by Paul Yoon
“Fresh like the best fruit,” Vang said.
Before the interrogator could say anything else, Prany and Vang stepped toward him, grabbed his arms and his head, and threw him down against the table so that his body was folded over the edge. They twisted his chin up, shoved a small towel into his mouth, lifted him back up, and slammed him down again. They pulled back on his arms as though they were levers, hard as they could, hard enough that they heard both shoulders pop. The only sound that came from the man was a murmur of surprise, a grunt, and then his attempts at breathing as his body struggled. They had already broken his nose. Using their weight, they pressed down on the top half of his body as hard as possible, but Prany was already out of breath. There wasn’t a lot more strength left in him, he realized.
Years in a cell. The two of them wrestling as quietly as they could to build up stamina.
It wasn’t enough. Before panic could set in, the interrogator freed himself from them and collapsed onto the floor. They braced themselves for him to shout, but he didn’t. The towel was stuck in his mouth, already soaking up his blood. He crawled slowly toward the door, both of his arms dragging strangely along his sides. Vang grabbed the interrogator’s waist, pulled him back across the floor, and together they knelt and pressed their weight on him again.
Because of Prany’s hand, Vang was holding the hunting knife. He grabbed the interrogator’s hair and pushed his head down and began to stab him in his side above his belt. The interrogator bit down hard on the towel and screamed and his eyes welled and reddened. He flopped like a fish out of water. Prany shoved the towel deeper into the interrogator’s mouth and weighed his knee down against him. He watched as Vang kept stabbing him, faster, all across his side, the carpet beginning to grow dark and thick and wet. His glasses fell off, but Vang ignored this, kept stabbing. Then he leaned down and spoke into the interrogator’s ear as his body jerked. Prany didn’t hear what Vang said. He watched Vang’s mouth moving beside the ear and watched as Vang gripped the knife with both hands and pushed down into the back of the throat, the blade slipping down slowly at first and then softly.
And then it was done. The interrogator went still. Vang let go of the knife, which was still in the man. It was like a piece of rock had sprouted from his neck.
Quickly, they took off their towels and shoved them against the interrogator’s body to soak up the rest of the blood. They headed into the bathroom, where Vang vomited, kneeling over the toilet. The Fanta and the beer and all the food he had eaten slushed into the toilet bowl. He shut his eyes. He laughed. He laughed louder and Prany covered the doctor’s mouth. Prany turned on all the water spouts, the shower head, and the faucet, and he helped Vang up and they began to wash themselves. They opened all the shampoos and unwrapped the soaps and cleaned themselves and each other as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, all without looking at the mirror.
They got back into the clothes they had come there with, the clothes that had been given to them. They looked once more at the interrogator on the floor, at his open eyes, the knife in him, his arms crooked. The wet carpet and the towels growing more dark.
They left the inn, the two of them crossing the lobby where there was that faint music, and hurried past the courtyard down the road through the forest. They didn’t look back.
Vang handed Prany what little money they had left and said, “You find Auntie. Go.”
They had forgotten to clean Vang’s glasses. Prany took them off him as they walked down the tree-lined road, trying to rub the blood away as quickly as possible. The scratches on the lenses were dyed red. Prany’s breathing became erratic and he began to shiver. And then he stopped on the road and clung to Vang, pressing their foreheads together, wanting to be close to him one last time, to hold the only person he knew anymore one last time.
“Come with me,” Prany said. “Please.”
Vang, ignoring him, took back his glasses and said, “And then you find Alisak. You find him. Go.”
So they parted by the highway, the ferryboat long gone. Prany walked back to the bus station and Vang crossed the road and shouted, once, up into the air, an animallike noise, a bellow, his shape growing fainter as he descended the slope, before his journey home, to swim in the reservoir for the first time in his life.
The bus heading north was a small repurposed military truck that reeked of hay rot, and when it turned into the station lot, he hurried on. The old man who had been waiting on the bench all this time got on as well. They sat across from each other in the dark. They were the only ones.
Prany kept shivering and was out of breath. He tried to sleep, but when he shut his eyes, he saw the strange way the man’s arms had dragged across the floor—the towels around him as though pale moss had begun to grow on his body. When the truck sped over a pothole, he thought he was going to vomit, but the nausea went away. He forced himself to stay awake, focusing his gaze on the narrow strip of the receding road that was visible through a gap in the tarp: the borders of fields, a billboard that slipped away, the tail of a large animal, and the sun going down.
He was engulfed by the sound of rushing air and the rattle of the truck bed. There was also the knowledge that one other passenger was on the truck with him. He looked for the old man’s silhouette in the shadows across from him but couldn’t find him. He wondered if the man had switched seats. Whether his shoulder was now a breath away from his. Who was this old man? What kind of life had he lived for seven years? Prany fought a sudden desire to swing his arm, swing into the dark, and jump. When he thought he finally would, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, the truck pulled into the next station, and Prany leaped off, crossed the lot, and switched to another bus.
He was following Auntie’s directions. These whispers of narratives from fellow prisoners who would occasionally pass on information to them. It seemed the only thing he could lean on. As the hours passed, as he kept traveling and keeping himself awake, he kept expecting the touch of someone beside him, a voice. Or for the bus to stop, for a car to appear behind them, for a roadblock or a checkpoint. Gunfire. For him to be pulled away.
But all Prany ever encountered was a group of soldiers gathered on the side of the road, wearing the same green uniforms the prison guards wore, ignoring the bus as it drove by. Before the soldiers vanished, he watched through the gap in the tarp as they gathered around a farmer who had his wrists bound and was kneeling in the grass.
It was evening by the time he arrived in Phonsavan. He was the only one to get off the bus. He left the station and walked toward the center of the town, searching for any points of recognition, of a town that had perhaps rebuilt and recovered. But it was desolate, hardly there at all, only what was left of the land. Even the abandoned tanks were gone. There were craters along the side of the road and debris everywhere, more than he remembered: the dismantled structures of what had once been homes, the school, the broken head of a Buddha lying on its side with a single enormous eye staring blankly back at him.
Up ahead, there was one brick building intact. Its yard was littered with plastic jugs. He almost didn’t stop until he remembered that it was the town hospital. He walked up to the door that Noi had shot and he stepped in, catching the shapes of people asleep on the floor, sharing a frayed cotton blanket, the moonlight revealing them waking and shielding their faces against him as though he were a weapon.
He left them alone, kept going. He didn’t see anyone else. Out in the night now, he began to feel looser, more awake and aware; it was good to walk, to be out of the bus. He picked up a leaf, spun the stem between his fingers. He moved away from his exhaustion and stayed with the fact that at this moment he was experiencing a physical freedom. That he was walking. That he could do so all night if he stayed in the shadows. That there was a sky and it was enormous and unbroken. That it was quiet and clear and that what they had been imagining for so long was now done.
When a wind came, he let the leaf go. Then, approaching the town, he saw to his surprise w
hat had once been the heart of it: the night market, aglow. He stayed on the periphery, under a long, rotting balcony, peering across at the old stalls where he could make out three vendors gathered in a corner, trying to sell their ceramics and baskets, though mostly they were talking to each other, drinking tea, keeping each other company. In one stall, under a hanging lamp, a woman refolded a textile, and he saw the towels all over the floor again. As though they had given their torturer some courtesy afterward. He didn’t know why they did that.
A man walked by, and Prany, turning, almost bumped into him. Prany froze. The man didn’t notice and headed toward a side street. He was pulling off gloves and dressed in a pale uniform Prany had never seen. He thought at first the man must be Pathet Lao, but then Prany caught sight of two actual soldiers: they were checking the papers of the vendors and their goods, one of them pocketing a tiny, ceramic teacup.
Hurrying down toward the river, staying in the shadows, Prany kept looking for somebody, someone else, anyone, faces.
He followed the bank until he reached a large settlement, moving up a slope. A myriad cluster of wooden huts, clay houses, and shanties with metal roofs. Some had collapsed and had never been rebuilt; others had changed over the years. They were dark, though, and it was impossible to tell if anyone actually lived there anymore. Yet after all this, after all the identities and shapes and lifetimes the settlement had gone through on that hill, it had survived.
All night, Prany had been resisting this. But he wanted to see it one last time. To approach this neighborhood again one last time. As though he still lived in this corner of town that had been here as far back in his life as the moon was high above him. As though there remained some part of him somewhere in one of those shanties far up the slope where there was a hot plate and stacks of newspapers they had used for almost everything. Where he would fix an antenna for his father in the morning, all so the man could catch an hour of a radio show. Where a woman trying to siphon electricity off the town wires was electrocuted one morning, and the way they had avoided her body for days, unsure of how long a body could carry a current. Where Prany had once watched Alisak, six years old, swinging a coat hanger at an approaching man in order to protect his mother.
They had all taken care of each other. Where had they all gone? It startled him to be suddenly thinking of parents at all. So many of them on this hill, including theirs, had vanished early on, had died in the war, left, or had become abstractions, erasing themselves so completely in the opium they were hired to harvest and then stole and became addicted to.
He had come here once, during the war, before they had been recruited by the nurses, and hid the one thing he had of his father’s up under the eave of what had been their home: a fountain pen. This great luxury of writing. Ink and paper. How the man saved the ink for so long it had, in the last year of his life, dried up. Prany had wondered, when he came, if the pen had survived, knowing it hadn’t.
They had nine years together. Before his father died. Two years longer than the years Prany was imprisoned. To him, now, always a lifetime. But it was never long enough to know anything about the man other than he built roads for the country and was often gone. That he liked coffee and the radio. That he had been good to them, though he always preferred being alone. But that one day, because they begged him, he taught the three of them how to drive his motorbike on this river road Prany was standing on now, tonight. The man’s shirt pocket always stuffed with cigarettes and a notebook, one Prany never got a chance to see.
His father the secret poet.
Years later, in the chaos of a firefight, Prany watched as a farmer picked up and brought a live grenade to his stomach to shield the blast from the three of them. They had been wandering the mountains in the east and had been running toward an abandoned truck that was blocking the passage.
As the grenade detonated, as the man’s shirt ballooned before he sank to his knees, Prany thought of his father—the smell of him, his poor posture, the permanent tar stains on his fingers. How in the early mornings as Noi slept, Prany would sneak out ahead of him, climb a tree, and wait for his father’s motorbike to pass under along the road.
How Prany loved this. This private vantage. The hill not yet awake. And how his father always slowed and reached up to grab his son’s bare feet before driving on. Their eyes meeting. The touch of his father still there on his heels, like the brush from a feather, as Prany climbed back down.
* * *
When he turned around, a girl appeared from behind a lamppost and approached him. She was smoking a cigarette and clicked her tongue. Before Prany could speak or flee, the girl slipped her arm under his, and they were leaving the road together, following the river again but heading farther away from the town.
“You Prany?” she said, in a whisper.
“I know five people by that name,” Prany said. “Two boys and three girls.”
This made her smile. The closeness of her in the dark startled him. She smelled of the river. Her breath was sour. He felt the movement of her arm against his pocket and he stopped, gripped her wrist, and found some of his money in her grasp. She stayed where she was, close to him, smoking her cigarette and staring at him until he backed away.
“Where’s Auntie?” he said.
“Ask her,” she said, and pointed at an open shed up ahead.
It was an old fishermen’s shed with a thatched roof. As he approached, he noticed a younger girl, around thirteen, sitting on the wooden counter in the back that had been used to clean fish. She was wearing a pair of men’s trousers, the cuffs rolled up, the waist cinched with a thick rope.
“Careful where you step,” the younger girl said as he ducked under the roof.
For a moment, he thought she was talking about a bomb. But she was simply looking down at a path of moonlight on the ground. So Prany joined her on the counter and looked down, unsure of what she was focusing on until he spotted a caterpillar slowly making its way along its border.
“If you wait long enough, it’ll go into the light,” she said, and swung her legs in the air.
“Long time to wait,” Prany said.
She shrugged, held the edge of the counter, and stared at him. They didn’t know each other. In the sudden stillness in the shed, he began to feel his own exhaustion again. It was like his own skeleton was trembling inside of him. His hunger returned, also, but the thought of food nauseated him. He took out another bill and asked where Auntie was.
When she didn’t respond, he asked what her name was.
“What’s yours?”
“Me? I’m a vampire.”
“That’s not funny,” the girl said. “What happened to your hand?”
“What happened to your face?” Prany said.
There was a thick shrapnel scar running across the girl’s cheek.
“Bah,” she said. “The boys think it’s pretty. It’s pretty, no?” She angled her face at him as though she were posing for a camera. She was whispering, too.
“Khit,” she said. “My name. Khit.”
He did not yet recognize the name.
The other girl, who had been standing guard outside the shed, clicked her tongue. The two soldiers he had seen in the square earlier walked down the street. Before he was aware of his own body stiffening, he felt Khit’s growing smaller as she folded herself behind him like a cat.
“Someone looking for you?” he said, sliding her behind him on the counter.
“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” she said.
Together, they watched the other girl approach the soldiers. The soldiers whistled. The girl laughed at something they said and took one of their hats and slipped it on, angling her hip. Then she waved the money she had taken from Prany, slipped her arms around them both, and led them away. She didn’t look back.
When the footsteps faded, Prany said, “What will happen to her?”
“Her? You mean, what will happen to them,” Khit said, and giggled as she crawled out from behind him.
“Please,” Prany said. “Where’s Auntie?”
Khit continued to ignore him, searching for the caterpillar on the floor.
“It’s there,” Prany said, pointing.
She leaned forward to look. “You have food?” she said.
He stood and went over to a bin in the corner and rooted around, but she said she already checked. He took out his last bill from the envelope. She said it really wasn’t much use here when there was hardly any food, but she took the money anyway, tucking it into her sock.
As he sat back down, he noticed some blood on his fingernails, on his shirt, too, and wondered if she had noticed. She was pushing her thumb along the old knife marks on the counter. He caught a metallic taste in his mouth and spat, and then he held himself, pacing the hut a little. He wanted this girl to keep talking.
“The cars,” Prany said. “I haven’t seen a single car.”
“Thailand,” Khit said. “Or in storage. Gas prices. No money. Gone.”
He asked how long the town had been like this, the country. He thought of him and Vang getting out at the bus station earlier today. Was it only today?
Khit replied it always was. That it had always been like this. “Where have you been? People died or didn’t come back. Mostly only the soldiers now, here. Those two. Always those two. They choose a house where there is someone trying to live or spend the night, go in, take whatever they want, sell it or trade it with the truck that comes every week with their cigarettes and their bottles. Sometimes, some travelers pass through, but not many. Last year, I saw a North Korean. You ever seen a North Korean? Or a Russian? Different uniforms. Smell different, too. The North Korean gave me a cigarette. He spoke some French. Not bad.”
Prany mentioned the uniformed man he had seen earlier, the one he had almost bumped into. He asked what kind of uniform that was.
“Not police,” Khit said, eyeing the road. “They clear fields. Bomb detectors. Like I said, where have you been? All these questions. They’re everywhere. The only good work you can find. You’ll see signs. Shows you where you can go and where you can’t. Just like me. I’m your sign today.” She pointed out toward the distance. “You should go to the hospital.”