Lucky Ticket

by Joey Bui

  ‘What do you mean?’

  As if in slow motion, the foreign photographer approached Julie and touched her on the back as she had done to me.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, smiling brightly.

  I went around the exhibition by myself, avoiding the other university students. I looped through the exhibition another three times, but Julie was always busy.

  When I got home, Buwa had a pamphlet from the exhibition on the coffee table in front of him. For a moment, I was offended that he had not spoken to me there.

  ‘What did you say to her?’ Buwa said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Aakar’s mother, when you were at his burial.’

  ‘I didn’t talk to her there.’

  ‘Did you ask her if you could use her photograph in the exhibition?’ he asked.

  ‘She doesn’t know I took it.’

  He stared at me and I thought he looked very old.

  ‘You took photographs about the war?’ His voice rose as though he were about to yell.

  I didn’t reply, waiting for him to continue, but eventually he just hiccupped and left the room.

  I went to bed feeling as if no one was talking about the same thing, but that perhaps my photograph was good because at least it made people feel something. That night, little lumps appeared on the inside of my thighs.

  Julie didn’t sleep with me. She slept with Paresh, another university student, and then she went back to America. Paresh was five years older than me and studying economics. He was not particularly handsome, rich or smart. No one mentioned the photograph again once Julie had left. Buwa was still barely speaking to me.

  Every time I thought about Julie I felt anxious. One day at university, I asked Shabnam:

  ‘If you had to describe me, what would you say?’

  She was about to go into a lecture. She burst out laughing so hard she couldn’t speak, but I knew she was faking it.

  In between gulps, she said, ‘That’s not what this is about.’ And then she went inside the classroom, laughing.

  I stormed off.

  The lumps on my thighs were growing bigger and more inflamed. They hurt when I climbed onto my bike or when my thighs rubbed against each other. I hadn’t had sex with Shabnam for weeks, since the night we’d gone to watch the Hotel Yak and Yeti. All I could think about now was the caption under my photograph at the exhibition: Tirtha Kumari Bhujel, widower and mother of three, grieves at her eldest son’s funeral at Naubise village near Kathmandu.

  I planned to ask Buwa what was wrong, and tell him that I had apologised to Aakar’s mother, although I had no intention of meeting her. The day I went to talk to him, he was on his knees in the study, measuring a chair for cushion covers again. I was sure he heard my footsteps approaching, but he didn’t turn around. I walked away.

  I was convinced I was getting sick in the same way Aama had. I didn’t tell anyone, because she had died from a woman’s disease, so that could not have been the case for me.

  But I didn’t die, and then it was the anniversary of Aama’s death and my turn to clean the shrine. I woke up early and went out to Durbar Square to collect the bucket and scrubbing brush. The Buddhist shrine was off the main road and through a series of courtyards. Multicoloured prayer flags hung across the courtyard, strung between apartment windows. Several stories above them were clotheslines. I kneeled down and spread my thighs on either side of the Buddha’s foot. It was cold from the morning dew and soothed my sores.

  At noon, Widow Dhital, a friend of my father’s, came down from her apartment to give me a bowl of chiura, beaten rice, and poured in dahi, a yogurt she made herself and kept in a large soft drink bottle. I still thought I was dying and I wanted to ask her about my sores, but she spoke first.

  ‘Is your father getting better?’

  I didn’t know Buwa was sick. Perhaps Widow Dhital asked this about everyone’s father, since the elders were always complaining about a cough or not sleeping well whenever there was a change in the weather. I chewed for a long time before speaking.

  ‘He seems better,’ I said finally.

  When I had finished eating, she scraped the last wet flakes from my bowl and pinched my cheek.

  ‘You know, Ngodup, I remember the way that your mother doted on you. It hasn’t been the same since she died, has it?’ she said.

  I nodded. I didn’t want to disagree with her.

  Aama never doted on me. She was always scolding me, and often slapped me across the face when she was angry, not like the affectionate taps Buwa gave me on the head. For her, my marks were never high enough, and I was lazy and inconsiderate. Even when she was sick and in bed all day, she scolded me for leaving the house and not taking care of her, although Manna was there to attend to her every need. Buwa was the lenient one and covered for me when I went out, especially if I said it was for a protest. I avoided being at home, as Aama grew more irritable the sicker she became. She died in the night while I was out with my friends. I came back to find Buwa on the floor beside her bed, crying. His left leg was stuck out at a strange angle and his eyes were swollen. I had never seen Buwa look so weak and didn’t wanted to embarrass him, so I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Buwa still misses her,’ I told Widow Dhital.

  And I suddenly missed him, even though I had just glimpsed him in the dining room this morning, eating breakfast alone.

  The courtyard was full of people for Aama’s anniversary ceremony. Relatives, friends and neighbours came to lay candles on the newly swept cement before the Buddha’s feet. As I watched each flame popping to life, my thighs throbbed. I stood in the shade at the back of the courtyard and spread my legs wide so as not to aggravate the sores. Shapes of light stencilled by the prayer flags filtered into the courtyard.

  When the bells started ringing and everyone bowed their heads, I thought of the easiest prayer I knew.

  ‘Om mane padme hu.’

  I was filled with the vibration of the humming and the reverberation of the bells. I felt restless. I looked up and a ray of light shimmered through the flags above me. I imagined staying anxious forever, my sores continuing to throb; the light would keep shimmering, no one would tell me what I had done wrong, and one day I would get used to it. Across the sea of bowed heads, I watched Buwa’s profile as he prayed. His hair had turned white at the roots and his expression was soft. He had changed so much from the boisterous academic I had known growing up. Standing among the elders, he seemed to belong with them now.

  Nearby, I spotted Shabnam standing beside her two little sisters, holding the hand of the youngest, who was starting to fidget. Shabnam turned and held up a finger to shush her, smiling in a way that she never did with me. I wanted to embrace her, and Buwa, but there were too many people between us, and neither had been speaking to me much lately. I wondered how much I had missed. I promised myself that, after the ceremony, I would ask them, I would find out, I wouldn’t let them go.

  At that moment, the humming of all the people around me in the courtyard seemed to rise in unison. But I wasn’t a part of it, and hadn’t been for a while. I remembered the way Julie described my photograph and thought what a strange thing it was to say. How could anything not be full of life? Everything was full of it.

  For Nam Le

  The honourable man’s greatest duty is to his family. It is not so much a prayer as a reminder. On top of the altar, collecting dust on her marble skin, a small statute of Phật Bà frowns austerely. Next to her are the portraits of my parents. Incense powder sheds as I pull the stick out of its plastic tube. I pick up a lighter, strike it once, twice. No. I need a smoke first. I pull on a coat and head outside.

  Exhale. A soft grey plume wafts into the still air, swirling in delicate strands. Inhale. Watching it against the concrete and brick of my backyard, I imagine the same streams of smoke winding down passages and darkened chambers in my lungs. I feel a sting as the cigarette fizzles out at my fingertips.

  I smoked before I came he
re too, when I worked as a rickshaw cyclist in Vietnam, determined to pay my own college fees. I used to watch as my cigarette fumes fused with waves of heat and the steam from hot chicken broth, and was carried into the momentum of the city. There were no traffic lights—I would dodge and weave and the older cyclists would swear at me and spit in my face. I didn’t respond; one unspoken word is nine words of peace. It was easy not to mind in the din of Sài Gòn, where the shouting matches of a lovers’ feud strained against the fluent rap of street marketers, Hot-coconut-syrup-on-mung-bean-sweet-soup! Hot-coconut-syrup-on-mung-bean-sweet-soup! and against a thousand different pitches of bells and the deafening rumble of skewed wooden wheels.

  Under the market stalls and in the alleyways crammed between apartment buildings, the smell of fish sauce and overripe fruit seeped out, as though from some open wound beneath. It was a city spilling at the seams with a million different bodies crisscrossing and overlapping, glued together beneath the dense heat that blanketed them.

  It wasn’t until I stepped into the rented brick unit in a southeast suburb of Melbourne, seventeen years ago, that I started to mind: the tattered carpet and the peeling plaster on the walls, the musty smell in the bathroom, and everything I owned in a fake Nike sportsbag by the door.

  Somewhere out of sight, a lawnmower starts up. I crumple the cigarette into the ashtray and fragments of ash continue to smoulder feebly. I have not turned on the ducted heating all winter—a waste of electricity for only one person. The honourable man withstands small nuisances in order to conquer large adversities.

  At twelve minutes past five, the doorbell rings. The air freshener I had sprayed earlier hits my nostrils and I feel nauseous. I rub my damp hands on my pants and they drag against the cotton. The doorknob turns with a metallic scrape and my insides grind like a chain of teeth as the door clicks open. ‘Son.’

  I was fourteen when the soldiers destroyed my province. I woke up to my mother combing her hair, pulling it over her left shoulder and brushing down its length nine times, her lucky number, before twisting it into a bun in one quick, reflexive movement. It calmed me to watch her like this. She had already opened the windows, filling the house with all the places the wind had been. There were valleys in Sơn Mỹ, and swells and rises. It was a two-minute peace. I learned how that world could shatter with the sudden crack of a gunshot and the snap of a spine as it breaks in two, draped over my back. I lay in a ditch for ten hours, sinking into the warmth of the mud, losing feeling in my limbs as they numbed under the weight of my mother’s body, counting the thuds of my pulse, too loud, inside my head. I slowly became consumed with envy for the empty bodies around me, oblivious and safe.

  To this kind of world I brought a new and innocent life. Every time I look at my son, there is debt.

  Tuyết often talked about the fight we had when our son was a year old. My cousins from Tây Ninh had written to us again, asking for money. It was a bad time: we had our baby, Tuyết was not working and we had monthly remittances to send to her family. She accused me of being selfish and we fought for so long that I could no longer remember what exactly we were arguing about.

  Tuyết went to the door, carrying the baby and her handbag. We were shouting. She threatened divorce. I lunged and pulled the baby out of her arms. She has told me about this scene so many times that I see myself now as an outsider looking in. I held our son around the belly, thrusting him forwards as though to drop him.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with us. We had no problems until he came. What’s wrong with us is this child!’ I shouted.

  The words rang false to me when she repeated them later. Flat and strange words. She said that I was going to throw him. I remember her screaming in such terror that it shocked me out of my anger. I gave the child back to her and fled from the house.

  The next day, when I came back, we sat in the backyard on patio chairs. She was quiet and formal. She said that we had to talk. It was her hope, for years, until she finally left, that talking would provide a solution, if the right words were said.

  That morning, I told her everything at once, and tried again later in different ways, but they were already dead words. I said that I had hated life for a long time, that I had thought about suicide many times, but had been weighed down by more and more responsibilities that kept me from it. I said it was a mistake to have had a child.

  Tuyết stared out at the back fence as I talked, her expression hard and unflinching. She said nothing after I finished. I looked at her face for clues, for a way out of our deadlock, but all I could see was how old we were getting. Her face was wider and more lined. Her lips, more purple than pink, slack in a way I hadn’t seen before. I had always pictured her talking, smiling, laughing, frowning, kissing. When I first met her, she had been popular, surrounded by a large family, courted by many suitors and visited by many women for advice.

  Neither of us spoke now; we were surrounded by silence for miles, stretching in every direction, for years ahead. A pine branch scraped against the corrugated plastic roofing above us. She had nothing more to say. She never looked pretty and lively to me again.

  It is raining heavily outside and my son stands close to the door, his hair flat and his eyes shadowed. He is in school uniform, but the clothes are not his; they are too loose for him, the pants too short. The last time I saw him, two years ago, I had pulled him by the neck and dragged him out this door. He had looked fixedly, unashamedly at me and I had wanted to destroy him.

  ‘Come in,’ I say now.

  He walks through the door and hesitates before sitting down on the couch by the altar. The leather groans beneath his weight. He opens his mouth to speak, but I am not ready.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ I say.

  My hands are shaking again, but I cannot go outside to smoke. Under the vapid light in the bathroom, my face is wan and papery. I slap water on my cheeks and drops slide down the pockmarked surface, lingering in folds of loosened skin, collecting on my chin, then slipping off one by one onto my shirt. I should change into a cleaner one anyway. I hurry to the wardrobe, already short of breath. I see the old white singlets and polos that I have owned for more than a decade, and cannot remember which ones are stained. Finally, I reached for a blue button-down shirt I have not worn for a long time.

  When I return to the living room, my son seems graver than before. He looks like me in so many ways, and carries some of the same terrible burden. For a father’s lifetime eating salt, a son’s lifetime thirsting water.

  I ask after his health and he replies guardedly, his Vietnamese uncertain. A muscle spasms in his jaw.

  ‘I promised Má I would come here,’ he says.

  I ask, ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

  In a flash, I have the reflexive urge to yell at him, but it is fainter now, as though worn out from use. I feel us both making the same calculation. My quick anger, his defiance, a shouting match, a slammed door, and then, two years later, my shock again at how his face has changed. I am convinced that we have been moving back, irreparably, to that same place. The words I have been practising all day burn like embers on my tongue as they fall out.

  ‘Come home.’

  The words catch in my throat and I feel my eyes stinging with the force of holding them there. He draws back. A neighbour’s phone rings, shrill and rhythmic, in the darkness outside.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Come home, and it will be different.’ I feel scales hardening on my lips and press my teeth across them.

  ‘I know it’s hard.’ I look at my son again and realise I no longer know all the words to any prayers. With every hardship…I say to myself, but after that my mind slips back to its vacant screen. ‘But if you say yes, it can be done. We can forget what happened. If you say yes, we can find a way.’

  His eyes are puddles of black. Nothing moves in his face—his severe brow and concave cheeks. Behind him the window rattles. The rain is full of acid. In the slow descent of
evening, streaks of water blur on the windowpanes and the room dims. It occurs to me that I never finished the prayer to Phật Bà, that the stick of incense has yet to dissolve into dusty vapour, to lift and curve in graceful wisps. There are only old ashes on the altar and stumps of incense sticks that I lit some time ago in the ceramic pot. I think about which prayers they had carried, which hopeful pleas, and how those possibilities had drifted away with a word.

  At uni, I was obsessed with a girl in a way that I sometimes thought was sexual. Michaela sat next to me in a writing workshop. She had a delicate, pointy face, and the left side of her head was shaved. On the other side, her hair hung in blonde tendrils.

  She wrote weird stories with no endings. There was one about a girl who follows a bartender to Portsea, where the two of them stay holed up in his shitty beach shack for two months, having sex and cooking Chinese food. Another one about a girl who hates her superficial friends and sits alone in an op shop. One day a Vietnam vet asks her for a ciggie.

  She wrote weird stories with no endings. There was one about a girl who follows a bartender to Portsea, where the two of them stay holed up in his shitty beach shack for two months, having sex and cooking Chinese food. Another one about a girl who hates her superficial friends and sits alone in an op shop. One day a Vietnam vet asks her for a ciggie.

  The first time I talked to Michaela, she invited me to get a coffee with her. The coffee shop was a window in the wall. A big, heavily bearded guy hulked at the window. ‘Hey,’ he said in a raspy voice.

  Michaela ordered two espressos, and told me that the beans were cultivated in the Ethiopian highlands, just west of Jimma, and half-soaked for a day before drying.

  ‘We only use half-soaked beans,’ added the guy, making me think of socks.

  Michaela told me on the way back to class that she did social media for the café and showed me photos on her phone with captions like Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. – Martin Luther King, Jr.