It was beery, painless, loveless, and so free he might have been falling through a warm sky, untouched and unencumbered. And then one morning he had stared into a brightly lit mirror and admitted that he had lost his youth. After that there had been questions. Sometimes he wished he had a wife. Sometimes he wondered if he did in fact have children. Sometimes he woke up in a panic, knowing that after all the dreams that once had mattered and the struggles that had in the end simply drained out the wishes and the hopes, after the years of trying to live without owing anybody anything, without playing the whore to any other man, he had finally comprehended that all of it added up to nothing more than a trick.

He’d spent twenty-five years trying to put salt on the tail of a mirage bird, or maybe an unrisen phoenix. Nothing had changed except his age. The whores may have sold out, but at least they had something to show for it.

In the early 1990s the “Bamboo Curtain” that had been imposed by Viet Nam’s ruling communists in 1975 began to lift. The season of terror and darkness that followed the war was slowly receding. Foreigners were allowed to visit some areas of the country. And he began to dream of going back. What better place to return to, in a world where everything was lost, anyway? Sai Gon, where he might still take a five-dollar room in one of the flophouses of Pham Ngu Lao Street, float again on a band of raw emotion, no longer drearily certain of where the end might find him, no longer moribund with where the past had taken him.

Then, like some deus ex machina, the American government had delivered all that back to him. They needed a liaison officer to work with the Army’s Central Identification Lab as it searched for the remains of those still listed as missing in action during the war. Someone who understood the culture and spoke Vietnamese. Someone who didn’t mind lousy pay and frequent travel to the worst areas of the country. He’d jumped at it. So now he spent about half the year in Viet Nam and the other half in Hawaii. He’d even learned to like Hawaii, which had surprised him after spending most of the past thirty years in Asia.