Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,41

cookies, crullers. The host makes the tea and coffee. A nice balance that way. She had thought about ordering a whole tray of goodies from William Green-berg’s up on Madison, rainbow cookies and pecan rings and challahs and croissants, but that would be oneupmanship, womanship, whatever.

She turns the flame under the water high. A little universe of bubble and burn. Good French roast. Instant satisfaction. Tell that to the Viet Cong.

A row of tea bags on the counter. Five saucers. Five cups. Five spoons.

Perhaps the cow-shaped creamer for a touch of humor. No, too much. Too whimsical. But can I not laugh in front of them? Didn’t Dr. Tonnemann tell me to laugh?

Go ahead, please, laugh.

Laugh, Claire. Let it out.

A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it’s a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option. I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing.

Yes, move wild laughter in the throat of death. A good doctor, yes. Could even quote Shakespeare. Move wild laughter indeed.

Joshua had written her a letter once about water buffalo. He was amazed by them. Their beauty. He saw a squadron once tossing grenades by a river. All merrily laughing. Throat of death indeed. When the water buffalo were finished, he said, the soldiers shot the brightly colored birds out of the trees. Imagine if they had to count that too. You can count the dead, but you can’t count the cost. We’ve got no math for heaven, Mama. Everything else can be measured. She had turned that letter over and over in her mind. A logic in every living thing. The patterns you get in flowers. In people. In water buffalo. In the air. He hated the war but got asked to go while out in California at PARC. Got asked politely, of all things. The president wanted to know how many dead there were. Lyndon B. couldn’t figure it out. Every day the advisers came to him with their facts and figures and laid them down on his desk. Army dead. Navy dead. Marine dead. Civilian dead. Diplomatic dead. MASH dead. Delta dead. Seabee dead. National Guard dead. But the numbers didn’t compute. Someone was messing up somewhere. All the reporters and TV channels were breathing down LBJ’s neck and he needed the proper information. He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn’t count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn’t figure out how many crosses to go into the ground. A crack computer unit. The Geek Squad. Quick initiation. Serve your nation. Get your hair cut. My country, ’tis of thee, we’ve got technology. Only the best and brighest came. From Stanford. MIT. University of Utah. U.C. Davis. His friends from PARC. The ones who were developing the dream of the ARPANET. Kitted up and sent off. White men, all. There were other systems also—how much sugar was used, how much oil, how many bullets, how many cigarettes, how many cans of corned beef, but Joshua’s beat was the dead.

Serve your country, Josh. If you can write a program that plays chess you surely can tell us how many are falling to the gooks. Give me all your ones and zeros, heroes. Show us how to count the fragged.

They could hardly find uniforms small enough at the shoulders or long enough at the legs for him. He stepped onto the plane, trouser legs at half-mast. I should have known then. Should have just called him back. But on he went. The plane took off and went small against the sky. A barracks was already built out in Tan Son Nhut. At the air force base. A small brass band was there to meet them, he said. Cinder block and desks of pressure-treated wood. A room full of PDP-10’s and Honeywells. They walked inside and the place hummed for them. A candy store, he said.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell