by Lan Cao
“I want to walk through here,” the voice announces in English.
“Here? Why? What’s here? We’re supposed to be at . . .”
“Just to check on something. Someone. It won’t take long.”
The truck is left to idle as the voice trails off. Warnings are shouted. The neighborhood has not been swept. There are shooters. Vietcong, Vietcong, they repeat. “Di di,” they shout in a swollen, roaring rush of Vietnamese, then English, “Go, go,” urging him to go away.
I want to shoot out of the jar and into his arms. James is coming for me. My heart leaps with relief and with fear. I crane my neck upward to look. The big metal gate opens. I hear his footsteps cross the graveled path, pass the mango tree, and head toward my bedroom door.
I’m over here, James, I say, but nothing comes out of my mouth.
I look up and see the muzzle of an upturned gun sticking out from the column of red brick. The muzzle moves, left, then slightly right, then left, stalking the footsteps. I bite the back of my hand.
James, I cry. The chimney. I don’t know if my cry carries any sound. It is as if a hand had reached out and with an overpowering muscular force clamped my mouth shut. I am transfixed inside the stale air.
Shut up, a voice commands me. The voices are back, but not indistinct this time. I hear one voice, shrill and potent, emanating soundlessly from somewhere within my body.
James! James! I yell, but my voice dips just out of my command and reach. I dare not move or breathe.
It is happening again. A shadow, two shadows, restless and charged, fling themselves against the cistern’s walls. They spin as they expand and shrink, vanish and reappear, inside and outside the fleshly manifestation of my being. They race wailing and lunatic inside the tight confines of the cistern, one, the smaller of the two, crying and hiding behind the bigger, fiercer one. The shadows converge, then detach. I am here and not here. I watch and am watched. I am. I am not.
Like a storm, black and raging, a figure from within me shifts her shape until she is enormous and angry and erupts with a roar that swipes everything else aside. A keep quiet is sounded. It is there, speaking in the voice of an angry girl.
She puts out her arms and pushes me down. I am fastened to the bottom of the cistern.
Who is it? Is someone else here?
Cecile. Cecile?
Cecile cowers and cries. I sense a little girl’s movement, hanging on as size is taken from her. She remains but a frail shadow that wraps herself wholly in the larger shadow’s reflection.
I keep quiet. Sounds vanish.
A voice rumbles within my chest, the stormy appearance of a new scowling being. Charcoal-black eyes; a shadow of a face, barely perceptible yet strangely familiar, flickers in front of me, prying and unprying itself to and from different realities. The voice physically assaults my head.
But there is still the matter of James’s life. I struggle for control. With supernatural strength, the shadow overpowers me. I succumb.
I am unable to escape its grip to shout out my warning to James. But from within myself, I can hear it all. I try again with greater force to expel a sound, a warning. Once more, someone darts out, from the deep internal depths of my being, and slides a hand over my mouth.
I hear a shot go off. A body falls to the ground.
Everything turns black yet again.
Soft clouds drift above a vast, illuminated sky. When I come back to myself after lost time, everything is quiet. I peek out of the cistern. James is no longer there. The ground where the body fell is covered with blood. I see red streaks where the earth bleeds, where flesh has been dragged. The back of my hand is torn and chewed. I find myself walking to that spot where blood was spilled. A gun lies on the ground. I pick it up and feel its weight and heft against my palm, its unexpected warmth, as if alive. I can see through a large gaping hole in our garden wall and a pile of scrap and rubble at its foot. Someone is hosing off blood. The surviving soldiers are there. Falling in and out of step, they pick up one dead body, then another, and another. I see the red protuberance of flesh and subcutaneous tissue under ruptured skin that shows the jagged line of cartilage and bone. I can hear their strides, the different lengths produced by each booted thud as they survey the hurt, the dead, and the damaged. They stand in twos, grabbing the corpses by their hands and feet and swinging them in a back-and-forth hammock motion onto a truck. I scan the latitudinal expanse that leads to the horizon. The sky is suspended in an opaque purplish haze, dense with particulate. The smell of blood, explosives, and smoke overpowers and chokes. The kite is still there, swaying in a gust of wind. And the chimney is still there as well, but it is black and scarred and pocked with holes. A column of deformed brick. The top part looks as if it has been blown off. In the dying light it stands there, eclipsed by the smoke, a lopsided, lonely silhouette inside the apocalyptic colors of Tet.
Moments later, I am inside our father’s embrace, overtaken by a sinking feeling. I do not see Galileo anywhere. I call out to him. He always comes when called but not this time. I do not see my cricket either.
I look at our father’s face and feel the terror in his black-hot eyes as they cling to mine. His eyes roam the entirety of my face, as if it were the face of a stranger. I am not surprised. I am an empty shell taken over by spirits he does not know.
“Your mother.” He sighs. “She lost you.”
He touches my face gingerly, then wipes sweat from his forehead on his shoulder. My entire being feels bitter. My body is taut and stiff. I can feel an internal crackling that reverberates against my palm. I touch myself on the chest. I see a purplish bruise on a patch of skin. I look. I am here. A part of me is still watching another part. All of us stand there together on a bed of moribund, earth-colored grass. I see the mango tree, its scrabbling branches. Pity the poor mimosa plant, which does not dare show itself. There it is, struggling, wilted and limp on the brown patch of earth. I see the sad, inward folding of the leaves, and know that the strange sensation I have been feeling since my sister died will never leave me.
12
Kieu and Tosca
MR. MINH, 2006, 1967
I know that I cannot avoid talking about it forever, the death of my daughter. It is a memory already wrenched loose, protruding always at a painful angle.
I relive her death numbly. Mrs. An often stares at the pictures I have in my room. She wants to know more about what happened.
In the middle of a war, death is ordinary. But I discovered it wasn’t that way when it was the death of my own child.
Her death was sudden and I still refer to it as an accident. Years later, that is the only way I can think about it, if I am able to dwell on it at all.
The day after she died, we buried her. We had to do it immediately, before our bodies registered the fact of her death and its finality. Afterward, I did the most difficult thing I have ever had to do: I ushered myself out of the cemetery. I ordered my body to carry on. I resented its ability to do what I commanded—walking away and leaving my child buried there. Please, my wife said. Please. I could hear her whimper. But she never finished the thought, the sentence, or the prayer.
There was no funeral procession, no drums and cymbals. Our grief was ravenous but private. Things that matter come in sets of twos. Two eyes, two ears. Two kisses on the cheeks, one on each. Two lungs. Two arms. Two legs. I would not be completely blind if I lost one eye. I would not be completely helpless if I lost one arm or one leg. I could still draw oxygen in if I lost one lung. If it came to that, I would have a spare.
But because we have but one heart, there is no second one that can serve as a reserve when the first is stricken by sorrow.
• • •
For years I cowered deep inside the shadow of Khanh’s death. My wife did too. And as our national picture got worse I lost myself in the complications of war. I was not myself after she died.
For purely senseless reasons, I sharpened the hooks and snares I did not even know I had and flashed them at my wife. Through silent tears, coldness overtook us. A form of vengeful counterspeech took over. Instead of comforting words, there were cruel accusations. The urge was to pull everything down, even if it collapsed.
“Why?” Not why did this happen to us? but why did you let it happen? I tortured my wife with a question that provided entry into pain itself. Days after Khanh’s death, I reveled in my power to accuse and to judge. A mother, more than anyone, is supposed to protect her children. I remembered Cliff’s remarks about his wife’s devotion, her maternal instinct, and repeated them to Quy.
My wife in turn asked me the one question that still haunts me to this day. “Have you ever thought that the bullet was meant for you? My brother warned you.”
I cringed. Sanity is rarely a match for sorrow. It will give way to the sudden unleashing of the sword. Holding the blade, I wanted to plunge it in, deep, and then twist it. I knew how to wield a knife. I wanted to brandish it against the mother who failed to protect her child. I knew how to exploit her motherly sense of culpability, her moment of defenselessness. Neither I nor my wife ever fully recovered from this disreputable instinct to hurt.
We had fallen icily out of each other’s orbit. Sometimes I could almost remove myself from the domestic scene, step back and watch us from a calibrated distance. I could see the white plastic cap of her Valium bottle staring back at me from a chest of drawers. I could see a good enough imitation of marriage. Months after Khanh’s death, a cordial formality had insinuated itself into our relationship. We were two fretting people hanging on to the remnants of what had become a mild and modest union because neither of us could bear to inflict yet another hard-hearted crack into our already fragile beings.
The terrible truth was this: My wife could no longer be touched. Becalmed, hers was becoming a life of separateness. A line from a poem that Alfred de Musset wrote haunted me: “Everything that was no longer exists; / everything that is to be does not yet exist.”
• • •
A few days before the Cambodian mission, I reached out to Quy. I was embarking on a dangerous operation and I wanted to break through the chill between us. I wanted to be touched again by her particulars—the tender heart I knew and loved. And so I lingered at the breakfast table, sipping my coffee, thoroughly unsure of my place. My wife was sitting across from me, on the far side of the table, eating a tangerine. She rotated it and inspected the orange skin on all its sides. I watched her nick the rind with a fingernail and peel it off. A tangy scent floated in the air. The fruit fell into two cleaved halves.
“Would you like to meet me at the bakery this afternoon?” I asked.
She nodded halfheartedly. “Yes. As you wish.” I took her in. She looked back at me but her gaze was tentative. Then she walked toward the window, her back facing me, and pressed her face against the glass as she gazed into our garden. I found myself looking at her reflection in the window, its fleeting movement liquid against the glass pane, giving me back something I had long misplaced.
I got up and walked toward her but when I reached for her hand, she stiffened and her head turned hurriedly the other way. And then I knew. I knew by the smells. I was a few steps away from her and I could smell it on her breath, the smell of gin and beer, lurid and sharp. I could feel the sting in my nostrils.
• • •
A few days after the Cambodian mission, my wife took it upon herself to nurse my wound when I left the hospital. I reached out to her, made sure our hands touched when she cared for me. My near death could be the opening we needed to redeem our marriage. A new ocean swell ushered something different into our household. My recuperation—and Cliff’s—seemed to provide my wife with a medium through which she could find herself. She became preoccupied with ministering to us. She turned herself over to that task, tending almost maternally to our meticulous progress. It could transform her, I hoped.
My wife made sure that certain foods were served to Cliff and me. To expedite our recovery, to strengthen our immune systems, she made swallow’s nest soup. Swallow nests were spun from swallow saliva and nestled in crevices of caves and cliffs. They were hard to get because few climbers had the skill needed to shimmy up bamboo poles and pry the nests from the rocks. The nests were expensive, but my wife was willing to pay a high price for them. A single nest could cost as much as several thousand American dollars. She was also willing to sit patiently, immersing the dried hardened nest in water and plucking feathers and other impurities from it with a pair of tweezers. It was believed that protein from the nests enhanced the regeneration of cells and tissue. My wife watched attentively as we spooned the most concentrated distillation of calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, and other trumpeted nutrients into our mouths.
“You must take one more spoonful,” she insisted when either Cliff or I had had enough. Her tone had a bite of authority that made me obey. She propped us up with pillows the first few days we were released from the hospital. Cliff was more stubborn. My wife slipped one arm behind his head and slid a rolled-up towel under his neck and ordered him to eat. “My husband told me what you did for him. You risked your life, Cliff, to save him,” she said, glancing at me and fitfully gesturing. I felt the tug of emotions through my chest.
Emerald-green eyes darted about, then settled softly on Quy’s face. “He would have done the same for me.”
In retrospect, I realize that it was not I but she who tried to hold us in the moment—away from the lingering threats of war and loss. We were three ordinary people in an ordinary house, slipping out of one moment and skittishly into the next. We could sip coconut juice together from a coconut shell. We could discuss with a lesser gravity military matters in our capital. With unguarded candor, Cliff and I could even retell the story of our days and nights along the Cambodian border—the murderous moments before we were duped. I told Cliff what Phong had recently learned—that the scout who had taken us off course had vanished. He was not among the dead. Or at least, his body was never found. Cliff agreed with me. “We were set up,” he said.
As Cliff and I went through the slow process of physical recovery, Quy helped us stake and rope our lives together. We were bound by something delicate but enduring, something that I knew would not vanish once its novelty wore off. Slowly Quy began to let go of the nighttime drinks and pills. I took great solace in that. She was embarking on something different, an even keel of companionship, with peace and quiet. One evening it might be a simple dinner, steak au poivre, tenderly red inside, perfectly browned outside by a flash of heat, presented on a plate of pommes frites. Other evenings it would be nothing more than a leisurely time by the windows, each of us quietly reading a book while the American channel displayed a mindless but entertaining lineup of television shows. Sometimes we would put on my wife’s favorite arias. Joan Sutherland’s voice soared and dipped, suddenly leaping into a defiant high C and then plunging two precipitous octaves downward like a knife thrust into flesh. For my wife, Sutherland was Tosca. And Tosca was Kieu herself. The triumphant high notes, sustained and suspended and always supple, commanded her attention even as she engaged Cliff in conversation. We talked. She flicked a morsel of cake from the corner of his mouth. I read in my leather armchair as the oblique sun cast its last purplish hues aslant against the pages. Occasionally I clasped her hand and she would let me. Our fingers intertwined in a tender even if awkward approximation of closeness.
I was satisfied enough with time spent that way. I was content to inhabit those moments and to be open to other similar moments. To stop insisting on a certain outcome. I knew we were no longer at a place in our lives where anything was possible, where the future was still to be lived raucously, riotously. Rather, we were hemmed in by the failures of the past, and any future we could still make for ourselves would have to carry the burden of past lives. I understood. Quy’s attention did not have to
be on me alone. As long as she was all right, I knew that I would be too.
I wake up and turn the television on, my heart hushed. Mrs. An is here. She gives me food and hands me a newspaper. These days, Iraq is coupled to a country, no, to a war from thirty years ago. They proclaim that Iraq is becoming another Vietnam. I scan the stories. It is Tet 1968 all over again. There is increased fighting in Basra, the city of canals and pipelines, the city controlled by the fiery and infamous cleric Muqtadar al-Sadr. Groves of date palms are shattered by bombs and bullets. Tanks roll through the narrow streets in battles as vicious as any I have known.
A part of me recalls a different Basra, city of Arabian legends, one thousand and one of them. Basra, city of my daughters’ dreams.
“I don’t know if I can ever return the money, Mr. Minh,” Mrs. An confesses.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I am happy that I can help. It’s all in the family.” I wave vigorously, as if to swat away any possibility of discomfort. Mrs. An gives me a tentative smile. She adjusts the angle of the television and pulls a chair next to my bed. We settle into what is the start of the evening news. I see the blurred contours of desert towns, a scattering of innocent anchorages that seem pristine and benign on the map. Tanks not much different from those that attacked Saigon in 1968 roll across the screen. In the background, an eerie glow is cast over the desert sandstone. Through the expanding and collapsing perspectives, the newscaster lists the names of towns ambushed and assesses the state of affairs in Iraq a few months before the presidential elections in the United States. Statesmen are interviewed. For now, the Iraqis, unredeemable, derided, and mocked, are not worth the effort. Soon enough their foibles, eagerly enumerated, will serve to exonerate the Americans. I recognize it, this shrinking willingness to stay and face the unintended consequences of your own actions.