Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi

My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded into windows where every rivet bleeds contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand waved across my chest and I watched blood on a small screen get back-sucked into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole I have to monitor: one torn flap shuddering an infinite ellipsis of gray stars back and forth.You’re the writer, the doctor said in French.Tell me what you see. Easier to stand in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub shaped like a hand; something celled, cavernously fluted as a lobster’s abdomen. How much work it must have taken to drag these bits out of pits of flame, from lake beds and rice paddies, and stack them in layers: the French planes heaped beneath the American ones, while the Englishwoman beside me peers into this mess of metals, trying to isolate one image from the rest. Ski boot buckle or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp’s nest? According to the camera, it’s just a picture changing with each angle, relic turned to rib cage, chrome flesh to animal: all the mortal details enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace an aluminum sheet torched across a thruster as if wind had tossed a silk scarf over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find a body foreign as my own entombed in here, a thousand dog tags jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides once more past me, each plane reassembling then breaking apart. Spikes of grief— or is it fury?—throb across the surface. Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds of something struggling to pry open death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks, iron trails. My heart rustles in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled at the images I fed him:A row of trees, I said, pointing at my chart.Stone towers, a flock of backlit swallows— Now I kneel beside a cross of blades on which the Englishwoman tries to focus.Do you think I’ll get it all in the shot? she calls as she steps back. Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath. Something like a saint’s skull. The sky floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.