by Yasuko Thanh
Torture, sheer torture, her fingers on her blouse, he could imagine them in his mouth. Then the buttons. Her hair, in a ponytail, the clinic door opening and a breeze moving the few strands ever so slightly across the blouse, across her cheek as she buttoned her blouse, one button after another, with those fingers. The wait was interminable and the sweat that dripped down his back felt like the Chinese water torture he’d heard about or read of in books, he couldn’t remember which now, either way, he thought he’d leap out of his skin and wanted to scream but all he could do was sit very still with the mask of a placid smile on his face, his hands clasped, waiting for her to finish. One button after another. Was she torturing him on purpose? As for Dong she was thinking about how much longer she could stretch out each motion. Man’s desperation and their footing of the dinner bill went hand in hand. As she smoothed her fingers round the circle of each button top she pictured exactly how the doctor would pull out her chair from the table (chivalrously), uncork the wine and pour it, swirling it in the glass (sophisticatedly), commenting on its flavour. He was cute, she thought. For him, dinner, then, bigger designs? She was no fool.
A man wanted to feel wanted. And in control. To make him think he’d determined everything. That was the trick. She neither liked nor disliked who she’d become. It was simply a part of life. Like the overshoes she put on in the morning.
Taking her time? How long did it take to button a blouse? Now licking her lips? Her pale, almost grey-blue lips as she nattered on about “… thank you so much for this bottle of—I really appreciate it—don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have some syrup to last me till tomorrow …” forced him to clasp his hands, the fingertips turning white, then purple. It took every ounce of his power to stop himself from screaming. Inhale, exhale. Had she no idea?
But of course this was the ruse. To give off the impression that she didn’t.
No, she didn’t. Going on and on. Now rocking as she sat on the examination table, twisting this way and that. The smell of her perfume, was it really jasmine? He looked around. Could anyone else tell what he was going through?
The body of the fish girl still lay in the corner. Tomorrow someone would get it, the creature would be gone. Two creatures. Both magical. What were the odds? Two magical creatures in one night. Listen to him. Had he gone mad? What would Khieu think? Buttons. Buttons. How much longer? This long, when your finger lingered on the glass bead, lingered there, the way a strawberry lingered at your lips when you weren’t sure whether to bite down or not, savouring the cold, or the heat, the texture, the little seeds, the way it tickled your lip.
“So? How much do you think? Should I take? I mean if it comes back before morning because I’ve already taken, um, how much now?”
“What?”
“Because I’ve already taken … three teaspoons?”
“Oh—this? You can, take—” He looked at the bottle. “Four, no, two.” He’d lost himself, as with the fugue.
She gave him a few piastres and he watched her walk out of the clinic, realizing in the next minute he’d never know who she was, having learned neither her last name nor her address.
Oh, well. She knew where to find him if she wanted.
Chang, the court translator and lover of books, rapped on the clinic door and Georges-Minh, the last person in the clinic as usual, sighed as he unbolted the lock.
Chang’s patient smile filled him with a guilt-ridden tenderness. One always feels badly toward the thing one has hurt. Chang’s sunny disposition infuriated Georges-Minh, who was melancholic by nature, and secretly envied his swish, his walk as if dancing. His disdain for what people might suspect. What if people thought he was gay? He swung his hips, sometimes trilled when he spoke. Didn’t he care if he became a joke?
Georges-Minh felt so invisible some days, a beam of light could pass right through him. If he opened his mouth no one would be able to hear a single word. He kept his armour close no matter what the heartache.
Chang was a songbird. He would sing his song whatever people might think. He swung into a room and chirped the gossip of the day. How could Georges-Minh respond any way but gruffly?
“Of all nights for you to come,” Georges-Minh said.
“Rough one?”
Georges-Minh shrugged.
Chang often came to visit Georges-Minh and the two would talk, or read each other their favourite lines of poetry, or drink plum wine until the sun came up to stave off the loneliness they both understood. Whenever Chang frowned or smiled, the right corner of his generous mouth moved more slowly than the left.
Chang took off his hat and scratched his head as if Georges-Minh might have been trying to imply something. “Why? You want me to go?”
“No, nothing like that. Just a crazy night.”
“Do tell.”
Georges-Minh thought about telling Chang everything that had happened but instead said, “Some crazy whore scratched me.” He didn’t really think of them as whores but was angry about the child.
“Is that her, on the other side of the window, glaring at us?”
“No, wait, that’s … nothing.”
“Ugh.” Chang shuddered. “It’s not nothing. It’s a hungry ghost.”
“Like I said. No, wait. It’s a kid.”
“It’s just one of those opium boys.”
“Get! Get out of here!”
The missing words lodged like fish bones in Georges-Minh’s throat. Because the incident, his shame, the mermaid was over, there was nothing left to say. “I think I’m coming down with a flu.”
The opium boys looked in at the lights of the clinic burning after hours with longing, in particular Sing Sing, the mixed-race boy who had spoken with Georges-Minh earlier, the doe-eyed one with skin the colour of tea who thought himself separate from the herd. He balanced on a barrel next to his friend Luc, who rarely left his side. As if one day Sing Sing would rise above it all and escape the streets because of his mixed heritage. One day he’d become more than he was, have a place to go where he belonged, have a place that belonged to him, just like the doctor.
Sing Sing had felt hurt at the doctor’s suggestion that he throw himself in harm’s way just to capture that girl. A dumb girl. The doctor was obviously mad. He was just a boy, and after all, she’d attacked the doctor, a grown man.
Maybe eleven or twelve Sing Sing was, not even sure himself when or even where he was born. He’d introduced himself to the doctor once, proud to tell him his great-grandfather had been a member of the Expeditionary Corps. Yet the doctor hadn’t even remembered Sing Sing’s name.
Sing Sing pressed himself to the glass while the two men talked and shared a bottle that the visitor had pulled from his jacket. The two, oblivious to his presence, read from a book. Sing Sing’s nostrils steamed the window as he huffed in disgust.
“Watcha doing?” Luc said.
Sing Sing shoved his friend away with his foot. “Nothing.”
“What the fuck? Why you always spy on them?”
“Fuck you.”
Luc tried to push his way up onto the barrel to see. “Just a couple of homos. Who gives a shit?”
Sing Sing couldn’t explain. His hurt at being excluded. A privileged pain he wanted to share with Luc least of all, another opium boy, a mere street urchin, with no mixed blood. Most of all he wanted to get back at the doctor, who’d had no right to yell at him for not catching the girl who’d scratched the doctor and run. Sing Sing. The doctor hadn’t even remembered his name.
The doctor was weeping now and the man with the brandy was stroking his hair. Kissing his face.
“Want me to stroke your pipe while you watch?” Luc mocked.
“You ass fairy.”
“You’re the one watching.”
“Turtlehead.”
“Grease rag,” Luc said.
“Cream.”
“Butter.”
“Female toad.”
“Oh, go fuck your ancestors,” Luc retorted.
�
��You know what? You’re less than human,” Sing Sing said.
“You know what? You’re shameless and less than human.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re shameless and a son of a turtlehead and less than human.”
Sing Sing stepped away from the window and sat on the ground beneath it. “Fine, whatever, I’m done. This is stupid, anyway.”
Georges-Minh took comfort where it hurt, letting Chang do what he did best. His mouth and full lips banished the crazy whore, the cheek gouged by a woman he was merely trying to help, the mermaid he’d killed, his lost memory, the report he was supposed to have made to the Centre for Infectious Disease Control and had completely forgotten.
His shame of the past twenty-four hours exploded in a paroxysm.
Georges-Minh took. Chang gave. Sometimes Georges-Minh withdrew even his taking. The confusion left Chang exhausted. It terrified him. That one day Georges-Minh would roll over, back glistening with sweat. And never turn round to face him again.
“What if I loved you,” Chang asked him once. They were high on opium. Chang had brought him to a den. Georges-Minh’s first time.
“Ha. You can’t cage a songbird.”
“Touch me,” Chang said.
Georges-Minh laughed again. Wouldn’t take him seriously. “Give me the pipe.”
“Doctor, what are you playing?”
When Georges-Minh looked up from the bottle, Chang was grinning. “What?” Georges-Minh asked.
“You’ve got me in your waiting room. I’m in a difficult place, you know.”
“Why are you always so serious?” Georges-Minh said.
“You’re looking at my crotch,” Chang said.
Georges-Minh couldn’t help but suppress a small smile. “I haven’t put you there. You are right about the crotch, wrong about the waiting room.”
“You’re wrong,” Chang said.
Georges-Minh poked him in the ribs. “I am fond of you.”
The following day, on his way to the clinic, Georges-Minh entered the humid offices of the Centre for Infectious Disease Control and, although recognizing their scant resources would have little effect in stopping the spread of anything, told them about the two men he’d seen at the clinic and the one he’d seen at his home, how he’d treated them for what may be a new type of paddy fever, and he mentioned the black-spotted rash and the lingering memory loss. He omitted mentioning the girl, the one who’d scratched his cheek, even though he’d thought about her since yesterday because of the way she’d said, “Who am I?” not once, but twice, and he also deliberately left out mentioning his own brush with amnesia. He’d never before seen a contagious disease that allowed spirits to infect the bodies of the living. But, since ignoring spirits was a matter of pride, he kept out this information as well.
As Georges-Minh had predicted, the conversation swung around to the lack of resources, the lack of infrastructure, lack of hygiene among the peasants and working class.
“I’m writing a paper,” the charge physician, a Frenchman whose name was Michaut, said. “Contributions to the Study of the Manifestations of Male Hysteria.”
The other day Georges-Minh had been sitting inside, and the burden of air that sagged on the furniture, the paper flowers in crystal vases, Chinese crepe-paper dragons propped behind picture frames like museum pieces stale with loss, temporary as the stuff from which they were made, caused him, suddenly, to run from the house. And he was weeping.
He ran to the garden and the sun was shining uncontrollably. An intense feeling of life washed over him, as if he’d fallen into the river.
He wondered now, Was he a male hysteric? How else could he be suicidal one minute and ecstatic the next? Could that be why he’d lost his memory?
6
During the following weeks, Georges-Minh tossed and turned more than he slept. He treated seven more cases: four men and three women, a banker, a coolie, a truck driver, a physician, a student, and two housewives. He wondered if children had a natural immunity for he hadn’t come across a single one in clinical practice. Everyone around him seemed to be losing his memory. He tried to infect himself with the paddy fever infecting others. Why couldn’t he lose his, at least on a more permanent basis than he had? Was he immune? He waited for another amnesiac fugue. He thought of reading Freud himself. Maybe he could find some clues, identify what might bring one on: part of him was curious, from a medical point of view; the other was simply craving, in the most pathetic way possible, a chance to feel new.
He searched for love everywhere: for the woman he’d met at the clinic. He was rewarded by stealing glimpses of her in the red-lantern-lit shops of the retail centre, the rice paddies, the covered market with a roof like that of a shed, the river shore in the open spaces between houses filled with arrack palms, the café, the bar populated by Foreign Legionnaires, Moroccan conscripts, Senegalese sharpshooters, and European merchants, the doorways of opium houses, the Botanical Gardens outside Saigon, which were open twenty-four hours.
A most amazing witch who could be in twelve places at one time, she appeared in an ao dai, then an evening gown, then with a shawl wrapped around her waist. In squares of cloth like a Moy. A brightly coloured cloak. A blue chemise. Or with her hair in different colours. Or in a head cap. Or with a swanlike neck. Once he was sure he even saw her face in the body of a two-hundred-pound woman.
Then he spotted her—at last, the real her. Her appearance stoked the fire into a blaze which had burned inside him for weeks. She entered the Cao Dai temple, where he burned incense for his father every Wednesday, by way of the main gate, beyond which the city’s urban sprawl was held at bay. She passed through the garden and for an instant the bodhi tree shadowed her face. After weeks of seeing doppelgängers, he feared it might not be the real her. The incense trembled in his sweat-moistened palm. As he trailed after her through the dragon-adorned entrance he tripped on a dead mouse in the door jamb.
He forced himself to stand next to her while she murmured prayers, taking deep breaths, trying to detect the scent of jasmine, the perfume he remembered from the clinic. The temple smelled of incense and burning mosquito coils made it more difficult.
“Oh, you’re the doctor.” Her smile turned his knees to bean paste. She said she was at the temple to burn incense for her cat, an impish look in her eyes. Her cat had gone missing. She hadn’t seen her for three days.
Of wild cats the city had enough. They jumped into windows left ajar and ate food not locked away until housewives were afraid to open their homes to the breeze. If cornered, they clawed. Rumour was they’d even killed a baby. The city’s medical health officer had written a report for the regional branch of the French colonial administration, published in the Saigon Daily newspaper, proposing a bloody cull. “Your cat has gone missing? Well, don’t worry. She’ll return. You can bet on it!” he said, disguising his doubt with a loud voice.
“Cats get hit by rickshaws every day, or become stray-dog food, or are even torn apart by alley rats. I’m praying, not for her return, but for her soul.” She turned away, completed her recitation.
Looking back toward him, away from the statue, she told him she had other pets. Pigeons, and a python. Her python ate rats, and sometimes rabbits. It had been quite nippy as a baby, but now it never bit at all. She fed her pigeons peanuts. Her father had wanted to eat them, the birds, because—of course—they kept breeding, but she wouldn’t let him. He could buy regular market pigeons for that. “He thinks I don’t know when one goes missing, but I do. He tries to do that, trick me. But I count them. I know each one by heart.” Only one day the snake had gotten loose and she’d found pigeon feathers scattered about. But she had gone to the market that same day and bought two more to replace the pigeons she’d lost.
Timid under her gaze, but propelled by the fire in his stomach, so like heartburn—yes, that was it, a burning heart—he asked her, again, what she’d been doing in the harbour area that night the ache had started.
She laughed, in a flirty way.
“Why? Are you afraid of cutthroats?”
On the contrary, he told her. He equated poverty with toughness. “I know I shouldn’t but they have something I don’t, some kind of resilience, you know? People who’ve had it soft whine, and those who’ve had it rough complain the least. It’s not like I’d say let’s trade places and think my life would be better. Poverty-equals-holiness is too simple an equation. But still. Even the children have something inside them they can pull out like a knife to protect them from life’s hazards. Switchblade strength. Yes, that’s it.”
“Switchblade strength? Ah, someone who fancies himself a poet. I’m not nearly so artsy. It’s just sometimes I need to get out of the house. My mom drives me crazy.”
“Parents are supposed to drive you crazy.”
“Do yours?”
“Mine are dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.” He flinched. What would she think of him? That he was cold. Maybe even callous—women liked tough guys, not sociopaths. “Death is a part of life,” he said, to soften his words.
“It doesn’t make it any easier. You get used to people. Even their bad habits. Anyway, mine nag.”
She lit her incense sticks from the fire in the drum. “Do this, don’t do that,” she said, imitating their voices. The incense sticks caught the flame, which leaped up the sides of the drum. “Oh, look, you’ve done that wrong,” she said, continuing to mock them. She yanked the sticks out of the fire drum. The conflagration moved skyward. “You haven’t done this right at all, Dong,” she admonished in the voice of a nagging mother. “Open your eyes.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, tried to blow out the flames. They blazed brighter. She grinned at Georges-Minh. Blew again. They formed a torch. Took a deeper breath. Blew. A dangerous flambeau. She waved the flaming pennon and shrugged. “No wonder you did such a poor job,” she mimicked. “But maybe they’re right. Holy shit—I’m about to set myself on fire. I just need to get out of the house sometimes! God damn!”