by Dionne Brand
“You’re just scared.” Carla said quietly.
“Nah, I’ve got to figure out this white-boy thing. I’m not going out like that …” He hadn’t told them about sex with Jackie. He wanted to keep it to himself.
“What’s to figure out, Oku? Jackie’s really wise,” Tuyen said. “She doesn’t want any hassle, no trouble, and Reiner’s like that.”
“Well, if she don’t want it hard, it’s not me, right?”
“Hard! Listen to you! You give it hard, do you?”
“I don’t mean that, okay, time out.” They were laughing at him. “That’s not what I mean. You all are dirty, man. Hey, let’s burn.”
“No, I have to develop some film tonight.” Tuyen felt for the camera.
“You do that high all the time.”
“Yeah, that’s when I want it to come out fucked up.”
“You and me then, Carla?” He needed a place to crash. He hadn’t shown up to Kwesi’s, and he didn’t want to explain. He couldn’t explain.
“Okay, for a bit, then I need sleep. I’m gonna get fired because of World Cup.”
“There’s hundreds of courier services. You’re like Miguel Indurain on the bike. You can always get a job.”
“Yeah, right, Poet. Let’s get the bill.”
“Word. What’s Canadian in 9.79 seconds and Jamaican in twenty-four hours? Ben Johnson,” Oku joked as they were leaving the bar.
“Oh, that’s lame, that’s so tired.”
The rain hadn’t let up, nor had the party in Korea Town. The police had moved the crowd on farther along to Christie, clearing the intersection of Bathurst and Bloor of the pile-up. The car horns still blared. Korean flags flying intercut occasionally with Brazilian and Japanese ones. Tuyen, Carla, and Oku stood watching and waving and singing, “Oh, Pil-seung Korea! Oh, Pil-seung Korea!”
Quy
Of the eighty-one poems of the sage Lao Tzu, Loc Tuc liked number forty. “The motion of nature is cyclic and returning. Its way is to yield, for to yield is to become. All things are born of being, being is born of non-being.” But me, I liked number twenty. “The sage may seem to be perplexed, being neither bright nor clear, and to himself, sometimes he seems both dull and weak, confused and shy. Like the ocean at night, he is serene and quiet, but as penetrating as the winter wind.” See, that’s me. I look stupid, I play dumb, but I’m working. Penetrating as the winter wind—that’s me.
Some ask if there were times that I enjoyed my life. To know this is to know the way. And why, others may ask, did the monk latch on to me? I would catch him off guard, staring at me when he thought I was not looking. I could feel his gaze burn my face from time to time. I spoke less and less as time went on. What is the use? I thought. And so when I uttered any sound he would perk up with curiosity. If I fell asleep, I would wake to find him watching me. When we arrived in Bangkok, I began to feel uneasy about his attention. You have to know that I wouldn’t recognize love if I saw it. So I thought he meant to do me harm. How would I know that he saw in me one hundred years of meditation, that I had lived several other lives before my present reincarnation. Garbage, I said when I found out, and anyway it was too late by then.
We settled in Bangkok in the Klong Toey district. Settled is not the word. We had a room in the back of a store that sold nails and tin and wire and keys. Bangkok was a city in constant dust and smog, the movement of it was turbulent. Bees, I heard the city as if a hundred thousand bees were buzzing in my ear. The bridge over the river had a constant hum of traffic resounding over the tin roofs of the hovels below, which was Klong Toey. There we made a prayer place. The three of us, his followers, were emaciated like reeds. It was strange how Loc Tuc seemed to stay healthy, looking through all of our hard travels. He wanted to be like some monks who had patrons, but he wasn’t as charming as he thought, and in Bangkok there were many monks ahead of him. The three of us, his followers, had more of a chance to end the cycle of reincarnation than Loc Tuc. We broke the rules of devotion, of course, smoking and drinking and such, but Loc Tuc was insatiable. More insatiable than all of us. We were his shadows, we performed all the tasks of meeting Loc Tuc’s desires. The female he fucked, the male cleaned and fed him, and I got his opium and submitted to his teaching, and we all three did his bidding when it came to delivering messages and bringing them, beating up on someone defenceless, stealing and doing the same duties for Loc Tuc’s associates in the dirty places of Bangkok.
Once I beat a man up, a man who owed us money. He ended up in the hospital, and I followed him there and beat him some more. I broke his wife’s jaw when she came at me. I don’t like people taking things from me. It was in the newspaper how daring I was and how I was low-life from Malaysia.
This is all hindsight. I sound bitter. I’m not. I didn’t hate Loc Tuc. After all, he took me from Pulau Bidong. He gave me a direction. He taught me who I was.
As I said, we lived off a tiny alleyway in the back of a store that sold nails and spanners and nuts and pails. Nobody came to buy any of this that I ever saw. A card game kept things going. Here you could bet on anything—where the rain would fall, whether two ants would go in a certain direction, anything. Sometimes there were dog fights and rooster fights and fights between men. Our room was small, and the four of us stuck close to it for the first few months while Loc Tuc put out his feelers for clients of one kind or another. Women wanting their fortunes told or men wanting a job done, like unloading a truck of TV sets or computers or American sneakers or cellphones. This was the beginning of the economic boom, the Asian tigers, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Tigers. You could get a job in an American factory, a German factory, an Italian factory—all right here in Thailand. Those stupids tied to those machines would stumble back home with less than what they went to work with, if they were lucky. Not we. We lived on the fat. We weren’t big. Not as big as Loc Tuc would have liked. Again it wasn’t his country; we couldn’t be too conspicuous. We ran into a lot of competition too, a lot of knives, a lot of treachery. Treachery. We ran into people like us. People wanting to get by. To live.
I’m not a liar. Every time Loc Tuc sent me to do something, I put a little aside for myself. If we stole television sets, I skimmed two per cent off the profits, same with dresses or video recorders or watches. Loc Tuc knew. Why would you trust me if I didn’t steal a bit too? Just like he did. What was I supposed to be? A sage? I made my own contacts, I cut my own deals. Stole vegetables, sold them to food vendors, stole cigarettes, sold to tourists and children. I was swift. I am swift. I learn fast. Anything. I pick up anything. I watch everything. I had a black bag full of cigarettes, watches, cellphones, pens, tapes, computer disks. I’d peddle them in the tourist district and all along Silom Road. From the old market, around the White Orchid, all over.
I often ask myself why I wore this disguise as a monk like Loc Tuc. No answer. I was a monk. I renounced the world. I didn’t know the world. It’s all self-deception, anyway. I’m not about to apologize for what I did.
Most days, when things were busy, we worked until one or two in the morning. When things were slow, we walked about all day, begging alms or sitting near the filthy river Chao Phyara. Our room was hot and dusty and suffocating in the daytime. At night the other guy and I listened to Loc Tuc do nasty grunting things with the woman. It got to be like music we fell asleep to. The other guy, Kien, jerked himself off to this tune every night. He wanted the woman, but he was such an ugly man she wouldn’t have him. At night I listened to the three of them, and it just turned me right off. You would think that I’d be spanking it myself, but the sound of them made me shrivel up. I would clamp one of the stolen Walkmans on my ears and go to sleep to Mallaria or the Stone Crows.
One day Loc Tuc took me into his confidence. I don’t know why. I’m not a person to be trusted. People always trust me, though. I’m the kind of person you think you’re having a conversation with, but I’m not there. If you look, my eyes are flying all over. Maybe Loc Tuc thought that loya
lty was the least he could expect from me because he had rescued me. If you are ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain to be in peril in every battle. Why did I think of myself as Loc Tuc’s enemy? Perhaps it was boyishness on my part. Loc Tuc said he was going to return to Ho Chi Minh City because he was tired and old and there was one last score of computer chips and cellphone batteries he would make and then he was leaving. He told me this when I was tying his arm off for his daily dose, and I asked him when we were leaving, and he said I was free. And in a fit of jealousy I told him that the ugly man, Kien, was fucking his woman. Then he fell asleep and I left to go to the market with my bag.
When I came back, the monk was lying on the floor with his right arm in blood. Kien was sleeping and the woman was not around. I had waited for Kien at the railway station for our usual sweet tea, but he had not appeared. It was there that he used to show me the panties of the woman, which he had stolen. He would grin and place them to his nose. Loc Tuc, I suspected, had tried to tie himself off again and the butchered veins in his arm had bled. But as I went closer to him, I saw that he had a bicycle spoke in his hand. There was blood on it. Then I noticed that the room was more wrecked than usual. The goods, which were usually the only orderly things, were in a mess, and Kien did not answer when I asked him why he had he kept me waiting at the station. I kicked his foot and he didn’t move. Then I saw his face, which was a mask of black blood. I tried to shake Loc Tuc awake, but he was gone into his dreams, so I waited and waited until he woke up.
Kien was still dead when Loc Tuc woke up weeping. We doubled Kien into a mat. We threw him into the murky face of the Chao Phyara River. Loc Tuc could not control himself. He was weeping so much, thinking of the reincarnations he would have to make. I told him, “Shut up! People disappear all the time.” He was like a child. “Nobody comes back,” I said, “and nothing happens.” He looked at me strangely, and calmness fell over him.
You would think he would be more anxious to leave Bangkok after this. I expected him to take off right away, but he didn’t. We went back to the routine in our room behind the store, except that Kien was in the river and the woman was never seen again. “Loc Tuc,” I said to him one evening, “when will you leave for Saigon?” He lay listless on his mat, his veins a twist of broken strings, his arm like a discarded guitar. He had done something, it would seem, beyond shame, beyond life. He would stare at me as if he didn’t know me, only lifting himself, slowly reaching a bedraggled hand out for the dirty heroin I brought him. Other times he would pace and flutter about jerkily, making another plan to leave for Saigon, only to fall into weeping again.
But sometimes I caught him staring at me as if I were an evil man. I would ask him then, “Loc Tuc, what did Kien say to you? He was a liar, you know. He was planning against you. Did he tell you something?” Loc Tuc would pretend he didn’t hear me. But my questions would quiet his accusations, which he never voiced but which I understood. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. I determined that as soon as I found out what I wanted from Loc Tuc, I would let him go.
SEVENTEEN
TUYEN WAS WET from the rain. She mounted the stairs ahead of Carla and Oku and felt around in her bag for her keys.
“Sure you won’t have a smoke?” Carla coaxed.
“Nah, next time. Tomorrow, save me some.” Her fingers touched the camera. She felt nervous. “See you guys.”
“Are you gonna be pounding on my head again tonight?”
“No. I’m kinda stalled on that one.”
“Thank God!”
“You’re kidding! After you made us haul that fucking thing up, nearly killing ourselves!”
“Anyways! Later.” Tuyen opened her door and entered her studio, leaving them in mock shock on the threshold.
Her small darkroom used to be part of the kitchen. She drew the camera from her bag, looked at it, and seeing that she had two more frames in the roll, at a whim shot them off at her own face. Then she rewound the film and removed the cylinder from the camera. In the darkroom, the only neat space in the apartment, she approached the three trays and scissors that lay on the counter. The lights off, she pulled the film out, cutting it smoothly from the spool, then with a dexterous motion she pulled it onto the reel in the light-tight tank. She poured the developer into the tank, tapped it to dislodge any air, covered it, and breathed. Exhaled, as if for the first time since entering the room. Her mind ran to her mother in another photograph. A picture of Cam, whose name meant “orange fruit, sweet mountain sunset,” and Tuyen’s two older sisters. Her mother luminous, the two girls laughing. That was long before they left Vietnam, long before Tuyen was born. The picture was on the mantel at the house in Richmond Hill—Tuyen had asked her mother for it, but her mother refused. Then she’d tried to persuade her mother to let her borrow it to make a copy, but her mother still said no, she could not part with it even for a moment. Her father had taken the picture, and whoever developed and printed it wasn’t very good. But her mother’s face and the girls laughing was illumination itself.
Tuyen poured the developer out and poured in the stop bath. This is where that other photographer may have faltered. She, or most probably he, may have done this too quickly, leaving some of the silver on the film or perhaps it was at the next stage. Tuyen emptied the stop and poured in the fixer to clear the negative of all the silver, and then hung the negative to dry on the line strung across the small room. She ducked out of the room, shaking her hands dry. The picture had been taken before Quy was born too. He was the small rise under her mother’s red dress. Red? Why had she assumed red? The photograph was black and white. She had not asked her mother the colour. She must have assumed, she thought now, from the darkish hue and the luminous face. It could just as well have been blue, but Tuyen liked to think of it as red, bursting with life.
Wiping her hands on her skirt, Tuyen realized that she hadn’t changed, she was damp from the rainy walk down Bathurst. She hadn’t put the lights on either, and it was completely dark. “Why is this place so messy?” she heard herself say aloud, then laughed at herself. Carla must be invading her head, she thought. The white drape of the city’s longings seemed illuminated. The lubaio stood erect in the middle of the floor of the main room. She had cut arms into it and had every intention of carving symbols into the whole structure, but for the moment her clothing hung from the arms, along with a bag of onions and another of her beloved potatoes. This to keep them away from the mice. Her futon lay like a messy nest under the window. Her windows faced only the alley, unlike Carla’s windows, which faced both the alley and the street. She changed, gathering desperate pieces of clothing from the floor and the signpost. She felt cold even though it was June and warm. The rain was still falling mistily outside. She wished she had a fire.
There had been another photograph on the mantel in Richmond Hill. Identical except for her father’s presence. And identical except that their features were now tense, the two girls grim. The rise in her mother’s dress was no longer there, and the boy whom it represented was also missing. Someone had taken the photograph of them as they were leaving Chi Ma Wan Camp in Hong Kong. They were among the fortunate. After six months Tuan’s grease-handing had finally paid off and they had left. As awful as the place was, Cam was reluctant to go. She kept expecting the disappeared boy to miraculously disembark from another boat. Tuyen’s mother removed and replaced this picture every so often from the mantel. As if she could not decide whether she admitted or could bear the reality it suggested but that she occasionally had to face.
Tuyen turned the stove on under a pot of water. She poked into the bag of potatoes and gathered three in her hand, peeled and cut them in halves, and put them into the boiling water. For all her apprehension earlier in the day, she felt safe now, the negative of her brother drying in the darkroom, the potatoes boiling on the stove. Uncharacteristically, she hadn’t looked at the strips. She felt safe in that too. She had captured something, she
was sure, and she had brought it to her cave. The thought of this studio being her cave amused her. Jackie called it that, and that is what it felt like now. Some early place where the inhabitants had no signs for decorum, no standards for neatness; where they observed an order that was purely utilitarian. The lubaio, the bits of wood, the photographs, the longings were what she brought to the cave to be handled, and thought about, and made into something she could use to create alternate, unexpected realities, exquisite corpses. That’s what Tuan and Cam were, exquisite corpses. Or were they her surrealists and she their composition? Their exquisite corpse? Not she, Binh.
Seeing him across the street in the rain, his arm around the man whose face was like an angel or a ghost or a child, she had made some discovery that she was yet to understand. The two seemed both real and metaphoric. She guessed that’s why she hadn’t looked at the negatives yet. She was still absorbing the images, freshly. She knew that by the time she looked at the images on the negative they would acquire other significances, and by the time she printed them they would be art, open to a thousand interpretations. There was one interpretation that she needed to catch. The one that had led her memory to her mother’s photographs disappearing and reappearing.
How many times had she rummaged through her mother’s possessions, going over the signs of their former life? There was only so much they could bring with them, of course, but her mother’s sentimentality could not have allowed her to come away with nothing. Perhaps their opposition to the new Vietnam had been so strong that they abandoned even memory. Yet from their talk she could not sense any strong political opposition, just a fear that had taken hold of them over the course of several months and propelled them to a bay one night. Her father had not been involved politically; he had, in fact, avoided the army. Her mother was the only doctor in a small clinic. They were part, to be sure, of the striving middle class who felt themselves vulnerable under the communist government—Tuan had had hopes of being on the ground floor of real-estate development in Da Nang after the American victory. But in all this they were ordinary people living an ordinary life who were suddenly caught, the way war catches anyone, without bearings; the way war dismantles all sensibility except fear. Only when they arrived in Toronto would they fully construct their departure as resistance to communism. That is the story the authorities needed in order to fill out the appropriate forms. They needed terror, and indeed Tuan and Cam had had that; they needed loss, and Tuan and Cam had had that too. And perhaps with this encouragement, this coaxing of their story into a coherent wholeness, they were at least officially comforted that the true horror was not losing their boy but the forces of communism, Vietnam itself, which they were battling. Whatever the official story, her mother’s cache of photographs told another, a parallel story, a set of possible stories, an exquisite corpse.