by David Joiner
"Let's go inside," she said, standing up. "I'll wash up and make you something to eat."
Nathan had no appetite, but still he followed behind her, already preparing in his head what he'd need to take on his trip.
Twenty-Five
Sunlight through the curtains woke him. A long moment passed before he realized where he was.
November mornings were different in Saigon: neither frigid nor wet, and not as short as in Hanoi. In Saigon there was sun.
Boarding the plane the previous night, he'd carried in his veins the cold damp grey of Hanoi. There was no trace of that feeling, though, as he drew the curtains. At seven in the morning it was hard to believe the sky could be so blue. Down below, sunlight had polished every inch of the street.
He showered and went to get something to eat. With Anthony heavy in his thoughts, he reverted back to when they always breakfasted together on De Tham Street, filling their stomachs cheaply: plain bread and a glass of black coffee. Was he having breakfast now, too? Was he conscious, and if so, what occupied his mind? Chasing the last of his bread with his cà phê đá, Nathan knew his responsibility to Anthony would increase exponentially when he returned to Hanoi.
On his way to Tu Du Hospital he was shocked by how much the city had been torn down and rebuilt. Although the day was cloudless, no view of sky was unobstructed: along every street he traveled, odd-angled arms of cranes extended hundreds of feet overhead.
At the hospital entrance, he threaded his way through a slow-moving crowd. Once in the maternity ward he followed a faded blue arrow to a corridor of offices. He stopped when a woman poked her head around a door.
"Are you Mr. Nathan?" she asked, stepping forward and smoothing her medical smock. Her hair was in a bun, and her round cheeks made her mouth appear smaller than it actually was.
"Ms. Loan?"
Almost shyly she shook his hand.
Nathan was led into an unadorned guestroom: there was an old chipped table with tea implements on it and two wooden chairs on each side. Framed photos of a hospital ceremony hung on the wall behind her.
"So," she said, pouring tea. "How exactly can I help you?"
She was generous with her time and, after an hour, he told her that was enough. She was a member of the Steering Board to Overcome Consequences of Toxic Chemicals and off the top of her head could give statistics for whatever he wanted to know.
Vietnamese and American figures differed greatly in quantifying the damage caused by Agent Orange. He knew, for example, that there was a backlash in America against claims that 3,000,000 Vietnamese had been affected by the chemical defoliant; that 200,000 children born with disabilities related to Agent Orange direly needed medical care and rehabilitation; that in a survey of nearly 50,000 Vietnamese war veterans more than 16 per cent claimed to have family members suffering from Agent Orange contamination. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government put all these figures much lower.
"We need money," Loan said as Nathan tucked away his notes. "The children have so little. It's why they're here. Their families are either too poor to pay for their care, or else they have no family." She handed him a sheet of paper with the contact information of relevant NGOs. "In your article, please tell your readers how they can help."
"I'll do what I can." Nathan placed it inside his briefcase. "May I see the children?"
"By all means. They're excited to meet you." Her expression changed as she checked her watch. "They're not finished with class, but that's okay. The last few minutes are usually a lost cause."
They started for the second floor.
"What are they studying?"
"Japanese."
"Why Japanese?"
As they climbed the stairs she explained that the Japanese had been very charitable with the hospital. Some children had been flown to Japan for surgical procedures unavailable in Vietnam. The Japanese teacher came three days a week with his wife, who helped the nurses care for children whose conditions required round-the-clock attention.
"Do any Americans volunteer here?" he asked.
"Every now and then we get curious visitors who donate money and supplies — but no, Americans don't come regularly. At least not to Tu Du."
He heard the children from the top of the stairs. When he stepped onto the second floor he wasn't prepared for what he saw.
Five children crowded the corridor. Of the five, one had no chin, one had teeth where her nose should have been, one was armless, another legless, and of those who did have arms and legs their limbs were either too short, or shriveled, or had an abnormal number of digits.
Off the corridor were four rooms. In the doorway of the first, two nurses appeared holding infants. One infant's head was the size of a watermelon — bigger than the rest of his body — and covered with scabs; the skin had stretched until it split and bled. The other infant, wriggling in the nurse's arms, had skin plastering the sockets of her eyes. Both children, Loan told him, had partial brains.
Behind them were a dozen cribs fitted with thin, discolored mattresses. The other babies were much like these two: heads swollen four times their normal size; armless, legless, or with shriveled appendages; eyeless; cleft-lipped; half-brained; blind, deaf, mute. A television was installed in a corner and showed an American action film dubbed in Vietnamese — to entertain the nurses, he supposed. Most of the infants lay on their backs, pawing at their bodies, and a weak collective wailing swirled in the room.
Loan cooed at the children the nurses held, playing with their feet. She stopped when the older children down the hall called to her, asking whom she was with.
"He's the reporter I told you about."
The children, some of whose disabilities affected how they spoke, crawled up to him and tried to pull him into their class.
"If you have class, why aren't you in it?" Nathan said. He was surprised his Vietnamese didn't faze them.
"We're smarter than the other kids," one child said, and his friends agreed, laughing at their excuse.
"Their learning's not as structured as it would be in a regular school," Loan said. "But they do pretty well for themselves."
Nathan followed her into the classroom. When they sat in the back, the students turned away from their teacher. The commotion they made attracted the children in the corridor back to class.
Nathan apologized to the teacher, who introduced himself in English as Nakajima, and gestured for the kids to pay attention to their lesson. After a minute their excitement died down and class resumed.
In control once more, Mr. Nakajima called a student up to the board. He'd written a question there and wanted a boy of around 12 to answer it.
Nathan watched the boy twist out of his seat. His head looked rather too small, and his back was bunched up at the neck, pushing one shoulder higher than the other. Because his legs were shriveled he had to let himself down headfirst, guiding himself to the floor with his arms. He scooted backwards between the rows of desks, dragging his legs, then clambered onto a bench beneath the chalkboard. Mr. Nakajima handed him chalk, and the boy reached up to write his answer.
Class lasted another five minutes. Before Mr. Nakajima dismissed the children, Nathan thought he felt his phone vibrate. He pulled it from his pocket and to his surprise found the screen blank. He remembered then that he'd turned it off after walking through the hospital gate.
His thoughts strayed to the real estate agency and, with a profound sense of disloyalty settling over him, he wondered about Anthony. He struggled to convince himself again that there was nothing he could do to help him. He'd return to Hanoi the next morning before work and find out what he might do then.
But he couldn't get Anthony out of his thoughts, and the guilt he felt, despite the arguments he developed to counter it, intensified. He excused himself and went outside.
The corridor was empty now except for a nurse folding sheets and
towels. Nathan stepped over her work and headed for the end of the corridor. When he crossed the stairwell entrance he discovered another room.
A nurse inside was hanging paper dolls between two cribs. This room, too, was for infants, though they were even younger than the ones next door. A toe-less baby with fingers extending from the stump of his half-arm reached toward her through the slats of his crib. Nathan continued past before the nurse noticed him.
At the end of the corridor he called Xuan. As he waited for her to answer he watched hundreds of people shuffle across the hospital grounds with the bright sun forcing them to cover their heads. Grainy photos of Asian refugees flashed through his mind at the sight of these tired, lost-looking people. The phone suddenly clicked.
"New Century, can I help you?"
"Xuan, this is Nathan."
Xuan exclaimed in surprise. "You're in Saigon? Why?"
"Something came up. I'm just calling to see if anything needs my attention."
"No, not really."
The vagueness in her tone bothered him, but he decided not to ask. "Any news about Anthony?"
"Not yet. As soon as we know it's okay we're going to visit him in the hospital." Voices in the background grew loud, and Xuan paused as if to see what the matter was.
"Is something wrong?"
"Just people downstairs arguing. But they're probably joking around. Things here are under control. If anything happens, I'll ask Tuan to deal with them." Tuan was the marketing director and had been working there almost from the beginning.
From the classroom door three students crawled outside and began helping the nurse with her folding.
"I have to go," Nathan said.
"So you'll be back tomorrow morning?"
Nathan swallowed involuntarily and started coughing. In the time he needed to recover, the prospect of returning to Hanoi paralyzed his voice. "The day after," he said.
"But your note says tomorrow morning."
"I have to be here one more day."
She didn't protest or inquire further, and he said goodbye.
Rather than return to the classroom he stepped inside the room where he'd seen the nurse hanging paper dolls. She now held a baby in her arms, bouncing it lightly and humming a song.
She shifted the baby's weight in her arms, holding it firmly against her shoulder. Its large head swayed but she cupped the back of it and guided its forehead to her lips.
The next thing Nathan knew he was moving toward her, reaching out to accept the baby's almost weightless substance. The baby's fingers grazed his cheek where he balanced it uncertainly. He wondered how he looked right then — like a father? Or like an impostor of a father?
The nurse rearranged one of his hands to support the baby better. "She's smiling."
"She's probably laughing at me." Nathan peered into her face. The baby's eyes protruded, and wherever she looked her gaze never stuck. Once or twice, however, he thought her eyes lingered on his.
When he approached her crib she began to squirm. He hesitated before returning her to the dirty mattress.
"What will happen to her?" he asked.
"I don't know. But I don't expect she'll live long."
For a long time Nathan stared at the baby. The idea that she wouldn't live — that this infant who'd just touched his cheek and struggled in his arms might soon die — seemed impossible. Even if her physical problems were in plain sight he still felt there was an extraordinary amount of life in her body. "Why not?"
"She needs special surgery. Unfortunately we can't perform the procedure in Vietnam. It's expensive and only foreign doctors know how to do it. If she'd been born in a rich country she'd have had the procedure within the first week of birth. Even if she had it done now she'd be brain damaged all her life. But she won't live that long. The fluid in her head will build up until its cuts off the oxygen to her brain."
"How long are you talking about?"
"A few more months. Possibly another year."
Nathan couldn't take his eyes off the girl. When he did, he realized that most of the other babies in the room had the same condition.
Loan walked into the room and stood beside him. "If we could accommodate every parent who contacts us with the same needs, our hospital would become a city of disabled children. These are the lucky ones."
Her last words lodged uncomfortably in his head.
"How do you know Agent Orange caused their conditions?"
"Technically we don't. We can't afford medical tests for every child. But they come from areas where Agent Orange was heavily used. Some of their parents were tested in the past, and high levels of dioxin appeared in their blood." She motioned to the corridor. "The other children are waiting for you. They're excited to answer your questions."
Nathan didn't want to leave yet.
"You're welcome here anytime," she said, apparently sensing how he felt.
Back in the classroom, the children were eating yoghurt and fruit and singing a Japanese song. Nathan took a seat next to Mr. Nakajima, who was conducting wildly with a plastic spoon. With great mental effort Nathan joined in the children's clapping.
There was nothing haunting about the airy bar of the Debonair Hotel, 25 floors above the city. Yet even here, a number of crudely primped young women filtered in and out of the adjoining dance club — prostitutes, no doubt, hired by the manager for a cut of what they made going home (or down a few floors) with a customer. Everything else looked bright and pristine.
Nathan flagged down a waitress for a glass of water. She got him one and he drank it before she walked away.
For the last three hours he'd wandered ghost-like through the city. Passing from one street to another had made him nostalgic, and there were moments when it was easy to believe he'd never left.
When he'd gotten as far as District Five, he encountered an old woman staggering from an alley. She had cropped grey hair, and her face was forced downward from the weight of what lay across her shoulders. At first glance her burden looked like a poorly rolled carpet. But as Nathan came nearer he realized he was mistaken. He stopped walking, unable to take his eyes off this old woman and the young man who hung across her like a human shawl.
The woman's face was deeply tanned, and so pitted that she seemed to wear a mask of dried orange rinds. She struggled with every step. When she got to a bus shelter she gently lowered the man. She sat down, brought him to her lap, and laid him sideways across her thighs. Nathan watched her pull his jerking head to her chest and hold it still.
The man's head was oblong, and his mouth hung open, slavering. His arms were skeletal, and his hands turned inward with the fingers bunched tightly together. Like the air bubble in a water level, his eyes rolled from side to side. He couldn't have been more than 50 pounds, and the woman no more than 80.
She started massaging the young man's legs. When she reached his feet, the soles of which looked freshly washed, Nathan saw that his toes were webbed, connected by folds of skin.
When he lived here why had he never noticed such people? In his attempt to live simply and integrate into this place that had become his home, had he been blind to the struggles around him?
When the woman maneuvered the man back onto her shoulders and boarded a bus, Nathan kept going. The deeper he penetrated the city, the more struggle he saw: thumb-sucking children wandering alone through the night selling lottery tickets in cafés, sidewalk restaurants, and gas stations; construction workers hauling stacks of bricks by hand and pounding thick cables on the ground with hammers; teams of women breaking rocks with pickaxes; on the top step of a vacant building, the façade of which was draped in dust-encased tarp, a woman slept with three children clutching at her from the step below; workers walked along steel girders 30 storeys overhead, detectable less by the dim lights suspended near them than by their white hardhats bobbing in the moonless sky.
He and Anthony had grown close in neighborhoods like this. When the downtown bars and clubs got too predictable they'd even sought these places out, driving to the outer districts and engaging with local people. That was the time of their "one-dollar nights": drinking and joking and having long conversations in which they tried to make sense of Saigon's strangeness. That routine had ended when Anthony caved in to Huong's demand — the same she'd previously made with Nathan — that he spend every night with her.
Sweaty and numb, Nathan had come to the Debonair thinking he could escape the gloom that had settled over him.
He ordered a Singapore Sling, not knowing what it was, only recalling that in Hanoi Anthony had once ordered it at the Metropole Bar. Later that night, thoroughly drunk, Anthony had commented that the drink had a sharpness to it, like a cleansing agent might.
The drink's seven-dollar price tag hardly registered with Nathan: for the first time he could remember, it felt good wasting his money on something he'd soon piss into the sewers. "It'll end up exactly where you flushed the last seven years of your life," he mused. He laughed aloud, hating what he stood for anymore.
Across the room a Western couple with an infant triggered his memory of the hospital. He could still feel the weight in his arms of the baby girl who would die because the simple procedure that might save her wasn't available in Vietnam. Suddenly the emotional dam he'd hidden behind cracked, unleashing a tearless flood.
He regretted having taken a job at Anthony's company. He'd cashed in a dream, but for what? For the situation he now found himself in? For a slow, painful strangulation of his soul? Writing had always been the most important pursuit for him, and money alone seemed a poor reason to give it up. The idea that his opportunity with Reuters was a chance he might never have again beat on him mercilessly. But what was he supposed to do now?
Coming to Saigon when Anthony was hospitalized had been a bad decision. Yet if he'd stayed it wouldn't have helped. Anthony had agreed to let him come here; being in Saigon for a short time wouldn't leave Anthony worse off. The company could manage. Anyway, there were other employees who were closer to Anthony's work than he was.