"Do you like Vietnamese cooking?"
I looked at her, and finally realized she was very nervous.
"I don't know," I said. "I've never had it. But I like Chinese, and Japanese, and Indian. I like to try new things." The last part was a lie, but not as bad as it might have been. I do try new recipes, and my tastes in food are catholic. I didn't expect to have much trouble with Southeast Asian cuisine.
"Well, when I get through you still won't know," she laughed. "My momma was half-Chinese. So what you're gonna get here is a mongrel meal." She glanced up, saw my face, and laughed.
"I forgot. You've been to Asia. No, Yank, I ain't gonna serve any dog meat."
There was only one intolerable thing, and that was the chopsticks. I used them for as long as I could, then put them aside and got a fork.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Chopsticks happen to be a problem for me."
"You use them very well."
"I had plenty of time to learn how."
It was very good, and I told her so. Each dish was a revelation, not quite like anything I had ever had. Toward the end, I broke down halfway.
"Does the V stand for victory?" I asked.
"Maybe."
"Beethoven? Churchill? World War Two?"
She just smiled.
"Think of it as a challenge, Yank."
"Do I frighten you, Victor?"
"You did at first."
"It's my face, isn't it?"
"It's a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I'm a racist. Not because I want to be."
She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can't recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.
"I have the same problem," she said.
"Fear of Orientals?" I had meant it as a joke.
"Of Cambodians." She let me take that in for a while, then went on. "When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I'm lucky to be alive, really."
"I thought they called it Kampuchea now."
She spat. I'm not even sure she was aware she had done it.
"It's the People's Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you very badly, didn't they, Victor?"
"That's right."
"Koreans are pus suckers." I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.
"You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else-except maybe the South Africans and the Nazis-had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can't tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact Orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the 'ethnic Chinese.' The Chinese are the Jews of the east."
"I've heard that."
She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.
"And I hate all Cambodians," she said, at last. "Like you, I don't wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate." She looked at me. "But sometimes we don't get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?"
The next day I visited her at noon. It had cooled down, but was still warm in her dark den. She had not changed her shirt.
She told me a few things about computers. When she let me try some things on the keyboard I quickly got lost. We decided I needn't plan on a career as a computer programmer.
One of the things she showed me was called a telephone modem, whereby she could reach other computers all over the world. She "interfaced" with someone at Stanford who she had never met, and who she knew only as "Bubble Sorter." They typed things back and forth at each other.
At the end, Bubble Sorter wrote "bye-p." Lisa typed T.
"What's T?" I asked.
"True. Means yes, but yes would be too straightforward for a hacker.''
"You told me what a byte is. What's a byep?"
She looked up at me seriously.
"It's a question. Add p to a word, and make it a question. So bye-p means Bubble Sorter was asking if I wanted to log out. Sign off."
I thought that over.
"So how would you translate 'osculate posterior-p'?"
" 'You wanna kiss my ass?' But remember, that was for Osborne."
I looked at her T-shirt again, then up to her eyes, which were quite serious and serene. She waited, hands folded in her lap.
Intercourse-p.
"Yes," I said. "I would."
She put her glasses on the table and pulled her shirt over her head.
We made love in Kluge's big waterbed.
I had a certain amount of performance anxiety-it had been a long, long time. After that, I was so caught up in the touch and smell and taste of her that I went a little crazy. She didn't seem to mind.
At last we were done, and bathed in sweat. She rolled over, stood, and went to the window. She opened it, and a breath of air blew over me. Then she put one knee on the bed, leaned over me, and got a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table. She lit one.
"I hope you're not allergic to smoke," she said.
"No. My father smoked. But I didn't know you did."
"Only afterwards," she said, with a quick smile. She took a deep drag. "Everybody in Saigon smoked, I think." She stretched out on her back beside me and we lay like that, soaking wet, holding hands. She opened her legs so one of her bare feet touched mine. It seemed enough contact. I watched the smoke rise from her right hand.
"I haven't felt warm in thirty years," I said. "I've been hot, but I've never been warm. I feel warm now."
"Tell me about it," she said.
So I did, as much as I could, wondering if it would work this time. At thirty years remove, my story does not sound so horrible. We've seen so much in that time. There were people in jails at that very moment, enduring conditions as bad as any I encountered. The paraphernalia of oppression is still pretty much the same. Nothing physical happened to me that would account for thirty years lived as a recluse.
"I was badly injured," I told her. "My skull was fractured, I still have… problems from that. Korea can get very cold, and I was never warm enough. But it was the other stuff. What they call brainwashing now.
"We didn't know what it was. We couldn't understand that even after a man had told them all he knew they'd keep on at us. Keeping us awake. Disorienting us. Some guys signed confessions, made up all sorts of stuff, but even that wasn't enough. They'd just keep on at you.
"I never did figure it out. I guess I couldn't understand an evil that big. But when they were sending us back and some of the prisoners wouldn't go… they really didn't want to go, they really believed…"
I had to pause there. Lisa sat up, moved quietly to the end of the bed, and began massaging my feet.
"We got a taste of what the Vietnam guys got, later. Only for us it was reversed. The GJ.'s were heroes, and the prisoners were…"
"You didn't break," she said. It wasn't a question.
"No, I didn't."
"That would be worse."
I looked at her. She had my foot pressed against her flat belly, holding me by the heel while her other hand massaged my toes.
"The country was shocked," I said. "They didn't understand what brainwashing was. I tried telling people how it was. I thought they were looking at me funny. After a while, I stopped talking about it. And I didn't have anything else to talk about.
"A few years back the Army changed its policy. Now they don't expect you to withstand psychological conditioning. It's understood you can say anything or sign anything."
She just looked at me, kept massaging my foot, and nodded slowly. Finally she spoke.
"Cambodia was hot," she said. "I kept telling myself when I finally got to the U.S. I'd live in Maine or someplace, where it snowed. And I did go to Cambridge, but I found out I didn't like snow."
She told me about it. The last I heard, a million people had died over there. It was a whole country frothing at the mouth and snapping at anything that moved. Or like one of those sharks you read about that, when its guts are ripped out, bends in a circle and starts devouring itself.
She told me about being forced to build a pyramid of severed heads. Twenty of them working all day in the hot sun finally got it ten feet high before it collapsed. If any of them stopped working, their own heads were added to the pile.
"It didn't mean anything to me. It was just another job. I was pretty crazy by then. I didn't start to come out of it until I got across the Thai border."
That she had survived it at all seemed a miracle. She had gone through more horror than I could imagine. And she had come through it in much better shape. It made me feel small. When I was her age, I was well on my way to building the prison I have lived in ever since. I told her that.
"Part of it is preparation," she said, wryly. "What you expect out of life, what your life has been so far. You said it yourself. Korea was new to you. I'm not saying I was ready for Cambodia, but my life up to that point hadn't been what you'd call sheltered. I hope you haven't been thinking I made a living in the streets by selling apples."
She kept rubbing my feet, staring off into scenes I could not see.
"How old were you when your mother died?"
"She was killed during Tet, 1968. I was ten."
"By the Viet Cong?"
"Who knows? Lot of bullets flying, lot of grenades being thrown."
She sighed, dropped my foot, and sat there, a scrawny Buddha without a robe.