Deceit and Other Possibilities

by Vanessa Hua

  They spent their days watching old American sitcoms and conducting Bible study. One afternoon, as they discussed forgiveness, Immanuel admitted his pain, after his rush to diagnosis left a patient paralyzed. A teenage girl, a promising diver, who now couldn’t breathe on her own. He’d come on the mission to atone. David admired him, the doctor’s willingness to be honest and vulnerable before them. Before God.

  Privately, David questioned why they were here, and wondered if the trip had been a mistake, like the many others he had already made.

  “This is safe to drink, isn’t it?” Lily asked on the fifth day. She cracked open a can of Coke. They had tried everything on the hotel’s short Western-style menu: gray hamburgers, soggy French fries, and watery scrambled eggs. Lily was too scared to go outside the hotel, and the others would not leave her behind. She ran out of energy bars and wasn’t eating much at meals, although Gene prodded her. David was tired of all of them. Why did Lily have to add to his worries? Couldn’t she just grow up? Gene didn’t know when to shut up with his wisecracks, and Eunhee made sanctimonious speeches about suffering in the Third World.

  After lunch, Immanuel pulled David aside. “Can we talk?”

  “What’s up, brotha?”

  “In your room.”

  He tasted his burger rising in the back of his throat. He smiled, unwilling to let Immanuel see him unnerved. In his room, dirty clothes leaked out of his suitcase, and books and papers were scattered across the nightstand.

  “Sorry for the mess.” David threw the cover over his unmade bed, realizing how sour the room smelled.

  Immanuel looked down, seeming to collect himself, and told David the group had voted and wanted to volunteer at a church in the capital. “I know you put a lot of work into this.”

  They had turned on David and chosen Immanuel as their leader. He had been losing them since the first day, maybe before then, and he had to put a stop to it.

  “That’s not the point.” Years of training on the pulpit—and his months at the poker table—did not leave him now, and David spoke with an authority he no longer felt. “We can’t give away the church’s money to anyone off the street. Justus vetted this for us.”

  Immanuel nodded. He seemed to have anticipated such arguments. “I can get online and look for other options.”

  “Online?” David scoffed. “You don’t know who’s on the other end. If it’s a swindler.”

  “We could meet them,” Immanuel said.

  “That’s not enough to make a decision on. Justus made site visits. Met with local leaders. He spent weeks. Months. He worked up reports about each village.”

  David wasn’t certain of the truth of these assertions, though he’d asked Justus to do those things. He had promised, but never sent David the status reports.

  The television next door clicked off and David pictured the volunteers clustered in there, eavesdropping against the wall.

  “I’ll call some friends from my old church who went on missions here,” Immanuel said.

  David sensed something shifting in Immanuel. Maybe the doctor didn’t want to be a leader, the others might have thrust the role upon him, and David seized upon this hesitation.

  “We don’t have time,” David said.

  “Can’t we ask Justus if he knows of anything local?”

  “I already have,” David said. Another lie. “He hasn’t heard of anything that fits our skills. Or our supplies.”

  He studied Immanuel, remembering what the doctor revealed during Bible study: the hasty diagnosis of his patient, the rush to treatment, and the tragedy that followed. “We can’t act too quickly,” David said. “Beware of feet swiftly running to mischief.”

  Immanuel sat on the bed and bowed his head—defeated as David had ever seen him, less of himself, unable to fill out his contours. A flat tire.

  He had violated Immanuel’s trust. What frightened him most was that he knew he would do it again, do much more, to gain control. To win. He counted the seconds, praying for a sign within the next minute that he might return to God’s favor. He closed his eyes, listening to his labored breathing, feeling as if crushed on the ocean floor, tons of pressure squeezing air and motion out of him. The phone rang, and David lunged for the receiver. Justus. David murmured yes, yes, yes, and hung up. They would leave tomorrow.

  ~~~

  On the road to the lake, they passed by trucks and busloads of tourists in safari gear. People walked alongside on a red-dirt path and pedaled on bicycles loaded with straw baskets and sacks. Brilliant greens, infinite blues, and livid reds painted the scenery of lush fields, palm trees, and the occasional tin-roofed house. At sunset, they walked a few blocks from their hotel to the lake. A blaze of orange and pink reflected over the placid waters. For the first time on the trip, David felt this country could be a place of miracles.

  The next day, they piled into two Land Cruisers, and drove south on a rutted road along the lake and its bounty. The air was wet and heavy, scented with mud and steamier than in the capital. They rode by a crested crane with an orange Mohawk. The deep, dark nostrils of hippos. A crocodile, jagged and ancient, sunned itself on a rock. A long canoe painted with teal and yellow geometric designs. A bare-chested fisherman. The hacking of machetes and the cackling call of birds echoed over the shoreline. David wished Esther were beside him. She had an eye for the fleeting.

  Gene and Lily napped in the backseat, their heads lolling on each other, their faces shiny with sweat. David wondered if he might marry them. Other couples had emerged from the church, and he could not help but feel that he had a hand in their happiness. Soon, one of the couples would name their first child after him. This would be his legacy.

  That afternoon, the road dipped down a ridge and they pulled into the village, which perched a few hundred yards above Lake Alexandrina. Children flocked around them, pointing and giggling and pulling their eyes into slits. Justus spoke with a teenager, who darted into one of the huts. The village elders understood some Swahili and English, but preferred their own tongue. Justus didn’t speak the local language, and so the teenager would interpret for the missionaries. Their message would be twice translated before reaching their recipients, which seemed like a children’s game of telephone.

  A boy rubbed his hand on David’s bare arm, fascinated by the smooth, pale skin. Justus gently shooed him away. A gray-haired man strolled out. He looked well-fed—paunchy and jowl cheeked—and wore a bright orange T-shirt and a brand-new pair of sport sandals, which puzzled David. He had imagined the villagers living in unbelievable poverty, with rheumy eyes and, if not the swollen bellies of starvation, at least gauntness. The elders ushered them into a grassy clearing.

  “Thank you for meeting with us,” David said. “We’ve come a long way. Our church has a lot to share.”

  Justus spoke with the teenager for several minutes, which seemed odd because David’s opening statement had been short. The guide’s tone turned sharp and his hands sliced the air. He gestured for David to join him, and they walked out of earshot.

  “They’ve already been saved,” he said, unable to meet David’s eyes.

  Impossible. This couldn’t be happening, not when they had traveled so far, survived so much, and come this close. Justus meant the neighboring village, or he’d misheard the chief, or he had misheard Justus. If he could come up with enough explanations, he might hit upon one that negated Justus’s words. But his dreams, once imminent, had become a Polaroid reverting: vivid to ghostly to blank in seconds.

  “Some Baptists came through.” Justus dropped into a whisper. “Last week.”

  “You said they were unreached. You promised. You promised.” He shouldn’t have picked such an inexperienced guide. Or had Justus known all along?

  “Can we go somewhere else?” What he prayed for must exist out there, beyond the next bend or next hill. “Somewhere else unreached.”

  “Missionaries over the years have covered villages all the way to the border, they say. People here would
welcome your church’s help.”

  Pride, not love of God, had pushed him to lead this mission, to found his church, to gamble with people’s lives and their faith. Pride: the root of sin, or sin in its final form. He was going to lose everything for his sins. An empty church, an empty apartment, an empty life beckoned. Unless.

  “I take care of you, you take care of me, right?” David asked.

  Justus nodded slowly. The trip—without the unreached—would fall short of the inspiration that would open the pocketbooks of his flock and soften the hearts of the board. He pictured the villagers beaming and singing a hymn, their arms raised high as they encountered the Lord. If not truly, than the appearance of would be just as moving on film.

  “We’ll help, like we planned. But don’t tell the volunteers that the villagers have already been saved. They need to think we did it. And tell the elders … well, tell them to act surprised when we share the Gospel with them. Like they’ve never heard of Jesus. Or at least, they’ve never been touched by him. Not like with us. The word of God came through us. That’s the deal.”

  “We cannot lie,” Justus said. “We can remind them of God’s love.”

  Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue. And to convince others to lie, was that not even worse? The lip of truth shall be established forever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment. Donations would pour in. These people would be saved, as would Bountiful Abundance and his marriage. But for a moment.

  If Justus refused to help, David would make sure he never screwed anyone over again—and the guide could pray to the god he held superior. He’d attack the guide’s greatest weakness: his sense of responsibility. “If you don’t work with me, the villagers will get nothing,” David said.

  The guide’s face twisted, and David glimpsed the skinny teenager forced to sacrifice a life with his family for a life with the church. That struggle. David wanted to kneel and ask for forgiveness—from God, from them all— but he could not force the words from his lips.

  Justus had escaped the poverty of his village for a reason. Call it instinct. Call it God-given, but Justus could see possibilities, practicalities, where others could not. “No problem. I will tell them.”

  They returned to the clearing. After winning over the villagers with their good works, the missionaries would spread the Good Word. But first, an omen: a flock of cranes rose from the lake, startling them all. Their magnificence proof of God. Necks extended, pointing like arrows to the heavens. Wings powerful and beating in time to his heart. Why shouldn’t soaring precede every fall? The cranes wheeled in the sun, blinding David for a moment before they lit out toward the horizon.

  Acknowledgments

  I wrote these stories over a span of more than a decade. Like the rings of a tree, the stories mark many significant events—the year I married, the year I gave birth to my twin sons, the year my father passed away—and reflect my passions past and present. I’m grateful to the people and organizations who helped me realize my dreams.

  Many thanks to Aquarius Press/Willow Books publisher Heather Buchanan, editor Randall Horton, and author representative Antoinette Gardner, who believed in this collection and in me.

  My deep gratitude goes to my writing group—Maury Zeff, Jane Hannon Kalmes, and David Baker—who read draft after draft, challenging and cheering me on.

  I am indebted to The Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Steinbeck Center at San Jose State University—and in particular to Paul Douglass, Nick Taylor, Tommy Mouton, and Dallas Woodburn—for their support.

  Much love to my professors at UC Riverside, Susan Straight, Michael Jayme Becerra, Chris Abani, Andrew Winer, Reza Aslan, Goldberry Long, and Robin Russin, and to my classmates, Andy Sarouhan, Carly Kimmel, Adam Pelavin, Eva Konstantopoulos, Holly Gaglio, and Jackie Bang, among others, who continue to encourage and inspire me. In the Bay Area, teachers Michelle Richmond and Karen Bjorneby set me back on the path of fiction.

  Thank you to Bread Loaf, Aspen Summer Words, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Napa Valley, and Voices of Our Nation conferences for your support and fellowship, especially the Waiters of 2009—you inspire me with your amazing work, and I cherish your advice, support, and friendship.

  Angie Chuang has been an invaluable and insightful reader, with a careful eye and a big heart. Dawn MacKeen has been virtual water-cooler buddy—our near-daily calls are a lifeline, providing laughs, support, and strategy.

  Friends and fellow writers who read drafts, recommended me for opportunities, encouraged and advised me along the way include Yalitza Ferreras, Jessica Carew Kraft, Alicia Jo Rabins, Reese Kwon, Harriet Clark, Dara Barnat, Kirstin Chen, Frances Hwang, Angie Chau, Beth Nguyen, Aimee Phan, Ky-Phong Tran, Pia Sarkar, Josue Hurtado, Ryan Kim, Irene Chan, Jason Husgen, John Stevenson, Mary Ladd, Ali Eteraz, the Taylors, the Freedes, the Cooper-Jordans, the Nilsens, Rob Schmitz, Mei Fong, Kevin Allardice, Kaitlin Solimine, and the Love Boat Crew.

  At the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, we commiserate and celebrate. Josh Korwin designed the book’s beautiful cover. Jaqueline Perez took wonderful care of my twins when I disappeared to finish just one more story, just one more paragraph, just one more sentence.

  I’m grateful to the editors and reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle who helped shape me as a writer.

  The following magazines published earlier versions of these stories: “The Deal” in The Atlantic, “Line, Please” in Daily Lit, “Loaves and Fishes” in Kweli Journal, “What We Have is What We Need” in American Literary Review, “For What They Shared” in River Styx, “The Responsibility of Deceit” in Cream City Review, “Accepted” in Crab Orchard Review, “Harte Lake” in Hopkins Review, “The Older the Ginger” (as “Uncle, Eat”) in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. Outpost 19’s California Prose Directory anthologies republished two stories, and the New Short Fiction Series brought my fiction to life on stage. Special thanks to C. Michael Curtis at The Atlantic, for his kind and insightful attention, and to the editors at ZYZZYVA, Laura Cogan and in particular Oscar Villalon, who have generously opened many doors and welcomed me into the literary world.

  I owe much to my mother, Sylvia, and my late father, Lo-Ching, whose determination and hard work have always inspired me. Their pride and faith spur me on. My sister, Inez, and my brother, Lawrence, were the earliest audience for my story-telling, and my nephew, Declan, among the latest. I deeply appreciate the support of my in-laws, Robert and Patricia Puich, and my sister-in-law, Kristine Puich, and her partner, Jeff Elmassian. My husband, Marc, is my rock, my love, and father to our twins, who teach me so much about life and its wonders every day.