Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

  “T, are you listening?” he heard on the phone.

  “Oh. Yes. Yes. What’s up?”

  “I’m leaving,” his brother said. He sounded far away, like the phone was on speaker and he, for whatever reason, was whispering.

  It made Tuấn whisper, too. “Where you going? And for how long?”

  When they were teenagers, his brother kept a map by his desk. He always wanted to travel. When the chance came up for him to go to Vietnam, Tuấn was surprised he didn’t want to come. During the entire trip, he kept thinking how his brother should have been there and how he would have enjoyed it. And how having his brother there might have made him feel less out of place.

  Tuấn rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. Eleven.

  “I’m leaving leaving. Out of the country,” said his brother.

  “What?” He rubbed his face. “What do you mean? When?”

  “Soon,” he said. Then after a pause, he added, “Meet me at Daisy Dukes. Now. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  There was a long silence before Tuấn began talking again. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on right here on the phone?” he said before realizing his brother had already hung up.

  * * *

  —

  Tuấn got his bike from inside the house and began pedaling toward the Quarter. By the time he got to Daisy Dukes, Ben was standing at the entrance under a flickering neon sign. He wore an UNO hoodie and jeans, though it wasn’t too chilly outside, and greeted him with a casual two-finger salute army-style as Tuấn slowed down and got off. Tuấn locked up his bike and, wordlessly, they entered the restaurant.

  “Long time no see,” Tuấn began as they were seated.

  “I’ve been busy,” Ben said. He scratched his head and looked down at the floor. Tuấn looked down, too, trying to see what Ben was seeing, but he saw only scuff marks and french fries and napkins and straw wrappers. He looked up and saw a waitress taking a couple’s orders.

  “Hey, do we know her?” Tuấn asked Ben and pointed with his chin. “She looks familiar. But I don’t know where I know her from.”

  Ben turned to look and quickly pulled the menu over his face.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Addy Toussaint. I went to school with her. I didn’t know she worked here. Shit.”

  Tuấn remembered now. Addy. A small girl, Haitian, liked chewing gum and Coke. She came over sometimes on her bike and waited for Ben. He remembered she was close enough friends with him that his mother was comfortable having her wait inside the apartment.

  He looked at her now. Obviously, she grew up, but her smile was still childish. The word that came to Tuấn’s mind was innocent, like she wouldn’t hurt a fly. He wondered what ever happened to the two of them, Addy and Ben. He was quick to think it was Ben’s fault.

  “Tell me when she’s gone,” said Ben, still hiding behind the menu.

  “Not yet, not yet.” He tried to hold in his laughter. How childish they were being, like teenagers hiding from their crushes.

  Addy looked over at their booth, and for moment she paused. She looked like she was about to walk over, but another waitress called her and she walked away.

  “Now,” Tuấn said and let out a laugh he couldn’t help.

  “Thank goodness!” Ben said.

  “What you ever do to her? You couldn’t have possibly broken her heart.”

  Ben didn’t answer. A waitress came by and filled up their water glasses.

  “So tell me about things,” Tuấn said now, sighing. “How’s school going? You got that degree yet? What’s it in?” He looked at his brother, who was still small—always more of a boy than a man—and tried to find any changes. When people haven’t seen each other in a long time, there was always a comment on how different one of them looked. He searched and searched, but couldn’t find anything different about his brother.

  “English,” Ben said. Then, as if to clarify, “Books and reading and writing. That kind of stuff. I just graduated, actually.”

  “Congrats, my man. I’m proud of you. I am. I always wanted to go to college, you know,” Tuấn said, though they both knew it was a lie.

  “Yeah?” his brother answered.

  “Yeah. Learning and stuff. A man can go far.”

  After they ordered—a bacon cheeseburger and fries for Tuấn and a veggie burger and a pickle for Ben, who said he was watching his weight—Ben told him where he was going.

  “France,” he said. “Paris. To be exact. There’s a school there. It’s a summer program.” He looked out the window and took a napkin from the napkin holder.

  “But you’re done with school. That’s what you said.”

  “I am,” he said. “I am. It’s something extra. You wouldn’t understand. But it’s important, you see?”

  “Do you need money? Is that what you need, why you needed to talk to me? Or are you asking for permission?” He pictured his brother on the streets of Paris. Tuấn had never been, but he’d seen it in enough movies and on TV. It was always cold and rainy. There were cobbled streets and old cafés and expensive apartments. He pictured his brother lost and unable to speak the language, unable to survive. You shouldn’t go, he wanted to say now, you’re being ridiculous. “You always do what you want.”

  “It’s what Dad taught,” Ben interrupted him, “wasn’t it? French literature? Or language? Or something like that?” He unfolded his napkin and began tearing off pieces.

  The question caught Tuấn off guard. Now he remembered his father’s wife and her library of books, all in different languages, not just Vietnamese. It occurred to him that some of those might have been his father’s and not his father’s wife’s. It made more sense, somehow, in his head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think he did. In Vietnam he had this big library.”

  “I wonder,” said Ben, “if he’s read anything I’ve read.”

  * * *

  —

  Ben drives cautiously but above the speed limit. He holds the steering wheel with both hands and bites his lip; still, he pushes down hard on the gas. Tuấn wants to tell him to slow down—the car’s engine’s not in good condition—but his brother seems very focused. Maybe he’s afraid of driving, Tuấn thinks. Ben slows down when they reach Seabrook and turns in to Wesley.

  “Ol’ Wesley,” Tuấn says. “Haven’t been out this way in forever.” He had dropped out in the middle of senior year. He was always getting in trouble with everyone there. He was living two lives back then: one in school and one outside of it. He had to make a choice and at the time he was proud of it, but sitting in the parking lot with his brother makes him question it.

  Ben is looking around as if he’s anticipating something.

  “Why’d you drive here?” Tuấn asks.

  “Wanted to see it in person before school started,” he says. He rolls down the window and turns off the engine. The humid night air seeps in. Cicadas hum in the bushes. Tuấn unbuckles his seatbelt.

  “How does it feel,” Tuấn asks, “to drive? It’s freeing, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Ben says. He opens the door and walks out to the front. He looks out into the empty parking lot, dimly lit by a single lamppost. Four or five parking spaces away, two crows fight over a slice of pizza.

  Someone was here not too long ago. Tuấn pictures teenagers hanging out and listening to music and eating pizza. He wonders what he missed by dropping out. He opens the car door and stands by his brother, who is now sitting on the hood, staring into the night sky.

  “I’m so glad we don’t live in the city, downtown,” Ben says. “You can’t see the stars down there. Too much light.”

  Tuấn looks up. His brother’s right. He’d never noticed it before—all the stars spotting the sky.

  “Did you
know,” Ben says, “sailors used to use the stars to find their way home. They’re constellations, you see, and if you knew what group of stars was what, what you were looking at, you knew where you were. Isn’t that neat?”

  “Neat,” Tuấn says. (Looking back at this memory, Tuấn will think of his brother’s inheritance: the intelligence of a man he never met, the ability to hold on to facts, a pure love of knowledge.)

  They sit silently.

  Whenever a car passes, Ben stiffens and watches it drive by. When it’s gone, he lets his body relax and looks disappointed. Tuấn doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.

  “I wanted to tell you something,” says Ben, breaking the silence, “but I forgot what it was.”

  “It probably wasn’t anything important,” Tuấn jokes.

  “Probably.”

  After a few more minutes, Ben tosses him the keys.

  “He was right,” Ben says out of nowhere, pointing to the school’s emblem. “It is a cowboy.” They get in the car and Tuấn starts the engine. He drives.

  He’s exiting I-10 when the car starts to smoke.

  “What’s wrong?” Ben asks, shouting his words over the sound of the sputtering engine. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Not sure,” Tuấn says. There’s a grinding sound he hadn’t heard before. He pulls off to the side of the road, across from a shopping center.

  Tuấn pops open the hood. The smoke makes him cough, and he waves his hands to get it out of his face. It’s smoked up before, so this doesn’t surprise him too much. He had gotten the car extra cheap from a friend of Thảo’s. At the time, it felt like a bargain. Now, everything makes sense.

  Ben rushes over with a bottle of water and Tuấn pours it over the engine to cool it off. “Thanks!” he says when the smoke clears and the bottle is empty.

  “It was for you,” Ben says. Then, “You were coughing.” They look at each other, then at the car, and laugh.

  Tuấn plays around with the engine before he turns and sees a Kmart across the street.

  “They might have something we need,” Tuấn says, already beginning to walk.

  “Like what?”

  “Something. We can see. Maybe coolant. I should’ve used coolant in the first place, not water. I’m stupid.”

  “Nah,” says Ben, walking with his brother. “Just bad luck.”

  The four-lane road is empty. They walk over. Once on the other side, though, they realize it’s too late—the store’s closed for the day.

  “They close at eight,” Ben says after reading the store hours. “Who closes at eight?”

  “One hour late,” Tuấn said, looking at his watch.

  Tuấn leans his head against the window. He could break in. He’s done worse things in his life. He could list them all in his head, but when he looks over, Ben’s heading toward the shopping carts in the parking lot.

  And when he’s there, he takes one, begins running, and lets go. The cart flies a few yards until it hits a lamppost at the end of the lot and falls over, the metal banging against the asphalt. They both laugh, though Tuấn doesn’t know exactly why, or what is so funny.

  He says only, “Hey, I have an idea!” and runs and gets another cart.

  It is Ben in the cart first and Tuấn at the handlebar. Pushing the cart down the street, Tuấn laughs and Ben says this is ridiculous. He exaggerates the word: ree-dic-coo-liss! He waves his wrists in the air and his hands look like they’re about to take flight. Not too fast, not too fast—but not too slow, either, not too slow! says his brother. Tuấn listens and does the opposite of what his brother wants: fast means slow and slow means fast and everything is fun. Tuấn pushes for a few minutes, then it’s Ben’s turn. He’s small, but what he lacks in strength he makes up in energy. They switch back and forth, riding the cart until Versailles is on the horizon and they make it home.

  * * *

  —

  After they finished their meals, Tuấn told Ben to come home with him.

  “For a quick second,” he said. He let Ben ride his bike as he followed behind.

  “Where do you live now?” Ben asked as they went down the streets.

  “Same place.” Tuấn trailed behind as his brother took the lead.

  “Working at Royal Oysters still?”

  “Nah. Now I’m a guide for Swampland Tours. It’s an okay gig.”

  “You gotta learn a lot for that, don’t you. A lot of history and geography and stuff like that.”

  “I guess so. But I’ve lived here for so long. You know, you kind of just absorb that sort of stuff.”

  “Look! No hands!”

  “Don’t do that. You’ll fall. Quit it!”

  They turned onto Esplanade and made their way toward Claiborne.

  “I’ve lived here all my life, and I still don’t get it,” Ben said. He stood up on the bike and stomped down on the pedals. The front wheel zigzagged down the street.

  “New Orleans is not for everyone,” Tuấn said, “but it’s home.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, like that was all he had to add. Then, “How was Vietnam? How was the funeral?”

  “Everything changed,” Tuấn said. “I tried to find our old home.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But it was gone, built over. Even the street names changed. Our street used to be named after a type of flower. Now it’s named after some guy.”

  “Bummer.”

  They turned down a dark street. Ben slowed down, so Tuấn took the lead.

  “And our father, he was married to this woman. Another professor. He became a professor, you know, at a state-sponsored university. It was the same building he worked in before, just a different name. She works there, too, his wife. Very nice. Quiet. Younger than Mom.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. It made me wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  About what we hide from each other, Tuấn wanted to say, about what we don’t know about the people closest to us. “I don’t know.” Then, “There was a war. Things happen.”

  “I know,” Ben said.

  They went two more blocks before Tuấn pointed out his house.

  “Still blue, I see,” Ben said, pointing at the stoop.

  “Fresh paint,” Tuấn said. “Stay here,” he said at the door. “I have something for you.”

  It had occurred to him while they were eating that there was something his brother needed to have, something of their father’s—a necklace with a gold coin engraved with some other language. With the way it looked, it was probably from France or somewhere in Europe. It didn’t belong in Vietnam. It didn’t belong anywhere in Asia. Maybe their father had been to France and brought it back. Maybe Ben would know more about it, find it useful in his travels. It belonged to Ben, Tuấn felt; it was already his.

  He rummaged through the pockets of his suitcase until he found it and ran outside, feeling the small metal chain jingle in his hand. When he opened the screen door and let it swing closed behind him, he found his brother wasn’t there anymore. The bike leaned against the house and next to its front wheel sat an envelope. Tuấn picked it up. It felt heavier than he’d expected. Inside were a few fifty-dollar bills and some twenties. About five hundred altogether. Tuấn looked out into the streets and there was nothing. The night was silent. No cars, no people, no animals, no Ben. Ben was gone. Ben disappeared. Like he wasn’t even there, like he never was. Not a trace. He was so much like his father.

  Ben

  2000

  Professor Schreiber told him history happened in cycles. One thing happens, something reacts to it, it all disappears from consciousness only to return later. His mother came to the United States to escape the Communists. It seemed fitting, then, at least to Ben, that—years later—he would leave New Orleans and fall in love with a commun
ist—in France.

  The communist was named Michel, and Ben was stunned by his ruggedness and energy. There was a wildness in him, in his eyes especially, that made him seem out of place in a city as sophisticated as Paris.

  He reminded Ben of the construction workers he saw in New Orleans. They had rough hands, sun-tanned skin, and bulging muscles from work. For months, there was construction work across from Paradise. Ben would watch them work diligently and marveled at the way their muscle, visible beneath their skin, moved—machinelike but at the same time somehow erotic. The men would come over and ask to refill their bottles of water. When they learned it was a gay bar, they seemed embarrassed, but it didn’t stop them from coming over.

  Michel could’ve been one of those men—easily. Surely, Ben thought, he couldn’t have belonged to this world, a dimly lit bookstore in Le Marais, counting money and chatting with customers.

  That Wednesday night, Michel stood behind the counter, talking intimately with a girl who must have been maybe Ben’s age, twenty-two at the most, with bobbed hair and a light spotting of freckles that did not make her look unattractive. Michel wore a beard that made him look older, though he couldn’t have been that old. Ben pegged him at no older than twenty-five or twenty-six.

  They were laughing, the two of them, at something one of them had said. It was so funny the girl had to cover her mouth with both hands and catch herself from falling backward. Then the girl looked at her watch and her eyes opened wide.

  “Tard, tard,” she kept repeating as she gathered her shopping bags. “Late, late.” They pecked each other on the cheeks and she ran out the door.

  Ben had planned to stay in the city for as long as he possibly could. He had graduated in May of last year, and with money from the extra student loans he took out for living expenses, he was in Paris before he knew it. He chose Paris because after reading Henri Murger—a used hardcover of Scènes de la vie de bohème in English with yellowing pages—he knew it was where he was meant to be. And then there were the news reports always announcing riots and protests over little things—an increase in stamp prices, taxes, changes in school curriculum. Parisians, he was sure, cared more than Americans, who were too content for their own good.