Removing his shoes, French stood beside No at the altar and followed her motions as she burned a joss stick and prayed. Afterwards, when they were collecting their shoes, he brought up the beautiful Notre-Dame cathedral in downtown Saigon, and said, “Until now I wasn’t sure you were Buddhist.”
“I am,” she said in an odd tone, not looking up at him, “but not everyone worships Buddha.”
***
They returned to Vung Tau on the ferry, returned to his hotel. To his bed. She rode atop him, with such intensity of effort it was like she was penetrating him. Later, after they napped, she went down on him with mechanical skill and he climaxed, which he had seldom experienced with oral sex, not that his experience with women was all that extensive. He knew that she was doubling her efforts to enchant him, but at the same time she occasionally seemed to withdraw, distant and gloomy. Did she sense that all her work was only partly successful? As much as he knew where her real desires lay, however, and no matter how little his heart was engaged, there was no denying that she had him in a spell. She was like the animals he sought – familiar and alien at the same time. Somewhere between flesh and fantasy, the real and the mystical. Exotic as she was, she was almost a cryptozoological entity herself, like a mermaid. In youth, hadn’t he fantasized about having an Oriental lover? Maybe, didn’t all white men? Didn’t men speculate about horizontal vaginas? Upon returning to the USA from his first trip, never having tasted the local fauna despite having been surrounded by such beauties, he had felt a profound ache of regret, like coming back from a scientific excursion without a trophy. Could it be that regardless of his imagined chivalry toward women, he had even returned to Viet Nam this time with the half-conscious hope to capture one of these creatures, just as much as he had come to corner one of his evasive beasts?
And he knew he was the exotic creature, from a half-imaginary land, that she was hoping to bag, too. Who was capturing who? Who was hunter, who was prey?
“I know another place,” she told him, leading him by the hand the next day. “Please, let me show you.” Don’t go, she might as well have pleaded, buying herself more time so that her spell, his obsession, would deepen. You can’t go...
***
How had he missed this in his guidebook, and right here in Vung Tau all along? The Lang Ca Ong – or Whale Temple – was surrounded by a wall upon which were painted whiskered dragons frolicking in the ocean, one carrying a group of people on its back. A turtle was worked into the decor on both sides of the pagoda-roofed gate that opened onto the temple grounds. Above the entrance into the temple itself hung framed paintings, the central one showing a dragon – or, in Vietnamese, Con Rong, No explained – coiling in the clouds while a whale in the sea spouted water from its blowhole.
Inside, more paintings of whales covered the walls. Carved dragons scaled in metallic gold twined around columns, red electric bulbs at the ends of their whiskers and clutched in their mouths. The altar was flanked by two crane statues, standing on the backs of turtles. And behind the altar of glittering red and gold – both tacky and opulent at the same time – was the skeleton of a whale in a glass showcase, its massive ribs tinted by the red-hued fluorescent tubes arranged within. To the right were more whale bones in another glass case, while inside the case on the left were heaped countless long-snouted dolphin skulls. French leaned over each glass sarcophagus eagerly, hoping that he might spot something unusual...maybe even the bones of the centipede-like Con Rit itself. But despite his knowledge of animals he was no marine biologist, and if any such bones were mixed in with the contents of these reliquaries he couldn’t tell.
Later, at the hotel, he would go online with his laptop and read about a widespread “whale cult” that existed in Viet Nam, which revered “Ca Ong” or “Ngu Ong” (“Mr. Whale”), a name that was, “...a mark of both fear and reverence, a god so powerful that even to speak its name is courting danger.”
Whales were believed to watch over and protect fishermen. When whale carcasses washed ashore, they were buried and then exhumed several years later to be brought to this or other whale temples. At the Thuy Tu communal house in the city of Phan Tiet, he learned, sea turtle skeletons were displayed along with the whale bones.
French read that whale worship possibly predated any other major religion in Viet Nam, dating back to the Cham and Kh’mer people or even further, but even to this day there were whale worship festivals, one right here in Vung Tau called the “Nghinh Ong,” held in the eighth lunar month, that included martial arts displays and dragon dances.
French transferred to his laptop pictures he had taken at the temple with his digital camera. One of these had been of a foo dog, upon the head of which a worker had draped a wet face cloth, maybe to dry it or just out of mischief. The image had struck French oddly. It made the foo dog look like another beast entirely, with a faceless, amorphous head. He stared at the image now on his screen.
“Hey,” No called from the bed. She was still here...exhausting his money. Exhausting his body. He turned toward her to find her lying across the mattress on her belly, nude, legs splayed, a smooth-skinned dragon waiting to carry him on her back across the rippled sea of their bed sheets.
French rose, and went to her to worship.
***
French woke to find that night had fallen, and to find No already awake, watching the TV mounted by the ceiling, remote in hand. When he realized what he was seeing on its screen, the volume low, he sat up and snatched the remote from her hand. “Jesus Christ!” he hissed. “Why didn’t you wake me up, No?” He thumbed the volume loud.
It was a news program, showing video footage taken at Hoan Kiem Lake in the center of Hanoi; he recognized it by the Thap Rua, or “Tortoise Tower,” dedicated to the Golden Turtle God, Kim Qui. The Thap Rua stood on a small island near the middle of the lake, and served as the background of the jumpy footage. The video was all the more obscured by a downpour of strong rain. Could the storm be responsible for the great swell that rose and fell in the water? It looked as if a large body had broken the surface for just a moment or two, then submerged again. One might have thought it was a submarine. French felt a chill wave like water run down his naked back.
“Tell me what they’re saying,” French commanded.
“This was taken today,” No translated, “by news people. They say earlier today tourists were making videos, too. It’s Con Rua. I told you he is as big as a house.”
“It’s impossible! If the thing is as big as it looks here...Jesus, it would be bigger than Archelon!” French was referring to an extinct turtle of the Cretaceous period, itself only thirteen feet long. “And something this big in a fresh water lake? No, no, that was just a wave or something. It...”
But his words trailed off as the same footage was repeated. For scale, he saw a few people within the frame, covered in plastic ponchos with hoods and pointing frantically at what French had just witnessed.
“My God,” he whispered. “I’ve got to get back to Hanoi right away.”
No touched his arm. “You can’t, George. There’s a very bad storm now in Hanoi. They won’t let you fly there. Floods and everything, like the storm in 2008. Many people died then. They say this one could be worse. Maybe that is why Con Rua is awake again.”
“I’ve got to try,” he said, pulling his laptop onto the bed with the intention of e-mailing people he had only recently worked with in Hanoi, from the Cryptozoic and Rare Animals Research Center and the Teachers Training College-Viet Nam National University.
No reached around him to enfold his forgotten penis in her small hand. She worked it like clay. “George, please listen to me. I think the police won’t let you go, either. Sometimes they won’t let foreigners come into Hanoi. Because of Con Rua, I’m sure they will stop you.”
“I have to try, No...this is what I came for!”
“George, hear me...please don’t leave me. There’s something else I can show you.”
“Will you let me work now, plea
se?”
“George, it’s something I was afraid to tell you about before. This thing I know you will want to see.”
“More whale bones or pig fetuses? I’m sorry – please, stop talking and let me do this.”
“George!” she practically begged, squeezing his member so hard it started to hurt.
French shoved her hand away and snapped, “Enough, okay? I’m running out of money as it is!”
No got up from the bed and snatched her clothes out of a chair. French sighed irritably, too impatient to even look up when she slammed the hotel room’s door behind her.
***
It was as she had said, however. French’s friends confirmed that the tropical storm was a severe one, prohibiting air travel, and it appeared the authorities were not permitting travel to the capital on account of the events at Hoan Kiem Lake, besides. French sent e-mails back begging his friends to remind these parties that he had come to Viet Nam specifically to investigate the lake’s mysterious inhabitant or inhabitants. He could help them.
His contacts responded that they would relay his messages, do their best, but until the storm abated there was little more that could be done.
French kept his eye on the TV, but the news was focusing on the storms that were lashing not only Hanoi, but now Vung Tau as well. Another e-mail from a colleague said that the storm down south where French was might rise to the level of Typhoon Durian, which in 2006 had ruined 120,000 homes and killed 48 people, devastating Vung Tau.
He had closed the doors to his hotel room’s balcony, but when he looked through the glass it was to see the ocean turned gray and choppy, a frightening body of turmoil, an elemental chaos that gave the impression of a world either in the making or in its death throes.
And so French was all the more surprised to get a call from the hotel desk, telling him that he had a visitor if he wished to allow her up. He gave his consent, and a minute later opened his door to find a shivering No, her hair hanging like seaweed. Glumly, she said, “Do you want me to take you to see this thing, or don’t you?”
He cupped her cheek, though he didn’t know if it was out of affection or just apology. Her skin was wet and ice cold. “We can hardly go out in this monsoon, can we?”
“I’ll take you if you want.”
“Will taxis be running?”
“I have my Honda.”
“Honda!”
“I have an extra poncho for you.”
He sighed, reluctant to abandon the TV, but reluctant to let her go again, maybe next time not to return. Though he would have preferred they both remain here, with him getting her out of those wet clothes.
“And why couldn’t you tell me about this mysterious ‘thing’ before?”
“You will see when we get there.”
***
He should have known from the state No was in that the extra rain poncho from her Honda’s storage compartment would do little to protect him. The bike’s rear tire threw water up his back, and by the time they reached their destination even his underwear was soaked. He felt it was a miracle she hadn’t lost control of the bike. He had never seen the streets of a Vietnamese city so eerily empty. It was an apocalyptic sensation.
They were in a particularly poor section of the city, a close warren of badly constructed and maintained concrete houses, many with open fronts and no way to keep the rain from slanting inside. As No brought the Honda to a stop in front of one of these buildings, its outside painted a pastel aqua, she beeped the horn. They slung their legs off the bike, hurried to a barred metal gate. A man squatted on his haunches with his back against the side of the house, poorly sheltered under an awning. He was disheveled, unshaven and gaunt, appeared to be watching the storm – until French noticed that his eyes were entirely white, like large pearls pressed into fleshy pouches. The man took no heed of them, and No barely acknowledged him, either, as if he might only be a crouching statue.
A figure came scurrying to meet them on the other side of the bars: an elderly woman even more diminutive than No, hunched, her head covered in a kerchief. As she unlocked the gate, she peeked up at French’s face and he withheld a gasp. Her eyes were wide in her grayish face. Not just wide: they bulged as if to drop out of their sockets. Her jaw hung slack, as though it had no bone inside it, and no teeth besides.
No spoke to the woman briefly as they entered the house, and the woman turned and passed through a curtained doorway, but French barely noticed because his attention had been diverted to several other individuals in this front room with its stained walls dotted here and there by clinging geckos.
A boy in filthy shorts sat on the linoleum floor peeling and eating small fruit from a bowl. French had eaten these translucent orbs himself and quite liked them. In English they were called longans, after the Vietnamese long nhan, which meant “dragon eye.” The boy was maybe six or seven, and he had the same deformity as the old woman, if not as pronounced, his goggling eyes so protuberant that it was questionable whether he could close his lids over them. His lower legs were unformed, too, tapering at the knees into thin vestigial appendages like flippers.
A teenage girl sat on a lacquered wooden chair watching a TV with poor reception. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail that revealed her small, half-formed ears, her eyes also bugging from their sockets. She glanced at French nervously and he tried to smile, despite noticing that her left arm had never developed beyond a webbed hand hanging limp directly from the shoulder. On her lap she held a dirty naked baby with reddish hair; Amerasian, or some other mix? Its hands were fleshy mittens, and again the distended eyes, in an oddly shaped skull with little more than holes for ears. The baby’s head lolled and it stared glassily up at French, drool dangling from rubbery lips.
French leaned his head close to No and whispered, “What happened to them, No? Is this from Agent Orange?”
“No. They were here before the Americans came. We call them ‘nguoi o duoi sau.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Um, like ‘people who live in the deep,” she said quietly. “‘Deep people.’”
He found it hard to believe that these abnormalities were not the result of Agent Orange, especially since viewing those fetuses at the War Remnants Museum, the animals at Suoi Tien Theme Park, that painting in the Fine Art Museum. But he could understand, with their ichthyoid appearance, how these blighted prodigies could be considered “people from the deep,” especially in a coastal city. He could understand how No might believe she had brought him to his Holy Grail at last.
“How do you know them?” he asked her.
He noticed she kept her eyes averted from the malformed children as she replied, “I told you about my cousin’s husband, with the bad dreams. He was a fisherman. He left my cousin to be with one of these people.”
French had a funny intuition. “He wasn’t that guy we saw outside, was he?”
“No, that man was her last lover. I don’t know where my cousin’s husband is now, and I don’t care what happened to him.” She sounded bitter at the way this man had betrayed her cousin, though French wondered why a man would leave his wife for a member of this clan, if she possessed similar anomalies.
“So who are we waiting for now?”
“The woman who stole my cousin’s husband,” No murmured.
“Are any of these children his?” he asked, sweeping his eyes about the squalid room again, taking in the grotesque brood.
“Maybe some, but not all.”
The teenage girl had been listening to them, and maybe she had understood at least some of their discussion, because she spoke up softly, “Dagon la ba cua chung ta.”
French glanced over at her, then back to No and asked. “What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Dagon is our father.’”
“Dagon? Are you sure she didn’t say ‘dragon’?”
“No.”
“Not ‘Ca Ong’?” he said, remembering the revered “Mr. Whale.”
“She said
Dagon,” No insisted. He noticed now that she wouldn’t make eye contact with him, either. She seemed restless, eager to be elsewhere, though this had been her idea.
“And so who is Dagon, then?”
“Ah!” cried a voice across the room, and startled, French looked up to see the old woman holding back the curtain of the room she had disappeared into. From it wafted the scent of incense. French saw that she had removed her kerchief to reveal a head as hairless as the drooling infant’s, her scalp covered in thick peeling flakes...perhaps from scalp psoriasis?
“You can follow her,” No said.
“You aren’t coming with me?”
“No. You don’t want me...you’d rather have your terrible thing instead. So have her. And she can have you.”
“Hey, No, come on now...”
“Go on. She is waiting for you.”
“Look, I’m going to need you to translate.”
“If you met Con Rua, or Con Rong, who would translate for you? Go on, George. I give you what you want.”
French sighed, again losing patience with the woman’s unrealistic expectations. He turned from her and approached the waiting old woman. She let the curtain drop back into place behind him. “Ah,” she grunted again, leading him through a murky room toward another curtain-covered doorway. Joss sticks with glowing orange tips burned before a little altar, beside the offering of a bowl of longans. A small idol stood on the altar, painted black and red and metallic gold, and it reminded French of that foo dog with the towel on its head at the Whale Temple, in that the griffin-like beast with its folded wings had a lumpen, octopus-like head, devoid of eyes or features apart from its beard of coiled tendrils.
The old woman lifted aside the curtain and indicated that French should enter alone. He stepped through the threshold into a small bedroom, its air so hot and humid that he could barely draw a breath, as though he walked on the bottom of a heated pool.
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