I turn away. A little girl slides past and she catches my eye and stops and she holds up a book of lottery tickets.
“You buy,” she says.
“No,” I say. “Sorry.”
“You buy,” she says, coming close. “Good luck win money.”
“No,” I say.
Her hand is on me, on my wrist. I yank the arm away.
“Go away. Please,” I say.
“Fuck you,” she says and she moves off and I rub at the place she touched, hard. Rub her touch away.
I jitter around. Move off from the statue. A man has a case opened up by a bench and it’s full of packs of cigarettes. I draw near. I haven’t smoked in years. I coughed my way one spring run from St. Louis to Denver and I stopped cold. But I want a cigarette now.
“You buy,” he says.
I look at the brands, all Chinese or Vietnamese but all of them with names in English: Lord Filter. Ruby Queen. Park Lane. White Horse. Sunny. Hero. And there’s a brand in a white pack called Memory. My hand goes out and it’s trembling. I think Park Lane was the brand name that masked the marijuana when I was here. I pass it over, though I’m sure it’s just tobacco now anyway. I take a pack of Ruby Queen and a pack of matches and I pay the man and walk away.
I open the pack and tap out a cigarette and put it in my mouth. I stuff the pack in my pants pocket and strike a match. I touch the end of the cigarette and pull the smoke in and it tastes like truck exhaust and I wait for the nicotine to kick in, to smooth out the rough spots, to steady my hand, but it only grates in me and all I’m getting is a shitload of blurry nights with a shitload of interstate exit signs drifting past in my headlights, and I flip the cigarette away.
I’m more jumpy than I was before. Then I see her crossing the street, far away, down at Le Loi near the fountain. I see her though there’s a hundred people around her and a hundred people between us. I see Tien and she’s dressed in that white blouse with the big bow and the dark, tight skirt that hides her knees. The way I first saw her.
She comes into the square and for a brief moment she doesn’t see me. I think to walk away. As connected as I am to her by my love—and I am as connected to her as I am to the limbs of my body—I almost turn and walk away fast and find some place to hide and then get the hell out of this country without ever seeing her again and never ask another question of myself about what it was that happened. Go back and get into another truck and follow the black track of the exhaust burn in my lane till I fucking die. But I’m not quite scared enough to do that.
Then she sees me and she starts to hurry, cutting through the threads of Vietnamese strolling in the square, dodging people, and she doesn’t seem to be one of them at all, she’s moving in a different way, quicker, more focused. I think: Like an American.
And she is. Half of her is. That’s already known. Watching her move like this, coming closer, is no reason for the revving to start again. I curse my cowardice. I curse these rushes of fear. I wait for her touch.
But it’s not Saigon anymore, it’s Ho Chi Minh City, and Ho is watching us and his own touch is secret, it seems to be one thing in this public place but is another, I’m certain now. Tien is here and she’s breathing heavily and our hands flap out in front of us, not knowing what to do, and I don’t quite know how it happens but our right hands connect and we shake, like two strangers meeting and introducing themselves, or maybe like tour guide and tourist. We both look down at our shaking hands and Tien laughs, though it is low, sharp, full, I think, of my failure last night.
“Hello,” she says, still looking at our hands.
“Hello.”
“This feels so strange,” she says.
“Uncle Ho is watching,” I say.
She brings her face up, glances over my shoulder. She laughs again, softer now, and then she says in a whisper, “He is easily offended.”
“Good to meet you,” I say, out loud, not letting go of her hand, playing the little game, though it’s the last thing I want to do right now. “I’m Benjamin Cole.”
“I am your guide, Miss Tien,” she says, and she bends near. She whispers again. “Does this mean we can start over?”
I know she’s asking if we really have to go to Nha Trang, if we can’t just take another tour of the city and then meet tonight and resume our love affair. But I can’t find a way to answer.
She says, “Out here. In this public place. Away from my room and all the . . . things that are in it. Does it seem the same to you?”
Our hands separate. I say, “I still love you.”
“And I love you. But it is the other thing I ask about. The fear.”
I wait. I wait for some other answer than the one I know I must give. But there is nothing else. “We have to know for sure.”
She nods once. “Then I have reserved a car for us. I wish it was right now. But the soonest I could arrange was in three days’ time.”
“Three days.” It’s dumb repetition. I don’t know how to hold this feeling for three extra days.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “The city is full of Japanese businessmen until the weekend. They have booked many weeks in advance.”
“I understand.”
There are no words for a long moment and then she says, very softly, “Until then, it must only be a handshake for us. Is that not so?”
I look closely at her eyes. Surely if she is my daughter, I’d be able to look in her eyes and see something of myself and know. But there is nothing clear. And the fear won’t go away.
Tien nods as if I’ve answered her. She says, “I will see you on Friday. I will meet you with the car just over there, in front of the Rex Hotel, at eight in the morning. We can get very close to Nha Trang before the night.”
I say, “Are you angry with me?”
“No,” she says. “Not with you. I am angry with my father.”
What races in me now is gratitude for this woman. Her certainty lifts me, smooths the rough spots like I’d expected from the hit on the cigarette. I say, “I want to touch you now more than ever. You understand?”
“I wish not to understand until it can be more than words.”
“I love you, Tien.”
Her eyes fill with tears, but she lifts her chin slightly, keeps them from flowing. She offers her hand. “I will shake your hand for that,” she says.
I smile. She does too. I take her hand as if to shake but our hands do not move. We touch and people pass by, close to us. She releases my hand and goes off, past me.
I do not turn to watch her and suddenly she is near me again, at my side.
She says, “I do not want you to misunderstand for these three clays. When I shake your hand just now, I was full of some strong feeling about you, a good feeling. I did not say in return ‘I love you,’ but I do.”
And she’s gone. I watch her this time as she moves off, past Ho with his hand on the child, and into the crowd. When I lose sight of her, I dig my own restless hands into my pockets and I find the pack of Ruby Queens. I tap out another cigarette and I light it up and I suck in a deep drag and it burns in me but I keep it in and all the empty nights on the road come with it, all the nights pulling smoke in and letting it out, over and over, and I keep the smoke inside me now, like holding my own ghost.
He is on the curb when Mr. Thu and I drive up. He has a small bag beside him and we stop. I can see his forehead wrinkle when he sees Mr. Thu. I get out. We do not shake hands this time.
“You remember Mr. Thu,” I say, even before he can ask. “We will drop him at his house on our way out of town.”
Ben nods. I open the back door for him. Mr. Thu is already out of the car and picking up Ben’s bag and he heads for the trunk. “Please,” I say to Ben, motioning him into the backseat. I feel how formal I am, how distant this all sounds. He does too.
He gives me a brief, sad look and he moves and bends, entering the backseat. I do not care if anyone sees or what they think, though I am very discreet, really, turning my body to shield this thing I do, but as he goes by me I move the hand holding the door and touch him on the back of his thigh, just a quick touch and I grasp the door again and close it.
I step away from the car and my heart is racing. I should be more considerate of Ben’s fear. But I will not share it. I am looking for this trip to escape my father, not find my mother. I will not even think of my mother. Somewhere along Highway One, well before Nha Trang, I think things will become clear on their own.
I turn from the car. I look around. The xich lo drivers are in a clump in the midst of their cabs, arguing about something. The doorman at the Rex is looking down the street. No one has seen my counterrevolutionary act. I get into the front passenger seat. As soon as I close my door, I hear the trunk slam shut. I look into the backseat at Ben. I want him to be smiling, happy for my touch. He is not. His eyes are very sad.
I say, “I am sorry.”
“Why?”
“For touching you.”
Mr. Thu is opening the driver door, unaware what we are saying in English.
“Don’t you know what it is I’m afraid of?” Ben says.
“Of course I know.”
The door closes. Mr. Thu is beside me.
Ben leans forward and touches my shoulder, just with the tips of his fingers, and he sits back deep in his seat again, his eyes looking out the side window. I tell Mr. Thu to take us to his house.
Mr. Thu lives in a place where I have taken many foreign officials and businessmen, a New Economic District where the rapid development of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is very clear. There are many streets, soon to be full of children and trees, where blocks of beautiful apartments, constructed from highest grade portland cement made in modern factories in Can Tho, glisten white in the sunlight. We drive down such a street and stop. Before Mr. Thu gets out, he and I speak a little in Vietnamese—he thanks me for this time off, because he has a sick child and his wife’s two brothers and their families are visiting from Hanoi, and I thank him for letting me take the car—and while I am speaking my own native language, I am feeling very strange. I am thinking very much how Ben cannot understand what I say or what I hear. And I am hearing even the English in my head as a foreign thing, words about cement production and economic development. And I know I cannot touch Ben when Mr. Thu is gone, though that is what my body yearns to do. This strange feeling makes itself clear to me: I feel suddenly like a person who does not know who she is.
Then Mr. Thu is out of the car and walking away and I watch him until he has disappeared into one of these modern socialist-state apartments. I sit for a moment even after he has gone and I do not say anything and I do not look into the backseat. Ben is silent, too. I am the ghost now. I think what it must be like for my father, watching someone he loves without a language to speak with or a body to touch with.
Then Ben speaks my name. “Tien.”
I turn. He slides forward in the seat. Our faces are very near. I wait but this is as close as we are going to get. So I ask him, “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you can drive on Vietnam’s roads?”
“You forget what I used to do here.”
“My truck driver.”
“I know the rules. Never stop. Small gives way to large.”
“You are ready to be as dangerous as my countrymen.”
He smiles at this thing I say. I am glad. He gets out of the car and goes around and he slides in behind the wheel, beside me.
I clutch the steering wheel and it’s a stunningly familiar thing. To drive and not to feel.
“What have you done these three days?” This is Tien’s voice and I turn to her, trying to hear what it is that she’s said.
Finally I answer, “I’ve watched a paddle fan spin on the ceiling.”
“I have no fan to watch. I have only tourists and prayers to a man I think maybe does not hear me anymore.”
My hands are cranking the engine. I want to drive now.
Even though it’s not a truck and an interstate. It’s a Fiat sedan with a Saigontourist sticker across the back windshield and an alien street rimmed by an ugly block of apartments. And another street, running through a cleared field waiting for more concrete, and another, packed full with motorbikes squeezing past ramshackle produce stands and restaurants and warrens of scrap wood and corrugated-sheet-metal houses. She tells me where to turn, but says no more than that. I’m glad. I want to hold a wheel and drive in the silence that was my life for years. Even going slow. Even with young men with black flares of hair and young women in sunglasses looking in on all sides while I creep ahead only to find myself in another press of new eyes. It’s all right. I’m holding the wheel, I’m moving, I turn off the air-conditioning and roll the window down and let in the smell of exhaust, a smell of the road, and I have a place to drive to, a place ahead that will resolve all this.
And finally the city traffic loosens somewhat and the road widens a little and though it’s full of potholes and oxcarts and trucks pushing in front of me or jumping out of the oncoming lane and forcing me over, still I can push a bit and I lay on my horn and the women on bikes and the tiny three-wheel Lambretta buses and all the motorbikes give way for me. I just stay clear of the trucks and they’re funky-ass things, for the most part, old deuce-and-a-halfs or old commercial De Sotos and Jimmys, with jerry-built water tanks on the tops of their cabs and copper tubing feeding down into the engines, doing the work of long-gone radiators that can’t be replaced.
And then we’re farther out of town, heading for where Long Binh must’ve been, a massive Army base camp out northeast of Saigon, the place we all passed through on the way into the war. And there are billboards: an enormous display of a piece of PVC pipe, a giant tube of some Hong Kong toothpaste, and a billboard that pleads, GOLF VIETNAM. And then there’s a turnoff to the place where a sign says they’re building the Vietnam International Golf Club. I try to figure how far we’ve come, to see if they’re building that right there on the doorstep we used for all the guys to come and fight in Vietnam. But I don’t think the government that has filled Tien with all those little riffs of ideology would have the sense of humor for that.
I think of her. I look. She has her face turned to the rush of countryside. A flooded rice paddy now. Women out there in conical straw hats bent into their work, up to their ankles among the low green plants. And a boy near the road on the back of a water buffalo. I look to the highway and I swerve around a pothole as big as the buffalo’s head.
But being on the road is good. The road rolls, even if you’ve got to dodge and honk and give way. Your life passes. You get through the hours you wouldn’t know how to get through if you were sitting still somewhere. And I must have missed whatever was left of Long Binh because we’re going through a town called Honai and there was nothing like that between Saigon and the camp. We’re crawling again, but still moving. Four Catholic churches almost one after the other. And no pictures of Ho out here. It’s a country I don’t expect.
Then the road again and rubber trees, a plantation, the quick run of the even, deep rows of trees, their white trunks all with the same dark slashes, and a grave out there, a little stone monument in the trees. I follow it with my eyes and I see Tien again and she’s looking, too, turning to see the tomb. I think to speak to her. At least to explain my silence, though surely it’s best for her, as well. It’s a kind of touching, our talk. This trip is hard on her and I’m very sorry for that. But the rubber trees vanish and now there’s a pond, and I turn to the road and it is narrowing down, and something is fitting together in my head and Tien slides away from me once more. The pond—I look again before it’s gone—the pond curves away from the highway and
out to the north and it’s shaped like a sickle blade and the sun flares there and is gone and the pond is gone and I know the place. Ahead, the road has narrowed but tree lines have taken up, maybe a hundred yards back, on both sides.
And suddenly this feels like the place. I have never remembered these things—the rubber trees, the curving blade of a pond, the narrowing of Highway One—even in my dreams of that day. But now it’s clear. I slow down, I draw off the road, the shoulder is narrow, but I squeeze far over, the wheel bucking a little in the uneven ground, and I stop.
“What is it?” Tien says.
I get out of the car. A truck flashes past, ragged and Army green, and its horn blares and Dopplers away down the road. I look and it’s full of hay but it’s still a deuce-and-a-half, a truck from some old convoy, and I know where I am, I feel sure I know, and a cluster of motorbikes races by, a voice floating out, shouting, meaningless words. I start across the road. Hurrying before another truck coming from the north. And I’m off the road and the truck’s draft buffets me and I wade into the scrub growth and I stop and he could have stood right here.
I turn. I stand just as he stood, the blond guy with the missing arm. I wait. The sounds from the highway are faint now. I wait for something to clarify itself. I try to see him again. It’s been a year or more since I’ve dreamed about him. But when I did, he was very clear. And two years before that, clear. But he’s dim now. How odd, to find this place because of new memories, restored memories—the pond, the plantation—but now that I’m in the place again, the man who made all these memories important has faded. I can’t see his face anymore, it’s all darkness, as he looks at what’s happened to him. He’s an outline, blurred by the sun.
I lift my hands. I stare at them before me. My two hands. And then I look across the road. Tien’s face floats there in the window of the car. She has slid across to the driver’s seat so she can see what it is I’m doing out here without a word of explanation to her, and her eyes are clear from this place where I stand, dark and steady on me, and I feel her on the palms of these hands. I am in Vietnam, the place where I went to war for my father. I saw an image here, in this very field, an image that clung to me not by its horror or its strangeness but by how it fit all that I had felt till then and all that I would feel for years after. And it’s gone now. Gone. And in its place is this image across the road. The face of this Vietnamese woman, watching me, waiting for me, she has opened her body to me, and in it, this other image dissolved. A great dark mass erases her face, the flash of a truck, and for that moment he’s there again, like the flare from the first rocket in the attack, his face calm except for the knot of puzzlement in his brow, and the truck is gone and it’s Tien instead. Puzzled, too, I know.
The Deep Green Sea Page 13