by Paul Yoon
Seven of the beds were still occupied. He watched the nurse who recruited them pumping the seven with morphine and then trying to hide her crying as she hurried out of the room.
They were going. Alisak understood that suddenly. He looked around for Prany and Noi. Then he got up and walked over to the woman who had spoken to them. He stared at her, convinced he would, years from now, remember her. She stared back at him, in the haze of the drug.
“Don’t forget the wheelbarrow,” she said, and smiled.
He wouldn’t remember her face, but he would remember he didn’t have the courage to touch her in that moment—not even her elbow or her shoulder as she kept smiling as though watching a band at a café. Maybe in the morphine she was.
The house rattled again, and he felt Vang take his wrist.
“Teach me another word in French,” Alisak said.
“No time,” Vang said, and pulled him away. “Come on.”
He wanted to know where his friends were. Vang assured him they were just up ahead as they hurried down the mirrored corridor. In the mirror, Alisak saw he was still carrying the pillow as though he were a child. He dropped it, fixed his hair, and tucked his shirt into his pants as he followed Vang.
He didn’t even know whose clothes he was wearing. He had long ago gone through the ones he had arrived here with. Against the wall were three gurneys occupied by more who would be left behind. Following Vang, he passed through the kitchen, where the other doctors were emptying cupboards in silence, packing what they could in duffels, tucking kitchen knives into their pockets.
Alisak caught Prany in a far corridor. He told Vang he needed to head upstairs, but the doctor gripped his arm, and they kept going. He felt the house shake. Voices filled the air. Then it was the blades of helicopters, one already leaving as they entered the destroyed wing where they kept their bikes, the wind suddenly gripping his shoulders and pushing him back.
He leaned forward against it. His bag was next to his bike. Prany’s bag next to his bike, Noi’s next to hers. Noi and Prany themselves were outside in the dark, helping some people into the aircraft.
What time was it? He wasn’t sure. It could have been evening or not yet morning.
“It’s the last one,” Vang said, shouting into Alisak’s ear over the sound of the engine. “No space left. We’ll head to another exfil point. They’ll pick us up there. I’ll ride with you.”
The helicopter took off. The wind blew dust and old leaves and debris into the room. In the corner, behind pieces of the wall, were bits of the outside that been collecting there for months. It looked like a nest.
Noi and Prany came back, got on their bikes. Noi had tucked the pistol in her waistband. One of the nurses got on Noi’s bike, carrying Noi’s backpack. One of the doctors who had been rummaging through the kitchen joined Prany. Alisak handed Vang his bag.
“France or Thailand?” Prany shouted.
“What?”
Vang couldn’t hear. He didn’t answer. They started their bikes. Alisak’s stalled. Alisak motioned for Prany to go ahead and he tried again. The sky flashed as his engine came to life. He drove out and Noi followed, all of them turning on their headlights and entering the tobacco field. The wind blew over them again, not from the helicopter now. A burst of rain. Alisak turned to see the windows of the main ward one last time, searching for the woman, but there was only the rain spraying on the glass. The sun was rising invisibly behind the clouds. They were drenched. In between the denotations was the sound of the far helicopter. And then there wasn’t. They increased their speed, Prany in the lead, Noi behind Alisak.
So they were leaving. They were suddenly gone. He looked briefly back over the doctor’s shoulder at Noi. He thought Prany must be pleased to be out front. Prany kept speeding up, eager perhaps, and Alisak blinked his headlight for him to slow down in the rain. But Prany didn’t, he sped across the valley and soon he was a good distance away from the two of them.
He wanted to turn to see where Noi was, but with Vang behind him he knew he shouldn’t. He followed the sticks and soon they were passing where Vang had woken up three mornings before. Or was it four mornings before? He had lost track of the days. Days and time. His eyes were sore and bloated. He felt the sting of one of his blisters opening again, unable to heal.
In the far distance, more bombs detonated. They could see the bombers now. They were flying parallel with the bikes but still far, gliding over a mountain range as though they were ancient birds. It was almost beautiful. It embarrassed Alisak that he thought that.
The rain thinned. Good. He tapped the handlebar with a finger, ignoring the pain of the open blister. He increased his speed, hoping to catch up with Prany, but mindful of the mud that was now everywhere. He drove over a bump, but he remembered it, had driven over it before. The bombers were no longer visible and the sky began to clear, bringing color everywhere. He passed an empty farm and a few stone jars that had survived, intact, as tall as houses, and others that were demolished and pulverized. Two women stepped out of a small open shed as though they had been living there and shouted something indecipherable, waving a pale shirt.
He made out a tree line in the distance. The wind. He waited for the rain to return but it didn’t come. He had lost Prany over a slope and then he found him again, far away, a small, dim path of headlight in the valley.
France or Thailand. A river and fish.
He felt a tapping on his chest. He tried to ignore it, focusing on their safe line of sticks, but then looked down quickly. Vang’s fingers were tapping Alisak’s body manically. Alisak didn’t understand what was happening. He tried to ignore the tapping. And then he knew. Vang was humming and pretending to play the piano.
It suddenly occurred to Alisak that the doctor had not been on a motorbike for this long before. Or had never ventured this far out from the hospital since he had arrived. Alisak shouted at him to stop, but Vang didn’t respond. He tried again. The tapping was distracting him. He grabbed Vang’s wrist and tried to pry the hand away down to his waist, but Vang clawed hard against Alisak’s chest. He kept his hand there in a way that scared Alisak. Or a feeling close to it. He tried again one more time, pulling down hard on the doctor’s hand, not realizing the bike was tipping to the side from the shifting weight until he sensed a slipping and turned to see Vang, wide-eyed, mouth stunned open, sliding back, clawing for him. Finally, he spotted Noi’s headlight, closer than he thought she was. Close enough to briefly see her startled face as she swerved, breaking away from the safe line of sticks to avoid the doctor, who was falling now, and then the blast happened—bright, close lightning, there was that pesky ghost in his chest again—and as Alisak was propelled into the air, there was only the dirt and the start of morning.
He was unaware he couldn’t hear when he got back up. He thought he was hearing everything. Thought he was standing when he was lying on the ground. Then he stood, wiped the mud from his eyes, and checked himself. His head, his chest, down to his legs. No wounds. No breaks. No blood. Through the dense smoke, he walked around in a small circle, searching. He rubbed his eyes. Then he thought he spotted a headlight racing ahead.
It made him hurry. He coughed, stumbled. Bright spots cascaded across his vision and then vanished. He walked a little farther in the smoke and found his bike. It was okay, the bike. The engine still running, a wheel spinning. It was a good sign. A lucky sign. He looked across to where he thought he had seen that headlight. He thought it must have been Noi racing ahead, and laughed. The laugh felt good. No, it felt great. He shouted and clapped. He punched his chest and laughed loudly. He wiped some more mud off his face and kept looking around. Vang. Where was Vang? There. Not far at all. He grabbed Vang’s wrist and helped him back onto the bike. He asked if the doctor was okay.
No time. He raced across the field, not waiting for a response. He felt Vang’s hand against him and was relieved the doctor was no longer pretending to play the piano. He sped up, ignoring his dizziness, the bright spots
that came back. He found that headlight again, in a far field. It appeared now to be heading in the opposite direction, back toward the farmhouse, but he quickly lost it. He wondered if it was something else. An animal? No time. The land was brightening even more. The air. His eyes not yet used to it all. Squinting, he followed the last of the safe line until he made it to the road toward the town and went faster.
In the schoolyard, not far from the river where they used to sleep by the tree, two helicopters, Hueys, were idling. He thought the bike up ahead was Noi’s, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bike at all but a jeep. Alisak dismounted and entered the wind of the blades. He could hear everything. People were running by him and getting in. The first Huey took off. A man rushed over and led Alisak to the second one.
Alisak shouted, asking where Prany was. Where Noi was. Every time he opened his mouth it was as though he were swallowing the wind. He couldn’t hear himself. Then he realized, only now, that he couldn’t hear the helicopters either. He heard only a ringing, a loud bell.
Where are the others?
The man stopped. He reached across and unclasped Alisak’s fingers. He picked up the hand that Alisak had been holding and threw it across the schoolyard. He lifted Alisak up into the Huey and buckled him in. The helicopter was full. He tried to recognize someone but they were all shapes pressed up together in the dark. He kept looking down at the hand on the concrete. Severed below the wrist, it was mud-covered, its fingers slightly curved as though it had been holding something.
And then, around the thumb, a silver glint. Or perhaps he was mistaken, he wasn’t sure anymore. He wanted to shut his eyes, to shout and jump off, but he did nothing. He couldn’t move. He heard only the bell. Then that, too, was gone.
The silence was wonderful. It was like an embrace, the softest blanket around him. He tucked himself into it. The ground beneath him shifted like water. The sky kept flashing. He wondered if the sun was plummeting, breaking apart. He thought that would be fine. Because the wind was all over him, and that was like a blanket, too. He had never been so high up in the air before.
For this, I can fly, he thought, but forgot who said that.
As they took off, they lingered over the yard and then turned to follow the shape of the bright, trembling river, past an old boat tied up to a post, past the remnants of the monk’s house, where a dog stepped over a fallen door and, for a time, galloped after them.
In an anonymous air base, he was hurried onto a large cargo plane and traveled for a lifetime.
Alisak slept and woke and changed airplanes at other air bases, seeing the outside for a minute—some flat sliver of unreachable landscape beyond a fence, a million stars thrown onto what looked like a heavy dark sea above him, always the wind—and then he slept again, unaware that he was crossing India and then Saudi Arabia.
The hold shook, but it was also him shaking, uncontrollably, his hands, his limbs. He sensed someone touching his wrist and he jerked his arm back. Then he felt the handkerchief the man beside him had offered mysteriously, as though Alisak had been crying or because there was something on his face to wipe away.
Is there something on my face?
He didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t open his eyes for hours. Afraid to look at anyone, afraid of what they might look like, what condition they were in, what they were missing. He said it was just like a tree getting struck by lightning, but no one responded.
In his blindness, he folded the handkerchief into a thick band and tied it over his eyes, the length just long enough to make a small knot behind his head. (There, better.) He turned to the person beside him and then the one on his other side and asked what part of them they were missing. He said it was okay, he knew how to stitch them back together.
He unbuckled his belt, got up, and, still blindfolded, navigated the narrow aisle like a drunk, then suddenly like a dancer, growing more confident in his blind steps, creating something close to a flourish with his arms. He clapped and shouted. The more the plane shook, the more he was able to move freely. It was as though he were in space, afloat.
He taunted the other passengers, shouting that he had all of them, both his hands and both his legs, all his fingers and toes.
He was whole!
He asked if the plane was carrying a wheelbarrow. Then he skimmed past a wall of wooden crates, attempted to climb them until a pair of arms wrapped around him tightly and dragged him back to his seat as he screamed and struggled and kicked.
The snap of a buckle.
“You are a stupid boy,” someone said close to his ear. “A stupid boy.”
They let him keep the blindfold on.
Hours later, after they had landed again, he thought he was changing airplanes when a man led him onto the tarmac and took him across, holding him the way a father would. He recognized the smell of him as the man who had given him the handkerchief.
The man began to whisper commands in French. “Walk straight, keep walking, there, careful, watch your head,” and then Alisak was settled into the back of a car.
He let the man untie the handkerchief for the first time in days. Sunlight shocked him. It was impossibly bright and blue everywhere. Above him, a large-winged bird followed the wind over the rooftop of a building. In the air was the smell of something deep and old. He pushed through his own haze and tried to focus on the back of the plane to see if anyone else was stepping out.
Where were the others?
“What others?” the man said. “Remember what I told you. Be good. Work well. Live. Do what you were good at. You’re here now.”
He had no memory of anything the man had told him before this. He didn’t even know who this person was. He shifted his focus onto the features of this stranger, but then the car started, startling him. He reached for him, but the man shut the door and stepped back, not going with him, so that all Alisak would ever know of this person was that he kept him company from one airplane to the next, that he had a pale handkerchief that once smelled of perfume, which he let Alisak keep, and that he was now receding, standing on the tarmac and waving.
There was a tremendous ache in Alisak’s eyes. He was dehydrated, sleep-deprived, disoriented, and nauseous from the sudden speed and the turns of the car. The driver, an older woman, glanced at him through the rearview and spoke to him in Thai. Her skin was dark and thick from the sun. It was like the desert. She was wearing sunglasses that kept slipping down her nose.
“Where are we?” he said.
He couldn’t fully understand her, so he had switched to French.
“Perpignan,” she said.
He had never heard of Perpignan.
“France,” she said. “Southern France.”
“Not Thailand?” Alisak said.
She laughed. In the rearview her mouth hung open, revealing the front teeth she was missing, another capped in gold. She introduced herself as Karawek, though she went by Kara here. She was Thai, had been here already for years, helping people like him.
“People like me,” he said, though he was unsure if he said it out loud.
He had never seen the ocean. They were suddenly driving beside it. It was everywhere and flat and sky-colored. He got lost in it, out there, beyond. Some layer of him inside began to leave him, through his fingertips, his eyes, his mouth. Leaning against the window, Alisak began to cry. Not because of the water. Karawek pretended not to hear and turned on the radio, driving slower, passing by a headland where there was a church. Stone houses and then a seawall where a boy was sitting on the ledge, fishing. Far away, a red boat was moving slowly, following the coast. Then the car turned away and they were driving inland toward the mountains.
Karawek said he could open the window if he wanted. He rolled it down, was met by the wind. It dried his face. He was getting used to the brightness. The heat felt different here, it was thinner, more dry. They were driving by an orchard. And then, without warning, an abandoned cottage, the roof collapsed. Beyond, in a pasture, goats watched them.
&nbs
p; “How do you know him?” Karawek said.
He had been clutching the handkerchief, but now he folded it, following the visible creases, and slipped it into his pocket.
“Who?”
“The Seabird. Yves. The Vineyard.”
“The Seabird?”
She didn’t go on. They arrived at what he assumed was the Vineyard, the woman driving up to a large barn at the base of the mountain. He saw no vines. On a nearby slope, on the ridge, was a large stone house. Karawek handed him a card with a Marseille address and told him if he ever needed her, to call.
He thought she was leaving, but she took him in using a side entrance. They were in the shade of a corridor, and as Alisak turned into a room with square bales of hay, the tallest man he had ever seen stood from a desk where he had been writing in a notebook and, ducking under the hanging lamp, approached.
“Ah,” the man said. “So you are the one who has been wreaking havoc on my brother’s motorcycle collection.”
Before Alisak realized what was happening, he was embraced, his entire body swallowed by the largeness of the third stranger he had spoken to today. The man’s medical coat cocooned him. It masked the daylight. He breathed, smelling something wonderful. Cleanliness. He couldn’t remember the last time he had bathed. Standing there on the threshold of the room, he grew self-conscious of his body, his stink, and of his weakness. Some vague memory of a blind walk down the cargo hold of an airplane slipped into him and vanished.
He yearned for a plastic bag of the powdered soap he and Prany and Noi had washed with. The way, wet, it would create a layer of mud on their faces so pale that roaming the halls of the farmhouse, they had looked like monsters in the mirrors, frightening the nurses, and each other.
He pressed himself into the stranger as though wanting to vanish. The man didn’t resist.
“I told you,” Karawek said, still in the corridor, finishing her cigarette, her voice an echo. “The Seabird.”
She extended her arms to mimic the span of the man’s. Someone else, someone new—a young woman, a glimpse of pale hair—appeared in the corridor and greeted Karawek. They were all looking at Alisak.
