Run Me to Earth

by Paul Yoon

  She didn’t understand all of what he was saying. The man sighed.

  “I wish I had a mask,” he said. “Find one for me, will you? Maybe there is a place in your town. Maybe someone could make me one. Do you know a mask maker? I want the border of it speckled in jewels. I want the nose to be very long.”

  In the dim light of the room, he showed her his profile and mimicked extending his nose with his hand.

  “They say I should have fled a long time ago,” he said. “Fled with all of my fellow countrymen. That I’m foolish to still be here while your country implodes. Foolish to throw my parties. And that perhaps I am a maniac for violence. What do you think? Is it foolish or maniacal of me? Do you understand these words in French? I do not know them in your language, but I did in German. I don’t remember anymore. I used to know German words. I would kneel beside a dying Nazi, just a boy, and promise to save his life if he taught me some words. They always taught me some words. All that yearning for one moment longer in life. That brief recognition of a world beyond one field or bombed-out town where they lay dying. That there might be a future beyond there. What hope. Tell me, do you still have parents?”

  He stopped, as though he had heard a noise. There was no noise. She was holding her breath, and then breathing when she couldn’t hold it any longer. Repeating this. She was thinking of a German boy—she had understood that part of what he said—and then the way he had phrased the last question. And then for what seemed like the first time in a long time she thought of them, her parents, or just her father, clinging to a fading image of him, young, not entirely sure anymore if it was true or from her imagination.

  The Frenchman brought his hand down and reached across to rub the collar of her shirt.

  “You stained it,” he said, but she didn’t look. “You can take off the clothes now and give them to me or I can take my money back. Do you understand?”

  Noi had been focusing on the two girls on the floor still asleep. She didn’t speak. She did nothing. Then she heard a clock chime in a far room, and the man reached behind her and took his money. Slipping it into a pocket in his robe, he leaned back again, studying her once more, and then stuck one of his fingers into his mouth, wetting it. He slid off a ring he was wearing, reached across and slipped it over her thumb, and thanked her for her services.

  She made to leave, quickly, but he was the one who left. He returned his chair to where it had been, swinging it over the two girls who were still asleep, and then he opened a side door that was a part of the wall, and vanished.

  Not long after, she would return to the front entrance and walk out of this house, returning to the town at dawn to find her brother with a hat over his face, asleep against a fisherman’s hut across from the hill community where they had all been born but knew hardly anyone there anymore. She would search for Alisak.

  But before all this, before that walk, before the days that went on, and before she moved further away from the memory of that man and this house, she went to the girls in the corner of the room. She sat on the chair that was warm from the heat of that man, and leaned down to check each of their pulses.

  * * *

  Even now, years later, Noi could still feel the warmth of them as she found herself entering this room on what would be the last evening at the farmhouse. Again, she sat down in that corner chair that had survived, the cushion frayed and faded from the weather. She imagined the shapes of those two girls curled up on the floor. Imagined them standing and leaving, too.

  She heard footsteps. When Vang appeared, he didn’t notice her at first. Thinking he was alone, Vang approached a window that was still intact and looked out at the fields where he had stumbled out three days earlier, out of his mind. In the moonlight, the doctor was just a shadow. Noi heard him tapping his fingers against his chest—something, she had noticed, he had recently begun to do. She stood, the creak of the chair causing him to turn, and she walked around the long table and met him there, by that window.

  “We leave tonight,” Vang said.

  “I should wake Alisak.”

  “No. Let him sleep a little longer. He’ll need the rest. The helicopters won’t be here for a while.”

  She nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at her. “Were you looking for me?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said.

  “Is Prany all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. He’s on his shift. No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. There’s a woman in the ward. First row. She was asking for you.”

  Noi spun the ring around her thumb. Outside, beyond the fountain, the sticks Alisak had planted in the fields swayed slightly from the wind.

  “Will she be coming with us? That woman.”

  The doctor shook his head. Noi had known the answer for a while now. She wasn’t sure why she asked. And then Vang looked at her and said she had saved his life and he had never thanked her for it.

  “Yes.” Noi smiled. “You already did. That day.”

  Vang didn’t respond, but tapped his chest some more. She moved closer to the window and wiped her breath away. She caught a faint blinking light on the horizon. Then it went away. She thought of Alisak again. She wanted to say to the doctor just then that even in the madness, he had given the three of them time and a place to be together, but she wasn’t sure if he would understand, or if it was even a thought she wanted to say out loud.

  She thought about whom she would be able to find if they were all wearing masks.

  “Tonight,” Vang said again, and began walking away.

  “Thailand or France?” Noi called to him, her voice echoing in the long room.

  From the corridor, under the one chandelier that remained hanging from the ceiling, Vang turned.

  “France.”

  * * *

  Where was that man now? She never discovered an answer to this, never knew if he had eventually escaped or had stayed to confront this world becoming, minute by minute, unrecognizable. Whether he was, in fact, a fool or a maniac.

  Sometimes, over the years, the Tobacco Captain would visit her in a dream, always in the guise of someone else: a farmer who once provided her shelter; or a soldier she had stumbled on one morning, running by her in the valley without acknowledging her presence; or often, later, a doctor wearing a pale coat as he appeared around the bend of a wooded path and asked if she wanted to take a walk with him.

  And always she did walk with him, certain of their destination, but never remembering when she woke. Never understanding why she kept him company at all, only that in dreams he was kind and, almost like a young boy, shy.

  It was Alisak whom she walked with that day. Eventually, she found him on the river road, in his arms a crate of food he had found. His mouth already full as she accompanied him to that old tree across the hill and for the first time stopped to embrace him, wanting, more than anything, to feel him around her, by her. To feel every year they had been in each other’s life.

  He dropped the crate. He laughed. They stayed that way as a new noise entered the morning and a tank rolled along the river road, followed by a line of trucks, their beds crowded with young men. They were passing through the town. Noi and Alisak stepped aside, covering their ears, uncertain about what was going to happen as the great tank lumbered by, almost crushing the crate Alisak had dropped. Then one of the men fired his rifle into the air, and a few others followed.

  They waited. But that was all. The men looked down at Noi and Alisak and then at Prany, who had woken and slipped on the hat, and the men passed, all the engine noises unbearable and then growing fainter as the birds circled overhead and the line moved away, heading south. The shudder of the road and that old tree where the basket weaver would notice them four days later, convinced they were spirits up on a branch.

  Now, when Noi returned to the ward, the woman had slipped back into her morphine. Even so, Noi sat with her for a little while, knowing that she would always wonder why the woman had called for her earlier that night, would alway
s wonder what she had found in those brief corners of lucidity in her collapsed mind. And why that desire to share it with Noi.

  She reached for the woman’s hand and held it. She said, “I wanted to tell you that I remember the potter and his wheelbarrow. Once, when I was tired, when I couldn’t feel my legs anymore because we had been walking for hours, my brother over there took the wheelbarrow from him, told me to get in, and pushed me down the road we had been wandering. Ten seconds of this act of love and mischief from my brother. Twenty, maybe. The potter, who had been heading to his home from the town before we had come upon him, chasing us. I can still hear the clatter of clay pots around me as I held as many as I could to keep them from breaking. And my brother’s laughter even in his own exhaustion. The high canopy and the uneven road… in the next life, I hope we will all see each other again.”

  Noi then said good-bye and navigated the rows to Alisak, who was still asleep in the corner, not far from the gap in the ceiling. She watched his stomach rise and fall, the twitch of his foot from a dream. The temporary peace of him lying there. She let him sleep a little longer and found Prany taking off the stained bedsheets from a day-old attempt at surgery. Her brother continuing to work in these last moments.

  She said, “Soon,” and he said, “I know,” and she headed back down the hall of mirrors, stopped, faced her reflection. She was unable to remember the last time she had looked at herself in a mirror. Sixteen years old. Her shoulders and her hips a little wider than four years before. There was all the tiredness contained around her eyes. The cracks in her lips. Her hair long enough to braid and tuck under her shirt whenever she drove the motorbike. Her bandanna and men’s boots.

  She knelt to retie the boots and crossed the kitchen, where a doctor and a nurse were beginning to empty the cupboards, and went up the main set of stairs into the room with the painting and the empty bed frame. She lifted the floorboard and took out their backpacks and slipped the pistol under her waistband. She checked each bag and made sure they were stocked with all their supplies and zipped up. She strapped one on her back, the other to her front, and carried the other out into the piano room, where she was about to kick open the bottom panel of the instrument but hesitated. She thought of baskets swaying from a pole.

  The sky shuddered. Out the window, it was growing pale, not quite dawn, but light enough that she could make out the silhouettes of the helicopters approaching. Almost at once, the sound of them was everywhere, and she hurried down. The nurses were already helping the wounded who could walk past the dining room into the blown-out wing where they kept their bikes. She could now hear nothing but the helicopter blades. It came in every gap and hole in the house and was so consistent, like an endless current of the fastest water.

  She ran to the bikes, met the force of the wind, dropped a bag beside each, and came back to help bring patients out. Someone touched her shoulder and she turned to see Prany behind her, a woman leaning against him, her eyes alive and unable to settle. The woman was shouting, but they couldn’t hear. All together, they hurried to the second helicopter and did one more round.

  When they came back to their bikes, Alisak was there with Vang, who told them where they were going. Noi gave the nurse who was riding with her the backpack and then she slid the pistol around her waistband so that it was resting against her belly button. She leaned over to her brother, placed her lips against his ear, and told him to be careful. The salt taste of her brother’s ear that reminded her, unexpectedly, of the back of their father’s neck. Prany rolled his eyes. All their hair wild and tangled in the rush of wind.

  How much they loved these bikes. How much they were looking forward to France. And yet how little, she thought, they knew of it. Noi sensed the nurse settling behind her and said, “I’m going to buy a chandelier,” but the nurse couldn’t hear. She tapped the nurse’s arms to indicate that she should hold her tight. And then they all started their engines, heading out, Prany in the lead and Alisak in front of her, leaving this house forever.

  The helicopters were now gone, and the noises of the world returned. The bikes’ engines. Her own breathing. She shouted back to see if the nurse was all right, and the nurse replied. Then almost immediately it began to rain. It came down on them, wetting the grip on her handlebars. She sensed her front wheel slipping slightly from the mud but kept the bike straight and pushed on, knowing the rain wouldn’t last. She concentrated on the safe line, on Alisak and Vang not far up ahead in the cone of her headlight.

  Soon, the sky cleared. She could see the start of morning. Another farm in the valley and then a pair of distant bombers on the bright horizon.

  What was that song Vang had been singing?

  There was the delay of passing thunder. The engines of their motorbikes. She thought of her brother pushing her in that wheelbarrow as fast as he could. And a silver tray, undiscovered in that house somewhere, with her fingerprints on the bottom of it. Then the map Vang always wanted them to envision as he took them on a verbal tour of French monuments.

  She wondered whether the journey would feel far. Or if it would be as though no time had passed at all. Whether there would come a point where this, here, and everything that had happened before would seem so distant she would not be able to remember all of it. And whom would she be with then? Would there ever come a day when she would wake to find that all the pieces of her life and her environment were there as she had left them the night before?

  Do you still have parents?

  She had woken one morning on that hill to the voice of the peddler who was looking for her and her brother.

  She was thinking of the clatter of the peddler’s wares, the burned wood smell of him as he leaned down and told them he had found their father when, in the wind and that cone of her bike’s headlight, in the growing daylight across the valley, she caught Vang sliding away from Alisak’s bike. Her breath escaped her, and she swerved, hard, gripping the handlebars, leaving the safe line of sticks, her bike speeding across fresh earth.

  She had turned too fast, was going too fast, her focus still on Alisak and Vang, when she felt the wheels go over a bump. She was searching for Alisak. Her eyes were, frantically. That anchor. And then she found him, looking back at her, and she focused on him, his face, which carried an expression she wasn’t certain of, but which seemed to her, in that moment, like the greatest gift, like something wonderful and old, as though, like some unrecognized promise, they had been given a chance, all of them together, to become old. And as Noi let go of the handlebars and the nurse leaned into her, screaming, it was, just then, in all that sudden, immense quiet, enough.

  KHIT (1994)

  Tape #1

  [ *the sound of a piano key…*

  There is a centaur. In the city, near the station.

  Is that how you think of him?

  No. I just wanted… it reminded me… the window, the house… I’m sorry.

  You’re tired. You’ve come all this way.

  I slept a little on the train.

  You must forgive my English. It’s gotten better over the years because of the hikers, but I feel self-conscious about it.

  It’s better than mine. I know some French.

  We can meet in the middle, then. I’m sorry about the train. It is like that down here, often late. Probably not like that in New York, no? I’ve never been. Crossing the ocean, even a small strait, was something I always wanted to do. And now you are here, having traveled more than I ever have and ever will. All because of him.

  Yes.

  It was a lifetime ago.

  You said he was here for a year.

  Yes. Only that.

  A year is a long time. How long have you been here? Were you here before he came? Are you from here?

  I thought this was about Alisak. Why is this machine between us?

  Would you like me to turn it off?

  No, it’s all right. But why?

  Because… in case I forget.

  You mean, in case you ne
ver find him. In case this is the end.

  Will I find him? Where is he?

  Why should I tell you anything? You’re a stranger to me. I don’t trust you yet. And I certainly don’t trust that thing between us. Besides, there’s really nothing to say. It was more than two decades ago. I can hardly remember myself from those days. Are you sure you don’t want to rest? You’ve come all this way. Here. Drink. The tea is getting cold. I’ll get food. How about a sandwich and some olives?

  Try.

  I’m not sure what you’re looking for. He worked for us and then he left. We never saw him again.

  Try… ]

  She arrived in the spring, landing in Paris and taking the train south through a country she thought she would see seventeen years earlier.

  The whole trip took just over a day. She slept in fits and starts, first on the flight over and then the train. She gave up on sleep and walked the corridors of the cars, wanting even in her jet lag to consume everything racing past the windows. She kept a hand in her pocket the whole way and rubbed the cover of the passport she had, that morning, used for the first time in her life. How, waiting in the border control line, she had grown convinced someone would pull her away. That someone had been looking for her all this time. That it ended here.

  It was well into the afternoon when she stepped out of the Perpignan station, facing a rotunda where there was a statue of what she thought at first was a horse rearing up. Then she noticed the head and the torso of a man. To her surprise, a group of monks appeared, the bright color of their robes snaking across the street as they paused to take a photo of the centaur.

  When a taxi pulled up, she gave the driver a piece of paper with the name of a mountain hostel and in her rusty French she managed to explain how to get there, though he waved the directions away, said that he knew, called it the “old Vineyard.”

  “You’ll need more than that,” the driver said, pointing to her bag, thinking she was a climber.