Run Me to Earth

by Paul Yoon

  She could barely understand him because of his accent. She looked back at the monks one more time and tried to think of something else to say, to hear him again as he drove down an avenue lined with palm trees. Sometimes, she spoke French with people who came into the restaurant. But there had not been many times since she had immigrated. She had to race to learn another language—English—as fast as possible.

  Now, here in southern France, she felt like a new immigrant again. If she had ever stopped feeling like one.

  She didn’t say anything else to the driver. She caught him glancing at her through the rearview as she checked the front pocket of her bag for the recorder and the tapes. She kept her gaze out the window. Then, as the taxi sped west out of the city toward Vernet-les-Bains, the mountain already visible, like the one near her childhood home, she thought of a promise she had made almost two decades ago, and of that young girl who had followed a man into an abandoned farmhouse in the hopes of leaving with him.

  Khit had left, but not with him. Every day, for seventeen years, like a door that would never shut, she had thought of that.

  * * *

  “You said you found us through Karawek,” Marta said.

  They were sitting across from each other at the dining table of the main house. Khit nodded. She said she discovered Karawek through some people she had met. Which led to Marta and this house and how Karawek used to work with them. She was told it was Karawek who had driven Alisak here the day he arrived.

  “Discovered her?” Marta said.

  “I was bussing a table at the restaurant,” Khit said. “My parents’ restaurant. We live in a college town. We spent five years in the city, in Queens, and then moved north. It was cheaper, quieter. They opened a Vietnamese restaurant across the street from the campus, in Poughkeepsie. The Hudson Valley.”

  Marta asked why it was a Vietnamese restaurant.

  “It’s easier to draw people in,” Khit said. “No one would eat there if we called it a Lao restaurant. During the school year, it’s popular. The summers are slow. Harder for us. But we manage. We’ve done okay. I love it there. The beautiful river. The color of the fall leaves and the apple orchards. The light.”

  She then told Marta that last winter she was working when she overheard a conversation about someone who used to help people in France. It was a table with parents dropping off their kids. They called the person “The Saint.” They were talking because of the news. It was on the news.

  “You must have heard about the camp,” Khit said.

  Marta had. “Thailand broke down a camp and sent a hundred refugees back after all these years. It was because they didn’t want to deal with them anymore. What do you think happened to them as soon as they touched Lao soil?”

  Khit thought it was possible they were arrested and questioned. She said, “Will you think less of me if I told you that I avoided the television when I heard? I didn’t want to know. But these people came in that day and they were talking and that was how I found her, Karawek. They asked about the college town and whether their daughter would be all right. Whether it was possible for her to avoid the city—they were referring to the bombing at the World Trade Center last year, nervous that it could happen again. Then they gave me a number I could try that might lead to another one and another one.”

  “And eventually you found her,” Marta said.

  Khit had stood and walked over to the piano. She didn’t turn but knew that Marta was still studying her, still considering her and what she was sharing. She hadn’t known what to think when she picked up the phone and dialed. It was a Marseille number. She didn’t believe Karawek would answer. Or be the person people said she was. But the woman confirmed she used to help the refugees. And that she knew Alisak. Karawek admitted all this casually. It surprised Khit.

  “Come back to the table,” Marta said. “The piano is out of tune, anyway. Is it true you knew each other as children? That’s what you said on the phone.”

  “No,” Khit said. “I knew someone who knew him as a child.”

  “It’s hard to imagine what Alisak was like as a child. Who is this person you knew?”

  “A man named Prany. They were in the war together.”

  “How old are you? Of course you wouldn’t have known Alisak. You look like a child yourself.”

  “I’m thirty.”

  “And when did you come?”

  “Fifteen years ago.”

  “Straight to New York? To Queens?”

  Khit shook her head. She hadn’t gone straight to New York. She spent two years at a camp in Thailand like the one in the news, she said. She lived in a hut with a dozen others. She fished. She mended tears in clothes and she and the other children attended classes in a large, open shelter run by a teacher. For two years, that was her life. She thought she was heading to France, because everyone else seemed to be.

  There were days, she confessed, when she wasn’t unhappy there. They had very little food. They were often sick, but they had hope. A point to look forward to. And they had crossed the border. They were safe. They were waiting for sponsorship and they were safe.

  “Auntie took care of me,” Khit said. “I’m sorry. You wouldn’t know who that was. She did what your Karawek did, help resettle refugees, among other things. She visited as much as she could. It was Auntie who convinced a young couple to pretend I was their child because it would be easier for families. And she was right. A Methodist church in Queens sponsored us and brought us over. We got a studio apartment in a large brick building in Jackson Heights. We slept together in the corner, trying to get used to the space, the sound of the heating pipes during that first winter.”

  “This young couple…”

  “I call them my parents because they are. They raised me. They’re healthy, still working. What time is it over there? They should be heading over now and getting the kitchen ready. I should be with them. In Laos, they were at a mountain hospital helping wounded Hmong fighters during the war.”

  “Like Alisak.”

  “Yes,” Khit said. “I suppose that’s right. And Prany, too.”

  “And you have been looking for him all this time? Alisak?”

  “No, not always,” Khit said. Sometimes, she asked around. But as the years passed, it seemed impossible. No, more than that: it seemed insane. To find one person in a continent across the world. Not knowing if he was even there anymore. If he was alive. The insanity of a promise, she said.

  “A promise you made to this man… Prany.”

  “Yes.”

  Marta leaned back in her chair. The afternoon light fell on her and then a shadow from the window behind Khit. Khit didn’t turn.

  “During his first month here, he was scared someone would come for him,” Marta said. “Alisak was. He would wake, convinced the person was close by. He said he had done something terribly wrong. That he had messed up. That he hadn’t followed the route, that he had left people in a field. It was like a fever. We didn’t know if any of this was true. And now you are here and today I suddenly believe him more than I believe in anything. Is Prany the one he was scared of?”

  “I don’t think so,” Khit said. “No. I don’t know.”

  “Should I be scared of you?”

  “No.”

  “And tell me, you’re here because…”

  “Because I promised.”

  “The insanity of a promise.”

  “Because I need to know.”

  “Know what exactly? That a man named Alisak lived here? That he got better or didn’t? That he remained a broken thing or got healthy again? That he made a life with whatever was left in him? Even now, I cannot fathom the amount of bombs that were dropped there. How many did you come close to stepping on? Or witness go off?”

  Marta touched her own face, indicating Khit’s scar, but she ignored the gesture, leaning forward and wrapping her hands around the warm teacup. The steam glanced against her chin.

  Where they lived, Khit said, near the coll
ege, there was a middle school with a baseball field. Her father took her to a game one evening not long after they moved. It was free. They had never gone to a game in the city. They sat in the back of the bleachers and shared a paper cone of shaved ice. She loved that their tongues turned blue. It was the first time she saw a baseball up close. Someone hit a foul, and it landed near them.

  “That sound,” Khit said. “Something happened inside of me. I couldn’t control it. I clenched my fists and began to breathe hard and I shut my eyes. I felt my father holding me, but I couldn’t stop. I am sure people noticed. I wanted to stop. I wanted to open my eyes. My father tried to get me to go, but I also wanted to stay. So we stayed. Eventually it passed. But throughout the game I was afraid of the baseball. Afraid of watching it being tossed in the air and afraid for the person who had to pick it up. But most of all afraid of the sound it makes when a bat hits it or when someone catches it in their leather glove. This seems silly, yes? But I was afraid. My father was, too, I could tell. That is the size of a bombie. One baseball.”

  * * *

  She took a bite of the sandwich Marta had made for her, trying not to stare at the woman, knowing the woman was staring back. She thought Marta was no older than fifty. Even though it was spring, she was wearing a shawl and a heavy sweater, and her hair was braided. There was a moat around her. Khit had sensed it when she had arrived earlier, the way Marta was preoccupied with unwrapping a new paintbrush as Khit followed her inside. The tea already on the table.

  Every minute it seemed impossible that they would keep talking, but they did. Perhaps it was her tiredness, but Khit found herself not minding the questions Marta kept asking, and not minding her own answers to them. Other than her family and the customers, she couldn’t remember the last time she had really spoken to someone. Her parents were older now, so that most days it was her at the restaurant, closing up. There was the occasional ice cream at the place across the street if it was still open. The college student working there to pay his tuition always giving her an extra scoop. The short walk home to the condominium a few blocks away that she had moved back into years ago and where her mother would be up, waiting for her, watching television. The rare night when they stayed up, remembering Auntie together.

  “How long were you married for?” Marta said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Two years. Long enough to have a child. Javi, he’s my ex-husband.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a policeman. But farther north now. Near the Canadian border.”

  “My father was a policeman!”

  “Were you always afraid he wouldn’t come home?” Khit said.

  Marta said she had very few memories of seeing him when she was a child. Something happened in her village and in the surrounding area, which caused him to be gone a lot. So most days, she would listen closely to the radio, hoping to find him in there. She would slowly switch channels wondering if someone else had spotted him.

  “He was a bit famous,” Marta said. “In the village. Because of what happened. He was by then, how you say, a detective.”

  Khit asked what had happened.

  “He did his job. He solved a crime. But I was asking you about your policeman, not mine. Javi.”

  “Yes,” Khit said. “You’re right.”

  One day, she was on her motorbike heading toward the train station. Every month, a deliveryman would drop off supplies or packaged noodles they got cheaply, so she would go down to the platform to receive them. The man stepped out of the train, handed her the box, and went back in. As she turned, Javi told her to drop it. He appeared out of nowhere. He thought it was drugs. He made her open the box, and to his surprise it was plastic utensils. She began to laugh on the platform. She called him an idiot. He should have arrested her for that, but he didn’t; he followed her to the restaurant as though she were going to do something else with the utensils.

  “You drive a motorbike?” Marta said.

  Khit smiled. “Of course. We all do. My family. It was all we had at the camp. It was our only way of moving from one camp to another, of heading down into Chiang Mai. Six motorbikes. We all learned. We were thirteen, fourteen. The adults taught us. We had to concentrate on how to maneuver the machine on mountain roads, in the mud, over stones. The driving made us forget where we were. It helped us when we were feeling scared or helpless.”

  There was a man, she recalled, who used to cry every morning when he woke in the camp. As though every day he remembered where he was, and he would cry. Everyone could hear. It was unbearable to so many of them. Not knowing where they were supposed to be. Would they eventually go back home? Were they waiting to go somewhere else? Was this all there was? This mountain camp in Thailand? On a bike they didn’t often think about those things.

  “But that was how I met him,” she said. “A box, a train platform, and a bike. Javi started coming to the restaurant for lunch. He stayed for exactly half an hour always. He would sit by the window alone, order his food, and read a book or do a crossword. I had never seen someone underline words in a book before. Every time he did that it was like he was drawing on me. I felt it. It was strange. It made me curious. I got sick of him eating alone. So I began to sit with him, not caring that my parents and the other customers were watching.”

  “What was he underlining?” Marta said.

  “Passages in novels. It was a way to keep up with his English, he claimed, though really his English is better than mine.”

  He liked books, she told Marta. He wrote poems he refused to ever share with her. It turned out they briefly lived only a block from each other in Queens. He had emigrated from Mexico as a young boy before her. Then his father found a job at the college as a landscaper and a gardener, so they moved north.

  Marta asked what Javi’s father was like.

  Khit said she never met him. “He died,” she said. “Of cancer. A few years before we met. But after those lunches, Javi and I began to spend more time together. He would pick me up after his shift and we would watch a movie or take a walk around the college campus that looked like an amusement park to us, everything so perfect. The hedges, the paths. We stole flowers, telling ourselves it was in honor of his father. We ran into a million students and some invited us to their parties, probably because we looked young. And you know what? Sometimes we went. What do they call them? Keggers. I love that word. It sounds reckless. Javi, the policeman, at a kegger. We did silly things like that. Boys would come up and ask me about my face and I’d make up stories: a knife fight, a boxing match, three pit bulls. Whatever it was, they believed me.

  “You see, I was less hesitant then. Less shy of this new world. Less, I suppose, afraid. We made each other laugh, Javi and I. We got to know each other through laughter. He helped me with my English. We were suddenly in a college town in America and we found it both hilarious and amazing. He was alone. Save for my parents, I was alone. We had each other and then we had Philip.”

  “Philip,” Marta said.

  “Our child. We named him Philip. We thought it would be easier for him that way. To have a name like that.”

  “Has it been?”

  “What?”

  “Easier for him?”

  Khit paused. She noticed the tape was running. She made to turn it off, since she had been using it up talking about herself, but then changed her mind. Marta noticed, but didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know why it didn’t work out between us,” Khit said. “Between Javi and me. Or I can feel it on some days. It is strong and certain. It is like the feeling when you are aware of the last hour of the day and you haven’t done enough, but it is okay. It is okay. I loved him. We had good years. We had our boy. We had an apartment near the train station and the river with bright sunlight and we slept to the whistles of those trains and woke to the smell of the Italian bakery down below. We had jobs and we had my parents, who grew to trust him. We had days off and day trips and a camera and too many photos of Philip. It was a
life. A good life. Then Javi left, and I let him. I let him go, because I could only go so far with him. And I don’t know why that is. Whether it will be like that with someone else. Whether it will always be like that. I don’t know what there is to say that could explain this better.”

  “Maybe you did already,” Marta said.

  * * *

  An early star appeared above the far trees. Then two figures emerged from the distant barn and washed their hair using the hose. Khit watched through the window as the water arced up into the dark blue air. The way they helped wash each other.

  It was hard to describe, but she was both tired and awake. She wondered if that was what jet leg was. Being in a state of two things. Two places. Here, but still somewhere else.

  She wondered if Philip was helping make the takeout kits. When he wasn’t at school he was always there and he liked doing it, wrapping the plastic utensils in a napkin and then binding them with a rubber band. He liked peering over the counter and spying on the diners, too. Making up stories about them, which he would whisper across to her. She didn’t realize until now how much she would miss waking him from the chair he always fell asleep in and walking with him back home tonight. She lifted her plate to bring into the kitchen, wanting to stay in the thought of Philip for a little while longer, but Marta gestured for her to stay.

  So Khit switched tapes as Marta mentioned that it had been a hostel for years. It was for people climbing Canigou and those passing through on their way up the Pyrenees. It wasn’t busy right now, but it would be soon. She didn’t charge much. Enough for petrol, to keep up the house, to keep the cupboards in the barn stocked with provisions, coffee. There was Yves’s garden. She could still manage that. She went once a week into the town.

  “Every year I think I will stop, but I don’t,” Marta said. “I like looking out the window, too. I sit where you sit, wondering about their lives, all these people who want to climb and hike the length of a country.”