Cosmo Read online

  ‘Hello,’ Crystle said, after a beat, drawing out the o.

  ‘Hellooh,’ said the woman, imitating her tone. Crystle counted a few seconds, unsure of what to do. The woman reached beneath her seat and pulled up a manila folder, which opened to reveal a large glossy picture of the boy on the bed, obviously pre-surgery: his face rent by a massive, disfiguring hole in his palate, yellow baby teeth crowding around the gap in the bone and skin. A successful surgery, then, Crystle guessed.

  ‘Wow!’ she said, nodding, looking up at the boy. ‘It’s so wonderful …’

  ‘This Huyhn,’ the woman said, ‘my son.’

  ‘Hello, Huyhn,’ Crystle said, reaching out to touch the tip of the boy’s sandal. ‘My name is Crystle. It’s nice to meet you.’ The boy smiled.

  It really is incredible, she thought: the boy wouldn’t have been able to eat or speak or have a girlfriend – so many things would have been withheld. She felt a genuine sense of pity, worried suddenly that she had cringed. How cruel God could be, she thought, considering the boy’s fate. How many people born into ugliness, into misfortune. But improving this depressing turn of mind – this wide and irreconcilable gulf between her life and his, between her life and those of her Missouri City peers, the fat and forgotten – she felt again a sense of pride, not for who she happened to be or from where she came, but for what she was representing. If these were the sorts of missions she’d be asked to represent or promote as Miss Universe … well, she could live with that. Watching the United States, the nations of the First World, operating for a force of peace. Curing children of maladies – it was almost too good to be true. Humanitarian work held a subtle but not insignificant allure; she considered the ways in which her motivational work – that burgeoning business plan she’d carefully set out back in Texas, the crowded churches she knew she could pack with people who would listen to her story of sacrifice – could be the bridge between her education and what her mother told her was the Lord’s work, the spirit they were so eager to remind her of. It would have to be a substantial section of Waiting to Win, this personal and national obligation to those less fortunate. She never expected that merely days before the competition’s end she would be feeling this much warmth and pride for her culture, her people, what the block-lettered U.S.A. on her sash could stand for.

  ‘Can you take picture?’ the woman asked her, holding a disposable camera with her free hand.

  ‘Sure,’ Crystle replied. She was shuffled toward the side of the bed, made to pose beside Huynh, who sat looking happy but scared, smiling his scarred and uneven smile. A few shots were taken, then a few more standing beside Huyhn’s mother, who flashed the peace sign. Then it was time to sign autographs on ruled paper, using the Sharpie she carried in her purse. It was still surreal to be famous, but never a chore: all you had to do was show up, be there and smile, and suddenly you’d brightened and blessed someone’s humdrum day. She gladly signed autographs or posed for pictures, losing that sense of awkwardness by doing what was now routine. If this was what these people wanted, then she would humbly oblige.

  Before she could move on to another bed, saying goodbye to Huyhn and his mother, Lieutenant Croft emerged from the noise and confusion of the room and sidled up beside her. Finally, she thought, one of these Navy boys has come to talk to Miss U.S.A.

  ‘How’re we doing here?’ Croft asked, rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Just wonderful,’ Crystle said, waving again at Huyhn, who now seemed distracted, speaking slowly and obviously painfully to his mother.

  ‘That’s great. I mean, chances are these kids will remember this day for a long, long time. It’s been such a hard road, after all.’

  ‘Oh, I can only imagine.’

  ‘But you’ve probably had a hard road yourself. It must not be easy being Miss America!’ Croft laughed, a wheezy exhalation.

  ‘No, it’s not exactly all fun and games,’ she said, but then remembered, ‘but a complete walk in the park compared to what these kids have been through.’ A good answer, she thought, and true, but it would be gratifying to talk to someone like Croft, or Commander Kubis, about how hard it actually was. All the things she couldn’t say, the things no one wanted to hear.

  Croft nodded, frowning. ‘Yeah, no doubt. But still, it must be hard for you. In a way. The travelling, the exercise, the dieting. I’m only guessing, though …’

  Crystle felt good hearing this. It was probably his halting attempt at hitting on her. It was charming. He sounded edgy, a little off his game. Let him go on, she thought.

  ‘… but you must have to pay, like, real close attention to how you dress, all the little details. The discipline. What you eat … even how you talk, uh, saying the right things …’

  Sure, Crystle thought. You’re just scratching the surface, pal.

  ‘But then again, I have no idea. I mean, I can’t imagine what it must be like. Some kinda stress, huh?’

  She laughed and nodded.

  ‘I mean, you could get a question you aren’t ready for, or you could fall down or something, like last year?’ He laughed a bit, as if in apology.

  ‘Oh, of course, of course,’ Crystle said rapidly, her throat feeling pinched, squeezed down to a straw. ‘Yeah, ah, I just …’ Of course I could, she thought. I could fall. She was blushing, feeling the familiar needles tickling her cheeks.

  Croft grinned. He seemed aware of the red rush of blood to her face, staring at her in a way that suggested he was delighted by her blushing. Then he said something else, and touched her arm just below the elbow, grazing the tips of his fingers against her bare skin, but the sound of his voice seemed so cloudy and flat, as if she’d been dunked underwater and was now trying to listen to a radio playing above the surface. Was someone playing music? She had the distinct impression that there was music playing somewhere. Why would they have a radio in a hospital? She turned from Croft, or she thought she did, dizzy now, her mouth fixed in its frieze of geniality, of polite conversation, and caught the eye of a boy a few feet away, maybe four or five years old, peeking from behind one of the curtains separating the beds. A brief, passing image of a child, his mouth blown to pieces by a monstrous cleft: pre-surgery, this one, for some reason mingled with the other patients. Like he’d been snuck into the group to remind the cured children of how far they’d come. Unfair, she thought. Why was this baby here? Why were they letting this happen? His mouth opened and closed in silence, revealing his pink gums, his grotesque jaw. They weren’t prepared to see this. They weren’t prepped. He was crying. The baby was crying.

  ‘–rry, are you okay?’ Croft said, his voice sharpening to reach her, fingers still hovering over the sensitive patch of skin below her elbow.

  Crystle snatched her arm away. Croft was too close – she could smell his sweat through his deodorant, the fabric softener on his sweater. She pulled her purse farther up onto her shoulder and took a short step back. No, that wasn’t the right move. Her pulse felt out of control; she felt a crazy vein wriggling in her temple. The baby had disappeared, moving behind the curtain. She stepped forward again, smiled, and reached out and touched Croft in return, tapping the left side of his ribbed sweater. She batted her lashes and looked into his eyes and asked, in as soft a voice as she could manage, ‘Lieutenant Croft, is there a restroom I could use?’ Her voice surprised her: it was full of the old Texan drawl she’d been trying so hard to vanquish in New York.

  Croft looked boyish, hurt. ‘Uh, sure thing, yeah, of course … just let me show you …’

  Then there was a nurse by her side, a white woman in her late forties, her head a grey skillet of tightly cropped hair, slightly overweight, leading her back through the laughing ranks of Vietnamese women and the double doors and then along another hall. Crystle knew instantly that she was utterly lost on board the ship; she’d need a guide to return to the tour. She felt girlish and uncoordinated, being led by an adult who seemed infinitely more composed. She wondered if any of the other girls saw her being led away
, if they’d raise an eyebrow, speculate aloud if she was okay – some fake gesture of concern that would ultimately fuel the fires of gossip. They reached a washroom.

  ‘Take all the time you need, hon,’ the woman said, but didn’t smile.

  The washroom was enormous – over a dozen stalls arranged in uniform, factory-modelled succession. Beneath the harsh light of fluorescents, Crystle dropped onto the lid of a toilet, door locked, unspooling a roll of sanitary paper and dabbing at her eyes. The tissue came back dry; she wasn’t crying. She wrapped her hands around the back of her neck, massaging, breathing in the sharp smell of disinfectant. All right, all right, she thought. When you’re worried about something, you see it everywhere. You notice it more often because your brain is fixated on it. It’s natural. You’re just hearing something your brain wants you to hear. She blinked. ‘Get a grip, baby,’ she whispered, bent over, kneading the flesh of her neck.

  She sat on the toilet for what felt like a long time (or time passed in an odd, weightless way: the feeling of time not passing at all, her eyes tracing along the minute seams in the fabric of her capris). But she knew she had to get moving – she didn’t want the chubby nurse or the other girls to think she was sick, or making a bm. Her heart was thumping too furiously, though, to chance getting up and risking another attack. An attack – that’s what it was. She wasn’t stupid; she’d seen enough pre-pageant meltdowns (girls hyperventilating into makeup bags, crying hysterically, bent over with dry heaves or calling their mother or boyfriend or daddy saying, I can’t do this! I can’t do this!) to recognize a full-fledged panic attack when she saw one. It was the first of its kind; all other moments of disorientation paled in comparison: those flapping butterflies or seizing chills or losses of concentration. This time she’d completely lost track of what was being said to her, thought she’d heard music, got angry over a misfortunate baby. It was like she’d blacked out. There were anxious unknowns: what had she said to Croft? Where did that nurse come from? Her heart still squirming, Crystle rose and pushed through the door, emerging from the stall and forcing herself into composure out of sheer embarrassment. She stood before the steel sink, the flawless mirror, dabbing at tiny beads of sweat that had gathered at her hairline. She was careful with the folded toilet paper, worried that the sweat would start a chain reaction of frizz that would explode in the outdoor humidity. Then she sucked in a great gulp of air, puffed violently, slapped her cheeks and left the restroom.

  The nurse was standing in the hall, hands on her thighs. ‘Ready to go back?’ she asked.

  ‘I am ready,’ Crystle said. There was that southern drawl again – as if she were slipping back into that easy, seductive way of speaking, as if she’d hadn’t been working so hard at firming up her r’s. Get a grip, she repeated.

  ‘We’ve had to move everyone forward,’ the nurse said, after they’d entered the intensive-care ward. ‘You’ll have to catch up with the group.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry for slowing things down …’

  ‘No, it’s no problem. It’s just that – uh huh,’ she said in confirmation, opening the doors to the room in which Crystle had met Huynh, still boisterous with children and attending mothers. A quick scan revealed that the other contestants were gone. ‘We’ll have to get a move on,’ the nurse continued briskly, even snottily. ‘I’ll get you there in a jiffy, though.’

  The nurse moved ahead, leading her back through rooms she’d passed earlier in the tour. A column of Vietnamese civilians lined the wall of one wide and crowded corridor, each adult and child wearing a white hospital mask and looking impatient. She could sense them watching her as she passed. She felt under an immense pressure. Those eyes. She fought down deep to find her usual comportment, right hand gripping the straps of her purse, staying three steps behind the scurrying nurse.

  Now Crystle recognized the main entry point to the ship: an access area jammed with people, card-carrying crew members scrutinizing a stream of mask-wearing locals. She’d been here an hour ago. She spotted Commander Kubis among the crush. As she approached, he turned and smiled at her: that warm and generous smile, his composed appearance. In a few more seconds she was approaching the massive port, getting flashing glimpses of the blinding bay.

  She shuffled with the line past a pair of tarpaulin curtains, crossing the threshold from shade to light and slipping on her sunglasses. She was outside now, in the heat. Blinking, a hot gust fluttering her blouse, she held the crown of her head with the flat of her hand, gazing eastward across the bay and into the smudged horizon of the South China Sea. She looked out past the jutting hulls of passing yachts and the hotel’s scuba boats and the stiff canvas sails of local fishing vessels, out to the limits of vision: the meeting between the flat azure of the bay and the cloudless, boundless blue of the July afternoon. Then she turned toward the shore, eyes sweeping across the jade sandbar, hearing the cry of gulls in the air, the sound of unseen flags rippling in the wind above her, smelling the salt in the water, watching distant bathers wading before the warm and shallow reef. She could spot the reclining, tricoloured beach chairs of her Diamond Bay Resort. All those drinking, lounging tourists, playing in the sand, waited on by a fleet of diligent, uniformed Vietnamese with their broken English and lisped French. And in the distance the green and blue watercolour hills of the jungle, a serene and unchanging backdrop to the apartments and government buildings of Nha Trang: all that raw energy, car horns and confusion.

  There was a long ramp. The long ramp she’d climbed to board over an hour ago, excited for the tour, the photo ops, was made of corrugated steel that was searing and dazzling in the sunlight. Nurses and crew filed ahead of and behind her, loose scrubs rippling in the wind, flanked on either side by hip-level railings sloping down toward the docks of the harbour. A mass of bodies crowded the waterfront: half of the group leaving, half arriving, a mix of Mercy employees and brightly clothed Vietnamese, the tops of their heads uniformly black and gleaming. In seconds, she spotted the four girls, wearing sunglasses and looking up. They’d be hard to miss, she thought. Jennifer was waving, her brown arm a languid noodle in the glare.

  They needed Crystle to move, to fall in line with the march of legs and shoes, right hand wrapped loosely around the rail, and step down the long ramp to join them. They were beckoning to her, laughing, making it all a game. Or were they laughing at her? Thinking her ditzy or incompetent? It would take her thirty seconds, striding in time behind the blue-smocked nurse ahead of her, avoiding stepping on her heels, while the mask-wearing Vietnamese, adults and children, filed by her left, climbing up and into the Mercy, headed toward reunion or diagnosis, calamity or relief.

  She’d left Commander Kubis behind her in the shelter of the ship: a last, smiling vision of the assured and confident officer, a final wave of his polished hand. I’ve forgotten to ask him questions, she thought, now on the platform at the lip of the ramp. I’ve forgotten the interview. But it was too late: she couldn’t wait or turn back; she was a servant to the queue; she was late. They needed her to reach the bottom so they could board another minibus, be shuttled down the shore of the city to their various destinations, the hotel room at the close of day. She couldn’t hold up the production, even by a few meagre minutes; they couldn’t leave without her. She looked down.

  And while walking she saw another ramp, separated from the present by a handful of precious days and nights, as clear as the corrugated steel before her. There were similarities: there were groups of people waiting for her to walk, people invested in her ability to think and act and perform. There were colossal expectations for her to move, and move well, to accomplish the easy task of walking. To smarten up and meet them. To go out, ten steps forward, and turn to the left. Hand on hip. Smile. Turn again, and walk the long ramp. Stop, hip thrust. Walk away from the crowd, the roar. Stop again. Look over the shoulder. There were colossal expectations. But where one ramp was bright and on a decline, the other was dark and level and glossy. The other was in the Crown Convention
Center of the Diamond Bay, the largest arena of its kind in the country. She’d stand in the wings in a line of other contestants, waiting for the production staff with their impatient clipboards and headsets to wave her forward; it was all a quick snap of judgment and paying close attention to your cue. Recalling rehearsals. Jerry Springer or Mel B, one of the hosts, would announce her time onstage over the in-house loudspeakers: U.S.A. and Crystle Stewart would flash along the bottom half of television screens in Missouri City, in Houston, in Manhattan, in living rooms and in bars and restaurants, and those watching in public places would stand and lift signs and whistle and blow into dollar-store noisemakers, clapping, cheering. Her mother and father, ecstatic, Team Crystle, ex-classmates and teachers from the University of Houston, from Elkins High School, even the biters. This was their girl, about to glide across the slick floor, past the tiki torches and vertical fronds, the imitation waterfalls and horizontal red and black lights that suggested a lake at sunset, the tropical exoticisms of contemporary Vietnam. Immense columns of Romanesque stone like a tiered display case, the arched wall of a coliseum. American voices, celebrities, judges, performances by Lady Gaga. An extended edition of Robin Thicke’s R&B hit ‘Magic.’ Springer and Mel B zipping onto the stage on a moped. This was the moment. This was the evening-gown competition, late in the pageant, and it meant sink or swim. It meant poise and sophistication, conjuring a collective notion of classical, mid-century beauty. The dresses reached the floor, were meant to glide effortlessly with the walker. Heels were mandatory. This is what she had trained for: the endless hours of preparation, one chance at execution, one chance to impress. The channelled pain. Psychic training and teeth-grinding concentration and pain. A mind turning on its body, transforming it, moulding dumb flesh into purpose, through routine and repetition, ironing out its weaknesses, conquering fatigue and fear. The race goes not to the swift; it was Crystle’s turn to walk. She took a step, and another, and then it was lights, the great star-like spotlights of the theatre, and out in the gloom of the primeval audience, where thousands of Asian faces smiled and watched, Crystle saw her name written in code. A script for the recorded television broadcast, saved and uploaded as a file meant for public consumption. Crystle and Stewart becoming keywords, allowing searchers to find the video, to sift through the mass of moving pictures to find her performance. Her body transformed to pixilation, out and above the void of the arena, already electronic, leaping from flesh and decay into endless repetition, playback, memorization. Her practised movements now able to be slowed, paused, sped up and repeated. Embedded. Saw it clearly, the code that would hold her ageless and unchanging, perfect.