rasey says he won’t come down,” Raksmey yelled from above. “I must observe him and make sure he doesn’t fall.”
“Rasey does not need to be observed! Come down right now,” Jean-Baptiste called up.
“Or maybe a wrestler?” said Renoit. “The little man would be a son of a bitch to bring down in a match—”
“Claude!” Jean-Baptiste turned upon him. “Don’t joke about this. This isn’t a kind of game. This is my son.”
Renoit held up his hands. “I’m envious of such possibility. To think: a lifetime of mobility. How quickly it fades when that which is dear is stolen from us.” He slapped at his wounded leg. “La liberté est un fugace don.”
Despite Raksmey’s inclination to spend his days in the trees, Jean-Baptiste’s rigorous methods of education had created a brilliant mind. Or rather allowed an already brilliant mind to blossom. By the time he was seven, Raksmey was reading well beyond his age. He, like his father, was a swift reader, who could take in books just as quickly as they were put before him. And yet he appeared indifferent to their contents.
“What did you think?” Jean-Baptiste asked after Raksmey had devoured Saul Bellow’s new novel, Henderson the Rain King, in a day.
“Boring,” Raksmey said with a shrug. “Too much talking.”
“Human discourse is important. It cannot all be chasing lions and such.”
“Can I go out and play?”
“Complete your experiments first,” said Jean-Baptiste, shaking his head. “You can make a lion out of words, you know. More powerful than any beast in the jungle.”
“Yes, Papa,” said Raksmey.
The years passed, marked only by the notches in the trees and the cyclical monsoons that broke the heat for three months every year. Eugenia’s vision began to fade and Jean-Baptiste fell and broke his ankle, which slowed him considerably. He and Renoit would limp around the plantation and bicker at each other. In other ways, time stood still at La Seule Vérité, as it always seemed to do. Tofte-Jebsen puts it rather elegantly: “If you stared at a river long enough, you started to believe that the water, and not the earth, was the one true thing” (160).
Much to Jean-Baptiste’s delight, Raksmey began to show a natural inclination for the sciences, moving through advanced textbooks with ease. Their science lessons were conducted in Jean-Baptiste’s basement laboratory, the same laboratory that had housed his many failed experiments. Raksmey, unlike his father — who was impatient and often allowed his mind to wander — was a born experimentalist. The two of them took up Jean-Baptiste’s old radiation research, dusting off the jars of radium, even building a linear particle accelerator that utilized new superconductive technologies Raksmey had discovered in a science journal. While his father had been interested primarily in documenting radiation’s destructive effects, Raksmey became fixated on the beneficial powers of the radiation beam in decreasing tumor size. His methods were much more disciplined than Jean-Baptiste’s — there was always a control, always a second and third retrial, even if the results were favorable. In short, he was not just curious — he was a scientist. After a while, Raksmey was making observations about radiation treatment that Jean-Baptiste had never come close to considering, tuning frequency, wavelength, and fractionation to the specific types of cancerous tissues. Jean-Baptiste noted each of Raksmey’s discoveries in his notebook, and next to one he could not help writing an overeager underline: Ça se passe.
Still, everything that Raksmey did, even if procedurally defined by great discipline, was also inflected by a sleepy indifference, a weary adherence to the rules, as if he were performing for an audience that had not shown up. He would go about his work with quick, precise movements, but there would be no joy on his face, no excitement at the possibility of discovery.
Jean-Baptiste also noticed that Raksmey had a habit of whispering to himself while he worked. Eventually he realized that Raksmey was actually communicating with Rasey, who had not been banished by the blossoming of Raksmey’s intellect, but instead had morphed into a subtle, constant presence, a benign sounding board of knowledge. Watching his son move with equal parts meticulosity and insouciance, Jean-Baptiste found himself oscillating between awe, frustration, and jealousy, as if Raksmey knew a secret that none of them were in on.
“Do you enjoy this?” he finally asked his son one day. Having donned lead smocks, they were exposing a rat’s splenic tumor to radiation from Raksmey’s linear accelerator while modulating the degree of fractionation by quarter steps.
“Enjoy what?” Raksmey asked, intent on aligning the beam.
“The lab? Our work? Science?”
“What is it, Papa?” Raksmey looked up. “Have I done something wrong?”
“No. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just want to know your desire. What do you want to be?”
“I want to be like you.”
“No, you don’t. You have a much better chance than I do.”
“Chance for what?”
Jean-Baptiste sighed. “Maybe it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“For you to go away.”
“Away?”
“To school.”
“Are you angry with me, Papa?”
“I fear I can no longer give you what you need.”
“Papa!”
Raksmey ran to his father and hugged him. Their embrace, weighed down by the clumsiness of their lead aprons, felt oddly disembodied. Later, Jean-Baptiste would comb through his notebooks and confirm what he had suspected in that moment: it was the first time he had ever hugged his son. He had no rational explanation for this, only that maintaining the necessary distance between the observer and the observed — the fact that he always carried notebook and pencil in hand so as to be ready to capture life’s spontaneities (like an embrace) in real time — had prevented him from actually embracing his son in real time. He did not note this absence in his notebook.
The rest of that day, Raksmey was unusually quiet, glumly stalking through the house. In the afternoon, Jean-Baptiste saw Tien and Raksmey paddling across the river to their island.
“What did you say to him?” Eugenia signed.
“That it might be time for him to go to school.”
“To school? But you were against sending him to the lycée!”
“Not just any school. To Saigon. To my school. They’ve changed the name to Collège René Descartes, but it’s still the same place.”
“Saigon?” she said aloud. “Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s safe. It’s Saigon.”
“The Americans have moved in.”
“The Americans will make it safe.”
“The French did not make it safe.”
“The French are fools. The Americans are much more practical.”
“You really think they are any different from us?”
Jean-Baptiste, caught in the quicksand of his thoughts, did not respond.
At dinner that night, Raksmey broke his silence.