Anguli Ma

by Chi Vu

  He calls out, “Ey!”

  The dog stops, and looks up at him momentarily, its muzzle frosted with sandy-coloured earth and just a smear of something dried up, which it licks with its long, lolling pink tongue. Then, greedily, it continues digging up what’s beneath.

  The man sees a piece of fabric, half buried in the clay soil where the stray is digging. The brown man approaches, his shoulder clips something and he hears the softest “snap” of a large spider web springing away from him. The spider’s round belly dangles in the middle of its crumpled web. The sun is out, heating the grasses, boulders and paths within the park and the bitumen roads that surround it. The swollen midday air stirs something dreadful in the man’s blood. He glances up the cliff to the rear of the factory high above them, and sees that no one is about; no one is there to cast an eye over this scene.

  He walks softly. Glossy black ants scurry over something slender and whitish, almost translucent by now. He wades into the scrub as high as his waist. The stray looks up at him, its tail wagging. The man takes in the naked, silver trees; their rough bark lying stripped and scattered on the ground.

  The dog backs away from the mound, and starts to growl. The man makes friendly noises at the stray, and herds it up the hill through the overgrown thistles toward the hurricane fence. His hand searches, then clutches a large rock on the ground. Some of the thistles are now as high as his head; their thorns catch on his clothes and spear his forearms. The dog’s long coat is covered in burrs; it is struggling to move in the thick scrub and weeds. The stray bares its teeth, its red, jagged gums. The man stands erect with the heavy rock lifted over his head.

  He notices the dog’s breathing, how it is shallow and fast, how it becomes stilted as the dog presses itself against the thistles and the hurricane fence, unable to get through. He notices his own breathing, which is strangely high-pitched. The dog begins to shake uncontrollably, its hair stands up along the ridge of its back. The brown man looks into the eyes of the dog; the dog sees the man and knows itself to be animal, stuck in its animal form. It regrets its imminent pain and death. It is able to regret because it has known joy, the joy of running freely in the wind.

  The man’s hands drop the rock down on the animal’s head. The dog lets out a loud, high yelp, but the blow does not kill it or even knock it out. The brown man lets the rock fall to the ground, all strength leaving him.

  ‘I am useless now,’ he realises as the stray runs a crooked line down the hill, escaping across the river at the fish trap.

  Đào

  Đào picked up the Nhân Quyền and turned to the horoscope page. Perhaps it will tell her which lucky numbers to pick this week.

  Those born in the year of the Dog are naturally optimistic, sociable and loyal to a fault. It is vital this year to recognise which loss is grave, and which is merely painful.

  Đào started to wonder: what could this prediction relate to? The newspaper was filled with horror stories from her home country, what with all the escapes and Thai pirates, now the morbidity was spreading to the horoscopes!

  The phone rang. She picked it up. It was Thảo, her friend from the migrant hostel days.

  “Người đẹp, em want cái gì?” Đào cheered up. “Yes. The Meeting will be on this week.” She listened to the earpiece. “You won’t be there?… You’ll be back on the Monday…What’s your bid this time?…I’ve written if down…If you’re successful, could I hold it for you?…Okay, em đừng có lo, tôi hiểu rồi, I’ll hold the money for you.” Đào hung up the phone, her mind gainfully occupied with calculating the interest to be paid on Thảo’s bid.

  In the warmth of her bed, Đào remembered those early days when she first arrived. She didn’t know what to do with herself, and was constantly busy rearranging her life to this new country. She thought that one had to take some chances, or else get crushed by change.

  The side gate squeaked.

  She got up and looked out the kitchen window. Peering into the darkness, she could see Anguli Ma and two men entering her backyard. They went into the garage. A dim light was turned on. After a while, the warped door opened again momentarily, throwing out a small cloud of cigarette smoke, before closing again.

  Đào wondered, “What must Bác and Sinh think about this new tenant, and of me…” but admonished herself immediately. Anguli Ma was just having fun like other men his age. And yet her intestines burned with tension.

  The moon was silent-calm. Suddenly Đào longed for the advice from her parents and elders, from the whole society which she had once been part of, was taken care of by, whether wisely or not. She had never been alone like this before. Like an arm without a torso, or a leg without a thigh, or a pair of ears without eyes.

  Đào patted down her uneasiness, and tried to go back to sleep. As the night dragged on, the men’s revelry was intermittently heard as snatches of drunken singing, and the clinking of bowls and glasses. These sounds intermingled with the ocean of traffic flowing along the highway.

  At one point, Đào startled herself from her sleep. She woke thinking she’d heard a man’s drunken scream or perhaps it was the wailing of a human child. Now she was no longer sure whether she had heard it or not. She listened hard to the night and its endless flow of cars along the highway. She looked around her room. Nothing had changed. So she lay back down.

  Very early in the morning before her tenants had woken, Đào came down the concrete path. She was careful not to disturb the blue drops of dew on the long grass, which would make her slippers and socks wet. Then Đào stiffened; there was a trail of blood, of something dragged along the side of the house. The trail continued past the studio to the bathroom-outside.

  Although she tried to push it away, a jewel of terror gleamed inside Đào.

  Young Triều

  While the car was moving, its door opened with Young Triều leaning out. He vomited a gush of white fluid onto the road. The door closed again and the car resettled into a straight path and sped off. That was after the whisky, after driving home, after the puddle of blood in the boot of the car, after the impact with the front when they ran over the dog, after meeting Anguli Ma again that day at hụi. In the drunken blur Young Triều saw, back at the house, Anguli Ma carrying the dog in his arms.

  It was breathing unevenly with its perforated lung. But there was something else that was strange with the collapsed dog. It had Anguli Ma’s face attached to its furry neck.

  Young Triều yelled in a drunken lilt, “Wow, I liked you better before,” pointing his index finger at the dog’s face. “Fucken fur all over and then naked on the head.” He was delirious with his own swearing, and laughed, “You look hideous with Anguli Ma’s face…”

  “Shut up you arsehole,” Anguli Ma told him.

  Young Triều looked at the melting plasticky dog. “Wow! I bet De Niro can’t do that – ‘You talkin’ to me?’”

  The dog didn’t answer, but instead began to grow pointy ears; its face was rubbery-pink, like recently burnt flesh. And when Young Triều looked up, he saw that Anguli Ma now looked like the dog. Young Triều turned between the dog with the man’s head and the man with the dog’s head, and his own seemed to swirl around violently.

  “Stop changing!” he screamed in the woman’s backyard and blacked out.

  “Stupid poofter,” Anguli Ma spat at the unconscious boy.

  When he came to, there was the smell of cooking, beautiful cooking.

  They were in a room with bare walls covered in mildew, and a wooden door on the side. Then, Young Triều was able to recognise the garage door entrance. He sat up and was given a bowl, and ate. The rice was cooked to perfection, each grain was plump yet separate. The first two dishes were delicious, very tender médaillons of meat and handmade grilled sausages; but when the third dish came along, it had a small tail in it. He began to feel queasy, but tried not to let on. Anguli Ma pressed another beer onto him.

  The workmate intervened; he complained that Anguli always presse
d drinks onto everyone. “He’s just trying to lose himself, and take everyone else with him. Eat some more rice, it’ll make you feel better.”

  Young Triều blinked and obeyed. The rice did soak up the nausea in his stomach.

  “What do you do?” the workmate asked him.

  “I just finished my studies. When I find work, I will save money to buy a house.” The young man was starting to feel his body again.

  “No point doing all that study. You’re homeless, man. Just like us,” said Anguli Ma.

  Anguli Ma

  They felt they had done nothing wrong. They had been driving at night: him, the workmate and Young Triều. The men drove across the silent, empty land, intermittently marked out by a solitary street sign, an isolated tree, an abandoned warehouse. They got onto the highway, and then more tidy, mean, suburban enclosures.

  And there was a dog on the road. Anguli slammed the car into it. The thud of the collision, and then the front and rear wheels rolled over its black body.

  “Đụ má!” he said.

  “Shit, what was that?” the workmate said.

  “It was solid,” Young Triều said. “Was it a…child?”

  Anguli turned off the engine. “Don’t be a pê đê. It was a dog! Black as night. Ran onto the road.” He got out of the car to look. He went to the back and unlocked the boot.

  “What are you doing?” Young Triều said, following him out.

  “Look at him. He’s not going to make it,” Anguli said.

  “What are you doing?” the workmate protested from inside the car, “What? We’re going to take him?”

  Then, there were people around, spilling out of the concrete slab homes. They had heard the sound of the body being struck and then the three men’s voices. They were in a housing estate area, full of old people in pastel-rendered prefabricated homes.

  “Poor dog, poor dog, I will take him to the vet,” Anguli Ma announced in English.

  The small crowd started to talk more quickly and loudly, but a little old Italian lady, eyes no longer bright said, “What an animal lover he is…”

  They chucked the dog with the blood and black fur into the boot; they drove away and drank more whisky. They listened to its rasping breathing in the back, sometimes loud, then sometimes so weak that it seemed the animal was finally expiring. But then the breathing would come back again.

  Their car drove through the western suburbs, with neat gardens and milky, overfed children. A land so sparse and peaceful that the newcomers believed that it was empty space, unmarked and un-storied, a barely populated land uninhabited by wandering demons and limbless men from wars that dragged on for millennia.

  Still the animal in the boot had not died.

  The sedan parked out the front of Đào’s house. They went along the side path, and Anguli was scruffing the dog around the neck, carrying it. It was whining, struggling to get out of his embrace.

  “Which tap? Over here tap?” the workmate asked. There was the bathroom-outside that he shared with the girl and the old woman.

  “Close that door,” Anguli told the workmate.

  They taped its legs, its muzzle with gaffer tape. The dog’s forehead was smeared with its own saliva. Its barrel and chest floor were collapsed. Its coat was lustrous underneath the drying blood. Both he and the workmate knew that the dog would, for a shiny moment, acquire the vocal chords of a human and the eyes of an angel, and that this was not to be trusted. Anguli Ma held the dog’s body between his legs and stretched its neck under the tap. His right hand reached out to Young Triều to pass him the blade. The workmate turned on the tap, struggling with the stiff handles. Anguli cut its throat under the running water. Blood flowed, swirling into the black drain hole. The body of the dog released its shape, and quietly folded in half in his hands.

  They cooked three dishes on a butane stove in the garage. Dinner was served up. The men relished the special occasion, and the workmate quoted ancient poetry:

  Sống trên đời/ăn miếng dồi chó

  Chết xuống âm phủ, biết có hay không?

  “What is dồi?” Young Triều asked.

  “Sausages,” the workmate explained. “In this lifetime, one tastes a piece of…”

  Young Triều continued, “And, after you die…and descend to… âm phủ?”

  “To Hades, to hell…” the workmate’s voice was warm in the darkness of the garage, “who knows whether these morsels will be offered or not?”

  “I am unsure if this here is Hades or not, but if so, the second line has been answered!” Anguli drunkenly proclaimed.

  They laughed and continued eating. The talk turned to more mundane things, what they’d seen on tivi.

  “What about that dog?”

  “What dog?”

  “In the desert…”

  “Yes, the dingo that’s eaten the baby.”

  “Everyone’s saying the mother did it, and her weak husband helped her.”

  “They dressed their baby in black – the colour of death for them.”

  The men were quiet for a moment.

  Young Triều was the first to speak again. “In this country, the dog eats the man,” he said mournfully.

  They all looked at each other and laughed so hard that their bellies hardened in ache and their eyes squeezed out little tears. Their laughter roared in the upside-down world.

  They continued drinking until Young Triều passed out again. Cigarette smoke clogged the garage room. Now it was only Anguli and the workmate left. They had exhausted their bravado and were two blind men; they continued drinking despite their blindness. The strange night had reminded them of the old world. They shouted to each other to keep track of their progress.

  “The last time I had this much fun was…” The room was spinning so. “Hahaha.”

  “Yes,” someone punctuated.

  They kept losing track of each other…in the blurry, roiling room.

  “A large group of us, post-game drinking.”

  “What year?” Anguli shouted.

  “Seventy-five.”

  Something still stabbed at their organs at the mention of that year.

  “Friends?” a lifeline was thrown.

  “Yes, twenty.” They could see one another again. “Our team won – it wasn’t really about the winning, we were drinking like devils because it was ‘Seventy-five’.”

  His voice was so very soft now, and the room seemed suddenly calm and quiet. Even though in the lead-up to the Fall of Saigon, everyone knew what was about to happen.

  “The end của một cuộc đời,” the workmate concluded.

  In that stillness, they avoided each other’s eyes, for losing a homeland was like losing someone who knew you intimately, and whom you knew intimately. In this abyss, Anguli Ma and the workmate realised that their old life, and youth were both gone forever.

  And so their drinking brought them a blindness that was preferable to the bright vastness of their daily lives in this new âm phủ, this other layer of Hades. Somewhere in the depth of their sorrow, the two men became isolated from each other. With their spirits empty, they cried, quietly in their seats.

  Đào

  Early in the morning, she swept up the wet, black fur. The bristles of her broom became soaked in blood, painting the tiles with slowly diluting washes of red. She had to stop herself from throwing up in moments of nausea. Đào decided she would conceal this from her tenants. That’s what I’ll do, she thought.

  The old woman heard the scraping of the broom, and stepped out of her studio quietly. She saw that Đào was already up and cleaning. Đào tried to hide what she was doing, but the old woman soon saw the bloody scene.

  “He brought over his friends. I won’t let him bring them over again,” Đào said.

  Bác did not speak for a long time. So long that Đào had almost forgotten she was there and resumed sweeping the wet floor.

  Finally, the old woman said, “When you were on the boat, did you…think thi
ngs?”

  “Yes, there was nothing to do but think. Some of the younger women went mad looking on that vast, fizzing sea. Why are you bringing this up now?”

  Bác tried not to sound too bitter. “None of us knew whether we were going to meet with god or the devil out there. And as we waited, we made promises to ourselves, our deities and Ancestors that if we got out we would live our lives better. I did it too, until I lost my son.”

  “Bác ơi, it was very tragic about your son. But dwelling only on the past will make us sick. I can’t afford to get ill…things are different now. Try to think more about the present Bác, and the future. The past is gone.”

  The old woman remained in a dark mood. “We think we left this behind when we escaped.”

  “Left what behind Bác?” she said quietly. “Women cleaning up after men?” Đào continued sweeping.

  “Left behind ma cô hồn, in the old world.”

  Đào stopped. Wandering, hungry ghosts. Unable to be reborn as a human or animal, unable to enter heaven or hell because of their gruesome, untimely deaths.

  “We think we have a new beginning because we escaped the terror, and came to a new land. But we haven’t left them behind, they came with us! Can’t you see it?” Bác’s gaunt face and grey eyes were unwavering in the morning light.

  Đào begged the old woman not to tell Sinh, who was still asleep at this early hour. “Bác ơi, Bác đừng có nói về việc này cho Sinh nghe nhé ?” Đào said, trying to keep her voice low.

  Bác pressed her thin lips together, bitterly.

  “I beg you, con lạy Bác, please don’t let Sinh know.” Đào whispered with hysterical fear.

  Đào made sure she watched Sinh go off to work later that morning. Đào sat there in the kitchen, waiting for Anguli to awaken. She tried to read the newspaper. The feature was about a beloved songstress who had, to the delight of her fans, managed to escape and resettle in America. The muse of Vietnam was free. Đào was agitated, and could not take in much else of the news.