Lotusland

by David Joiner

The consulate guards didn't inspect Nathan's passport. Just seeing a white face seemed to satisfy them. Nathan placed his passport and cell phone on a plastic tray, watched them tie these together with a rubber band, and took a numbered card. Le, however, was stopped and peppered with questions.

  What's your business here? With whom do you have an appointment? When were you issued this passport? Is this your first visit here?

  Nathan was ushered through the security detector into a large waiting room. Looking around, he saw various forms on metal shelving units up and down the white walls; posters of U.S. landmarks and advertisements for university business degrees; rows of seated visitors and their belongings; and a counter where low-level consular staff sat indifferently as a dozen Vietnamese people jostled with each other to submit their applications.

  Behind him, Le stepped onto a platform so a guard could brush her with a metal wand.

  A minute later she hurried over, giggling nervously. "I thought they might arrest me."

  "You do look suspicious."

  Her giggling ceased. "Do I?"

  He pointed at her grey-and-black striped suit. She even had a black sunhat, though she now clutched it beneath one arm. "You look like a gangster's moll."

  Ignoring him, she pulled out a crisp blue folder. "You're sure you filled this out right?"

  "Of course."

  She laughed again, straightening her jacket. "It's just a thirty-minute interview. Why am I nervous?"

  Nathan waited for her to sign in. Behind the counter window a paunchy American man walked past. Immediately Nathan recognized him — his name was Andrew, he recalled — as one of Anthony's old friends. Nathan had been introduced to him shortly after arriving in Vietnam. At that time Andrew had just passed his civil service examination and was preparing to fly to the U.S. for training. Nathan thought he should say hello, if only to give Le more confidence in him and in what she was over-worrying.

  Without looking up, the woman behind the window pointed at a door to the side of the room. Le thanked her and came back to Nathan.

  "I have to go. I don't think you can come with me."

  "I'll wait across the street." Squeezing her hand, he wished her good luck.

  When she disappeared, an unpleasant thought hit him: if her interview went badly, the closeness they'd achieved, if not yet the intimacy, might be irrevocably lost.

  He started toward the exit.

  "Nathan."

  Nathan turned to see Andrew rapping on the counter window. He waved Nathan over enthusiastically.

  "What the hell are you doing here, Nate? I haven't seen you in two years, I bet. Not since I started here."

  "You haven't changed. Except it's hard to tell with that thick glass you're standing behind."

  "If I look heavier and balder, it's definitely the glass. Anything I can help you with?"

  "Actually, I'm with a friend. She just went in for an interview."

  "Shopping for a visa?"

  Nathan nodded. "Immigration."

  "Wife or girlfriend?"

  "Girlfriend, I think. It's hard to tell sometimes."

  Andrew's smile flickered. "I see."

  "I guess there's no point telling you her name."

  Andrew looked at him strangely, then glanced at the Vietnamese employee sitting beneath him. "No," he said, frowning. "That's not how we work."

  Nathan smiled. "Just wanted to make sure you're on the up and up."

  "That I am. By the way, Anthony wrote me the other day. He said he'd finally lured you into his empire."

  "I'm thinking about it. But it's a little complicated now."

  "Oh, right." Andrew threw a look at the door Le had passed through. "His e-mail made it sound like a done deal."

  "That's his specialty. He's a good talker."

  "I was going to call him tonight." He looked at Nathan skeptically. "Should I tell him I saw you?"

  "I can tell him."

  "He'll want to talk about you. And he'll think I kept this a secret from him if you tell him after I call."

  Nathan laughed, although he knew Andrew wasn't kidding.

  "He told me you accepted his offer," Andrew went on. "He said he notified several candidates that his search was over because he'd found you."

  "Like I said, it's more complicated than that."

  "You should call him, then." His voice had taken on an urgency, as if he was speaking of a moral imperative. He glanced toward a back room. "I have to go. Let's get together sometime."

  For a moment Nathan couldn't move. The encounter was unexpected, and the shock of their conversation hit him after Andrew left. People in the waiting room were watching him, and only when the woman behind the counter looked up, lowering her glasses to see him better, did he head through the exit to reclaim his passport and cell phone.

  He crossed Le Duan Street and ordered tea at a café. As he sat there, with one eye on the consulate, he wondered what had kept him in Saigon for more than half a decade. Certainly the city had changed since he'd come here, but could those changes have outpaced the changes that had occurred in him?

  Fifteen minutes ago he'd felt happy, but now that feeling was tinged with the fear that he'd have to let go of something dear. He wanted the best for Le, but in his view that meant giving herself to him.

  It was a strange contradiction that happiness had to be balanced by loneliness. In America, country of wide-open spaces and inspiring nature, it was acceptable to feel lonely, for loneliness was inescapable in a landscape like that. But in Vietnam it was different. Saigon was so crowded, so lacking in space and nature to get lost in, he felt that loneliness had no place there. Yet he did feel lonely: loneliness more profound than he'd known in America. In Saigon, where humanity had taken to places that Americans would never dare inhabit, loneliness seemed a kind of failure. He dreamed sometimes of being alone in a great expanse, but unable to move, rooted like a tree.

  The pattern had been established long ago: starting out happy, loneliness slowly catching up. If happiness were a rock, loneliness was the moss that slowly crept over it.

  He wondered what Le would do if faced with this pattern in America. Would it change her? Would she recognize it? Or would her 24 years here protect her? He turned the question inward, asking himself what aspects of Vietnamese life he might never be able to recognize or understand. He was assailed by countless notions borne out of the chasm between privilege on one side and privation on the other.

  By the time Le emerged from the consulate, dark clouds filled the sky and the sun had disappeared like a pill dissolved in water. She must have only just removed her wig, for she was shaking out and fingering her pink hair. She stopped on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street. Nathan didn't get up right away. He enjoyed watching her like this: from afar, knowing she wanted to see him.

  When she started for the corner he went after her, threading his way through traffic, calling her name when he was near.

  "How'd it go?" He touched her hand, her arm, her cheek. "You're still alive, and your body's intact — all good signs."

  "It went okay," she said, giving him a quick hug. "It's hard to tell with Americans. They're serious but also friendly. I don't know what's real. The worst part was dealing with the Vietnamese staff. They look down on people like me."

  She described how she'd complimented a woman at the immigration counter on a pendant she wore only to be told to save her flattery and pretty smile for someone who could help her. "I guess it was just her way of trying to make me fail."

  "You should have told someone what she did."

  "And jeopardize my chance of getting a visa?"

  He retrieved his motorbike and pulled onto the sidewalk, waiting for her to climb on. When he turned in the direction of her gallery, she leaned into him.

  "I don't want to go back."

 
If he didn't know her so well he might have mistaken the urgency in her voice for anger and guessed she'd fared poorly in her interview. In his handlebar mirror, however, he saw her faintly smiling.

  "Where, then?"

  She pointed down the street. Only a few hundred meters away, Le Duan ended at the zoo and botanical gardens. "Let's go there. It's quiet and we can walk around."

  As they got close enough that he could make out the words Thao Cam Vien on a weathered signboard above the entrance, he realized three years had passed since he last visited. He didn't like zoos — caged animals in Vietnam depressed him — but it would be as good a place as any to hear about her interview.

  Aside from a few parking lot and ticket booth employees, and someone in a hammock strung between both groups, the zoo seemed perfectly empty.

  She was right in her prediction of quietness. The loudest noise was the rustle of leaves overhead, and the occasional cry of a monkey or bird. The honking of cars and motorbikes was muffled both by distance and the density of trees around them.

  They drifted past an island of blonde and black-haired monkeys. Several people were throwing chunks of apple across the scummed-over moat. Monkeys beyond throwing range gave angry, low-throated hoots.

  Soon they were standing before a pen of goats, which crowded in front of them bleating for food. Behind the pen was a French-colonial building, its yellow paint faded, its tiled rooftop dirtied with bird droppings and fallen tamarind pods. The second storey windows had their blue shutters thrown open and Nathan saw two women staring down at them, smiling as if something were funny.

  Le reached over the fence and let a goat lick her hand.

  "I like goats," she said. "They're curious. They'll come right up and sniff you out. A goat's more of a thinking animal than a sheep."

  "I've never thought about that."

  "The goats should know me. I visit them whenever I come here."

  "Le."

  "Yes?"

  "Aren't you going to tell me about the interview?"

  She waited until the goat lost interest in her and wandered off. "They said my application looked fine, but they told me — they were only being honest, they said — they told me that I wasn't the strongest candidate. But since I have proof of support, they told me not to give up."

  Her words lent force to his belief that she'd never stood a chance. Yet she still clung to this last thread of hope — the consulate's parting words had put a gleam in her eyes — and he felt badly for her. Not knowing what else to say, he told her she'd done well.

  "Someone came up to me after my interview. I was heading for the exit when he called my name. He said he met you in the lobby, that you're old friends. Why didn't you tell me you knew him?"

  There was accusation in her voice. "What would I have told you? I didn't know he'd approach you."

  "I don't like him," she said flatly.

  "Yes, well, I don't much either." Nathan wondered how Andrew had recognized her.

  "He asked if we were planning to get married."

  Nathan was stunned. "What did you tell him?"

  "I asked him why he was asking. ‘An informal inquiry,' was all he said. He made me more nervous than I was before my interview."

  "I wonder what that was about."

  "Did you talk to him about me?"

  "I didn't tell him your name and he didn't ask. Mostly we talked about Anthony."

  "I hope I never see him again."

  Nathan couldn't imagine what Andrew had wanted. The first possibility seemed altruistic: he meant to expedite the process for her, as a favor to Nathan. The second, however, seemed hostile: he wanted to catch her in a lie. Enormous implications lay between the possibilities, and Nathan had no way to know which was correct. Andrew had no reason to demonstrate any loyalty toward Nathan, which is why Nathan's hunch aligned with the second scenario. To Andrew, maybe this was a way to be loyal instead to Anthony.

  "Have you ever eaten hippo?" Le asked, venturing toward the adjoining pen.

  A cat with no ears slinked around the dead grass behind the pool where a hippo, immersed to the top of its head, lay staring at them both.

  "Where would I have possibly eaten hippo?"

  "I don't know. Africa?"

  "What makes you think I've eaten hippo in Africa?"

  Laughing, she grabbed his arm and seemed to perk up. They watched the earless cat skulk around a pile of vegetation put out for the hippo to eat, then scamper off when the hippo blasted air from its nose.

  "I can smell its breath," she cried, covering her mouth and nose. She hurried down the sloping path, leaving him behind.

  He caught up to her in front of the elephant pen, where four small elephants shared a patch of dirt less than half a football field in size. Swinging their heads from side to side, they stared across a dirty channel opposite the zoo boundary. Two new buildings were being constructed, and red and yellow cranes could be seen transporting concrete blocks in their pivoted arms. A heavy chain around the elephants' hind feet kept them from moving more than one step in any direction. There was little shade, and they continually tossed dust on themselves with their trunks.

  "I come here sometimes," she said. "You wouldn't know by looking at them, but they're intelligent animals. They're said to have excellent memories."

  "I guess that doesn't do them much good here. All cooped up like that, they probably lost their minds a long time ago."

  Le searched his face with her eyes. "I don't like thinking that way. It's too sad. One can't help feeling sorry for them."

  Nathan wondered what prompted her comment. Was it because they hadn't space to roam? Or because they'd been snatched from their natural environment and consigned to a run-down zoo?

  Behind them a woman on a mat with straw baskets before her started calling: "Sugarcane for the elephants! Two sticks, two thousand dong!" Her baskets bulged with stacks of purple, fibrous sticks.

  Le bought a dozen pieces and handed half to Nathan.

  The elephants, having observed the transaction, extended their trunks in anticipation of being fed. Le launched a stick towards the smallest one. It bounced to a rest in an orange dust-cloud at its feet.

  The wind's coolness foretold rain. A violent gust showered brown leaves down from the enormous trees around them.

  A girl of perhaps two, in pigtails and a flowered dress, tottered toward them from the side. An old woman followed, pushing a carriage. "Voi!" the girl said, pointing at the elephants and looking back at her grandmother. "Con voi!" She came up to Nathan and Le, grabbing Le's leg for balance and gaping up at her.

  When the girl noticed her sugarcane, Le gave her a stick, and the girl looked again at her grandmother.

  "Say thank you," the grandmother said. "This is her first trip to the zoo. She really liked Monkey Island. Didn't you, Lan?"

  Tugging at the cane, the girl nodded shyly.

  "The elephants like to eat that," Le told her. "Want to see?"

  Le tossed another stick of cane into the pen. An elephant lifted it with its trunk and pushed it into its curved, whiskered maw. The sound of it chewing made the girl laugh and stamp her feet. Nathan glanced at the grandmother. To his surprise, she was straining her eyes at Le.

  "Excuse me," the old woman said.

  Le took a half-step back, appearing alarmed by the woman's scrutiny. "Yes?"

  "I'm sorry, but . . ." She shook her head, as if she couldn't believe what she was about to say. "Don't I know you?"

  Le's mouth twitched, like someone had yanked out a tooth with a string, and Nathan guessed it was in recognition of the woman. But Le shook her head. She seemed upset by the woman's suggestion. "I've never seen you before."

  The woman pointed at her. "I think I knew your mother."

  Le's face hardened as the woman bent down to pick up her granddaughter. "I don't
think so."

  "You speak with a northern accent. Are you from Hanoi?"

  Le glanced warily at Nathan. "Yes, but I've lived in Saigon for eight years."

  "My name's Van." She paused, apparently to give Le a chance to remember. "And yes, it would have been a long time ago that I last saw your mother. I must be getting old; I can't recall her name . . ."

  "My mother's been dead 15 years."

  Nathan stared at Le. She had told him that her mother had run away when she was a girl.

  A pained expression flashed across Van's face, but she quickly recovered. "May I ask your name?"

  "I really don't think there's any possibility . . ." Le laughed uneasily. "I'm sorry, you've obviously mistaken me for someone else."

  Van shifted her granddaughter in her arms and lightly bounced her. "Your mother was a nurse, wasn't she? Married to a soldier? Or was it to a doctor? Wasn't she widowed during the war?"

  "She ran a flower shop. And yes, my father died during the war. But he was hardly the only one."

  There was a lag between Van's questions and Le's replies. Van looked at Nathan as if to see if he noticed this, too.

  "What do you do?"

  Le paused so long Nathan thought she wouldn't answer. But finally she did. "I'm a saleswoman."

  Nathan stared at her in surprise. He thought she might have told Van that she owned a gallery and painted. He supposed she'd been truthful — she did sell paintings, after all — but he couldn't help wonder what the point was in purposely being vague.

  "Excuse me, but what's your name?"

  Le sighed. "I'm not who you think. There are thousands of girls like me in the city — girls from Hanoi who came south. Surely you're thinking of one of them."

  A smile flickered across Van's face, and she raised a finger as if she'd remembered something that Le couldn't deny. "There was something about a marriage offer. Could it have been for one of your sisters?"

  "I'm an only child. Please don't ask me more questions."

  Nathan felt awkward caught in the middle, but the encounter interested him. Le's rejection of the woman's claim to know her touched on a theme he could never get her to open up about: her past. He continued to observe their interaction, but with his eye now focused on Le. If indeed she'd never met Van, it was hard to understand why she'd get so worked up over these harmless questions.