Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
inability to communicate, and fending off stress—How much trouble am I in here? How
much danger?—I decided to borrow a stratagem from Albert and began to yell: “Why
am I here? Give me my passport! What the hell did I do, goddammit?”
At one point I snatched at the officer's shirt pocket. He instantly turned angry, point-
ing to the star on his hat as if to say, “Don't you know who I am?” Then he aimed an
imaginary machine gun at me and feigned shooting it. That shut me up.
He pointed at my bicycle, then at a barracks house with an open door about thirty
yards away, and as I wheeled my bike over there, followed by a parade of young Viet-
namese cops, I had a conversation with myself in which I very coolly laid out my options:
Okay, you can freak out, which would be entirely understandable, but would mean you'd im-
mediately begin having a really unpleasant, anxiety-laden time of it. Or you can go with this,
see what happens, remain calm and amused rather than querulous. This is, after all, far and
away the most interesting thing that has ever happened to you, and unless something goes
really, awfully wrong, you'll have a great story to tell when it's over.
Now, I do realize that panic and anxiety aren't voluntary, but at that moment it struck
me as possible to make a choice and the choice seemed not only easy but absolutely right.
I actually shrugged, a gesture to myself—
Okay, let's go with it
—and whatever nascent
fear I was feeling drained away. I wheeled my bike through the open door into an empty
barracks house with several wooden bunk beds built into it. The young cops followed
me in.
They seemed like children to me, none of them older than twenty or twenty-one; one
of them was wearing a T-shirt with
NEW YORK
in block letters across the chest. Some of
them milled around my bicycle, touching the brakes, the shifters, the bar ends, the pump
mounted on the frame. When I removed the water bottle from its cage and squeezed it,
and a stream squirted from the mouth, the boys jumped back, startled and amazed, and
they started to laugh. Then they all wanted to try it themselves, and at that moment I
had a revelation:
I'm Gulliver.
We were suddenly having a cordial time, passing the water bottle around, playing with
the gadgets on the bicycle; for a few minutes I traded my helmet for one of their hats.
The goodwill was abundant, and after a few minutes one of the young men—the smallest
of them, and I'd realize later, the oldest—took me by the arm and led me out the door,
where I first saw that he was exceptionally tiny, under five feet tall and thin as a stick.
He couldn't have weighed ninety pounds.
