It had a souvenir stand. That killed me. I wanted to kill something back.
I rented an AK-47. Paid for a handful of bullets. Obliterated the target of an American bomber from fifty yards. The tunnel guides were impressed. “America number one,” they said. “American girl số một! ”
After a kiss from Luc, American Girl Number One put the gun down and said so long. Au revoir. Hẹn Gặp Lại. Sixty kilometers. Three hours. Ten shells. Done and done.
But I could still, too easily, avert my gaze and picture him setting up camp somewhere, living off the land. Maybe in Thailand. From where he could send a postcard. At least.
It came to me how tired I was of pretending I could see any distance at all. I thought maybe if I could find my way back to a clear image I could start over from there, and tried to figure how far back that would be. It turned out to be as far back as Mick, at eighteen, in a cave in Montana, a piece of quartz etched with a dinosaur-feather imprint, shining in his palm. I saw myself on the roof at home, aiming a plain gray rock, hitting him with it, and blood, but no one died; I saw us both in Missoula, hiking into the hills for another geology lesson. Then much blur, with highlights.
The two or so months after Củ Chi were necessarily (I told myself) but still only semi-blurry, and after finally trading all but my last few hundred bucks for thirty-six hours of airports, airplanes, counterfeit Valium, and three or four tiny bottles of bourbon, I was back in San Francisco, trying somewhat desperately to gain traction on slippery pavement in a very steep city. In addition to being jet-lagged and exhausted, I found that Frank was not there, this time, for me. He was done waiting. He tried to let me back in, but he couldn’t trust me an inch, and what he was waiting for was for me to go. Now. Not once he’d gotten used to having me around again.
When I was three days back, he got home from work and pulled my duffel bag out of the closet. He set it on the bed and unzipped it. He said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Riley. I really do. But you need to leave me alone for a while.” I started to pack. I took my time. I felt like I was drowning, waiting for the ocean floor to show up under my feet. He didn’t help or try to stop me.
He was right to give me the boot, but it still hurt, a lot. I didn’t ask him how long a while was but decided all by myself to believe that if I really needed him to, someday he’d let me back in. I don’t know why I thought I had to believe this about him. Us. Whatever we were. But I did. It helped a little. Enough to operate.
I had never told him why I went away so far and stayed gone so long. To do that would have required words, turned to sentences, I had no clue how to string together. And something told me it wouldn’t matter anyway. I was never meant to be Frank’s replacement ballerina, but no one can tell me I didn’t try.
Tried for the first time ever to say I was sorry for being so utterly useless when Lucas died. He told me not to worry about it.
“Honey child, it was the eighties,” he said. “No one was right.” I knew it still hurt him, ten years down the line, and that his studied nonchalance, about love, men, sex, friendship — anything ever meant to be serious — was a front, and one that might never come down. But he took me in, and he made me laugh. I began looking at ads in the paper for a place to settle. Regroup. Sleep. And if the dreams were going to be sad, or scary, quit dreaming them.
• • •
Since using telephones in Saigon had run five dollars a minute, I’d braved them only a few times, and they still unnerved me. When I call the number in the ad, though, the welcoming, soft southern accent on the other end of the line gives me the courage to speak. I manage to say hello and to ask if the room is still available.
“Sure, come on over. Can you make it this morning?”
“Yes.” I leave it at that, and an almost-whispered “Thank you,” so as not to sound too anxious or dazed or unbalanced. His name is Christopher, he says, and he is looking forward to meeting me.
Eddie comes along because he has a car and can give me a ride, but mostly for moral support and as evidence, I tell him, that I am not some sociopathic closet homophobe. When I say the last part, he looks at me so closely and earnestly, I think for a second he might put a hand to my forehead, to check for fever. “You get that you are in San Francisco, right?”
I nod, in what I hope is a convincing manner.
“You know it is not normal for you to imagine people might think that, right?”
“Right,” I say.
The place I am going to see is actually on a side street off Potrero Avenue, meaning it is not technically a Potrero Hill flat, but I can understand why anyone in search of a renter would advertise it as one. Down here in the flatlands, life is much more industrial, much less picturesque and trendy than it is up higher. But flat land is fine by me: level ground will probably come in handy for the more dissociative times, and those times will surely come around. Despite this new and somewhat disconcerting yen for stability, I know I’ll always look forward to — and if necessary find a way to manufacture — the occasional tectonic shift; the feeling of stepping off the curb and for a moment, due to certain smells or sounds or whatever other trigger, not knowing where the hell I am.
The street feels eerily quiet. It is the weekend, but even so, it seems as though there should be more people around, more noise, more traffic. I think about Saigon, the incessant sensory overload, and suppose anything short of an ongoing riot is going to seem strange for a while.
Here there are houses just like on any other block, but also a fair number of businesses, ones that do not cater to the Sunday-afternoon-stroll crowd: auto repair and machine shops, a fenced-in truck rental compound, a Texaco station, a screen printer’s studio in a pale-blue building at the corner. It isn’t really a neighborhood — is nothing at all like the blocks to the east, on which the coffee shops and florists and boutiques blend right in; they fool you into thinking maybe you aren’t in a city at all but in some lovely suburb made to look like one.
I think about trying to relate this bit of insight to Eddie, but don’t. I know there is probably something wrong with my reasoning but am unclear as to which parts I should leave out, or what I could add that would change that. It is good enough for now to be able to recognize this place is a little bit outside, and even though I can’t explain the concept (outside of what?), I can accept this recognition as a small but adequate step toward reentry.
I think of a Rickie Lee Jones song, part of a tape I once played over and over in my car. It is about a gas station, and about love, about running out of possibilities. I haven’t heard it in forever. Haven’t listened to Rickie Lee Jones since Lu went off the grid.
We ring the bell, and a vision appears. He is wearing cutoff jeans, a pale-yellow sweater vest that sets off beautifully the ornate “Mamma Mia” tattoo covering his left shoulder, fluffy white bunny slippers, and at least a dozen silver rings on each hand. His thick, platinum-blond hair is swept up into a configuration that falls somewhere between pompadour and bouffant. Combined with his shockingly high cheekbones and eyelashes long enough to brush them when he blinks, he looks like the cover girl on some outrageous Norwegian girlie magazine.
A voice from the top of the stairs — the voice from the phone — calls down, “You forgot your boa, baby. I thought you were trying to make an impression.”
The door answerer lifts his chin and rolls his eyes. He holds his hand out to each of us in turn, palm down and wrist bent, as if expecting a curtsy and a kiss.
“Max,” he says. “At your service.”