“Will miss Mister Clive,” she says.
“Đó là sự thật.” It’s true.
She looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “Been study?”
“Some,” I say.
“Phượng think a lot,” she says. “Good on ya.” She smiles, makes a small fist, and socks me lightly on the shoulder. “Me too.”
I say, “You are such a knucklehead.”
“Next week lesson,” she says. “Have to go now.”
“I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” is playing in the background. The line “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box” is the one that always makes me flinch. I picture my mother (Dad in a shadow behind her) looking out at the snowy buttes, tracing patterns in the frost on the insides of the windows, trying to imagine a place where there is no winter, where it is always hot, and when the rains come after weeks of threats and dry thunder and lightning in the west, people pour into the streets and squares to soak it up in the most literal sense — to express their gratitude for the one absolute requirement of a country like this one, a place where at one time, not all that long ago, what most of them probably wanted more than anything was to raise their families, farm their land, and be left the fuck alone.
I sit on the windowsill and watch Phượng walk away. Her áo dài is blue tonight. (Of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day. The boy went blue, and I panicked.) I know it is a special one she wears when she has a date. I expect Ian will show up to get her pretty soon, in his tattered linen sport jacket, and they will go to the roof of the Rex for dinner, stand at the edge of the terrace and watch the city: the young couples on their motor scooters, riding around and around the circle in front of the opera house on Nguyễn Huệ, slowly, hypnotically; the cyclos parked on the side streets, smoking, patiently waiting for passengers — someone, anyone who is prepared, however reluctantly and in whatever condition, to go home.
12. Somewhere in the Real World
The ad says, “Sunny Potrero Hill flat. Share with two ‘males.’ Straight-friendly. Must like cat.” The only cats I’ve ever really known were the barn kind, wild and prone to grasshoppering at any movement that could possibly be considered untoward. I assume the cat in the ad will be different, will allow petting and behind-the-ear scratches, like Cash would, if he were still around.
I like the idea of an animal, of getting to know something gradually, little by little, with no obligation to converse. I’ve come home tongue-tied is why. From Saigon. After the equivalent, in time, of a tour of duty there, and then some. I’m shell-shocked, though not in the usual sense. It is no longer Vietnam but America, now, that shocks, with its shiny veneer, its heaps of shrink-wrapped paraphernalia. Besides which, the war has been over for a long time.
At least that war has. But there have been others since, ongoing and everywhere, and maybe they are partially to blame for the fact that something feeling quite like armed conflict still carries on in my head. Armed but deceptively quiet, as if all the combatants are required to use silencers, and the stealth missiles to remain stealthy clear to impact.
I didn’t want to come back. I had grown to love being one of the missing, living in a place where no one could find me, no one could just stop by or call me up. I was so far away from my memories, I could almost pretend they were someone else’s. I had learned that distance was a force field — so very useful — and my mind was so busy trying to get me through the city and the days, I could forget for long stretches of time I’d ever had another life.
But I had. It had not gone anywhere, maybe temporarily into witness protection.
It took several weeks and a serious effort just to go buy a plane ticket, and it killed me that it had been so easy. To leave Vietnam. In one piece. I did not think it should have been that easy.
When it became apparent that I would never do it by myself, Phượng went with me and coaxed me gently into the EVA Air office. “See? No problem.” She put a dainty hand on the small of my back and pushed while I resisted. Phượng is surprisingly strong for a five-foot-tall, ninety-pound girl, and I found myself moving forward, in a swimming-through-tar sort of way, despite my best efforts to stand still or, better yet, back up all the way to and out the door.
“Nice lady help you.” The way Phượng said “help,” it came out sounding like “hey-oop.”
I knew she was making fun of me, however lovingly, because I was acting like an idiot.
“I could do with a little less sarcasm,” I said.
“Yes, dear.” The tiny girl continued steering me toward the nice lady in question, whose smile I knew was almost certainly genuine, but to me she looked remarkably like a crocodile. Or a “coco-deal,” as Phượng would say.
“Maybe we should come back later. Isn’t it lunchtime or something?”
Phượng stopped and gave me a look. “Don’t want to go back? Don’t go.”
“I have to.”
“Tại sao?”
“Tại vì.” I knew how childish it was to answer a Why with a Because, but at that moment, I did not care.
Phượng called me on it. “Lousy reason.”
“It’s all I’ve got,” I said. But it wasn’t.
Aside from the beers and the cigarettes and the suicidal, helmetless motorcycle excursions with Luc up Highway 1 toward Phan Thiết or through the rice paddies west of town over slick wooden and rail-less bridges, there was that guy and his dog, so sweet and so safe, refuge; in a place I might get to go, to pull back and start — what do you call it? — living.
I called again. He answered anyway. He was still alone. Or he was alone again. This time I tried to explain what had happened to me, or to us, or hadn’t, or… He said, “Yeah, babe, come on home,” and I blithely skipped right over the hesitant part — the part where he was lying — because I didn’t recognize it as meaningful, because it was something I had never heard before.
Love is something I do not, obviously, know how to do, but some recalcitrant tendency keeps driving me to make the attempt. Because sometimes I think what will cure me is to be surrounded, consumed, crushed, forced to feel something besides the all-too-familiar duality of rootless and pointless. Luc was sweet, but he was crazy, and he was going back to Paris. He asked me to go, but I couldn’t learn another language. Words I already knew I would never know.
• • •
After eighteen months, I had finally done what I’d first gone to Vietnam to do: ridden out to Củ Chi on the back of that Russian motorcycle, roamed the tunnels, the command rooms, the underground hospitals, the reencroaching jungle. Tried to figure out which turn Mick must have taken last and how it could possibly be that he hadn’t left me a message. In a Tiger beer bottle. Carved with a sharp stick into a red-mud wall or with a bayonet into a tree.
But there was nothing. It didn’t even feel like a war zone. It felt like a museum, or a theme park. It didn’t feel real enough for anything important to have been lost there. No heart. No mind. No life. No war.