Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  Now, she nodded toward Soraya, laughing and whispering:

  —I’m going before she traps me to do an interview! We’re having dinner in town. Will you join us?

  I was telling her I’d only just arrived, when all people and sound crushed out in a silent vacuum. Seb was standing at the far end of the room. He looked well. Still tan. He’d shaved the beard he’d let grow in Vietnam.

  —See you soon, then! Muay patted my arm and left with a few Thai teachers.

  I watched Seb, who hadn’t seen me, guide Ploy to the entrance of the plywood structure where the photos hung. They disappeared inside.

  Béa greeted me with kisses, eager to walk me through the exhibit. I stalled, soothed by her high energy, half taking in the black-and-white photographs of fishermen netting catfish, of fish eyes staring up from sun-spattered hulls. In the next chamber, two prints showed the back of a man on a motorcycle. He was leaning into a turn, hair whipped to one side, sweat patterning his T-shirt.

  —It’s Lek’s brother who died, Béa said softly. Motorcycle accident two years ago.

  Ploy’s laughter rang out from another of the partitioned spaces. Dread in every limb.

  The exhibit was building to Loose Boat, the photograph that won the Bangkok Prize. It hung by itself at the center of the plywood labyrinth. Standing before it, I watched a thin long-tail cut across the river, dimpling eddies in its wake. The rower’s back was tense, muscles taut. The stillness of the image made me feel the boat move, gliding upriver with each thrust of the oar.

  I asked Lek later if the title was ironic. The image was so focused, anything but loose.

  —No, he replied. Only with tight focus can you capture something loose.

  Now, coming out of the plywood labyrinth, I saw the native photographer looking at a photograph of fishing nets that flew through the air in sharp lines. He cocked his head, as if searching for the secret of motion unblurred. I thought of Loose Boat, how the river could flow because its ripples were still.

  THE IMAGE OF THE LONG-TAIL DISSOLVING in sunlight stayed with me at Cat Bar, where we ended the night. The owners, Lek’s friends, a Franco-Japanese couple who also made pottery, brought out whiskey and soda and joined us on the cushions. Toasts in Lek’s honor continued into the night, while he rolled cigarettes with too much care, keeping his head down.

  —Poor Lek, Béa said to me. He’s miserable. He hates attention.

  Where was the joke? The quip? I was craving satire in my too-tired mood.

  —When does Anthony get back? I asked. I heard he’s still on vacation.

  Béa looked at me strangely.

  —No one told you? That’s just the story Seb told the university so they’d hold his job.

  I frowned.

  —Koi went missing.

  Béa’s words slid against me, indigestible. She told me how Anthony had awakened one morning and Koi wasn’t there. He waited for him for two days, not leaving the house, until finally, terrified Koi was dead, he called the police. They told him to look through Koi’s things. Sure enough, many of his clothes were gone, and a few little valuables, too, from the house.

  I wanted to protest that they loved each other, even as Koi’s expressions of restlessness came back to me, the way he’d bristle sometimes under Anthony’s touch. I was very tired.

  —Did Anthony—was he okay? I asked.

  —He left so suddenly. I didn’t have the chance to talk with him really.

  —He went after Koi? I asked, imagining Anthony in one of his impeccably ironed work shirts, running through spiderlike streets in Bangkok, calling Koi’s name. Will he come back?

  Béa shook her head. She didn’t know. I felt devastated by the news of Koi’s betrayal, sad for Anthony. Our little band was beginning to unravel. I felt unbearably tired.

  One of the owners of the bar began mixing cocktails. Ploy looked on like an interested scientist. Seb was scowling at the native photographer, whom he hated for being loud and American. Seeing his gaze lift to Ploy, I tried to see her as he did: long brown legs, lips drawn to tease him. It must be this that Seb liked: someone to make light of him, to mock him.

  Béa went to turn up the music. She knocked a few balls into pockets on the pool table.

  All evening, Aurelia had been speaking earnestly to the female owner of the bar. She took a break to smoke. I noticed Lek’s gaze, like mine, riveted to her restless pacing. I motioned for her to sit down next to me.

  —What? she asked.

  —What were you talking about? I gestured to the bar owner.

  —You know, she said. Men.

  —What about them?

  —I’m calling a cab, she said.

  —You mean a tuktuk? You’re calling it?

  —Hailing it? Whatever.

  She waved her hand, then said suddenly, as if picking up a conversation we’d just left off:

  —He said he was retired, but he could have been lying. Sometimes they lie? He retired young and wanted to live somewhere beautiful for the rest of his life.

  —Who?

  —The man in Chiang Mai? With the villa? she replied, as if asking. Once they’re old news, I can talk about them. Ha-ah! Chiang Mai man is old news. He was French, like her guy? she motioned to the bar owner. So I was warning her. She should leave him.

  The bar owner was smiling at something her lover had said. I looked back at Aurelia.

  —Tuk tuk, she said. Share?

  I shook my head. Despite my fatigue, my limbs drained of energy, I wanted to linger at Cat Bar, among friends, in the last stretch of an era I feared—because of Anthony, because of Seb, because of many things—was ending.

  —Wait, I called after her.

  She turned, surprised.

  —Will you stay?

  —Here? she asked, looking around the bar.

  —No, I continued, embarrassed. In Chiang Rai, you know, for a while?

  I wanted Aurelia to stay, Seb to stay, Anthony and Koi to return. The native photographer planned to move on in a few days, and I wanted him to stay, too. I had a terrible sense that everything was slipping away and wanted to hold it all near me like a scared child.

  Aurelia paused in the doorway.

  —You look tired, she said, sizing me up.

  I nodded.

  —Maybe you should date, she said. I have a date, ha-ah! In Bangkok.

  She came toward me then, and said in a low whisper:

  —I know what it’s like. You can’t let this beat you. Find your strength.

  Her gaze met mine squarely. I tried to look puzzled. She motioned to Seb.

  —Forget him. He’s immoral. You’re too good for him.

  She held my gaze a moment, then turned abruptly and disappeared.

  When I gathered the courage to look at Seb, I found him staring, gray eyes expressionless. He looked down as soon as our eyes met. My heart began to pound in my ears.

  The air was thick in the bar. Stars in my vision when I got up from the cushions. Looking for the bathroom, I walked with exaggerated care, focusing a spot in front of me so I wouldn’t fall. It was odd to feel this dizzy, this tired. Did everyone know? Seb wasn’t the type to tell, but perhaps it was obvious from the way I looked at him. Were they sorry for me? I didn’t care. All people, even those I loved, could only slow my way to becoming like trees, like rivers, like earth. The toilet was a hole in the floor, sucking in the whole room, walls bending and shrinking into it. Vision swirled. Colors bitter, overripe. Musty, cloying. Floor floated to meet me until I threw up.

  Feeling better, fresher, I splashed my face with water, rinsed my mouth, and walked back into the bar. It must’ve been the whiskey, too much food or not enough.

  I must have been in there longer than I’d thought. The number of people in the bar had dwindled. Seb and Ploy were nowhere to be seen.

  IV

  Monsoons

  36

  the last day of July

  Drops drumming. Hungry. Bruised sky. Rain on the tin roof like
a sonata of the dead. Now and forever. Smell of rains. Humidity attaches to things, gets inside. Gecko on the wall. Candlelight shadow. Here in the house by the rice fields and elsewhere in another time, rain …

  Rain on the place Marcel-Aymé pelts the statue of the man in the wall: his protruding head, his hands, his knee. It slides across windowpanes into lines that signify nothing and point nowhere but hold the light like vials of mercury. Distance punctured by the rhythm of the rain, here as it was there, now as it was then. Delight in coincidence.

  … The house was empty when I returned. Glass doors locked. Aurelia gone. I’m lying on her bed, in her room. Couldn’t face my own. Sleeping for days. Lit incense to keep away mosquitoes, candles to ease the dark. Pages damp, soft to pen touch. The monsoon is our fault. We made it rain. In April, it was so hot. We threw water on the cracked earth, like a ritual. Months later, heat broke, rains came. Now the house by the rice fields crumbles like a ruin in the flood. It will burst at its stone and wood seams, fold into the earth, dissolve under skins of moss. …

  The heat has broken, but last night Paris seethed in it still. My computer heaved like a tired child. Fingers tapped out the sound of the rain that wouldn’t come. Windows open on the city like mouths gaping, wanting something without edges or ends, restless. I wrote:

  Flew around the earth in not enough time, far from gravity. No memory of the first flight. No memory of stopping in Singapore or arriving in Newark. But I can still see the face of the woman at the airline counter, professional and blank when she charged my credit card. No questions. No baggage. Return in ten days.

  Now the dark and damp conduct smells easily: wet flowers, jasmine, incense, melting beeswax. It’s the same orange candle you light in temples for the dead, Muay told me once, horrified to see it in my room. At the time I was so light, I laughed.

  When it was time to go—Mom wanted me to stay—I felt the shudder that comes over you when you know you’re seeing a place for the last time.

  The Paris heat wave lasted five days, the radio urging checks on les personnes âgées so they wouldn’t die in their apartments. I took cold shower after cold shower. Heat made it impossible to think. The only time it was cool enough to work was at night. I would work until late. Last night I fell asleep in my clothes, still hoping for the storms forecast on the radio. The first drops came down as I was falling asleep. I thought I was dreaming as Ella, but the parquet was wet when I woke in the night, undressed, closed the windows, and prepared for bed. Now, morning, the heat has fully broken; summer rain streaks the windows, closed for the first time in days. Breathing the rain, even in the closed room, I reread what I wrote last night (it was very hot), and go on:

  No sooner did I shut the glass door and lay down on Aurelia’s bed than the rains began again. In waking dreams, the house crumbled. My bed sailed out of the ruins, bumping against the remains of our tin and tile roof, washing out into the flooded yard by the banana and mango trees. A wave sent the bed-boat out the gates and into the rice fields, where, squinting through sheets of rain, I saw the house in the gray light that slid in silver needles from monsoon clouds.

  Monks say the season isn’t one in which to travel; footsteps puncture the earth, damage seedlings. There is violence to the monsoons. Edges dissolve. Foreground becomes background. The monsoons are a time for rest, contemplation, meditation, and study. Three months of rain.

  A long time ago, shortly after we’d met, Seb explained the monsoon by saying it keeps people close to their lovers. Some storms are over quickly, but others go on for days. What about you? I’d asked. I’d just arrived and wanted to learn as much as I could about him and about the country. (They seemed, in the early days, oddly connected.) We didn’t leave the bed, he said, grinning. Day after day it rained. It made me think of him now, with Ploy.

  There are respites, I learned, when the black and battered sky is shot with sunlight, which glistens on the wet leaves of palms and makes mirrors of the puddles. The air is clean, washed, and the colors of the landscape brighter, as if the color settings on a camera had been adjusted.

  As I slept, the rains spilled down the roof, making waterfalls of windows. Release like a loss finally grieved—that’s how I heard them in my sleep, full of despair, saving nothing, sparing nothing. All out. The sky wrung out. No one knew how far I’d gone, so there was no one to tell I’d returned. To Béa and Muay and whoever else cared, I was with Soraya in Bangkok. Seb proctored the exam for my class, and then the students left to spend their midterm break in cities. Soraya arranged it, hugging me. But in Bangkok I couldn’t: the cold in the clinic and the foreign tongue spoken whenever anyone wasn’t speaking to me.

  From the feel of the house, Aurelia has been gone a long time.

  On the night of her return from the United States, Ella wrote for hours, fifty pages in the same mood and hand. Odd smell to this journal, faded black cover, infused in the monsoon. Last night, we were writing together; we were listening to the start and stop of the rains. It’s the longest entry in the journals, dated “the last day of July” and full of memories: Songkran, the Thai New Year, which took place three months earlier, in April, then the terrible morning in Saigon at the end of May. I sense clearly now what happened in Vietnam—what happened physically, concretely, between bodies. It comes together, narratively. But Ella is falling apart. She remembers in the present tense, as if it were all still happening there in the dark. It makes me worry, imagination drawing her back with too much force, blending fact, memory, and figment.

  In the beginning, I had only to take her words and shape them. Now, I invent and cut away. I’m stepping on her, crowding her, sealing over what’s raw and real and true. We’re in combat. There is my narrative—ordering days and months—and her journals—radically particular: the smell of wet wood in the city with two names. My narrative has yet to yield a reason for her disappearance. Vietnam seems crucial, but the journals are far from clear. Not much pain from the night before, she writes, body an echo chamber for sensations, especially smells.

  The secret of her disappearance is very close to the surface in this long entry with its three scenes: the monsoons, Songkran, Saigon. What is the connector? A line from Ella’s journal returns as if in answer: Story of Seb. The story of Seb, as if by writing and writing she could tame what happened.

  But does memory change, chameleonlike, with its setting in words? It would explain why my father will not speak of the past. He’s modifying it to protect the future. We fear, by secret accord, that talk of my mother’s illness will trigger in me the same affliction. If we are quiet, it will stay quiet. My mother’s sort of trouble can develop and worsen at any time; she was thirty-four the first time she was taken away. Similarly, we don’t mention the time when I reach in memory and find only blankness. Z’s strategy is different. Z speaks often of my missing months, implanting in me his memories, hoping I’ll annex them as my own. It doesn’t work. Stories foisted on me from a time I don’t remember feel like alien skin.

  By the end of the summer, things had become grim in Ban Du. Soraya was gone, having joined an order of bikkhuni in Bangkok. She left a voice message on Ella’s phone, which Ella received on her return from the States. The message wished her beauty and peace in this life, the next, and all the others. Ella copied the voice mail into her journal. A few days later, she learned from Béa where Aurelia was: in a hospital in Bangkok. She’d been in a motorcycle accident; the man she was with had been killed. Lek took the first bus to Bangkok and did not leave her side. There was still no word from Anthony, who had left months ago in search of Koi. Ella’s problems might have shrunk in comparison. Instead, they mushroomed. The world became strange and sinister.

  I get up from the writing table and open the windows. The sky exhales into the room. It’s hard to imagine that a year has passed since that first meeting with Siobhán, a year of a life that has grown comfortable. I wake each morning with a task. I defer Z. There is a clear purpose, something specific to wonder about.
What will happen when the project is over? Or will I extend the story for the pleasure of weaving, warding off what I don’t want to face: my missing memory, the great hole in life into which everything loved can be lost?

  37

  October 4

  Space grown sick. House by the rice fields unlivable. Monsoons have ended. Pomelos and mandarins in the markets again, and green papaya. The mangoes have gone. Mangoes are a summer fruit. Grown too ripe and have rotted. The sky is the azure of the day I first arrived. Now toeing a line. Right side of okay, but one false step could ruin it all. I smelled something today in the spare bedroom, where all the laughing Buddhas are. It reminded me of the Thailand that greeted me a year ago: smell of rough magic.

  The sun was overhead when I came upon the sign, which is what I’d been looking for. Mist from the morning hadn’t entirely evaporated, so the path to the pavilion was green, live and fresh. Doubt struck as I walked among the birds-of-paradise and wet leaves of palms; I am wrong to leave. But Ban Du felt like a wasteland. Everyone gone: Koi, Anthony, Aurelia, Soraya—I should’ve gone with her, become a nun. The house by the rice fields, haunted and lonely since Aurelia’s accident, had been permanently blackened by the days of rain after my return, when I didn’t leave the bed, horrified by my body, wanting out of my skin. If I hadn’t been so afraid of everything, I’d have gone with Béa to see Aurelia. She took the bus with Lek, who resumed classes once Aurelia was through the worst but still went to Bangkok as often as he could. On his most recent return, he announced that Aurelia was walking again. He was so glad.

  Muay helped me pack up my office at the university. She promised to keep my postcard decorations and lesson plans, photocopies and whiteboard markers, for when I came back. She was angry with the university. I didn’t care.