by Paul Yoon
“The hospital?”
“I mean, the old one. The old house.”
“The farmhouse?”
“The hospital, the farmhouse. You’re making my head spin.” Khit pulled out a new envelope from her waistband. “You’re supposed to go meet Auntie there. First you go around back to the river. You meet the boat. And then you go to the farmhouse and wait for Auntie to come. And then you give her this.”
“The farmhouse,” Prany said, and opened the envelope that was filled with more money, American dollars this time.
“I don’t know why she goes there,” Khit said. “No one else does. Too scary for me. It’s just her and those ghosts.”
He thought the girl meant the history there.
“That’s a lot of dollars,” she said.
“Who gave this to you?”
“People who know Auntie,” Khit said.
“Did you take any of it?”
“You stupid enough to cross Auntie?” she said. “Who are you? That’s enough for two people to get out, no?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, and waved the envelope at her.
When Prany stood, she tugged on his sleeve and said, “You play cards? We can play together if you want. I know someone with some cards. The soldiers won’t come back for hours.”
“You know their route,” he said.
“Everyone knows their route,” she said.
He stepped over the caterpillar and crossed the hut, trying to remember the last time he had talked to someone a lot younger than he was. The last time he had been inside a fisherman’s hut. From the entrance, he could make out the top of the hill settlement, dark. Briefly, he remembered that garden, the handful of soil, that child. The caterpillar kept moving along the edge of the light.
“Where will you end up?” Khit said.
He didn’t know. Thailand or France, he thought, recalling how they, the three of them, had always said this.
“France,” Khit said. “I would like to go to France.”
He tried to feel something about his leaving, but there was nothing. It was as though it had already happened, that a long time had already passed from this point here. From outside came the faint sound of a boat. Water lapping. Prany didn’t turn, knew the girl was watching him. He said, “Got to go,” and headed down to the river where the boat woman was waiting for him.
So she had survived. He couldn’t tell if she recognized him. How many children had she provided passage for up and down this river? Did she continue to? He fought the urge to run to her when he saw her. But she didn’t speak or even look at him as he slipped quietly in, and then she steered him downriver, the water holding the reflection of the night. The moon in the wake. He dipped his fingers into the river. River of his childhood.
The woman steered with the crux of her elbow. They motored past a line of dead trees. The shapes of men in uniforms, too far away to hear them. He thought of his father again. The pen. He searched for the monk’s house, but couldn’t recall where it was. He wondered where all the monks had gone, whether the temple was there high above the river, invisible now in the dark. How many times had they paused, walking, and looked up at its corridors aglow with distant firelight?
He thought of how, when they were hiding in the mountains before they were caught, someone would stack pebbles on the ground, one on top of the other, every day in front of their shelter. These small towers in shades of earth that grew in number and never fell. And that, when they were finished, no one ever touched. As though in their completion the person had created something else.
Where was Vang right now? Back to the place he called home. Uncertain of the days Vang had left before he was inevitably found, arrested, and tried. Knowing all this, even as Prany kept urging him to leave with him, Vang hadn’t wanted to go anywhere else. I want to find my rooftop, he kept saying, Prany never knowing what that meant. In their last year, he had given up persuading the doctor not to part with him, but he would forever be unsure if it was to honor his friend’s wish or because they had both been so broken he couldn’t push it any further anymore.
They traveled for almost an hour. Then, after a bend, the woman slowed the boat, approaching a bank, running parallel with it, and it was then that she leaned over and gently placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezing once. And as a space opened up between the trees, Prany leaped off without her ever stopping, without him looking back.
He was out in the open. He listened to the fading engine for as long as possible as he made his way across the hills. Signs with large symbols began to appear on wooden posts indicating where bombs had been cleared and where they hadn’t been. He followed the clearance signs, stopping at a row of stone jars to peer inside them. He passed a log with a pair of weathered slippers on them. He felt the moonlight on his shoulders and he didn’t know why he kept thinking of those towels more than anything else.
What Prany knew was that in a short while the farm would be visible. And it was. The fields came up from the distance and then what was left of that house that had been a secret hospital, where they had nursed the wounded, driven supplies, mopped the blood off the floors, learned how to set a broken leg, suture, administer an IV, how to fire a rifle and a pistol. All this for some money and a place to live more than a decade ago. The doctors and the nurses paying them double if they were crazy enough to retrieve medicine from another hospital in the valley, racing the bombers.
What did it matter anymore?
The truth he knew tonight was that the vehicle that pulled up to recruit them could have been from the other side and they wouldn’t have cared if it meant, on that day, the promise of shelter and food. Because they were children who had nowhere else to go. And because, for what seemed like the first time, the people who had approached them had been kind.
He was suddenly tired again. It swept over him as he hurried past more signs, startling a rat who scurried on ahead of him. Prany crossed the first tobacco field, his eyes never leaving the house that now had half of its roof missing and most of the glass windows blown out. Smaller, more compact than he remembered, but looming all the same like the beacon that it had been when they used to race back with supplies in the dark, clinging to the tug of that one candle in the upstairs window in the backdrop of that flattened night landscape.
The courtyard had turned wild. And the fountain at the center was full of, mysteriously, soil. Rather than try the door, he hauled himself up through a window frame and slid in, reaching down to the dusty wooden floor. Always preferring an indirect way, as Alisak would have said. When Prany stood, he saw he had left a handprint in the dust. Like a single wide leaf.
He was in what had been a dining room and where they had placed more of the wounded when the ward was full. It was also where he had spied two doctors embracing each other one night, against a corner, the sudden need for that intimacy that could have had everything or nothing to do with attraction. How he could feel the urgency of that embrace from across the room where he had paused by the curtains, a bucket hanging from his wrist.
Always to his surprise, it was this house his mind had often leaped to these past years. Not the town, but here. The way he roamed the halls. Entered the rooms and opened drawers as though each held a mysterious treasure. The way they were all together. Wanting this place as though it were something he could endlessly carry with him.
He knew where he was. He knew every corner, every panel of flooring that sang and moaned. There were even a few paintings on the walls. It almost made him smile. So they didn’t take all of them. Still lifes of fruit. Ships in a port. A portrait of a girl that used to make him blush, her eyes always following him. Some of the arms of the high chandelier had broken off, as though someone had tried to swing from it.
Prany entered a room where there were more beds and a doctor’s coat hanging on a hook. He swung the coat on, the dust rising from its shoulders and floating in the moonlight. In a pocket, he found a folded piece of paper that he brought to a window. Som
eone had drawn a circle on it, in a decade-old pencil. Just that. He put it back into the pocket as though knowing it belonged only there, in a private memory.
He crossed into the foyer and climbed the wide stairs that were covered by a carpet that had thinned so much the threads tore with each of his steps. On the landing lay the carcass of a rabbit, shriveled to just its dark, mangy fur. The air coming in everywhere, thick with dust.
It could have been the middle of the night or closer to dawn. Prany had lost track of time. He didn’t know how much of it he himself had either. By now, someone would have long discovered the interrogator in the room. That young man or even the daughter, perhaps, her child.
This morning, he had woken with Vang in a cell narrow enough so that they could extend their arms and touch both walls that were stained and darkened by years of them doing this. This afternoon, they had pinned an old man down on a floor and they had done what they did, together. Every morning, he heard the shriek of a baton on cell doors and stood in his exhaustion and the hurt of his body. There was always the hurt. The recovery and the starting over again.
Now his body was heavy as sand, but he sensed a new focus as he walked down the wallpapered hall to the last room, where the door was ajar. He was beyond tired, to a point that seemed like clarity. He heard a noise downstairs, thought it must be the rat, and then he entered the room in the corner where they had often spent the hours.
An empty chair was pulled up toward the window. Outside, there was a view of his entire route through the valley. The bright night and the air coming in. As Prany crossed the room, stepping over a hole in the floor, he was already reaching for the piano, dust-covered, against the wall.
He lay awake, curled beside the hole in the floor. His body a dead thing for hours until the sun entered through the window and over him. He couldn’t remember if a day or two had passed. He had been trying to find a way into sleep. When he lifted himself up, his disorientation magnified, unmoored by the largeness of the room, the walls far away. For a moment, he forgot everything. It was almost like peace. And then he slid against a corner near the window and rocked back and forth until the shivering in his body went away.
His throat was on fire. His bones like ice. He doubled over and gagged, though nothing came out. His stomach hollow and raw as though someone had scraped it with a knife.
When he turned toward the morning, seeking the sun, Prany spotted a figure emerging from one of the stone jars in the distance: first an arm, then another, then a head—someone who had, perhaps, found something inside of the jar and was crossing the tobacco field. Only now in the light did Prany notice that some of the sticks they had staked into the ground had survived.
The figure ran across the field into the courtyard. Closer, he recognized that it was Khit. She avoided the front entrance as well, using the window, and from the corner of this second-floor room, he listened to her enter the way he had, the house giving in to her. He could picture clearly the rooms she was entering by the sound of her footsteps in relation to where he was, something they often did with Vang or with the nurses, always aware of where everyone was, always needing to be aware.
It took her some time to enter the piano room. When she did, she didn’t notice him. She stood in front of the instrument, opened the cover, and pressed down on a key. Then another. The notes, out of tune, lasted, filling the space.
“Play something for me,” Prany said.
She jumped. She jumped, he noticed, but didn’t turn. Then she did, slowly, considering him there shivering in that corner before playing some more notes.
He asked what she was doing here. Why she had followed him. Khit didn’t answer him immediately. She kept playing.
And then she said, “I don’t know how to save the money. To pay Auntie. To get out.”
“Where do you live?” Prany said.
“All over.”
“Not on the hill? The settlement? Where are your parents?”
“Mr. Vampire,” she said. “You okay? Is it your hand?”
She looked back at him in that corner.
“You ask too many questions,” Prany said.
“You’ve been asking the questions,” Khit said.
“You Thai? Hmong?”
“A little bit of everything.”
Then he asked again whether anyone was looking for her.
She shrugged. Her hands hovered over the piano keys. “What does it matter? I’m small and quick.”
“That’s you.”
“Yeah. And smart.”
“You survived because you’re small and quick and smart.”
“Last time I checked,” Khit said, and raised a fist in the air, approaching him. She stopped at the perimeter of the hole in the floor and sat down, slipping her legs into the space so that they vanished. “I like that coat,” she said.
“What did you find in the jar?” he said.
With her legs in the hole, she lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “My mother was brought here. She’d been injured. I was with my father; we couldn’t get to her. But I used to come here on occasion, after. I used to look for things that might belong to her, but I don’t do that anymore. It’s a strange house and I don’t like being here.”
“Then go.”
She stayed where she was, lying down. “Do you have food now?”
“Try the kitchen,” Prany said.
“I don’t like going down there.” She pointed into the hole but kept looking up at the broken ceiling. “Are you a bad man?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. Yes, I think I am.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“I think you should go.”
“Take me with you,” Khit said.
He remembered her. Just then, now. It was like she had surfaced from water and he had been there the whole time, waiting. He remembered her mother. The name. The ward. He remembered it all.
“Who are you?” Khit said. “Where have you been? What have you done?”
He wasn’t shaking anymore. He wiped his face and stood from the corner and walked past her to the piano. He knelt and popped open a panel on the bottom of it and reached up inside. She watched from the floor, upside down, as his fingers searched the inside of the piano for all the things they used to hide in there.
They stole from the dead. They took a ring or cut a piece of a shirtsleeve using a scalpel or collected a woman’s prayer beads and put these all into pouches and hid them, not really knowing why and not telling anyone—some compulsion the three of them were guilty of, inexplicably and secretly, with no further intention of doing anything to those objects other than to collect them, to hide them, and to keep them safe.
“You think I’ll get out?” Khit said. “One day?”
“You’ll get out. Now come help.”
He pulled out one pouch after another and they spent the morning opening them, sifting through all the things spread out on the floor for anything they wanted.
* * *
He waited a full day until it was night again. The girl slept the whole time, curled up by the hole in the floor. He had been drifting in and out, watching her. In what felt like the first time in years, Prany had briefly dreamed of Noi. She had come up on a motorbike and in one uninterrupted motion she had scooped him up, and before he understood what was happening, he was sitting behind her, leaning into her back, the two of them driving away.
He woke thinking of the curve of her arm that felt, when they were younger, like the greatest net. The suddenness of her care. Noi, who always entered his day like a door swinging open.
He heard a noise downstairs. Prany got up and stepped out quietly, softening the creak of the floorboards as much as possible as he followed where he thought the rat must have gone. The hallway continued past the main set of stairs, where there were other rooms with their doors closed. He ignored the rooms and headed straight toward the end of the hall, where there was another set of stairs, this one narrow and enclosed, and
he went down in the complete dark before he arrived in the kitchen.
In a wide crack in the floor, a fledgling tree was growing at the entrance. He moved around it, careful not to disturb the leaves. There was still an assortment of pots hanging from the ceiling, the night reflecting off them. Dried herbs a decade old were in a sealed jar. Animals had gotten into a grain sack, which was slumped in a corner with a hole near the base the size of his fist. In the far corner, near a bureau, stood a grandfather clock. If it was working, it was half past three in the morning.
He tried the faucet, heard it exhale. Then he went to a cupboard and collected what was left of the crackers and a can with its label missing. He searched for a can opener, pulling out the empty drawers, the room filling with the sound of the creaking wood.
The rat appeared, following the counter, and vanished under a faded tapestry hanging from the ceiling. The fabric fluttered like a sail, catching a draft. Leaving the can on the counter, Prany approached, pushed the fabric aside where there was the door, a thin horizon of light glowing at the bottom.
Prany was about to go in, but hesitated. He felt the draft on his ankles. Stared down at the light. He leaned against the door. Then he left the kitchen, headed to the wing where they used to keep the bikes, and stepped outside. He didn’t stop. He walked away from the house, skirting the field he had come in from, waiting for some sound or movement to break the horizon. Something to enter the valley.
It had all become this, he thought. All this time, it had never occurred to him that if he lived long enough to reenter the world, this new country, it would be empty.
He was still wearing the doctor’s coat. Its hem brushed against his calves as he stepped forward past a warning sign into a farther field that had yet to be cleared. When he shut his eyes, Prany saw the towels again, but it didn’t affect him as they had before. He clutched his ruined hand and breathed as he took another step. And then another, passing more warning signs.
