“Hold on.” My mother interrupted him. She looked at me and pointed her finger toward the front door.
I left to look for the others, curious to know what kind of games I would be joining. I could guess. At that point, we were all fond of war games. The sounds of make-believe machine guns ringing in our ears, the casualties with bright, fresh wounds we smeared on ourselves using hibiscus petals. The sense of being a part of something important excited us to our bones.
That night when the men in hats and coats had gone, the only sound came from behind the cracked open door of my soldier’s bedroom, which was to the left of the front entrance. In a few minutes, Mother would call for me to get ready for bed, which meant I could watch her play the game Prince of Persia on her computer. I would not blink as I watched her run yards and yards through the dank tunnels and jump through open-mouthed saws that could hack her body in half, her blood splashed on the stone walls. But I had a little time now to peer inside my soldier’s bedroom. He sat on the iron bed, packed with a single straw mat. White, blue, and green light flashed on his face from a small TV. His uniform was neatly folded and placed at the foot of the bed. He wore a thin white t-shirt and striped boxers. His hair looked even darker now that it was wet.
“Hair,” I said without meaning to. My mother had dry and coarse hair. I wanted to touch my soldier’s. I put the tip of my nose through the crack. “Can I come in?”
He opened the door for me. My hand brushed the seams of his shorts. The fabric was thin. I felt like I could see through him.
“What?” His brows lifted, a smirk flit across his face. “You like soccer?”
I nodded though I didn’t really care about soccer and sat down on his bed. I liked the smell of his room, much different than my mother’s, which was heavy with a perfume so distilled that made the air taste acidic. The air in here was laced of multiple things, salt, mint soap, one he used to wash his hair, and something else pungent I couldn’t identify. I stared at his legs, pale and hairless above the knees.
“Come on!” he shouted and punched the air. The male voice on TV was shouting too. “It’s over,” my soldier said, and turned off the TV.
“My mom said to get catfish for lunch tomorrow,” I said and hated myself for talking about mother. I didn’t want my soldier to think about anyone else in that moment.
“Alright. Now get out so I can get some sleep.” He lay down on the bed.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” I said.
“Sure. I have lots of girlfriends,” he said, his eyes closed.
“You do?” I frowned.
“No, I only have one girlfriend.” He blinked drowsily at me. “Don’t ask so many questions or you’ll lose your girlfriend’s privilege.”
I smiled the biggest smile. “Can I sleep here?”
“No,” he said, but did not object when I lay down next to him with my shoes still on.
Suddenly, the only sounds left were our breathing. The room throbbed with my heartbeats. I heard him swallow. My back was to him. I stayed like that, my muscles stiff. My elbow itched but I didn’t dare move. After a while, the tension exhausted me and I fell asleep.
I felt someone nudging my arm. I opened my eyes.
“Are you alright? Were you having a nightmare?” my soldier said. He looked so full of concern that I started to giggle. “Oh, you were faking it! Enough of this. Go to bed. Your own bed.”
“Will you carry me?”
“What did I do to deserve this?” He scooped me up in his arms.
My mother did everything in bed. I would often find her with her back against the wall, her computer on her lap. The TV would be on, a plate of grapes rotting nearby. My mother’s skin was pale, paler than people from our part of the world. She was thin, but when I pulled on the skin under her arm, it stretched out long and doughy. When I let go, it would return to before, fit to her small arms. She kept hundreds of books around even though she did not read. I thought it was a tribute to her younger self, a self she believed she still had. Sometimes when her laptop was closed, she’d be reading loose pages that were nothing like the novels or manga I loved. The mere sight of bold headings shrunk my brain to a dot and made me yawn. I crawled onto our bed and pretended the papers spread out everywhere were floating ghosts that would wake, grow bones, skin, and fangs if I as much as grazed their edges.
She was still awake, playing her game. This was my favorite mother, the one who was so focused on bringing the Prince of Persia to his betrothed that she wouldn’t look for a reason to yell at me, or worse hit me when her fury called for it. There were thousands of levels in the game, she had told me. She was at an especially difficult part.
“What if we could leave the camp if I won the game?” she said.
I loved what-if games, “What if in real life you could jump through the saws and get home right away. Our before-home. Would you do it?”
“Yes.” On the screen, metal spears shot up from the ground.
“What if you had to jump through three of them?”
“I’d do it. I’d do it if we could go home.”
“Five?”
“Yes.”
We both looked across the room at the windowless wall, or maybe we were really looking at the air in front of us, hoping for some dangers to materialize. A tangible threat we could defeat.
4
Sometimes the little girl and I played in the underground cell. We went there because of the rain. We were walking around the camp when we first heard thunder. I didn’t want to go back where I would be yelled at for getting in Mother’s way. We ran for a while under the pouring rain, until our clothes glued to our bodies. I saw her small, visible ribs, imagining for a moment that she was only a skeleton. If all her flesh were gone, what would keep her from disappearing?
We lifted the metal door where once long ago a Vietnamese prisoner who was forced to permanently lie on his stomach had a small view of people’s feet walking by. On my walks with Mother, we had seen similar cells overgrown with daisies. She’d told me of her uncle who had been kept captive in a similar prison during the French war. When he was released at the end of the war, as he tried to stand, his spine collapsed, unable to hold up the weight of his body.
The little girl and I crawled in side-by-side and lay down on our backs next to each other. I had many things on my mind that I wanted to tell her, but did not have the words for them. I often felt this way and usually hoped that the nameless things would slowly go away. Sometimes they did, but this time I did not want to forget.
“Do you ever dream about something that has already happened?” I asked her.
“No, why should I? That sounds dull,” she said. “Dreaming is for what you can’t actually do in real life. Last night, a miniature elephant was standing in my palm.” She opened her hand so I could see.
“I never had anything like that. No, nothing like that,” I said.
“Well, try harder. You can borrow mine to start with. When I go to bed tonight, I’ll think really hard of you. You think of me. That way, you can join my dream,” she said. “What do you dream about?”
“Always of the same night. Four years before my soldier brought me here.” I felt her scoot closer to me, the goose bumps on her skin grazing my own. “That night, I woke up to pee. I saw my mother put on a long green dress. She was in a hurry. She put her fingers on her lips and told me ‘shush, go back to sleep,’ so I did.”
“That’s it?”
“When I woke up, she was gone. I’m not sure what actually happened anymore,” I said. “I have the same dream so often that—I can’t tell. Something changes each time. What she said, how she said it, what she wore.”
“You didn’t see your mother for four years. That means you were three years old when she left?” She asked. “It’s not possible you’d still remember it.”
“Does that mean ten years fro
m now I won’t remember lying here with you?” I said.
At that moment, I heard the sound of a creature scurrying toward us, probably a mouse. I lifted my head and saw his eyes. Two round, floating beads.
“Stay still.” The little girl told me.
We held our breath, our bodies as still as corpses. The mouse ran as far as to almost touch his nose on our toes, but not further. He paused to look at us and went back to the shut-eye darkness.
Someone left a newspaper crossword on the foyer’s end table. Upon seeing it, I was immediately seized by the desire to fill in the blanks, to solve the mystery. The questions, though, proved to be enigmatic.
1.What did the Trung sisters die of?
2. The reason princess My Nuong dropped swan feathers and led the enemy to her father, causing the downfall of Vuong dynasty.
3. What is another facet of defeat?
And other similar questions. I tried to recall the history lesson I received at school on the Trung sisters. They were raised in a military town and were the first women warriors in Vietnamese history. I was both fascinated by and anxious about one detail: the elephants they rode to battle. Elephants were slow and cumbersome animals. Even though their appearance was intimidating, getting struck by a single spear was enough to bring them down. Had the sisters always known they were riding to their death? In order to avoid getting captured by Han’s army, they drowned themselves in a river.
Legend portrayed these women favorably, from their encouragement of other women to revolt even while pregnant, to their double suicides. The word suicide didn’t fit the empty grids so I tried to pencil in honor, fear, illness, delusion. Nothing worked. Then self-love, I added at last, which amounted to the right number of squares. But I decided that couldn’t be the answer. It was a word I’d seen by chance while flipping through one of Mother’s novels. It had jumped out at me amongst the thicket of words. The solutions to two- and three- across also had the same number of empty spaces as one- so I filled in the same answer, partly out of impatience and partly because something else had caught my eye.
On the right column of the page, in small print, was a personal account of an undercover cop who was responsible for tracking down a notorious drug ring. There was little mention of the organization, how he’d infiltrated it, or who would be charged with what crime. Instead, the story focused on three girls, one in particular, who skillfully engaged the cop’s attention by accidentally dropping an ice cube between her legs, then opening them to a wide V so he could see her bare skin and nude-colored underwear, damp either from her bodily fluid or the melting ice. A fog-like clarity invaded my mind. I squeezed my legs together and looked around fearfully to make sure I was alone. I scanned the rest of the article, but the words had become a pleasant blur. Leaving the newspaper, I stepped out to the courtyard. The sun was beating down on the building’s marble front steps. On the ground several meters away, I spotted the shadow of my soldier approaching. In my mind, he seemed older, but he must have been only in his twenties then.
“I have something for you.” He took a ring woven from areca leaves out of his shirt pocket. “I made this,” he said and raised it above eye-level, the same way a person would to check the authenticity of a bill. He squinted his eyes as if he expected to see something through the circle.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
I spread out my left hand, the one without the chewed up knuckles. He inserted the green band through each finger, but it was too large even for my thumb.
“Hm. Maybe when you’re older,” he said and put it in his pants’ back pocket.
I was going to tell him that he’ll probably sit on it and break it but his face had taken on a familiar look, one many others around here also wore, placid and faintly angry. I put my arms around his waist, my nose pressed against his stomach. I felt the heat of the sun burning my scalp and coursing down the rest of my body. My hands, however, remained icy cold. My soldier did nothing, only stood with his arms dangling by his sides. Maybe we both became aware of something then, a small and vague thing, which kept us rooted to our spot, our merged shadows one elongated, shapeless dark.
5
I didn’t know how many days, weeks, months, years I’d been at the camp. I’d forgotten to write down a few dates in my notebook and eventually lost track. It felt like two summers had come and gone, but I wasn’t sure. Why wasn’t I glad? Before coming here I never liked school. You had to memorize equations, poems, whole essays, and recite them in front of the class. For every mistake you made, you would get hit with a wooden rod. I didn’t have a precise memory.
“The hypotenuse is the longest side.” My soldier pointed to a drawing in my textbook. “The right angle is always ninety degrees.”
“How long will we stay here?” I asked, scratching the underside of the table.
“Hmm? You can play after we finish these problems,” he said.
“I mean when do I go home? My other home.”
“Don’t you want to be with your mother?” He looked straight at me. Adults only did this when they were preparing themselves to crush any argument you might come up with.
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t you love her?”
“Yes.”
“She loves you very much,” he said.
“Why are we here? She doesn’t have a uniform. Everyone here wears a uniform. My mother doesn’t. Why do I do these exercises? I don’t get a grade. There are no teachers. I don’t have any classmates. When—” My fingers were trembling. I rubbed my knuckles vigorously.
“Your mother is doing important work. You should be proud of her,” he said, squatting down so he was at my eye level.
“Do you work with her?” I asked.
“No.” He laughed and rubbed my head. “I’m only a soldier. I’m assigned to protect you.”
“You wash vegetables. You rent tapes for us to watch.”
“I do those things too. I’m here to help.”
“To make life easier?” I’d heard this before, maybe from the old man with the cane or the younger one in the fedora hat. Somebody had said to my mother if she needed anything just ask the soldier.
“Exactly.” He said.
After the tutoring session, I was afraid to face my mother. I was always afraid to ask too many questions, talk more than I was supposed to. She didn’t like talkative people. “Your father was a quiet man,” she would tell me with warmth and pride in her voice. I’d been rambling to my soldier. Even though there were many mosquitoes outside, I hid in the sugarcane field until night fell with my chicken clucking softly beside me. My eyelids were swollen with bug bites when I decided to give up.
The smell of fried garlic wafted from the kitchen. My mother was making my favorite dish. Boiled shrimp dipped in a garlic soy sauce.
“Wash your hands,” she said.
I put my pet hen on the balcony and gave her a scoop of rice. Maybe my soldier hadn’t said anything.
“You need to eat well so you can be strong. You’re getting so thin.” She made a ring around my wrist with her thumb and forefinger.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Would you like to go on a trip? There’s someone I want you to meet. A good friend.” She peeled a shrimp’s head off and gave me the whole shrimp, still juicy.
“Let’s see. Maybe we can leave Tuesday. No, I’ve got to be here then. How about Wednesday? But you need to be healthy. I can’t have you getting sick.”
I stuffed another shrimp into my already full mouth. My eyes were itching still and now tearing from smoke in the kitchen. A trip! What was a trip like? I pictured being driven in a van with my mother, the wheels rolling on a gravel path and farther away from the electric fence, through which I’d entered on a visit and had stayed.
We watched a boy get bathed in the courtyard. He averted his face from our gaze as his mother l
adled water from a bucket and poured it over his head. I wanted to tell the little girl about the trip my mother had promised, but something held me back. It felt as though the more people knew, the more likely the trip would get sabotaged. Even as an adult, I would continue to hold this superstition—the belief that one must never reveal the thing one most hopes for. For the next few days, I suppressed my excitement, even to my mother. I didn’t want her to know how much I looked forward to it.
The boy was spitting bubbles and crying because the little girl and I would not stop looking at him. He didn’t tell us to go away but only stood there with his hands cupped between his legs while his mother rinsed off his tears with another ladle of cold water. I thought that the little girl needed a wash herself. Recently whenever we met, her face would be streaked with a fine, ashy dust and she would smell like the pond at my before-home where tiny fishes lived with floating plastic bags. She also smelled a little like rust. Her hair was just cut short, while mine was long past my shoulder. I feared she would slowly become a boy and join the other children.
“You’re going to leave one day, aren’t you?” she said.
“I was just thinking that you were going to leave me.” I was surprised.
“I can’t ever leave. All I know is how to plant sugarcanes so I’ll become a farmer here. My father doesn’t teach me words. I don’t know if he can read.” The browns in her eyes seemed to have lightened. “You—you’re special somehow. You’ll leave here.”
“Don’t be stupid.” I laughed, but she didn’t laugh with me.
“I am stupid,” she said.
“I can teach you words. If that’s what you want, I’ll teach you,” I said.
“Can we maybe read those manga you always carry around?”
“Yes, and you can borrow them anytime.” I was relieved to see her cheered. Though we had looked at books together, I hadn’t noticed I was always the one reading out loud. “What will you do when you grow up?” I asked.
If I Had Two Lives Page 4