by Joey Bui
I was startled. I gulped. My hands slipped off the metal bars and I sailed out onto my back. My neck arched and I saw a swirl of coloured clothes and frightened faces just as my head hit the pavement. Then pain clouded my vision and filled my head with sharp green and red lights. I couldn’t move.
Here is what I remember: a gentle, pale yellow colour everywhere, something soft on my face, like freshly crushed mung beans. It was surrounding me, and yet it didn’t feel strange. I was serene.
I couldn’t see through the mung beans, but heard voices close to my face, as though there were lips about to brush my cheeks.
‘Who is it?’
The voice was clear and deep. I imagined the face of an old king. When he paused, there was a marvellous silence. I miss that silence most of all. It was how I knew I was in the heavens, where the dirty chatter of humans had finished.
‘I think we have made a mistake,’ said the king.
There was a series of knocks.
‘What do you want to do?’ said a second voice.
‘Has he found fortune?’ the king asked.
‘Not in this life. We can move him on.’
The king hummed deep in his throat, the way wise men do when they’re thinking. After a long time, he spoke. ‘Has she come yet? She has to find him.’
More knocking sounds.
‘Let him go back,’ the king said.
The yellow mung beans blanketed my eyes. I felt so relaxed and knew I was going to sleep.
When I came to, I was at the top of a building, in a hammock that was tied to the bars of a balcony. Down the corridor, there were bodies lying on stretchers, silent and bruised. It was a hospital. I had never been in a hospital before.
Thick gauze was wrapped around my head, which hurt at the back, so I rolled onto my side. I reached down. My stumps were also bandaged. I massaged them as I looked at the people around me. Next to me, a man was hanging his clothes out to dry. I felt great optimism in my heart and wanted to connect with him.
‘Hello, young man!’ I said.
He turned around. He wore glasses and his glossy black hair flopped down the right side of his face. ‘Greetings, uncle.’ He smiled.
‘You look well,’ I said.
‘You sure as hell don’t.’ He chuckled, then immediately looked very tired. He turned back to his wet clothes.
‘Then I’m in the right place, aren’t I? What are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for the long road to death.’ He turned to face me. ‘Would you believe it, I’ve been sleeping in this hospital two nights already, just waiting to pay my wife’s hospital bill.’
I thought of the hospital bill. It was Lượng’s revenge, I knew, taking me to the hospital and leaving me there, unable to pay.
‘Two days? Why so long?’
His forehead pinched with concern. It made him look like a handsome, wise man. A young man’s face with the seriousness of age. He looked how I imagined the young Vietnamese musicians, like Trần Tiến, looked when they lived alone in Russia.
‘Paperwork takes so long in this place,’ he said. He pointed. ‘You see the people lying in the corridor? Some have been sleeping here over a week to pay hospital bills for their family.’
I looked left and right, and the differences between patients and their caretakers became clearer. Caretakers were fully clothed, and clutched plastic bags as they slept or stared out into the courtyard.
‘They come from Bến Tre, from Tây Ninh, faraway villages, these poor peasants with no other choice. The temple monks serve food outside the hospital, but only four days a week. The other three they have to beg for it in the hospital.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Why don’t you just pay when your turn comes?’
‘Would we sleep here if we knew when our turn was coming? We have to be ready at any time or else they fuck up the treatment. They bruise your wife’s arm when they inject her, they miss a day’s medication, they let an infection fester a little longer. They charge an extra bribe fee, you know, so it can’t go into any books or anything. You get the idea.’
‘What’s wrong with your wife?’ I asked.
‘Machine ate up her hand. She worked in a cardboard factory.’
‘Ate up?’
‘Oh yeah, her skin ripped right off the bone. It’s foul, but don’t say anything to her. She hates it when I tell people, but how could they not notice anyway when she’s got no hand?’
I laughed, a slow, dry wheeze at first, and then great roars that surprised me. It had been a while since I’d used my voice properly.
He smiled again. ‘You should have seen her when she first got here. Fucking disgusting.’ His voice rose in excitement. ‘They cut a slit in her stomach and she had to sit with her hand in there—inside her stomach!—so that the flesh could grow around the bone. Keep it fresh, you know, until they could sew on some skin from her backside.’
I laughed until my head felt light.
‘So how about you?’ he said. He glanced at my stumps.
‘I fell off a bike.’
‘Onto a meat cleaver?’
‘No, no. This is old, from the war.’ I touched my right stump.
‘Cộng Hòa?’
‘Yeah.’
He nodded. He started eyeing his pile of wet clothes again, but I wanted to keep talking.
‘Fucking Chinese, huh?’ I said.
He swung some pant legs—white with purple dots, surely a woman’s pants—over the balcony bars next to me. ‘What?’
‘The Chinese bombs, right? You don’t know?’ I chuckled, trying to match his tone. I grabbed onto my left stump with both hands. ‘This is the handiwork of the Chinese, this is. They think hard about what they want their bombs to do. They don’t want to kill you, see. Because who are you? No one. They got their own billion people they kill all the time. They’re better than that.’
I had him.
‘The Chinese bombs don’t explode up, they explode low so that they take your legs. Only your legs! One hundred Vietnamese soldiers run through a field and umph, umph, umph, umph!’
I smacked one fist into the other palm for each bomb.
‘Two hundred legs fly off! You are ruined, you cannot fight them anymore, but you still have to keep living. You become a burden to Vietnam, one more cripple to look after. You see? You get it?’
An old nurse came down the hallway. She was large, sweaty, and encased in a tight faded-pink uniform. ‘What’s all the noise?’ she said.
‘I’m talking to the old vet here,’ my companion replied.
‘Don’t you have something better to do?’ she snapped.
‘I’ve been waiting two days to pay for my wife’s surgery, ma’am, and the doctors won’t give her a check-up until I do,’ he said.
‘You make any more trouble and I won’t give her any anaesthesia.’
She turned around to face me. ‘You’re a vet?’ she asked. She eyed my stumps. ‘Who authorised you to be here?’
‘I just woke up,’ I muttered.
She reached up and tugged at my head gauze. ‘Do you have any idea how expensive this is? How are you going to afford it? Fuck my mother, looking at you makes my eyes sore,’ she said, and continued down the corridor.
As she walked away, my friend chuckled. ‘But the Vietnamese don’t take care of their cripples anyway, that’s their trick. Well, not the soldiers on our side anyway,’ he said.
I felt a rush of warmth at the words ‘our side’.
‘You’d think there would be good people here,’ he said.
‘Everybody’s just looking to eat,’ I said.
‘You better be gone before she comes back.’
‘What? I can’t leave,’ I said.
‘It’s easy. They don’t even know who to stop. Just leave,’ he said.
‘I can’t, I can’t,’ I said, starting to feel anxious.
‘You will be in debt to the hospital for the rest of your life. Sorry to be honest, uncle, but I don’t think you c
an pay for it, can you? It’s okay. Leaving is the only thing you can do,’ he said.
Even though I was terrified, I wanted to listen to him. He had the kind and dishevelled air of a scholar. A lot like you.
‘I have to go too, so I don’t see you run away,’ he said. He offered me his hand. ‘I’m Cường. Good luck, old man.’
‘Kiệt,’ I said. Then I thought about saying ‘wait’ but no sound left my mouth.
He started to walk away and I panicked. I had to move. It took me a long time to reach the stairs, but no one stopped me. I turned around.
‘Go, go!’ Cường shouted.
I lurched as fast as I could on my hands, afraid of every person watching. Once I got through the dark corridors of concrete, past the tired relatives in plastic chairs, clutching bags, and the booths of unhappy secretaries filling out endless forms—once I got through it all and reached the street, I realised that I hadn’t been free at all before, and that now I was. I laughed and laughed and laughed so I would remember it well.
The truth is, I’m a fearful old man. What good fortune it was that I met Cường. I’m not foolish enough to believe that was an accident. I’m a fearful old man with a touch of good fortune.
We are the outside, I heard Hiếu saying in my head. What a change I felt in myself then. I believe that it is too easy to forget to live while you are doing other things. You chase morsels of food, one after the other, and then one day you realise that you have lost your way. I had gone too far from my path of fortune. Hiếu had come back to tell me so. Do you understand? Do you see? He was not gone forever.
I walked all the way down to Bến Thành market to find Nam, the seafood supplier who used to sell me tickets. The market rumbled with voices, snapping and whining theatrically as the good people bargained. That is what the Vietnamese do best.
Nam was perched on his stall, squatting over a little wooden bench, scraping squid clean with a metal blade.
‘Look who it is!’ he burst out. Because of my good mood, everything about him and the market seemed heavenly. The gleaming white squid rested smoothly in his fat palm. The water in which he dipped the squid was clear—Nam prided himself on the cleanliness of his produce. Buckets in front of him were filled to spilling, one with rounds of blushing pink basa amongst ice shards, others with mottled eel and shrimp and sucker barb. In a deeper tub, live crabs were scratching their pincers, fidgeting over one another and splashing in the water.
Nam dropped his blade and flapped his hands to dry them. ‘Where have you been, captain?’ he asked. ‘I was hoping hard as hell. I said to myself, I hope the old man didn’t die. I must love you a little bit, don’t you think!’
‘I don’t know where I’ve been, Nam,’ I said. ‘I think I was foolish, chasing the wrong fortune.’
‘I know how it is, exactly how it is.’ He sighed, tipping his head down to rest on his double chin. ‘Are you well? What’s that on your head?’
‘A bad accident.’
At the same moment, he clapped his large palms together. I couldn’t tell if he had heard me.
‘Look, I want to help you, captain,’ he said, suddenly grave. He leaned over to rest his forearms on his knees. ‘But you never paid me back for the tickets from last time.’
I glanced down at the buckets, afraid he would fall into them. ‘I lost them.’
‘What do you mean, lost?’
‘Gone, just gone.’
‘This is bad, uncle.’ He sighed again. ‘I can’t waste tickets just because you decide to run off after a fortune. You know I’m a good man. I’m an honest businessman.’
‘You won’t waste any more tickets. I’m not going to leave. I’m going to keep selling tickets for good,’ I said.
‘Maybe we’ll just start with fifty. That okay? Do you have any money on you now?’
‘No.’ Everything was back at the Trung Bình projects. The blanket, the soaps, the toy dog, a change of camouflage, and about 200,000 đồng.
Nam sighed again. He rummaged in some pouches by his feet and I glimpsed wads of blue 20,000-đồng notes packed inside, thick and clean. He pulled out a bunch of tickets bound by a rubber band.
‘You’ll be back?’ he asked, as he handed over the bunch.
‘I swear.’
‘You know I’m a good man,’ he said again.
‘I do.’
‘All right. All right, captain.’ He patted my hand. ‘Take care of your health.’
We settled back into our rhythm. I sold tickets on the corner of Điện Phú Electronics and at the end of the week I went to the fish market to pay my debt to Nam. I didn’t see Lượng again. The bánh cuốn ladies told me there were two rumours, one that I had died and the other that I had gone to my ancestral home in Bến Tre to die. Little did they know that I had already died. I made sure to ask the bánh cuốn ladies if they remembered the lady with yellow hair.
‘Don’t be difficult, captain, there are so many women with yellow hair. It’s a bleach dye, very easy,’ Sister Minh scolded.
I couldn’t explain what was unique about the lady I had seen. I didn’t have the words. How could I return to my path to good fortune? After the dream, I knew that the lady had come to give me my fortune. I remember as clear as day the light about her and the way I knew instantly that she was giving me a lucky ticket. But how could I find her?
One morning, I was in front of Điện Phú Electronics as usual. Two men were standing outside the store, one of them smoking. They were well dressed and had come with their wives, who were inside the store. Việt Kiều, the Vietnamese boat people who now lived abroad. I don’t know why I didn’t offer them some tickets; I usually approach anybody passing by.
After a while, the smoker came over to me.
‘You don’t happen to be a Cộng Hòa veteran?’ He was very polite.
I touched my camouflage, smiling.
He had a cheerful face, dark-skinned although he was a Việt Kiều, who are usually pale. The Việt Kiều also have a certain posture that sets them apart. Their spine is straight, their shoulders back.
‘Yes, yes, I am, sir. Are you visiting, sir?’ I said.
‘I’m visiting family.’ He gestured to the other man, who looked around with polite interest. ‘I said to my friend that you must be a Cộng Hòa veteran. The VC wouldn’t leave behind one of their own like this.’
‘Cộng Hòa, platoon Seven A,’ I said.
‘Seven A? I think—’ He paused and appealed to his friend again, who had turned away to smoke. ‘I think that’s my father’s platoon! Well, I think it might be.’
‘Are you sure, man?’ his friend said.
Then I looked hard at the Việt Kiều’s face, and suddenly remembered the same hollow cheeks on a face so thin that the skin sagged.
‘Lộc!’ I exclaimed.
He saw my recognition, and it was as if the ghost of my old friend was staring out of the eyes of this very thin, younger man.
‘Yes, yes! Lộc, yes!’ he said.
‘Văn Minh Lộc,’ I said. Sudden joy leaped into my soul and I knew that I had been right all along about the feeling of the cycle, of everything living on and moving around, and it was so sweet to feel the truth of the world that day.
I took the man’s hands so that he would come closer to me. ‘My friend Lộc,’ I said, crying. ‘Oh, where is he?’
The man looked at me so seriously that I think he may also have recognised the sweetness of immortality.
‘I am Phước, his son,’ he said. ‘My father died about ten years ago.’
Of course I knew that Lộc had already died, otherwise I would not have seen his eyes through this man right then. Now, years later, I wonder how it was that a well-fed Việt Kiều was still as skinny and starved as Lộc and I were in the war…
‘What do you remember about my father?’
‘I remember everything,’ I said.
Now both of the Việt Kiều men were listening to me intently.
&
nbsp; I told them about the first time I thought Lộc and I were going to die. Our squad of ten was sent to the outskirts of the city Long Khánh. It was a strange mission because no one knew who would meet us there and our captain got angry when we asked him for details. I had the feeling all along that there would be no end of the road, no Point B. I was very good with these things; back then I knew many things without having to think about them, only by witnessing them several times already.
‘Long Khánh wasn’t far,’ I told Phước now. ‘We were dropped off at Giang Điền and we walked the rest of the way, to a deserted stone house in Long Khánh. The grass around the house was unkempt and wet; there was no farmland in sight. It felt like the wrong place, and I sensed that we had come exactly where the enemy had planned for us to come.
‘“The map is wrong,” I said to the other men. “We were given the wrong map.”
‘They began to disagree, but there was no point. We decided that it was easier to start walking back in the morning.
‘We sat in the house with the doors open and took off our shoes, which were always damp because of the wetlands.
‘“Do you smell the lake?” said Xuân, a particularly dreamy man, the youngest among us.
‘“What lake?”
‘“We are close to Hồ Trị An, an enormous lake in the middle of the country, between the sea and the mountain. My cousins live nearby and when we visited them for Tết, we went fishing and swimming in the lake. You can look down the length of it and the width and you can’t see where it ends. It’s a real country picture, like in thread paintings.”
‘At one point during the night, we heard scuffling. We went outside to investigate, staring into the distance at the grass and the road. In the space between wondering and knowing that there were foot soldiers bearing down on us, the dread settled into my stomach. When I looked at the others, I saw the fear in Xuân’s face. He lifted his rifle before any of us could think to say anything.
‘BAM! He shot, and immediately, immediately, the fire was returned.
‘I slapped the unused newspaper box next to me and the metal rattled.
‘They were waiting, they were ready! You have to admit, wow, they were ready for us.