by Tatjana Soli
"Yeah. Not a war zone." He pulled back, irritated. "You know, I don't buy the 'weren't those the days' crap about the war. The war was shit, Saigon was shit, and we're lucky to be out of it alive."
"Sure." She could not share, after all, waking up in the middle of the night and pretending that she needed to get up for a mission, could not share her midnight patrols of the neighborhood with Duke.
"I gave you the benefit of the doubt over there. That you were out of your element."
"Have you heard from Linh?"
Robert was silent for a long minute. "A couple of times. He's on staff. I offered him a transfer, American citizenship to boot. He turned me down."
"I thought he married."
"Linh? No, that's not it. He's either patriotic or really patriotic, if you know what I mean. Darrow always joked that he was working for Uncle Ho's side."
"Whatever he is, I'd trust him with my life."
Robert said nothing.
"Do you remember that first night? When I left you at the restaurant? I thought you'd hate me, but you didn't."
"Didn't we go to some lousy Chinese place... in Cholon? I don't remember." But, of course, he did remember each thing from that night, and he had hated her, but it didn't hold.
"Remember Darrow saying they were lucky because there was always another war? I thought it was just macho posturing. But now I wish he was here so I could tell him I finally understand."
They got up and walked back to the boardwalk. The sky overhead black, a pale moon casting a sterile light on the water, on the houses in the hills behind them.
"There are plenty of twenty-year-old guys thinking they're immortal. You and I know better," Robert said.
"I'll take the assignment."
"Good girl."
She nodded and took his hand again, brought it to her lips. "Sometimes I wish I could just be back there an hour. Just enough so that I could really love all this again."
That night she opened the window while she changed for bed. After seeing Robert, she was confident that the dreams would come that night. She undressed in the dark, listening to the sliding of the ocean as she pulled the white, veil-like nightgown over her head. She put her hair back chastely in an elastic. Only then did she turn on the light, look at the pictures on the walls that were already in her head, then quickly turn the light back off. The dreams had begun to go away, and when they did come, they were less intense, and she found she needed to jog her memory before she fell asleep to meet Darrow again in that vast darkness. But instead of Darrow, the dream of the children came to her. She was kneeling this time, an unknown man beside her, lying prone, and the group of Vietnamese children approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but again when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Even while dreaming, she was trying to remember where the image had come from--it was a more threatening feeling than that day on the beach with Linh in Vung Tau--but she couldn't place it.
The rehabilitation center was down in the Wilshire district, and Helen circled the hospital block a few times, finally parking a quarter mile away at a coffee shop. The day was hot, the air crackling dry with Santa Ana winds, the usual smog-stained haze replaced by a sharpness that etched the trees and buildings on the landscape. Helen sat in the restaurant, her appetite lost in the smell of grease, floor wax, and disinfectant. She tried to focus on the assignment, to think of Lan as just another story.
She was late as she muscled her camera bags onto her shoulders in the parking garage and pushed through the pounding sunlight, the sour smell of hot asphalt under her feet. On the children's floor of the hospital, a whole platoon of doctors and therapists waited for her in their long, white, picture-ready coats. The head doctor on the case lectured about surgeries, using charts. His lab coat looked stiff and creased, as if it had just been taken out of a box. Samples of prosthetics had been laid out on a banquet table loosely covered by a long red tablecloth so that the display had the eerie feeling of an awards table, each flesh-colored appendage set apart and spotlighted from above.
"Where's Lan?" she finally asked.
"I thought you should see her progress first," the doctor said. He sulked at her lack of interest.
"How about I see her first," Helen said. "We'll talk after."
The room grew quiet, the doctor coughed into his hand. "Well then, let's go see her."
In a quick decision to brief her on the run, the woman psychologist walked alongside Helen. She was short and made a little skip every third step to keep up. Each time she spoke, she bit her lower lip as if the coming words might be bitter. They passed rooms filled with children. "Lan's by herself right now," she whispered. "She's had an aggression incident again with the other children." The woman narrowed her eyes so they disappeared in the flesh of her full cheeks. "That's not acceptable behavior. Biting."
"It wasn't ideal... her living conditions in Saigon."
"But we've saved her," the woman said.
"Actually we're the ones who hurt her."
The woman stroked her own cheek with a dimpled hand, as if the unpleasantness of Helen's words might bring on a rash.
At the end of the hall, she stopped and opened a door. At first the room appeared empty, but then Helen saw Lan sitting at a low table in the corner, shaping a ball of clay. The adults formed a semicircle around the table, but Lan acted as if she heard nothing, did not move her eyes from the clay figure in front of her. Impossible to believe she was the same girl from Saigon--now filled out with rounded arms and cheeks, glossy hair tied in ponytails with pink yarn, wearing a pink Cinderella T-shirt and pants.
"Lan?" Helen said. "Remember me?"
The girl looked up with a heavy, bored look, as if bracing herself for more unwanted attention. Helen moved closer, bent down to hug her. Her skin smelled sweet and medicinal, like cough syrup. Close-up, it was obvious that her face was bloated, her eyes dry and hard. Helen wondered what medications she was on. Lan's body remained limp in her arms.
Helen sat on a low plastic stool. The table was filled with toys, but Lan had attention for only the small ball of clay in her hands. She had the dull, listless behavior of an animal in the zoo. "You have a lot of toys," Helen said.
Lan grabbed her hand. "You bring me candy?"
Helen laughed, relieved at the shared memory. The doctors standing around them made her feel she needed to offer something up. "I brought her candy in Saigon."
Lan shook her head, impatient, with a sharp tilt of the chin. "Sam bring me candy. What you bring me now?"
"I came to take pictures again for the magazine."
Lan yawned. "I'm hungry."
The nurse stepped forward eagerly. "I'll bring you back some lunch, sweetie."
"I want hamburger," Lan said to her retreating back as the door swung shut.
Helen looked from Lan to the doctors. "Should we start taking pictures?"
"What are you giving me?" Lan shouted.
Behind her the doctors moved off, whispering and marking their clipboards. Under her breath, Lan began to sing a tune, the words getting louder until they could be clearly heard: " 'There was a little honey from Kontum/Boy did she ever like boom, boom....' "
"No," Helen said, bending down and hushing the girl. "Not in the hospital. Don't let them hear you." She felt a flush of parental embarrassment.
Lan shrugged and plucked at her hair, pulling out a few strands that she dropped on the floor.
"What do you want me to bring next time?" Helen said, figuring on bargaining with the child.
"A camera," she said. "Sam promised me a camera, and he lied and goes to die instead." The words froze Helen, and Lan noticed, becoming suddenly attentive. "He lied to you, too?"
"It was an accident, Lan. He didn't want to die."
"Mama says no accidents. I lose my leg because I was stupid girl."
"That's wrong. It wasn't your fault."
"I pick vegetables because they grow bigger
and more easy than walking around to safe place."
"It was an accident."
The nurse came back carrying two cafeteria trays of food and put one down in front of each of them. She winked at Helen. "If you two finish your lunch maybe I can find you a dessert."
Lan's face turned red, her brow furrowed. "My mama's right. No accidents. You're stupid."
Helen took a deep breath, suddenly tired of the whole idea of the shoot, the effort too hard; she just wanted to escape from the girl's craziness. "You like America?" Helen asked, bending down and taking a camera out of its case.
"I want that camera."
"This is mine. I'll buy you your own."
"I want to go home. Why can't my parents visit?" Lan shoved the tray of food across the table, sending it flying over the edge and onto the floor. "I hate chicken. Lan is special girl, eat anything she want." She jerked herself sideways on her stool, grabbing for the crutches against the wall, moving so quickly she lost her balance and fell.
Helen made no move to help her, and when Lan looked up and saw her sitting back, she cried louder as the nurse rushed forward and kneeled next to her.
"Don't touch," Lan screamed. "No touch me."
Helen's face beaded with sweat; she couldn't breathe, the commotion bringing back the low, dark Red Cross room in Saigon, the close smell of urine and unwashed bodies.
Images clattered one after another in her head. Helen rose on unsteady legs as if rising from a heavy, drugged sleep. No matter what she did, she could not escape, that much was clear. Even a dangerous talent better than nothing.
She longed for cool air and quiet. Lan's screams grew louder, more out of control, but Helen saw only the wounded children of Saigon in front of her, laid out on their beds sardine-style, the little boy in the courtyard eating bougainvillea blossoms. The camera in her hand shook. Lan rocked on the floor with the doctors kneeling around her like a wounded soldier attended by medics. Helen grabbed her camera bag and ducked out the door.
In the hallway, the cries muffled, Helen leaned against a cartoon rabbit painted on the wall and closed her eyes.
The nurse came out. "Sorry about that. Today's a bad one."
"She's done this before?"
"Oh yeah. Back and forth. Shell shock for kids. Not pretty."
"She wasn't like that."
"You don't look so good yourself. Why don't you lie down, and I'll get a doctor."
"That's okay." Helen moved toward the elevator.
"Aren't you going to say good-bye?" the nurse said.
"I don't want to upset her," Helen mumbled as the elevator doors opened.
"I can tell her you're coming back, right?" the nurse shouted, but Helen was already gone.
Helen and her mother walked below their house with Duke, along the crescent of beach where she had grown up; in the sand she took her first steps in, stumbling into her father's arms; along the water where she and Michael spent innumerable summers building sand castles while their young mother sat and talked with the other mothers and prepared sandwiches and Kool-Aid for their lunches. They walked under the limestone cliffs, Duke's gold body weaving in and out of boulders, where Helen and teenage friends had burned bonfires late at night and talked and drank warm beer, the whole point to pair off and go into the dark, lie back in the cool embrace of sand and explore with lips and tongues and hands, to allow a first kiss, hands under a blouse, a bra to be unhooked, gentle kisses and quick straightenings, and then return to the group at the fire, and all that sweetness, all those boys smelling of shampoo that would later be transformed into the shapes of body bags. They walked in the late afternoon, the sun saffron-colored, and Helen's mother cried, her face punched-looking, pale and blotched, hands clutching.
"I forbid it. No," she said. "It isn't fair."
"But it's no good," Helen said. "I don't belong anywhere else right now."
"No!"
"I need to go," Helen said.
They walked past families having early dinners, small children and dogs running and chasing, Duke running and chasing, around picnic tables piled with food, people laughing and talking, the same people they used to be, and Helen stumbled, something sharp against her ankles, her balance upset, and without thought she was diving sideways, facedown, pitching over her shoulder in a combat roll into the sand, and when she looked up she saw it was a piece of line pulled taut to a fishing pole stuck at the water's edge, and two frightened little boys turned from their dinners, afraid they were in trouble, and because it wasn't a trip wire, because it was not an ambush with a mine or a grenade or death at the end, Helen lost her control, sobbed and screamed and pounded her hands into the sand that had cheated her, that had cheated all of them, and her mother froze, a premonition, she did not know this strange haunted woman at her feet, her movements as foreign as that far-off, floating, green country, and seeing with her own eyes the death of her little blond-haired girl who was as dead now as her son, she realized she had lost them all, she was powerless against this thing called Vietnam. The people at the picnic table stared, silent. A large-bellied man with a sandwich in his hand hesitated and reluctantly began to approach them, Duke with a ball in his mouth ran along the water, and the young mother ran to her two boys, pressing them into her hips, the reality of the war creeping up the sand, invading, at last coming home.
FIFTEEN
Hang Hum Noc Ran
Tiger Den and Snake Venom--A Place of Danger
November 1968
It was a prodigal's return. Helen arrived in Vietnam at night; as the plane approached the darkened runway of Tan Son Nhut, the lights on board blackened to avoid rocket or mortar attack. Blind, she could only feel the magnetic pull of the place, dragging her back to earth, and she suspected it had exerted itself, however faintly, all the way to California.
She stood in the open doorway of the plane, unable to see anything in the pitch-dark night of the tarmac, the air shrill with the sound of jet engines revving for night runs. The physical weight of the heat and humidity made her feel like a fish being released back into water. She breathed in deeply, and the scent that had teased her in the States came to her, forgotten and familiar, a third-world emanation of jungle and decomposition, garbage and dinner and unwashed skin mixed with the fumes of sewers, diesel, and rain. Home.
In the chaos of the airport stood Linh, unchanged, as if their months apart were nothing. Her relief to see him in the flesh, as if she dreaded that he, too, had become a ghost, was so great she dropped her bags and ran to hug him, kissing his cheek.
He pulled away, embarrassed, and looked around to see who might have been observing. She had forgotten too much already; all the difficulties and barriers to life in Saigon had disappeared from memory in her rush to return. Linh handed her the golden scarf.
She took it and wrapped it around her neck. "I missed it."
Linh shrugged. "It was always yours. It waited for your return."
"Good to be back." She tried to hide her disappointment at the formality between them. When she had wired him announcing her return, she took his answer that he'd pick her up as approval.
She saw there had been a change in him, his face more tired and drawn than she had ever seen it. The war had not stopped simply because she went away.
"Is it really good?" he asked, and picked up her bags.
"Believe it or not," she said. "It's more terrifying there than here."
"I don't understand," he said.
They rode into the city in silence with a new distance. Without the barrier of Darrow, the easy camaraderie between them strained. Helen was very aware of Linh as a man, and her former playful intimacy, up to the kiss she had just given him in public, embarrassed her. Clear that they had had a unique window of friendship because of Darrow, and this allowed her to know him in a way that would not have happened otherwise.
Things appeared smaller and dirtier and shabbier than she remembered. The car idled at the mouth of the alley in Cholon, dawn just beginning to lig
hten the edge of the sky, the first merchants stirring. They walked single file to avoid the large puddle, Linh ahead, carrying bags, until they reached the crooked apartment, its worn, stained stucco and tipped blue roof, the faded Buddha door. Helen stood in the alley and looked up, and her heart flooded at the sight of the red lamp in the window. A guilty plea sure like smoking a cigarette after months of abstinence. Her vision swam. Unreal to accept that Darrow was gone when she felt his presence here stronger than she had in months. Nothing was the same and yet a teasing that one could rewind time.
"Did you marry, Linh?"
He watched her face, not able to guess her feelings. "No." He stopped, but when she remained silent he continued. "Thao fell in love with a mechanic. They married last year. She is expecting a child."
"I'm sorry..."
"I'm happy for her."
Helen seemed far from him. So far he feared he'd never reach her; he half-expected that she would know the imagined conversations he had with her in the intervening months, the intimacy gained in his thoughts. "Sleep and I'll come by in the afternoon."
"Stay and let's talk--"
"It's better to rest, I think. Be patient. Good night."
At the press briefings, Helen was surprised how filled the room was, how many unknown faces. New journalists jockeyed for information and packed the restaurants and bars. She recognized a handful of veteran reporters, and when she caught their eye, they nodded, unsurprised by her return. For those who had the appetite, it was as simple as wanting to be where the action was. For the first time in months, Helen felt she was where she belonged. Doing what she was good at. Being at the source of history in the making and not reading about it in the paper. But she noticed there was no more talk at the parties and restaurants and briefings whether the war was being won or lost. It had ceased to be an issue.
When she first went back to the magazine's offices, Gary met her with a big hug and stony silence.
"Come on," she said.
"You weren't supposed to come back."
"I missed you too much."
