The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  “Maybe you should go back,” Sam said quietly. “You can get closure.”

  “I will never go back.” My father slashed his index finger across his throat and made a guttural noise. “If I go back, they will call me a war criminal. They will put me in reeducation, and you will never hear from me again.”

  Sam pushed herself off the couch, rising before my ­father got started about what evil the Communists had done or would do. He would tell these stories for an entire evening. “Excuse me,” Sam said. “I have to use the bathroom.”

  After she left, my father turned to me and hissed, motioning to his belly and making a round curve in the air with his hand. I ignored him and got up to look around the living room for traces of a man. All I saw were the trappings of our life together. I’d given Sam everything when we divorced except half the money, but I hadn’t expected her to keep our mementos on display. Above the mantel were figurines of hula dancers from our honeymoon in Hawaii, and on a bookshelf were crystal paperweights in the shape of dolphins we’d bought in Puerto Vallarta. By the heater was the Robert Doisneau print I’d bought her in senior year, the black-and-white one with the man and woman kissing on a Parisian street.

  Next to the paperweights was a lacquered jewelry box etched with mother-of-pearl, which I assumed she’d bought in Vietnam. We’d talked often about visiting, but I’d never really wanted to go. I wasn’t even born there, my mother having given birth to me at a refugee camp in Guam, where my father named me after the American adviser who’d given him the compass watch. I didn’t understand what drew Sam to Vietnam, except maybe a need to find closure of her own. Perhaps she’d found it. She seemed happy when she brought out two envelopes of photos from her trip and told us the stories behind them. “A beautiful country,” she said, which was what everyone said about it. “Poor and hot, but beautiful.”

  Despite himself, my father grunted in pleasure as he studied the pictures. Sam had landed in Saigon and traveled north to Hue and Hanoi, with detours to Ha Long Bay and the mountains of Sapa. Most of these were places he’d only read about, since the war had kept his generation from seeing their own country. He passed me a picture of Sam on the deck of a boat, wearing a safari hat and a powder-blue North Face hiking jersey, the one I’d bought her for Christmas. Her freckles had faded to invisibility against her skin, pink from the sun, and she was leaning into a man with sandy-blond dreadlocks draped on his shoulders.

  “Is this the father?” I jabbed at the man’s face with my finger.

  She sighed. “Please don’t be stupid, Thomas.”

  “It’s just a question.”

  “You had a chance, Thomas. We had a chance.”

  My father said, “Excuse me,” got up, and walked out the front door without another word. After the door closed, Sam shook her head and said, “Neither of you has changed one bit.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “How have you changed, Thomas? Besides your haircut?”

  “You’re the one who’s changing.” My voice was loud. “You’re changing the subject.”

  “A woman can have a baby by herself.” Her tone of voice didn’t rise as it used to when we fought, but stayed subdued, as if weighed down by the unborn child. “A woman doesn’t need a man to be the father of her child, Thomas.”

  “You might as well say the earth is flat.”

  “Oh, my God.” She stretched the words out sarcastically, imitating the way the students spoke in her classes, the ones she used to talk about over dinner. “What century are you living in?”

  I wanted to ask her what a woman is without a husband, what a child is without a father, what a boy is without a man, but the questions wouldn’t come out. “Who’s the father?” I said.

  “You don’t have any right to ask me that.”

  Perhaps it was another teacher, or somebody she met on the Internet, or a stranger she got drunk with in a bar one night. Perhaps it was even some lucky Vietnamese tour guide. The thought of these other men made me drink the rest of the beer, not so much for the taste as to give me something to do besides throw the bottle into the television. When I was done, Sam got up and walked to the door, leaving me no choice but to follow. My foot was on the threshold when the unexpected sound of my name caused me to turn around, hopeful.

  “Don’t come back, Thomas,” she said. Over her shoulder, the television narrator was intoning about corporate pipelines and Nigerian strongmen. “You know it’s not good for either one of us.”

  My father was waiting for me in the Ford, smoking a cigarette from the pack of Camels I’d left on the dash. The stereo was on, and because American music didn’t please him, he’d brought along a CD of melancholic ballads sung by Khanh Ly. He liked to say that whenever he listened to her, it might as well be 1969 all over again. I got into the car and turned off the stereo. The street was empty and quiet, except for the hum of traffic from La Cienega and the barking of a dog somewhere up the hill.

  “That was a great idea,” I said.

  He tossed the cigarette out the window. “So did she tell you who the man is?”

  “She wouldn’t say.” I released the brake and eased the Ford into the street, lined with cars parked bumper to bumper. Halfway down the street, he said, “Stop.” Sam’s Toyota was next to us, pointing downhill with its wheels turned to the curb. The car was weathered and gray, and on the dusty rear window someone had drawn a frowning face.

  “Kill the lights,” my father said. He waited until I turned them off before he slipped out his Swiss Army knife and got out of the car. After walking once around the Toyota, he knelt down and braced himself against the driver’s side wheel well with his left arm, the knife in his right hand. He drove the knife hard into the tire, working the short blade against the rubber for several seconds until the incision was several inches wide. If the knife made a sound when it came out of the tire, I didn’t hear it.

  Once he’d repeated his work on the other three tires, he snapped the knife shut, stood up, and inspected the car with his hands on his hips. I looked over my shoulder, up and down the street, but the sidewalk was empty, and though some windows were lit with the blue glow of televisions, no one was looking out. When I turned back to the Toyota, my father was gone, and for a moment I’d thought he’d run away. But then he rose into my vision from the other side of the Toyota, a rock the size of a grapefruit in his hand. He hefted the rock over his head, paused to check his balance, and then hurled it at the car, throwing his whole body behind it. The windshield of the car cracked and buckled under the impact, but the sagging glass held, cradling the rock even as the echo bounced up and down the hill.

  When he climbed back into the car, I said, “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Just drive.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “Don’t turn on the lights until you get to the bottom of the hill.”

  I waited until I turned the corner before I flipped on the headlights and accelerated. “I don’t know you.” I banged the wheel with my fist. “I don’t know why anyone would do something like that.”

  “She’ll blame it on the blacks.”

  All the cars around us had black drivers.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “So why didn’t you say something?” My father leaned his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. “You should have rolled down the window and stopped me. You could have honked your horn, made people come to their windows.”

  We drove past the oil derricks, visible as shadows in the shape of gigantic pelicans nesting. Until Sam moved to Baldwin Hills, I hadn’t known Los Angeles even had oil. But I guess oil was to be found in every part of the world, just like anger and sorrow. A person only had to know where to look. I said, “No one has ever told you anything that would stop you, not from doing something you wanted.”

  “That’s because everything I’ve ever done I believed in.” The car hit
a bump on the entrance ramp to the Santa Monica Freeway, and he cursed, clasping his hand to his neck as if a bullet had grazed him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He opened his eyes. “I think I pulled a muscle.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “You wouldn’t know right from wrong.” There was no trace of anger in his voice. “The only way a man knows right from wrong is when he makes a choice.”

  “So was it right to cheat on Ma?” Far ahead of us, the sparse lights of downtown’s towers glittered. “Was it right to drive her to her grave the way you did? Do you believe you did the right thing?”

  My father sighed the way he did all those mornings of my childhood when he came into the living room and saw us asleep, or pretending to be asleep, hoping he might forget to drag us out of bed. I waited for him to clip me on the ear or sucker punch me for what I said, but he didn’t. He kept quiet until we were driving through downtown, when he said, “I never loved your mother.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “But I respected her,” he continued. “She was dutiful. She was a good woman. My father chose her for me because she was a virtuous girl, even though he knew I loved someone else. And this is why I never chose any woman for you. I wanted you to find a woman you loved.”

  “Don’t make this about me.”

  “Who else is it about?”

  He closed his eyes once more, and from downtown to the apartment, we didn’t speak again. When we reached his bedroom, I had to help him take off his shirt and lie down, holding him by the shoulders while he braced his neck and head. I saw the six-inch scar on his chest that I’d sometimes seen as a child, after he’d come out of the shower with a towel around his waist. Since he never told us anything about what he’d done in the war, we made up stories about how he’d been shot through the chest, or stabbed by the husband of one of his mistresses. The scar was a vivid bolt of red lightning in my memory, angled between his sternum and his heart, but in the dim light of his bedroom, it was only a pink zipper holding the rumpled, loose skin of his chest together.

  I found sleeping pills in a drawer of his nightstand, along with a bottle of eucalyptus oil and a box of Salonpas. “Take one,” I said, dropping a pill into his mouth. He swallowed it without water and I rolled him over, because even that act required a man to use the muscles of his neck. I splashed some of the eucalyptus oil onto his shoulders and neck and began massaging him. Soon enough he was breathing evenly, and once he was asleep, I bandaged him with the white strips of Salonpas, their medicinal scent reminding me of the times when he would lay them upon me after particularly hard mornings of exercise.

  After I was done, I picked up his shirt and opened the closet. The hanger was in my hand when I glanced at the shelf above the closet rod and saw my mother’s wig, resting on its Styrofoam head. What compelled him to save this, of all things, was beyond me. I hung up the shirt quickly and turned off the lights before I went to my room. There I lay in bed, listening for the police helicopters that cruised overhead almost every night or the Spanish rock that was always floating up from the crowded evangelical church down the hill. But everything was so strangely still and quiet, I thought I wasn’t even in my own apartment, and when I closed my eyes I saw the head’s oval face once again, marked by an arched nose and thin lips, its expression white, blank, and eyeless as it gazed down upon me.

  Late the following day, the police found my father’s Honda on a side street of Boyle Heights. The next morning, while I was sleeping between shifts, my father went with Mimi to retrieve it from the impound lot. They returned by the time I was awake and drinking my coffee, black and without sugar. My father was whistling a tune I didn’t recognize when he opened the door, Mimi trailing behind him. “Miracles do happen after all,” he said. “The car’s in one piece. The police think it was just stolen by kids looking for a joyride.”

  “Lucky you,” I said.

  “The little bastards even left me a gift.” He chuckled and showed me a cheap removable stereo in his palm, his movement stiff and awkward from his strained neck. “I guess they couldn’t stand the radio.”

  “The stereo’s probably stolen, too.”

  “If the police don’t have a problem with it, then neither do I.”

  After he went outside with a vacuum cleaner and rags to clean up the car, I was left alone with Mimi. She sat on the edge of the futon, wearing a purple satin tracksuit with clean white sneakers, hands folded on her lap as she smiled at me. The early morning sun coming through the living room windows reflected off the satin and illuminated her in the halo of dust floating up from the futon. Seeing her with my father made me think that perhaps Sam had made the right choice after all. Perhaps she was thinking of my father and mother when she divorced me. Perhaps she knew then what I know now, that they never should have married each other. The truth of the matter was that my father and mother should have married other people, even though, in that case, I might never have been born.

  “Sometimes I feel so sorry for you bachelors,” she said.

  “Mimi.”

  “My housekeeper does a great job,” she went on. “She’s looking for some more work in case you need help cleaning.”

  “Aunt Mimi,” I said. The coffee’s bitterness only made me aware of how dull my mind was.

  “She cooks, too, nearly as good as I can.”

  “You know he’s going to cheat on you, don’t you?”

  For a moment she said and did nothing, her expression unchanging. I thought she might not have heard me, or if she had, that she was too shocked even to react. Then she stood up, brushing away the cloud of dust with a wave of her hand. I expected her to say something, perhaps how she was not like my mother, but she didn’t say a word. Instead, she walked to the door without looking at me, her smile fixed on her face, and for a moment I believed she might just ignore me. But, with her hand on the doorknob, she stopped and turned to look at me.

  “Tell me something,” she said. The curve of her smile straightened into a thin, hard line. “Aren’t there times when you’d rather be someone else besides you?”

  I went to work. Then I changed my clothes and went to work again. Near dawn of the next day, I came home from night duty and was so tired that I wasn’t even aware of crossing the threshold of my bedroom and falling asleep, not until a staccato pounding woke me up after what seemed like only minutes. Someone was knocking on the front door. The alarm clock said it was seven thirty, and when I looked down, I saw that I was still wearing my pants. My shirt and shoes were on the carpet. I waited for my father to answer the door, but when the pounding only became more insistent, I had to climb out of bed.

  Whoever it was kept beating on the front door until I opened it. Sam was standing there, right hand raised and clenched. She was wearing an unbuttoned red cardigan over a black top and matching black pants made of stretchable wool. Her pregnant belly protruded over her waistband, and her top had ridden up, leaving an eye-shaped sliver of her flesh exposed. The navel at its center was like a pupil, its iris the gold belly ring she’d acquired in her freshman year one drunken night.

  “I didn’t know you had it in you,” she said, brushing by me.

  The sunlight behind her was blinding. I blinked and said, “What?”

  “My car!” She pivoted in the middle of the living room to face me. “I spent all day yesterday getting it fixed. How could you do that? How?”

  My watchman’s jacket was thrown onto the armchair by the door, and in the breast pocket was an envelope full of cash that I had gotten from the bank during lunch yesterday. My plan had been to slide the unmarked envelope under her door that evening. I took the envelope out of the jacket and offered it to her.

  “What’s that?” she said, arms folded above her belly.

  “It’s enough to pay for the car.”

  Sam looked at the envelope for a moment
and hesitated. I kept myself very still. If I so much as shook the envelope or said another word, she’d refuse it and curse me on her way out. While she was making up her mind, the sight of her belly ring and the smooth, tight canopy of flesh it rested on transfixed me. I wondered if she’d named the baby yet, if she knew its sex, and, above all, if she’d told the man who was going to be the father.

  “When I saw what you’d done to the car, part of me wanted to kill you,” Sam said, taking the envelope. “But another part of me thought you cared in some strange, screwed-up way that was completely your own.”

  I stepped forward and put my hand on her belly.

  “Mostly I wanted to kill you,” she said, frowning.

  I leaned closer and put my other hand on her belly, the navel and the ring between my two hands. I waited for the baby to kick or to turn over in the womb, and when nothing happened, I knelt down and placed my ear against Sam’s belly. There was a life hidden there, a life that if I were to hold it in my hands would weigh almost nothing. When I spoke, it was so softly that only the stranger curled up behind the belly ring could hear. Then I said it once more, louder: “I can be the father.” Feeling Sam’s hand grip my shoulder, I said it a third time, just to make sure they both heard me right.

  “Stand up, Thomas,” she said. “I want you to stand up.”

  I stood up. We faced each other, her belly buffering us.

  “Do you know what you’re saying?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” I said. Sam bit her lip and looked down, but she didn’t back away. I saw a pattern of three age spots by her jawbone. They had not been there the year before, when we had drawn up the divorce agreement with pen and paper, without lawyers and with a bottle of wine. I traced the slope of her cheek to the jaw, where the age spots were arranged like the dots on a die. A floorboard creaking in my father’s room announced that he had crept out of bed and was undoubtedly standing against the door. Sam and I turned our heads to the sound, but we heard nothing more. He was waiting, just like us, for what was to come.