The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  Then a shadow falls over my eyes. Ben is at the doorway. He steps in, moves to me. He is dressed. I look into his face, wait for my eyes to adjust. He stands over me and I can see him clearly now. His eyes arc soft, but something is wrong.

  “What is it?” I say.

  He takes my hand. “Nothing.”

  I rise up on my knees, quickly.

  He says, “It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong.”

  I try to believe him. I realize it is about his eyes. I am naked here before him, but his eyes stay fixed on mine. I suddenly know what he will have us do. “You want to continue the search for her,” I say. “Am I right?”

  “Let’s keep this room. Okay? We’ll be back here by sunset.”

  “You are not my father.”

  “Of course not,” he says, holding my hand tight. “I know that.”

  “I do not ask for a mother.”

  “Think of me as the child,” he says. “I’m afraid of the thunder. I know it can’t hurt me, but I hear it and I need to be reassured. That’s what this is.”

  It occurs to me that this would be a time to tell him about what I am sure is going on inside my body. There should be no more talk of parents and children except for this real thing. And if I had awakened to find him sleeping beside me and he was naked and we were going no further on this trip, then I would. But I will not let our child be mixed up in this fear of his.

  I say to him, “Let’s do this as quickly as we can. I want to make love to you on this beach tonight.”

  He should say that this is what he wants, too. But he does not. He nods to me and he moves away, I suppose so he does not have to see me naked as I get up from the bed. I am angry. I feel my face glowing from this like I have been in the sun too long. His back is to me. He is at the door again. “Ben,” I say to him.

  He turns. I say, “Do you love me?”

  “I’ll show you how much tonight.”

  This is a good answer, I think. I am letting my anger go with this answer. He is very troubled. I can tell that. I do not know why this should have come on him again. It had to be out on the beach, after we made love. Perhaps he slept, too, and had a bad dream. I rise up from the bed and he is already turning his back to me once more.

  He has the motor running in the car when I come from the villa’s office. I get in and he asks, “Did she know where the village is?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I will tell you where to drive.”

  He nods and we pull away. I open my window and keep my face in the sea air. I must prepare myself now, to perhaps find my mother. The woman in the villa pulled out a map to show me where the village is. She has two cousins living there. It is called Trang Non, which means in En­glish “full moon.” It is not a fishing village, as I thought. They are woodcutters and coffee growers. In the mountains by the sea. My mother might not be there. She might he dead. But if she is alive and we find her, I will say nothing. I will translate for Ben, if that is necessary, but only what he needs in order to realize that this woman is a stranger to him. Then we will go.

  That is all the thought I wish to give to this day, and we bump from the dirt road and turn onto Highway One, and we travel on. I see only the turnings that we need to make. We slide into Nha Trang along the main seaside boulevard, lined with coconut palms, and then we go over two bridges and we arc through the city and we pass a great white statue of the Buddha looking out to sea, desiring nothing, except to sit by the sea and be perfect, and we take the cutoff that goes along the Hon Chong beaches.

  There are mountains near us, but I do not look. One of these mountains is supposed to look like a reclining princess who married a giant who saw her bathing naked and made a handprint on some big rock and then she died. Or something like that. I am not caring to think of fairy tales at the moment. Things are suddenly very much what they seem to be. We are driving among mountains and rocks. That is all.

  And then I have to find a gravel side road and we slow and I find the place and we start to climb for a ways and then the road cuts back toward the sea and we are shrouded in trees and the road squeezes into one lane and bounces us around a turn and there is only a grassy field in front of us and a wall of trees. We stop. Ben looks at me.

  “We have to walk from here,” I say.

  He turns off the engine and sets the emergency brake and we sit quietly for a moment. Finally he says, “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  And then I find myself saying, “How sorry?”

  He looks at me, a little surprised.

  I am, too, at the thrashing that has begun inside me.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  I say, “Are you sorry enough to turn around now and take me away from here and never think about all this again?”

  “We’ve come this far.”

  “I am afraid. If she is here. I am afraid of her.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  He is right. I cry out to myself that he is right. If she is here, then she left me for herself, just for herself. Some part of me is afraid of that. But that is an old hurt. A thing long dead, it means nothing to me now. This is nothing to fear. But the thrashing goes on. From a darker wind. But if there is some other fear, then we must go on, or that fear will never end.

  So I take Ben’s face in my two hands and I draw him to me and I kiss him on the mouth, not caring if he is ready to do this in return, though he does kiss me, but not enough, really, not as much as I am kissing him, but I do not care. My mother will not come between us. She will not hurt us. I will take these two hands and strangle her to death if we find her and she tries to hurt Ben and me. But she will be a stranger to him, and to me, as well, and we will be back in this car soon.

  “I am all right now,” I say. “I want to do this thing and be done with it.”

  “I do too,” he says. I expect him to get out at once. But he does not. He turns my face now, with his fingertips just under my chin, and he kisses me on the lips. Very light. Very brief. But he does kiss me.

  I lean against the car door and I feel as if I have no strength. I do not need a mother. I press hard. It is for Ben. And the door opens and I move and I find myself out in the middle of the grassy place. The grass runs on to what looks like a cliff edge, and beyond is a slice of the sea. We have climbed a long way up already. Against the jade of the water is a distant fishing boat with a sail curved like a Chinese sword.

  Now we can also see a wide path cut in the tree line and we move toward it. My legs are heavy. Ben does not take my hand. And we are into the trees and climbing some more, sea pines for a while, swaying high above us, silent, my legs are aching from the slope of this path, and I am breathing heavily and I can hear Ben breathing heavily and these are two breaths now, it strikes me, very hard, two separate breaths on this path, not the one breath we made last night, and I touch the baby, and I climb. And finally the pines thin and the path levels and we come out into bright sun and another clearing. To our left is a gentle slope and coffee trees planted in rows, and before us, straight on, shrouded in bamboo thickets and willows, is the village. A dog barks up ahead, out of sight, and another.

  “Be careful of the dogs,” I say to Ben. “Village dogs can be vicious.”

  She warns me about the dogs and wherever it is in my head that I’ve been hiding since last night, I’m chased out now. This is how we began, and she should be pissed as hell at me or scared as hell but here she is warning me about the dogs again and the only thing in her voice is concern for me. Ahead is the place. There’s bamboo all around and some trees, but I can see the palm leaf roofs of the houses and a track of smoke rising and I can smell a wood fire and the dogs are barking like crazy. I should say to her, You’re right about the goddamn dogs, let’s get the hell out of here. I turn to her and she’s gone. For a moment, I think she�
�s heading back down the path and this is good. Let her run like hell. I’ll follow her. She can just whisper Fuck no and we can go away and if I have to live with some weird goddamn fears once in a while, I can do it. There’s just no way ever to know for sure. Ex­cept if we end up in the States, which I figure we have to, there’s blood types and there’s DNA or whatever, so there is a way and I’ll have to know sooner or later and someday she’s going to want to know, too. Like as soon as she starts thinking about children of our own.

  But she hasn’t bolted. She’s moving off to the right, toward the sea. I follow. She’s moving slow and dreamy and the sea is beautiful out there, it’s clean and the line of the horizon is sharp and wide, simple, things are simple there, and though I can’t hide the fear now, it’s too close—just along the path and behind some bamboo—I want this clean sword-cut of an answer, and I know it’ll be clean and it’ll be okay, some part of me is saying that louder and louder, to hell with fairy tales, and Tien moves to the cliff edge and stops.

  I come up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. Her hands come up and touch mine. I kiss her hair and then I look beyond her and over the edge of the cliff, and it’s sheer, falling far, far away down to the rocks and the sea.

  We stand like that for a long while. The breeze rustles at us but things feel very calm, all of a sudden. We made love last night along this sea. It’s ours. Her hands are on mine. I look down at them, and I see the moons there and the grinding starts again inside me.

  “It’s time,” I say.

  She nods and turns and she moves off without another word or another touch, and I feel this withholding—­suddenly all that I feel about her hands is the yearning to take them in mine, to kiss those pale moons—but I follow her, across the grass and onto a wide dirt path, and the trees take up on each side and then the bamboo comes in and the path narrows and we turn once and again, surrounded by the stalks of bamboo sectioned like bone, and suddenly we are before a little square with a great stone cistern in the middle and ringed by little houses of thatch and palm. A woman is dipping a ladle into the water in the cistern. Her face is hidden by a conical straw hat. A dog barks nearby. I look and he is peeking around a house and when I meet his eyes he disappears. The woman turns her head. She is very old.

  Tien crosses to her and the old woman greets her and they speak for a moment. First Tien and then the woman and then Tien again and the woman nods her head and it is a clear yes she is saying and she motions beyond the cis­tern, off down another path, and I try to keep still but I can’t, not for a moment, I come forward and Tien is turning to me and her face is drawn tight.

  “She’s here,” I say.

  “There’s someone here with my mother’s name,” she says.

  “Where?”

  Tien says another few words in Vietnamese to the woman who is smiling broadly at me and nodding her head over and over and Tien moves off and I follow and it’s hard just to walk, just to put one foot in front of the other in a regular way, but we do walk, slower than be­fore if anything. Tien is having trouble moving.

  “It’s okay,” I say to her. “I’m with you. This won’t take long.”

  She smiles up at me. My words sound confident. Maybe I am. Maybe I am or I wouldn’t be wanting to bolt down this path to wherever it is we’re going. She touches my hand, briefly, and my penis instantly stirs. But this first. This first.

  And we are moving through another maze of growth, and chickens scatter before us, clucking furiously, plunging into a tiny break in the bamboo, and we come out of the maze and Tien stops.

  There are two small thatched houses before us. She turns to the one on the left and two women are crouching flat-footed in front, their knees up by their faces, two sexless middle-aged women, dark from the sun, their hair put up in buns, straw hats beside them. And between them is a small package, cut open, of lime paste and a scattering of rust-colored arcea nuts and the pale green betel leaves, and one of the women, the nearest one, has just rolled a hit of this stuff to chew. Two aging women getting high on a Saturday morning. And the nearest one puts the roll in her mouth and she looks up at us and I am looking only at her mouth, and her teeth and gums are red from this stuff already, and then I look at her eyes and they are glazed a little and they look into mine and I don’t know how it is that I know but I do, because I never carried her face with me, except her eyes, and her eyes always seemed memorable from being like all the other eyes in this country, but now they’re before me and they’re Kim’s, the woman is Kim, and I’m taking all this in slow, and I hear Tien’s voice start up in Vietnamese and it is very distant and Kim’s eyes swing away from me. There is a moment now. Tien’s voice fades in my head but Tien remains, the smell of her and the press of her body remain, and I realize that I am complete. But I am complete only with her body and through her body, hers, my child’s, the body of my child, and Kim’s face is on her daughter and it stays and stays and there is no sound in the world and I am poised in some high place and will fall, but in this moment of suspension I am whole, at last, whole, and now in this moment a sound breaks in me, the South China Sea, and in this moment the dark beneath me is the dark of the shore beneath a golden moon, and Tien’s body is imprinted on mine, and in this act of our love, her heart and her mind and her voice are there too, and she is in my blood, and I am in her, in all ways in her, and from this moment, I feel the lift of my penis for her, and now it is a gesture that will tear us apart, my child and me, because it is for her that my body is doing this, for my child, and a terrible heat begins in that lift, in that place of my sex, a deep, hot roiling that spreads fast from my groin to my legs to my hands to my head and Kim’s face is on mine now and her eyes have gone wide and I look at my daughter, my lover, and my body yearns for hers, yearns even as this thing spreads through me like the fire that I wish had taken my father, taken him in that fiery hole and killed the seed of me that lies now inside my own child, my own.

  Ben and I come out of the path and the house has two figures before it and my heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat and these figures are both women and they are coarse women, low-class women, drugging themselves with arcea and betel, and the house is ragged and of the worst construction, unplaned sticks and bamboo tied with palm cord, and I am not even looking at the faces of these women. There is a sour rushing in me, like the fumy wind of motorcycles in the city, and I want this over now. I say in my native language, “I am looking for Le Thi Huong.”

  The face nearest me turns and the rushing stops. I go very still inside. Her eyes rise to me and they are blank. She does not recognize me. I was only a child when she last saw me. But I know this face. She is not dead. She has been crouching here all along, chewing and forgetting, and she saved her own life from a threat that never was, and after that, she wanted nothing from the past, including her daughter. And I have nothing to ask her now. Nothing to say. There is only one thing more and I do not even need her for this. Ben already knows she is a stranger to him. But I hear my voice shaping the words anyway. I say, “Do you know this man?” and I already know the answer and I will hear it and Ben and I will walk away and I will never tell her who I am.

  I follow the movement of her face, the lift of her eyes, back to Ben, and I look at him and his eyes are wild, though they are fixed, fixed hard, not moving, but I feel the wildness behind them, and I look at my mother and her own eyes widen, as if she has looked into the morning sky and a great ragged body had suddenly appeared, blocking the sun, ready to fall with teeth and claws flashing, and they flash now in me, the shape falls into me and begins to slash away, and I turn to Ben one last time, desperate to see a flush of relief there, a laugh, but he turns his wild eyes on me, and they are so beautiful, these eyes, these dark eyes, all the gentleness I have ever dreamed of is here in these eyes, and my hands ache to plunge to that sweet hard center of him and draw his body into mine, at this moment, at this very moment,
I want to cling to my father’s secret body, and I cry out, I hear myself cry a wordless thing and I know that whatever horror is in this sound, there is also my woman’s love for him, I ache as a lover for my father, and I break away and I move into the bamboo shade and I turn in the path and I am running now and my foot falls and falls and each fall strokes that secret part of my body and he is in my head and we are by the sea and it is night and he falls in me and falls and strokes and I burst from the path and across the little square and past the cistern and I know where I am going now and I pulse in my sex and I pulse there and I cry out again at this terrible thing and there is nothing to stop it but this thing I must do and I am in the path again leading from the village and then I am in the open field.

  I slow, I slow, I quake in my sex and I am nearly blind from the sun here and I push my body on, I push on, and the South China Sea waits and my eyes clear and the sea is enormous and it is green darkness like the dark inside the banyan tree and I move and I think of my child and the quaking makes it hard to put one foot before the other now and this is the child of my father inside me, and this much the quaking knows, this much is clear in the secret path I follow now across this field: we cannot all of us remain here in this life together, we cannot remain.

  And I move more quickly and the sea grows larger and the edge is near and the wind beats at me but I am stronger I will go now and the clean cut of the cliff edge will be mine, another step another and a hard thing sud­denly circles me, an arm is around my waist and jerks me back and Ben’s voice is in my ear. “Tien.” And the arm loosens and I turn and his face is above me filling the sky and his eyes are deep and I could leap there, I think, I could drown there and he pulls back from me, only a little bit, only for a moment, and we are touching eyes we are touching still and I say the word I do not mean to say, I do not want to say, I say “Father,” and we try to hold on to that word, I feel him straining like me trying to hold that word between us and the ache is wild in me and I feel it in him and then we are in each other’s arms and our mouths are touching from that ache and from what I know is good-bye and I am ready to go but he says, “Only one of us, my darling,” and his arms slip away and he is a blur now I cannot move he turns and he steps and he leaps and he flies he flies and he is gone.