Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  White, like an infirmary ward, like mourners at a funeral, like heaven.

  But what Maia craved was blank white space. The knots in her stomach had tightened and an ache swelled at the nape of her neck. She felt restless yet weighted down. She thought of shutting her eyes to clear her head before slipping off to the Central Highlands. Twenty minutes to the Liên Tỉnh Express Bus Station. She would take a xích lô. No regular bus schedule. When a bus filled up, it would take off. Phoenix Pass before nightfall.

  “I need a nap,” she said and settled on the bed beside the windows where No-No was batting at the white curtains.

  Na wanted to go for a swim and disappeared into the bathroom to change into her skimpy neon pink bikini. They could hear her humming a song about clouds’ illusions.

  JP retrieved the tube of sunblock from his pack. He squeezed the lotion into his palm, spread it on both hands, and applied it on his face, neck, chest, and arms. He pulled off his T-shirt. The tattoo on his upper arm was now barely visible under his tan. “Could you put some on my back?” He handed Maia the Hawaiian Tropic and sat at the edge of her bed. The scents of coconut oil, plumeria, and passion fruit filled the room. Under her hands, his muscles felt taut then relaxed. “Hmmm . . . It’s the first time you’ve touched me.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Don’t stop.”

  “Now that I’ve touched you, I have to kill you.”

  “Okay. Before that—” He unzipped his khaki pants.

  “No. Oh no. Wait!”

  “I have swim trunks underneath.” He lowered his pants. “Come with us for a swim,” he said. No-No had stopped clawing the curtains. His nose twitched and wrinkled, sniffing the air. Finding the fragrance on JP, he licked and gnawed him.

  “Okay, done.”

  “I’ll put some on you.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “What are you afraid of?” He turned to look at her. “Are you still angry at those old men at the train station?”

  The room seemed whiter. The orange fur ball rolled between them, purring and snuffling at the Hawaiian Tropic. She gazed into eyes like clear turquoise waters. Waves undulated, rippling. Their breaths, shallow and warm.

  “I’m not afraid,” she said and fell back onto the bed, closing her eyes.

  “Mai,” Na called, coming into the room. “You sick?”

  “Shhhhh!” JP hushed. “C’mon, Na.”

  Footsteps pattered on cement floor. The doorknob turned, the door squeaked open, and then closed. Through the window, she could hear JP’s low voice and Na’s laughter. The wind blew the scent of suntan lotion from the room. Voices faded. No-No curled up on the windowsill. She pulled the bleached sheet over her body and curled beneath it, listening to the waves rolling and crashing against the shore. White, like illusions of clouds. She visualized white empty space and saw turquoise waters. She breathed in and out. Her hand reached for the jade locket around her neck. She clicked it open and touched its cool hollow inside.

  Off the coast of Vung Tau, she had scattered ashes like sand from her jade locket, gone in the wind over the South China Sea.

  But the urn was empty.

  Xuan’s gaze was steady. “We’ve placed your father’s remains where they belong,” he said. His eyes squinted against the wind. He seemed nonchalant.

  The small rickety boat sailed past the Con Dao archipelago. The fisherman was relieved not to go farther and turned back toward land.

  That last night in Vung Tau, they drank tea with the clam pickers on the back beach. Maia served Xuan and the Public Security Trio hot cups of herbal brew from the nuns on the Isle Pagoda. They needed it, she thought—a deep oblivious sleep.

  At daybreak, the four men slept, legs dangling from the hammocks, mouths opened wide and eyes closed shut.

  Maia, Na, and JP carrying No-No made their escape.

  In the morning grayness, a ball bouncing back and forth woke Maia from a heavy sleep since the afternoon before. The beds had been pushed together under a single mosquito net that billowed like clouds with the sluggish turning of the rattan ceiling fan. Beside her, Na and JP slept, bodies in tertwined. Curling at their feet, No-No stirred when Maia left the bed. He yawned and arched his back, all the while watching her change into the yellow đồ bộ. He sidled up to her and circled her legs with his tail. When she gathered him up and pressed her face into his, he wrinkled his nose and pushed all four paws against her. He slipped from her arms and through the window into the gray light.

  “Goodbye, Pōpoki.”

  She collected her things and secured her bag. She glanced at the sleeping forms, still shifting and entangled in each other’s dreams. JP’s journal lay on the nightstand, a pen wedged midway between the pages. She picked up the journal and moved toward the windows for light, thinking she should leave a note. Instead of writing, she peeked at the entries on the places they had been, curious scribble and unfinished sketches. She was again arriving at the airport at noon, this time from another viewpoint. She was intrigued by the observations of things she had not noticed. Marginal notes on one page and parallel curving lines on the next conjured flickering light in grayness. She saw a figure stoking ashes to find embers.

  Outside, a single bouncing ball became many, pulling her attention from JP’s travelogue of juxtaposed images and askew details. She peered through the window. The boulevard was packed with people playing soccer, badminton, and đá cầu. The sounds of shuttlecocks rocketing off badminton racquets, soccer balls against bodies, and the calls of celebration mingling with defeat filled the morning. On the sand across the boulevard, a group of women in their sixties and seventies moved their arms and bodies in slow fluid motions, mirroring the continuous extension and re treat of the shoreline. They stood facing the horizon where a bright orange sun beckoned.

  Maia replaced her bag under the bed, left the room, and walked past the xích lô parked beside the motel, heeding the pedalers who were still sound asleep in the passenger seats. She crossed the boulevard and stood on the sand under the coconut palms several feet from the women whose movements rose and fell with the ocean waves.

  “Thái Cực Quyền,” a teenager said, coming up to her. He raised his thin arms exaggeratedly in a Tai Chi pose of a white stork flapping its wings. His grin ended in a yawn. He knotted his tousled hair into a bun, exposing a dent imprinted across his cheek where he had leaned against a bar while sleeping. “Mothers from the North,” he explained. “They’re looking for their children’s remains in the South.” He pointed to the group’s transportation, a Soviet vehicle with Cyrillic script still detectable under yellow paint. “I pedal xích lô. Need a ride somewhere? A beautiful sunrise from the towers?”

  “No.”

  He chanted a hymn to Mother Earth:

  Born from the puff in the sky and the fluff in the sea,

  Ninety-seven husbands and thirty-nine daughters,

  Creator of Earth, trunk of eaglewood, aroma of rice.13

  He crossed the street. “Come, before the sun is high!” He disappeared through the crowd and returned minutes later, pushing a rickety beat-up bicycle. “My xích lô needs fixing.”

  The boy took her on his bicycle down Tran Phu Boulevard along the South China Sea. They turned left on Yersin Street and then right on April Second. Heading north, they crossed the Cai River. They were strangers though she did not feel strange, sitting close to him on the rear rack, her arms around his thin waist. She could smell the sweat and hear his breathing when the road sloped up. On flat land, he pedaled easily and talked as if they were longtime friends.

  Across the Xom Bong Bridge, they arrived at the ancient towers on the hilltop erected by the first people. There had been eight structures, but only four remained. Except for some remnants of old masonry coated under layers of lichen, most of the towers had been rebuilt recently with concrete and red bricks. They climbed atop the boulders behind the four towers and looked down over the bridge. The sun rose higher and painted the thatched huts and fis
hing boats along the river in an orange light that reflected off the water. As the wind blew, she felt the delicate fabric of her yellow đồ bộ against her skin, and images from JP’s travelogue entered her mind. Lines blurred and spaces opened. She stood in the sanctuary of Mother Earth, momentarily transfixed in the morning glow of her childhood home.

  Homing

  AS SOON AS they could fly, her father wanted to release the pair of squabs he had rescued on a gusty rainy night. In the frigid Philadelphia winter, he cracked open the window of their third-floor apartment and shooed the fledglings away, but they always returned. They paced the narrow window ledge, gawked sideways through the pane, and cooed until he let them back in. They were rock doves that flocked the City of Brotherly Love.

  Windblown from their nest in the tall steeple of the St. Thomas Aquinas Church, the squabs were a few days old when found. No feathers, only yellow down covered their young awkward bodies. In months, the male grew big with sleek gray feathers, black-checkered wings, and blue iridescence around his neck. The female remained small and dark. The pair had distinct personalities. The male strutted with his puffed-up chest, pecked quick and hard, and cooed thunderously. The female was timid, quiet, and observant of their surroundings. They hung together, preened each other, and nestled on a corner bookshelf at night.

  During the day, the birds followed her father everywhere in the rented studio and greeted him at the door when he came home. In the summer months, he opened the window for them to freely fly away and return. The squabs became mama and baba to squabs that left, but Mama Nàng and Baba Chàng stayed. They built many nests in the third-floor home.

  The pair seemed as enchanted with reading as her father. Whenever he reclined in bed with a book, the male would perch on his shoulder, the female on his chest. In the morning, the threesome practiced English.

  Good morning, Chàng!

  Coo roo-c’too-coo!

  How are you today, Nàng?

  Coo roo-c’too-coo!

  Today we’ll learn the verb to be.

  Coo roo-c’too-coo!

  In the afternoon, they peered at the diagrams and instructions in his auto mechanic manuals. Their nights were filled with self-help guides and the world’s classics.

  Born into the First Indochina War and conscripted into the second, her father longed for a time when he did not fear for his and others’ physical survival. With the war seemingly in a distant past, he lost himself in stories that illuminated what life should be. He imagined living as humans should. In the twilight of Philadelphia evenings when he took flight with these ideals, forgetting the heaviness of his body, the rock doves were his companions. In those moments when he believed freedom could be attained in living, he felt at peace.

  The pair followed her father and Maia when they moved to another apartment, where there was more space for the used books he accumulated from library giveaways and thrift store sales. Their new place was on the ground floor on which the kitchen opened to the backyard, a narrow concrete enclosure adjacent to an alley where the neighborhood cats roamed. The kitchen door was often left ajar for the birds to come and go freely. In the first week, the male went missing for several days, but he returned. In a letter to Maia’s mother, her father wrote that the male got lost and the female led him home.

  Soon after that incident, her father found a sleek gray feather on the kitchen floor and suspected the alley cats were on the hunt. He built a makeshift cage out of an old shopping trolley to keep the birds safe at night. The cart was forty-two inches tall, and twenty-four-by-eighteen inches wide, with gaping openings. He ran wires through the openings to narrow the gaps. He removed the two wheels and secured the trolley in a corner of their backyard. Each night before bed, he whispered, “Good night, Little Bird. See you in the morning, Little Bird.” He put the pair in their cage.

  In hindsight, it was the perfect trap.

  One morning, they found only the female and the remains of her mate’s feathers.

  Operations

  XUAN WAS WAITING at Clouds Motel when Maia returned from the sunrise. He leaned against the yellow chrysanthemum planter, his weight on his right side, and his left foot turned slightly in. He was clasping a small brass container close to his body. He shifted when he saw her and limped slowly forward, dragging his left foot. Closer, she saw a muscle quiver at the corner of his left eye.

  “Enjoying yourself?” he asked. He held out the brass container, an ancient imperial dragon. “Your father’s ashes,” he said. “It was placed at Ox Pagoda the morning we made our offerings before Vung Tau. I’ve retrieved it—a different urn, but your father’s ashes.”

  She did not reach for it.

  He continued to hold the dragon in mid-air, fingers gripping its raised camel-like head and curling ribbon tail. “If you wish, we can arrange another sea burial.”

  She walked past him toward her room.

  “Come back to Ho Chi Minh City,” Xuan said.

  She glanced at the xích lô boy standing by the motel’s entrance. He would wait to take her to the Liên Tỉnh Express Bus Station for five thousand đồng.

  “The Central Highlands are closed to foreigners,” Xuan said quietly, keeping a distance between them.

  Out of nowhere, fat Pâté and Cross-eyed Lai reappeared, more robust than she remembered, but there was no sign of Comrade Ty. They flanked her and gripped her arms.

  “Get your things. You must come with us.”

  She tried to wiggle from them, ripping her shirt. They released their grips.

  At the doorway, No-No meowed and lashed his tail.

  Pâté and Lai paced around the chrysanthemums, the round buttons on their public security uniforms glaring under the sun.

  Maia reached down and scratched the cat’s damp, sticky hair. Pâté and Lai stopped their pacing. She unlocked the door to an empty room and saw a note on her bed. She recognized the page torn from JP’s travel journal. Pâté and Lai were at the door. She slipped the note into her pants pocket.

  When the men escorted her from Clouds Motel, the xích lô boy remained in his passenger seat, eyes hooded. A few feet behind, No-No trotted with tail curled upward, sniffing here and there along the path.

  The public security station was a redbrick square near the open market. A hushed conversation about her affiliation ensued when they took her in. Xuan ordered the chief công an to lock her up. He limped from the room with the dragon clutched to his chest. Pâté and Lai followed.

  “She with the group caught at the border?”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Well, this one entered through Tan Son Nhat. Why was she let go?”

  “On Tết, a Vietnamese male carrying a U.S. passport was stopped at the airport.”

  “An IVC member, wasn’t he? Whatever happened to him?”

  “Shot by a firing squad of seven.”

  “No, it was lethal injection. Didn’t even feel it.”

  “With the three-drug protocol? Isn’t there a shortage with the trade ban?”

  “They used domestic poisons.”

  “Are those reliable?”

  “Do you know what’s uncostly and unfailing? The guillotine.”

  “The country would be filled with bloody ghosts demanding their heads. With lethal injection, the dead are pain-free and unmarked. The heart just stops.”

  The men confiscated her bag and took her to a six-by-ten-foot cell, secured with a rusty padlock and chain. The inside was dark except for holes and slits of sunlight that fell through the cracks. A heavy musty smell of wet earth hung in the air. She groped for the only object against the far wall. The narrow plank bench creaked when she sat down. She saw outlines of passersby and their feet through the gaps in the door and space underneath—shiny black shoes of public security, ladies’ heels, baby sandals, flip-flops, and muddy bare feet. People stopped to peer in before continuing to the morning market.

  She was troubled by the men’s exchan
ge in the office and by Xuan and the urn. She almost believed him that it held her father’s ashes. She played on his respect for the dead and knew he would act his part. She sensed that he would not hurt her, but fat Pâté and Cross-eyed Lai were a different story. Was it possible that they were all in on it?

  She waited. She told herself not to panic. JP and Na would come.

  She remembered the note hours later when the sunlight faded into late afternoon and the surroundings were quiet. She retrieved the torn page from her pants pocket, unfolded it, and tried to make out JP’s scribble in the dark.

  Maia—Where are you? Na & I waited but we had to leave early for the dock to take a ferry to the Swift Isle. Tonight, we’ll be at Love City Café. We were there last night while you were sleeping. Guess who we ran into? Xuan and the Public Security Trio, except they’re no longer a trio—Comrade Ty is no more. Pâté and Lai sang backup for Na, and the café’s owner wanted them back for a group audition. He liked the harmony of their distinctive voices. I suggested they call themselves “Na and the Hi-Los.” The café was swarmed with American vets, Taiwanese businessmen, and local government officials. Everyone wanted to feel Na’s big hair and touch her smooth lineless palms. If we don’t catch up earlier, see you at Love City? By the way, did you know that the Camel-less Troupe is also in town? Apparently, we all caught the same Reunification Express.—JP

  Na and JP wouldn’t miss her tonight. Maybe Xuan would come. How did he know she was going to the Central Highlands? If he’d suspected, wouldn’t he have stopped her earlier? He’d asked her to return to Ho Chi Minh City.

  Perhaps at a different time and place, they’d head south on a daytime train, or ride it northbound on the brim of the South China Sea, as JP said Theroux did in The Great Railway Bazaar. They wouldn’t stop at the capital but cross the Red River into China at Lang Son. They’d ride to Beijing, to Manchuria, where at Harbin, they’d go east into the former U.S.S.R. They’d catch the Trans-Siberian Express at Ussurijsk, north to Chabarovsk, then westbound for France. In France, Xuan would perfect his French and meet a Parisian girl of Vietnamese descent. He’d use his middle name, Vinh, for honor and glory, or he might just keep Xuan—spring in Paris.