“Are you sure?” Demarest’s question was an electric probe. “No, you’re not sure. You’re not sure at all.” A beat. “It’s as if part of you never left, because you’re haunted by memories, aren’t you? Recurrent nightmares, right?”

Janson nodded; he could not stop himself.

“All these decades later and your sleep is still troubled. Yet what makes those memories so adhesive?”

“What do you care?”

“Could it be guilt? Reach down, Paul—reach down inside you and bring it up, bring it back to the surface.”

“Shut up, you bastard.”

“What do your memories leave out, Paul?”

“Stop it!” Janson yelled, and yet there was a tremor in his voice. “I’m not going to listen to this.”

Demarest repeated the question more quietly. “What do your memories leave out?”

The images came to him now in frozen moments of time, not with the fluidity of remembered movement but one frame after another. They had a ghostly surreality that was superimposed over what he saw in front of his face.

Humping another mile. And another. And another. Knifing through the jungle, taking care to avoid the hamlets and villages where VC sympathizers might make all his struggles for naught.

And forcing himself through an especially dense intertwining of vines and trees one morning, where he happened upon a vast oval of burn.

The smells told him what had happened—not so much the mingled smells of fish sauce, cooking fires, the fertilizing excrement of humans and water buffalo and chickens as something that overpowered even those smells: the tangy petrochemical odor of napalm.

The air was heavy with it. And everywhere was ash, and soot, and the lumpy remains of a fast-burning chemical fire. He trudged through the burned-out oval and his feet became black with charcoal. It was as if God had held a giant magnifying glass over this spot and burned it with the sun’s own rays. And when he adjusted to the napalm fumes, another smell caught his nostrils, that of charred human flesh. When it cooled, it would be food for birds and vermin and insects. It had not yet cooled.

From the caved-in, blackened wrecks, he could see that there had once been twelve thatch-covered houses in a clearing here. And just outside the hamlet, miraculously untouched by the flames, was a cooking shack framed with coconut leaves, and a meal that had been freshly prepared, no more than thirty minutes earlier. A heap of rice. A stew of prawns and glass noodles. Bananas that had been sliced, fried, and curried. A bowl of peeled litchi and durian fruit. Not an ordinary meal. After a few moments, he recognized what this was.

A wedding feast.