Catfish and Mandala

by Andrew X. Pham

“Took me nine hours. The longest distance I’ve ever ridden a bicycle.”

  “Hmm … This is the toilet.” She opens the bathroom door.

  “I’m tired but I could use a beer.”

  “The diner downstairs has beer and food.” With that, she leaves. The invitation for a drink dies in my throat.

  The room stinks. I want to celebrate with somebody Anybody. Cockroaches the size of Medjool dates scamper across the floor. Benevolently, I let them live. The two-inch mattress is covered with parchy linen. I turn on the ceiling fan. It creaks ominously on an unstable axle. Any moment, it can come down on my head like a whirling scythe. I open the window, but this doesn’t help much since it looks into the hallway. The woman returns and, standing in the corridor, wordlessly shuts my window from the outside. I am trapped in a puke-green room. The plaster peels off the wall in sheets, revealing cement and bricks.

  I go out to start my evening of revelry with tapas of jerked-liver salad in someone’s living room turned into a three-table eatery. Perching myself on a footstool, I slug down a 333 Beer, chase it with a Coke. The proprietor, whose two toddlers are playing with my shoelaces, delivers my extra-large plate of julienned green papaya layered with smoked liver, pork jerky, crushed peanuts, and chopped fresh basil, all doused with a vinegary, chili soy sauce. A Vietnamese opera wails from a Sony boom box. Three high school girls cascade around the coffee table next to me, and launch into a series of excited whispers-giggles with glances in my direction. I am still in T-shirt and cycling tights, which must look suspiciously like pantyhose to them.

  I feel woozy. With several thousand miles of touring beneath my belt, I know that unless I get something substantial in my stomach, tomorrow will be a very bad day. I bid the proprietor good-bye, and elicit another round of giggles from the girls with my Lycra-clad butt. Downtown at a Buddhist kitchen, I pack in a five-course dinner, hoping a vegetarian meal will help me feel better.

  Back at the hotel, I meet up with two British gents, the only other foreigners staying in the hotel, all of us on the same floor. One complains bitterly that a woman working the hotel grabbed his crotch, the other is mortified that a young girl, barely eighteen, has just grabbed his bum. Dead tired, I bid them good night, crawl to my room, and crash onto the bed. Crushed. Totally sapped. Everything aches. The day’s exhaustion falls on me like a boulder. The room is stale with mildew. I open the window shutters to let in some air, then go into the bathroom to mix a bath with the complimentary thermos of hot water. This makes about two gallons of tepid water. A rat pokes its head up the floor drain. I put a bucket over it.

  It feels like a maniac is tenderizing my gut with an ice pick. I get on the toilet just in time as my gut empties itself. It keeps coming. My insides turn inside out. I’m being eviscerated. I look down and watch my heart emptying into the toilet bowl. I am feverish but covered in gooseflesh. My head throbs. Few things will put the fear of God into me as effectively as seeing blood gushing out where it shouldn’t.

  I wash up, towel off, bundle up, and snivel to the only chair in the room. The windows are shut again. That sweet front-desk woman. I wonder if I ought to go look for a doctor. It is nearing midnight and any effort to get medical attention at this hour is going to be exorbitant, something my funds can’t handle if I am to make it back to Saigon. As I deliberate between life and money, a faint scratching noise comes from the other side of my door. The doorknob turns slowly. The door is pushed inward. It creaks and stops against the dead bolt I’d slid in place. I hear whispers. Silently, without getting up, I reach through the iron grill and latch the window shutters. Again, someone tries the door with no better result. More whispering. Silence. Metallic noises. Whispering. The shutters are tried. Finally, a soft knock on my door. A female voice, low and seductive: “Yoohooo. Hello. Please open. Hello. Please open. Yoohooo.”

  I half hope they will go away and half wish I had the strength to answer them. It is the rumor I heard among the tourists that worries me: a prostitute sneaks into a foreigner’s room and insists that he engage her services. If he refuses, she strips and yells. A policeman conveniently happens to be in the vicinity of the hallway. He barges into the room and arrests the foreigner for consorting with a prostitute. The only alternative to a night in jail is a stiff fine, anywhere from fifty dollars to three hundred dollars, payable immediately.

  “Yoo-hoo. Open. You open please. Yoo-hoo.”

  I want to at least open the shutters and talk to them, but I can barely stand. After a few minutes of “Yoo-hoo,” door rattling, and window prying, they must have thought me dead asleep. Footsteps recede from my door. I hear them trying the same tactic on the other rooms. Ten minutes later, they are back at my door, whining. “Please, mister, open. We friend. Yoo-hoo, please open. We cheap, very cheap.”

  This morning is worse than the last. I sweat in my sleeping bag, unable to move. The rooster—the damnable omnipotent rooster—is nothing but an edible snooze alarm. I vow to eat one first chance I get. When I manage to throw my feet onto the floor, I go directly to the toilet and enjoy another bout of bloody diarrhea. The water in the toilet bowl is so dark with blood I can’t see whether there are maggots in my stool. I fall back in bed. I am going to die. Perhaps something is eating me from the inside.

  Two hours later, I clomp downstairs. The receptionist directs me to the closest pharmacist. There is always a long wait at the nurse’s station, she explains; besides, the pharmacist is very good and can probably fix any digestive problem. The instant I step outside, a cyclo driver peels away from the pack scamming the street and tails me down the sidewalk.

  “Oy, oy, Brother. Can I take you somewhere? See some sights? Go to the beach? Restaurant? Shopping?”

  “No, thank you. I’m just going around the corner.”

  “Where?”

  “The pharmacy.”

  “You want to ride in my cyclo?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Are you sick?”

  I wish he would vanish. It is enough merely to keep my bowels in check as I walk. “No,” I blurt, rude enough for anyone but him. When I enter the one-counter pharmacy, he invites himself in as well, crowding over my shoulder.

  “This Viet-kieu is sick,” he proclaims to the woman at the counter.

  I turn around and look him in the eyes. “Please, I can take care of this myself. Do you need some medicine? You can go first. I’ll wait.”

  “No, no. You go right ahead.”

  The woman asks me what I need and I tell her that I have a severe stomachache and a fever.

  “You have blood in your stool?” he asks me.

  “Please!” I snap at him. “Do you mind? I am talking to her. I don’t want to discuss my problem with you. Could you please go outside?”

  He looks at me with incomprehension. I stare him down. He turns to the pharmacist, who regards both of us with mild amusement. She intervenes on my behalf: “He means that he would like to talk to me in private. Please wait in the street with your cyclo.”

  He drags his feet out, a child sent to his room, looking back over his shoulder in case either one of us has a change of heart.

  I sigh and, in a whisper, relay my symptoms to the pharmacist. She asks about the shape and size of my stool. I look over my shoulder. The cyclo driver is lurking six feet behind, ears trained on our conversation.

  “It’s dysentery, I tell you,” he says, directing his advice to the pharmacist.

  She gives me a fistful of multicolored pills—a four-day course of medication, twice a day, seven different pills each time. I have no idea what they are. She tells me to stay away from rice and meat. The cyclo driver shouts from the sidewalk, “Tell him to drink young coconut milk.” The entire course of medication, including the cyclo man’s advice, is three dollars.

  I take the medication. Because I am angry, angry at the weakness of my body, angry at everything, I get on my bike and leave town. To hell with dysentery and fever. I am a survivor.

  40

&n
bsp; Fallen-Leaves

  A piney smell of plywood, baked by a desert sun. Heat waving down like mist. A steamy wetness of sweat trapped indoors. Flies lazing through the air, dodging the sweep of the electric fan.

  An counted the dark eyes and whorls in the plywood, imagining monkeys and monsters. The hotness made his head thick. It was barely past noon, but he had already drunk three Coca-Colas. His mother had weaned him from his bottles of imported baby formula with Cokes. Maybe, she thought, these American things made him plump and troublesome. When he was three, he ate so much she rushed him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. Last week when she left him at home with the maid, he set a chair on fire. Yesterday, he opened doors and upset clients. The day before, the new girl found him in her room, under her table. Today Anh locked him in the chain-link cage with her. She had the cook bring him the new item on the menu, a big favorite with the GIs.

  Women came to the window of the cage, chatted with his mother through the wire mesh, and waved at him, smiling. They gave his mother money—rent, they called it. Anh put the rent on the table next to the bar-cash, the restaurant-cash, and the cabaret-cash, mounting, heaping great big blocks of bills like bricks—a mason laying a foundation. The swiveling fan feathered the bills, exhaling a greasy paper smell into the cubicle.

  Tallying cash with the ease of shuffling cards, Anh asked her first son why he didn’t like his pizza, an imported delicacy. He made a face and said it was too sour.

  An wanted to know whose mountain of paper it was. She told him it was theirs. He wanted to know what she was going to do with it.

  Anh said, My son, this money will take you abroad to study. In America you will become a great engineer.

  41

  Coca-Cola

  In eight months of biking, I drink two or three cans of Coke a day, enough to carbonate my blood for the rest of my life. The caffeine picks me up and keeps me from succumbing to the midday low. The sugar gives me just enough energy to boost the heavy bike over the big hills. The carbonation burns the road grit off the back of my throat. The familiar flavor keeps me anchored in strange locales. The wavy red-and-white logo tells me America has been here.

  Coke banners have displaced the Vietnamese flag. You can buy a Coke every five miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. It’s everywhere, sold by the case in markets as well as by the can in shacks with a six-pack inventory. At sixty cents a can, it is as dear as a third of a laborer’s daily wage. Coke—or Koh-ka as Vietnamese pronounce it—is a special refreshment, reserved for special events such as first dates and wedding banquets.

  Somewhere along an arid, scrubby stretch of land, I spot a thatched hut with a faded Pepsi flag out front, and a case of Cokes displayed on the windowsill. The noon sun has licked me dry. My mouth is a dusty crack. I pull over, lean my bike against a post, and waddle into the hut.

  On a packed-earth floor, three soldiers in olive uniforms with red stripes are crouching on footstools around a coffee table. Their conversation breaks and they look up at me with liquor-shot eyes, their chopsticks hovering above plates of boiled gizzards curly like cashews, pig hearts sliced like truffles, intestines chopped up like rigatoni. The centerpiece is a basket of herbs sided by a pile of ivory garlic cloves. One man who is eating from a bowl of raw, coagulated blood pudding glares at me, the blood dribbling from his scruffy mus— tache. The still tobacco air pulsates with the sweet bite of raw spices, boiled innards, and home-brewed rice wine the men have burped up over hours of drinking. Hands braced on the table, they sit with their knees up near their ribs, three hyenas tearing into the ruptured belly of a deer.

  Instinctively I nod, showing respect for their uniforms. A man growls something unintelligible into his cup.

  In the far corner, a woman squats on her haunches, slicing boiled cow tongue on a wooden plank. She stops, alert at the abrupt silence, and, seeing me, tenses. “What do you want?” she asks by way of greeting.

  “Hello, Older Sister. How are you?”

  “Well. What do you want?”

  “May I have a cold Coca-Cola?”

  “We don’t have cold ones. I can give you ice.”

  I couldn’t drink their ice. “Could you put a can in the ice cooler for me? I’ll rest a bit first, then I’ll drink it.”

  She looks me over, pauses, then nods without a word. Relieved that she didn’t take my request as an insult, I beat a hasty retreat to a seat outside. One of the men mumbles that the fucker at the door is a Viet-kieu. Can’t drink our ice, says another, too dirty for him. I groan inwardly, wondering if this pit stop is such a good idea after all. They begin to grouse about Viet-kieu in general. Dread settles in my stomach as I remember the mob that nearly lynched me in Ham Tan.

  While I debate with my thirst whether to leave, a dust devil kicks up across the street and scares a skinny dog. It whimpers and scoots inside the hut. A drinker flings it a piece of organ meat. The mutt noses the morsel then curls up at the other end of the room, leaving the scrap uneaten. A revelatory silence washes the hut. A humiliating moment. They see me witnessing their shame. The woman hurriedly resumes her chopping, contriving a screen for us all.

  “Goddamn dog!” the man with the bloody mustache hisses at the dog, but looks at me.

  Another man puts down his chopsticks and leans back away from the food, trying to hide his embarrassment. Glances shoot back and forth. Colors deepen on their faces. Having invaded their world and witnessed their disgrace, I avert my eyes as casually as I can. But, too late, I almost hear their minds shifting gear.

  “Three cans of Coca-Cola,” Bloody-Mustache shouts to the woman. I feel sick. It has come down to this.

  “Fuck! Bring us the Coca-Cola now!” another voice seconds.

  The proprietor is firm. “You can’t afford it. How about more rice wine?”

  “Shut up, sister. If we want your advice, we’ll ask. Just bring the Coca-Cola.”

  “With ice,” another man adds.

  “Please, no,” she replies, not yielding ground. “You owe me 22, 000 dong for this session already and you haven’t paid your tab this month. No money, no Coca-Cola.”

  The man wails, “I get paid next week! You know I’m good for it!”

  “You already owe me most of it.” Army grunts earn $120 a year, and most of their earnings go to rice wine.

  “Fuck this place. Fuck you, Sister. Fuck you for serving a Viet-kieu a Coca-Cola and not us. Fuck you!” the man brays.

  They rattle the hut with gusts of “FUCK YOU!” and “FUCK YOUR MOTHER!” and “BITCH!”

  “Let’s get out of here. We don’t have to take this crap from her,” Bloody- Mustache shouts to his companions and they stagger out of the hut.

  My thought of hightailing out of the joint perishes with the sound of their stools clattering on the dirt. What a gamble: my neck for a soda, one measly Coke, which I drank all my life without thinking. The one American thing touted throughout Vietnam. The only token of America the commoner can almost afford.

  In an instant, they surround me, each one a goner, tomato-faced and intoxicated to the hilt. Two weave uncertainly on their feet. I avoid their eyes, oddly noting the state of the Vietnamese army: threadbare uniforms and cheap brown army-issue plastic sandals. They have dark bony chicken feet.

  “You think you’re better than us, don’t you,” spits Bloody-Mustache.

  The roughest and tallest of the bunch, Cross-eyed, is about my height. He sneers, “Fucking traitor. Fucking Viet-kieu. You raped the country, then you fled to America. You … you American pet. Now you come back rich. America pays off traitors well, don’t they?”

  I stifle an urge to knock his teeth in. I don’t reply. It doesn’t matter, they are going to give me what they think I deserve anyway. This Viet-kieu is going to pay for all his treasonous privileges. What the soldiers say aren’t mere drunken words. They carry weight, seemingly steeped in the sentiment of too many Vietnamese, things I’ve heard obliquely in conversations, between the pauses where people reevalu
ate their words before uttering them.

  I watch them looming over me, coiling myself for the inevitable. I could take any one of them if I strike first, maybe two given their drunken state. But three against one are terrible odds, not to mention the trouble I’ll get from the local cops, win or lose.

  “Speak up, bastard! You think you’re too good to talk to us?”

  I raise a placating hand. “I’m just thirsty. I don’t want any trouble.”

  My reassurance is lost on them. It seems the fight had been started a long time ago by someone else. Two decades ago. But slights, real or imagined, between brothers are not easily forgotten. Now, with alcohol to wash away civility and reason, the undercurrent is clear on the breath of these men, who may have been my classmates in our schoolboy days.

  “I could have gone to America, too,” blurts the soldier to my left, a string bean of a man who I figure is the least dangerous of the lot. “My sister went with her husband, but I stayed because of my parents. Because this is my country! My country, not yours!”

  Cross-eyed spits the words at me: “Go home, Viet-kieu! You don’t belong here.”

  Bloody-Mustache lurches forward. I jump aside, fists cocked for a swing. The man crumbles to his knees and vomits, splattering the ground with bits of boiled intestines and liver and flecks of green herbs, whole sprigs of cilantro and mint leaves barely chewed. The hot ground steams his gastric juices. He retches, wetting his chest, tries to stand up, slips and falls on his own puke. His friends lift him off the dirt.

  A voice rings with disgust from across the street: “Indulge to one’s capacity, not to one’s greed.” An old proverb.

  Bloody-Mustache spins on the speaker, a soldier in uniform: “Shut your mouth!”

  The soldier snickers. Two more men come out of the diner across the street. The three of them chortle at the drunks. The first man wags a finger at Bloody-Mustache. “You should shut your own mouth or you’ll vomit up your wages.”