The Bru village in which I recovered my strength was technically across the DMZ, in North Vietnam, in a zone where none of our forces operated. A place so remote that the only montagnards who had ever seen an American were the FULRO fighters who passed through on occasion.
I would be there for five months.
It was the rainy season when I first arrived. The point—about twenty miles off—where the mountain footpaths were said to connect with a real trail was washed out. Where the trail connected with a safe route (or where I imagined a safe route might be) out of that country I didn’t know.
For weeks I couldn’t walk. My foot was badly infected. I was terrified of gangrene, of losing my leg. I lay in that room in a house on stilts in a village of twenty such houses nestled high in the rain forest and thought, this is where I’m going to die. And no one will ever know.
You would never have known.
You and I were together for such a short time. First in chaotic circumstances, among all those wounded men and exhausted nurses. And both of us wounded and exhausted in our own ways. Then we were alone together even more briefly, and intensely, in a city neither of us knew, before being torn apart.
Now, two years later, the idea that you could be with someone else torments me. When I tell myself this isn’t possible, it’s not out of false pride, but because I believe deep down that you must feel as I do. That for both of us there will never be anyone else.
Yet, with the passage of time, I fear I’ve become a ghost to you. Forever inhabiting the limbo of Manila. In our heads, a ghost can assume a whole other life, so fixed in the past that we convince ourselves it can’t ever return to this life. That’s a subject I know something about.
I know about possessiveness, too. My fears of losing you are still more painful to me than any wounds I’ve suffered. What two people can love each other deeply without wanting to possess, and be possessed? Isn’t love the only place we can give everything and honestly expect it may not be in vain? Even after we’re dead.
This is how my thoughts were running my first weeks in that bamboo room in which incense burned day and night. On the straw mat under the thatched roof I had plenty of time to think. The room was always twilit. In the upper corner of one small window I could see the sun light up the tall trees at midday, and in the same space I might watch a few stars flicker to life before I fell asleep. For six weeks I never saw the moon or sun directly.
As my fever abated, my mind fixed on more concrete and particular things. I thought of the bracelet I gave you. Of the slenderness of your wrist, and the scent of your skin when I kissed you there, and then on your shoulders and breasts. Many times as I lay in that room I felt your lips brush my cheek. And settle on my mouth. And part slowly before we were kissing hard, embracing, in our room in Manila with the shutters and the slow fan.
Over and over I revisited our time together there. Every moment, from different angles, but always with you at the center of the picture. The drive down the coast. The beach at Orion. Diving for shells. The bazaar where I found the jade earrings. The green dress they matched and the soft sound it made when you walked. The playing-card leaf on which you wrote our names. The hibiscus in the hotel courtyard and the cries of the cats on the high wall. But most of all our room. The ribbon on the fan and the muffled piano music in the next room. The narrow bed. Your body pressed up against mine. The red dot on your palm where the spider had bitten you in New Orleans. The spider with the stars on its belly.
In the Bru village there was a woman who nursed me, a sorceress. Like all the montagnards, the Bru are animists. To them, every rock, tree, plant, mountain, and stream has its own spirit and consciousness. The same goes for floods and fires, and even particular sections of the sky. Their word for this spirit-force is ae. When you’re sick, they believe the illness to be spirit-induced, adversely affecting your own spirit. Thus they insist that, more than the organs of the body, it is the spirit which must be dealt with. Left unattended, malignancies of spirit can spread and wipe out an entire village. (Or even a country: it occurred to me that the war itself has been perpetuated by such runaway malignancies in Washington D.C. and Hanoi.) With a high fever and lingering infection, added to the fact that I was a stranger of an alien race, my case was seen as especially dangerous. This was why the chief sorceress, the caretaker of spirits, actually moved into the hut belonging to one of Nol’s cousins where I had been lodged.
The first time I saw this woman she looked thin as a reed sitting in the corner of my bamboo room staring at me. Smoking a pipe. Among the montagnards, men and women alike smoke a bitter mountain tobacco laced with mint. I had seen many sorts of tattoos since arriving in the village, but this woman’s was particularly elaborate and gave me a jolt: a red spider, finely drawn on her left cheek, complemented by a concentric web that covered the right side of her face. At the center of the web there was a silver star. Through the dim light of the tallow burning beside me, the spider at times looked real. And at night, as the woman sat very still, the star twinkled. I came to look for it when I awoke half delirious in the darkness.
That first night, when she came out of the shadows to mop my brow and repack my ankle, the woman told me her name was Ji-Loq. Which in the Bru language means “spider crossing the stars,” a being with enormous powers in the world of spirits.
It was Ji-Loq who informed me (by drawing a circle of figures with upraised arms on a mountaintop under the stars) that the Bru I was among were a distinct branch of the tribe who worshipped the stars.
She brought me tea and boiled rice. And those bitter black roots which I chewed several times a day. I communicated with her by sign language. And by drawing pictures on a flat stone with a splinter of charcoal. When I grew afraid one night and drew a picture of a man with one leg, she shook her head vehemently and gripped my wrist. She was not going to let me lose my leg.
And I trusted her because of her name. Because of her name, I thought you had sent her to help me.
At first, during the long days and nights I drifted in and out of sleep beneath that thatched ceiling, my mind roamed fitfully. When I did sleep and dream, I did not participate in my dreams so much as I observed them from the outside. For a while, they were strictly dreams of my childhood: roaming the peripheries of the desert with a compass; watching my mother comb out her hair on the terrace when she woke at midday; sitting on the floor of my father’s study while he was at his desk without our once exchanging a word; building model airplanes out of balsa wood; and, most frequently, lying on my back on the lawn to study the clouds and the stars and the meteorites that flared brilliantly over the desert.
This part of my childhood didn’t last long.
I began getting in trouble when I was still very young. I was born in Reno, and after my mother left, when I was seven, I remained there for another eleven years. My father raised me—when he was around. He still lives there.
I never got over my mother’s disappearance. My troubles really began when I told myself that I had. The anger it fired up in me was going to burn for a long time. It started out with fights at school.
As I said, my parents were well known around Reno. My father is a rich, powerful man. For that reason, he has plenty of friends, but their loyalty is about as thick as a sheet of paper. With his enemies, on the other hand, the feelings run deep. They last lifetimes. His vendettas, and the vendettas against him, have been known to take on lives of their own.
One of the things my father never did well is play the fool. You could argue that his entire adult life was a tortuous exercise in erecting defenses against ever having to do so. My mother knew that. And the role of fool was exactly what she handed him the moment she very publicly ran away with another man. Having overheard their quarrels, and knowing how unhappy my mother was, and how cruel and difficult my father could be, I could almost forgive her just taking off like that. But I couldn’t forgive that she hadn’t given a thought to the consequences of her actions on me. For starters,
the ridicule to which I would be exposed.
In some ways I resembled my father: swallowing my pride was not one of my strong suits. Not when it came to being taunted in the playground about my mother. All my pent-up anger for her I let fly against the kids who taunted me. It didn’t matter if they were twice my size, or came at me in pairs, I took them on. I became very free with my fists, and the more I got beaten up, the harder I fought.
I don’t know how many times I was expelled from school—lots of schools. If it hadn’t been for my father’s influence, I would have been in reform school. As it was, I was lucky to have avoided juvenile prison, having moved up to petty larceny—shoplifting, picking pockets (without extracting a single dollar before throwing the wallets into trash cans)—and then to grand larceny, stealing cars off the street. I’d jump the ignitions, joyride the cars on the interstate, and ditch them in the desert.
I was a rich kid slumming, a dilettante criminal with the flimsiest of motives: that I was pissed off. Where my mother had left off setting my father up to play the fool, I was going to finish the job. Between the two of us, I thought, we could put him through the wringer. How wrong I was, and how dearly I paid for it. My father’s business was putting other people through the wringer. My mother had gotten to him, all right, but that made him all the more determined that no one else should get to him. And certainly not her son.
Which, as my troubles multiplied, is what he came to see me as: her son, not his.
I haven’t spoken with my father in sixteen years. Though our rift was many years in the making, it became completely and forever uncrossable on September 10, 1955, when I learned once and for all just what kind of man my father was.
It’s a complicated story. It begins and ends with the only other woman I ever loved, Mala.
Her name was Bel. My childhood sweetheart. She was a year older than me—nineteen when she died. My father, who barely knew her, hated her because of who she was. That is, who she was related to. She was the daughter of a former partner of his, whom he had betrayed, and the niece of his most hated enemy, whom he had cheated even worse. When he got wind that I wanted to marry Bel, my father not only forbade it, but promised to make my life miserable just for contemplating such a move.
In truth, her uncle, who hated my father every bit as much as my father hated him, and who wouldn’t have liked anything he might have heard about me, would never have approved our marriage, either, if he had gotten wind of it. But Bel kept our relationship a secret. She said we were a Romeo and Juliet story, born on the dividing line of an ugly feud, people on all sides thwarting us. Still, she told me, love would win out.
I wanted to believe that. To believe that love, not destruction, would win out. Yet I knew that, even in the most favorable conditions, love is fragile. And because of my history, I had a strong hunch then about what I know now: that destruction always wins out. But even people under the gun sometimes get some breathing room. Five years, six, for some people upward of ten.
Bel and I had less than two years. Time that seemed like it was ours alone—and therefore felt much longer—because we didn’t share it with anyone. It wasn’t that we were together all the time—far from it—but when we were, it was as if there were no one else in the world. And no one who knew anything about what we were doing or how we really felt.
We were going to elope, which meant running away together without a dollar between us. But because of a blowup with my father, my own foul temper, and a reckless chain of events he set in motion, everything backfired on Bel and me. We got badly burned and never recovered.
Events moved very fast at that time. Whenever I thought I had a grip on them, they changed. Even now, as I try to reconstruct them, they keep moving. Like a jigsaw puzzle some invisible hand scatters every time you’re poised to add a pivotal piece.
When you and I were in Manila, one of those pivotal pieces that had always eluded me just fell into my lap. It seemed to arrive across many centuries, but really it had only been fourteen years. And how strange that this should happen when with you I was living each day as if it were a year, when once again events were about to speed up and fly out of control.
Remember the proprietor of the Hôtel Alnilam, the Frenchman from Las Vegas? Our last night there, when we settled the bill, he passed me a note. After we went up to our room, I said I was going down for drinks, but really I went to his office. I was sure I hadn’t fooled you—it was the only time I ever lied to you—but you didn’t call me on it.
His name was Canopus. While I had heard of him back in Nevada, I had never met him. He used to own the hotel where Bel lived. When Canopus went bankrupt, her uncle bought it from him. Canopus was bitter about that, and plenty of other things. He had wandered through Indochina and settled down in Manila. He recognized my name the moment you and I checked in to the Alnilam. He had a grievance against my father, too, who he claimed had swindled him in some real estate deal that led to his insolvency.
I didn’t doubt it, and when he saw that, he assured me that he had nothing against me personally—but I didn’t believe him. He claimed he just wanted to buy a cognac for someone from back home—that no one from Vegas or Reno had ever passed through his hotel. And that was why he left the flowers in our room. Do you remember those red and yellow ones? He had cultivated them in the garden of his hotel in Vegas and then carried the seeds all over Asia.
But it wasn’t flowers he wanted to talk about. Pouring the cognac, he said he knew my story, the story of Bel and me, including some things even I might not know. Did I want to hear them?
I was stunned. A part of me didn’t want to hear any of it—not with you upstairs, not when I hoped I was finally putting all that behind me. But I had to hear him out.
Canopus told me that Bel had given birth to a child before she died. And that neither my father nor Bel’s uncle had known about this at the time. Neither had I, and it was as if he had struck me a second blow with a sledgehammer.
Until that moment, I was sure no one else had known that Bel had been pregnant. After we were separated, she told me she had had a miscarriage. That was in her fifth month. I never saw her again, so I had no way of being sure that was what had happened. I also had no reason to doubt her. She would have needed a good reason to lie to me about something that important.
It occurred to me even while Canopus was relating his tale that Bel did have a good reason: she had been protecting me. Not from my father or her uncle, but from myself.
I killed a man, Mala. In this lousy war I did terrible things. I’m lucky I don’t know the real numbers: how many hundreds of dead for the bombing runs I navigated. Back in Nevada, before I ever thought of enlisting, I killed a single man, but I did it up close, with his own gun. Afterward I hid out in Colorado, and Bel was afraid that if I returned to Nevada I would be arrested. Knowing it was hard enough for me stay away, she wasn’t going to tell me anything that might have brought me running to her.
I had killed this man in self-defense—actually, to save Bel’s life—but the police might not have seen it that way. That I had fled the scene was damning in itself. But for many other reasons, I was sure my version of events would never be believed. Not least of which was the fact that the very same cops I would be dealing with had several times picked me up for car theft. I was actually on probation. The fact that Bel had been at the scene with me, and so would be treated as an accessory to murder, made it impossible for me to risk arrest. On top of all this, the man I killed was an ex-cop.
He was also my father’s strong-arm man, a shady jack-of-all-trades named Dupont. He had been at various times a diamond courier and union organizer. As an undercover cop, he had been on the take, and though never convicted, he was eventually busted from the force. A large, dark man with black hair and long sideburns, he had blunt features and a square jaw. He favored flashy tropical shirts and a Stetson. For my father he performed an assortment of tasks: keeping an eye on his friends, delivering messages to his enemies, servin
g as bodyguard when my father traveled, and in earlier days, bringing my mother home from her nights-on-the-town. After my mother was gone, he had the run of our house, and even as a kid I had never gotten along with him, never trusted him. The feeling was mutual. He looked down on me as the boss’s spoiled son, and when I started getting in trouble I was convinced that he put in a bad word about me with cops who were still his friends. Worse, whenever he got a chance, he fanned the animosity between my father and me. Not that it needed much fanning.
What happened to Bel and me that day on a rocky flat in the desert might never have happened if my father—furious that I had taken something of his—had not chosen to send Dupont after me for it. Bel and I would have moved away together. She wouldn’t have died so young. I would have known my child. Maybe my father and her uncle wouldn’t have spent another sixteen years at each other’s throats.
One day after I’d been arguing with my father—that’s about all we did that last year before I took off—I found myself alone in his study, in a rage. As was often the case, the argument had started over my mother. Grown ever more embittered, he often made disparaging remarks about her to the people around him, like Dupont. To get under my skin, Dupont would then repeat these things to me. When I complained to my father about it, he exploded, and as always took out his anger at my mother on me.
This particular time he shouted that as far as he was concerned my mother had died the moment she last walked out of that house; the fate she met in Honolulu or Hong Kong or wherever she ended up was no concern of his. When he added that he hoped she was dead—something I had never before heard him say outright—it really set me off. Why then, I shouted back, did he continue to sink a fortune into private eyes to try to find her? He looked at me as if he wanted to take me apart right then and there, and without blinking an eye he said that as long as I was with that girl I was dead to him too. That was another first, bringing Bel into the whole ugly mix about my mother, and I knew with him it wouldn’t end there, it would never end, that I had been right and Bel was wrong: love wouldn’t win out where we came from; while we were around my father, and people like him, we would never have any peace.
A Trip to the Stars Page 50