There wasn’t a whole lot to remember. He hadn’t done much with his life other than to live it. The war, first with the Marine Corps up north and then returning with the Agency west of Sai Gon and in Laos, and when it ended not knowing what to do. A year floating past as he traveled aimlessly through Australia, living off the sizable earnings of the war years, which he had never had the opportunity to spend. After that there was no sense going back home, anyway. Home hadn’t been home for more than eight years. It had been too long, he had grown too untamable, and he had perfected skills for which there was very little demand in the States. His few short visits confirmed that the good jobs were taken and that the country was on its ass, paralyzed by endless and angry debates. So he had returned to Asia, sometimes with the Agency, at others on his own, pulling security work for American companies as they set up businesses in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. An easy life, devoid of ambition.

The years had blended into each other, a blur of dark-eyed women, warm turquoise oceans, and the smell of jasmine, smoke, and muck. He grew older, more cynical, less combative but somehow more confrontational. He drank less, ran slower, longed for old friends who wrote him at various post-office boxes and occasionally drifted through Bangkok or Manila and dragged him along on a two- or three-day binge of booze, friendly women, and old memories.

On rainy evenings as the typhoon winds rattled shutters on whatever hotel or house he happened to be occupying with whomever he had ended up with for that night, he might hear his mother in the whistling wind, wishing for him as she bewailed the unredeemable emptiness of his Asian fate. Now and then along the dirt roads and in the yeasty jungles of Indonesia and the Philippines he smelled the rot of dead carcasses and felt he could reach out and touch Hai and Dan and Thanh, Baker and King and McDowell, all friends he would have died for, but who instead were left violated and lifeless along the road that he himself still traveled. And always he would think of Mai, with her full lips and husky, teasing laugh, whom he had really loved and who had died because they hated her for loving him.