The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  But on that first night of this return to Vietnam I lay on the bed and I knew it had never been that way for me, not with Kim, not with Mattie, not with a few others, and it could never be that way with the woman out there on the back of the motorbike. But I also knew I was in Vietnam because of a desire just like that one you can have about sex, the desire for things to be whole. And I know now how that desire got stuck over here, how it failed to make it onto the plane back home in 1967.

  It was out somewhere along Vietnam’s Highway One. I came to the war and I was driving trucks and that was going to be okay, I was driving in the Saigon area, from Newport, the place where the supplies came in by ship, to the dispersion points around the area and it was going to be okay for me, and I thought the biggest danger I faced was running over somebody in the goddamn streets of Saigon, where there was just chaos, it seemed to me, where everybody just swarmed and there was only that. But in 1966 there was a big rush of stuff into the country and lots of new units and I found myself driving a deuce-and-a-half in a convoy up Highway One in the direction of Phan Thiet. It was hot and the cab of the truck was full of the smell of diesel because I was just a couple of vehicles back of our lead ACAVs, the armored cavalry assault vehicles, which had the dirtiest damn engines in the world, waving thick tails of smoke. I couldn’t see what was on the sides really, a rubber plantation for a ways, I remember, the thin trunks cut and bleeding latex, and then rice paddies and a distant tree line, and then red earth, brick kilns along the way.

  Highway One was a long road and I wanted to take it in and maybe parts of me did, but I mostly had to keep my eyes on the truck in front of me and the trail of smoke, and there was always the smell of diesel, a smell it would take me years to finally connect to other things, to the smell of oranges and nights on the California coast when nothing was going to come out of the trees to try to kill me. And somewhere along the way the day ripped open with a sound like the air was made of tin and was shearing and then clanging and we stopped dead and there was a roar of tiny sounds all cluttering together and then a hard ping off my hood and I was sitting transfixed and then the truck in front of me scooted sideways and there was a flare at the front of it and I saw an ACAV hustle itself to the right, into the scrub off the side of the road. Now I knew to go down under the steering wheel and I pressed at my shoulders to turn me and a little puff of white skittered across my hood and I was pushing hard at my own body focusing somewhere up around my shoulders trying to go down, go down to a place where I could not see the glass around me which held a bright flash of the sun which was somewhere out there watching all this and the glass also held a dim image of my face, I could see my own eyes looking at me going down toward the seat, falling but not very fast at all and this puzzled me why I was suddenly so slow. And there was another ping and splash of sound, glass, and I was down on the seat and I thought I was there of my own free will, not hit, and my body was cold but there was no pain anywhere and there wouldn’t be, I was okay, and then the ACAVs began their mad minute—the vast sky-wide cry of cannon and machine gun—and I knew that the tree line, where the others were, would shred and dissolve now and my head pounded with the sound.

  And I saw only one dead body.

  No. Not dead. It’s odd I should remember him as dead, though he probably died later. But he was alive when I saw him, alive and standing just off the road next to his truck. The fight was over. Suddenly I could hear the shallow little pulse of my own breath, fast now, so fast I was going dark behind my eyes. I dragged myself up and I was sitting and I gripped my steering wheel and tried to slow down inside. A sunburst of cracks was before me in the window and my breath slowed and settled, and then there began a slow beat, like great wings, flapping in my chest, and outside, cut by the cracks, was a deuce-and-a-half angled off the road and the cab was twisted and smoldering and the flapping in me felt like it would lift me up now and I had to deal with this breathing thing one more time and I wanted to open the door and maybe get out but I didn’t have the strength right then and so I put my face into the open door window and he was out in the scrub by the road, just a few yards away from his truck. There was no horror to this for me. Not like you’d expect. When I’ve dreamed of him, the few times I have since 1966, it’s been with a sadness that had nothing to do with his body, or even to do with him at all. He was a young guy, my age at the moment I was looking at him, twenty or so, a blondish guy I never saw before, though I think he’d been driving that deuce-and-a-half ahead of me. He was standing upright there in the scrub dressed in fatigue pants and a green tee-shirt and his right arm was gone. Just ripped away somehow and he was looking down at the place where it had been a few moments ago and he had this knot in his brow. He wasn’t making a sound and he was standing there by the road as if every­thing was okay but he just suddenly realized, with a kind of serious puzzlement, that he wasn’t all there. That’s what the dream has been, the few times I’ve dreamed of him. He’s looking at himself with that quizzical expres­sion and I look down at my own body and I find one arm and then the other and I have both my legs and though I think I can be sure that I have every part of my body, I know I’m not complete.

  I try not to think of my father at that moment when Ben’s lips first touch mine. But the smell of the incense of my father’s shrine is very clear to me and I try to hold that smell away from me and it is very hard. I have lit the slen­der tips of the incense a thousand times for him, more, five thousand times perhaps—every night since I was ten years old—and it is not easy to pretend that this smell is not here, that his soul is not here, but I want only to feel the touch of Ben’s lips. And little claws of panic are bur­rowing deep into me in the place between my breasts where his hand touched me moments ago. I think: I am missing my first kiss with Ben. I concentrate on the soft touch of his mouth. I press my mouth harder against him and his lips open mine slightly and he is touching the in­side of my lip with his tongue and I am forgetting now, forgetting the past, I am touching Ben and I am not ex­pecting what is next. I feel suddenly his hand on my bare stomach and then it slides down and inside my pantaloons and I yield to him as easily as the silk and his hand goes to that place between my legs.

  There are many things that I do not fully understand about my body. I know the ways of understanding from before the revolution: a woman’s body was given to a man by her parents and it was to make children for him. I know the ways of my mother: a woman’s body was something of such little value to her that it could be sold to any man. But the ways of our leaders now are not very clear. We are to be modest about our bodies because they are to be given to the service of the state. I think in order to make children for our country. Something like that. There were words about these things at first when the country was finally made one. That was in those early years when the streets of Saigon were thick at night with darkness except for a few scraps of fire in a gutter, a kerosene lamp burning down an alleyway. And there was such a terrible quiet. I sometimes wish in this era of our country that the motorbikes would stop outside in the streets, but they are better than the silence. I can wake at three or four in the early mornings now and it is quiet but it is quiet from a sound that was there only a few hours ago and will come again soon, it is still not like those years when the sun went down and there was no electric light and there was the smell of wood fire and a little kerosene and there was no gasoline and there was only the faint click of bicycle chains and we all whispered to each other. In those years I think a woman’s body was intended to make children for our great socialist state, but now I do not know. The lights returned and the sounds, but I do not know where our bodies are.

  When I met Ben, before he touched me for the first time, I crouched in my bathroom one night and I sponged my naked body and I began to tremble. It must have been because of him. He had been in the other room that very day and I had served him tea and now he was gone, but something of him remained, like a faint scent of smoke, and I was nak
ed and this part that he would soon touch felt as if it had begun to pout, like a child, pout from being left out of something she wanted very much to do. I stood up and I was still wet from my bath and I was naked. I moved to the little mirror and I could see only my face and my throat and only a little of my chest, not my breasts at all. I was modest still, in this great socialist state, modest even to myself in my own bathroom.

  The mirror hung with a cord from a nail and I touched it with my fingertip just at the bottom and it moved and my face disappeared and my breath caught when I saw my own nipples like this, before me, apart from me, and it was because of him. I tipped the mirror farther and I could see the little dark flame of hair coming up from that secret place between my legs and I let the mirror go and my face rushed back and quaked there and I remembered my grandmother’s question, and though I saw only me in the mirror, I did not feel alone: I had seen my nipples, my secret place, as he would someday see them, naked before him. And here was my face as he would see it. I tried to smile for him, but the pouting between my legs was very strong, and I had to stop because it was becoming painful now, this pleasure, this yearning.

  I dried myself and I covered myself with a silk robe and I lay down on my bed. And I thought that if I ever had a baby I would wish to have a girl, though my husband would certainly want a boy. If my husband were a Vietnamese. I blushed at this. This thought carried the possibility that I would not marry a Vietnamese and I knew who I meant. I wondered if American men wanted only boys or if they could love a girl child too. I would raise her as a good daughter of a great socialist state but I would do the old ways, as well.

  In Vietnam we worry about a child, if it will live very long. My grandmother told me how in the countryside, for the first month, the mother would remain in bed with her baby and the baby was wrapped tight in its bedclothes. The baby would be held safe from the sun and the rain and the winds and from those in the spirit world who would take her away with them. Then at one month old the baby would be brought into the sunlight and everyone in the village would gather around and they would take a white jasmine flower made wet from special water from the altar in the pagoda and they would hold the flower over the baby and a drop of the water would fall into the baby’s mouth. This would make the baby’s words sweet as the scent of jasmine all her life.

  I asked my grandmother if that was done for me and she shook her head sadly and she said, “No, I tell you this thing because as you become a woman of Vietnam you should know this for your own child someday.”

  I was sad when she said this. I wished to speak with words sweet as jasmine, but I could not. Perhaps I should not be sad about this, in this modern Vietnam, working in the job that I do. Perhaps I am better off this way. But I would want this thing for my own daughter. I lay on the bed on the night I saw my body through Ben’s eyes in my mirror and I dreamed of my own child, and this was so foolish, I realized. I did not know this man, this man I was already thinking of marrying. But that has always been the way of my country. In the old customs, the parents made the choice for their child and the woman met her hus­band only after they were betrothed. Is that so very dif­ferent from this? I sat with Ben and I made tea for him and he knew about the spirits of the ancestors and he spoke gently to me and I loved his face with its dark eyes and dragon’s jaw. So I thought of how I would let a drop of water fall on my daughter’s lips.

  Though the memory that had come upon me did not stop. I asked one more question of my grandmother when she taught me this necessary thing about being a Vietnamese mother. I asked, “Did you do this for my mother?”

  She seemed a little surprised at this question, though she should not have been. “Yes,” she said.

  I was thirteen or fourteen years old at that time and my mother had been gone for a while and I was glad she was safe and I wished she was dead and I was happy she had the drop of jasmine water on her lips when she was a baby and I was angry she did not give me this precious thing. And then I thought of something that made me question it all. It was this woman, my mother, who had received the precious water. “So it must not work,” I said. My mother had spoken some sweet words, I suppose, but none that I could remember, and certainly not all of her words for her whole life, and even if her words to all the men had sounded sweet to them, surely that was not the point of this tradition, to sweeten the words of a prostitute for the men who would buy her body.

  Still, as I lay on my bed, with Ben just behind all of my thoughts, I decided that when the time came, I would go to a pagoda and put the precious water on a jasmine flower and let it fall from there onto the mouth of my child. She would have this thing that I never had. And she would have a mother who was not forced to flee and never return. And she would have a father.

  A father. I lay on my bed and my body felt things it had never felt and I dreamed of a child, and who was the fa-ther in this dream? An American. Did I imagine he would stay in Vietnam and we would live in this room where I grew up? Did I imagine I would leave Vietnam and go to America? No. I did not imagine anything except a child in my arms and Ben nearby. All the rest did not exist. I did not even think of Ben touching me. Not directly. My body dreamed of that in its own way, quaking and swelling and trembling, but in my head was only a jasmine flower and a drop of water and a child and she was beautiful and her eyes moved to mine and I could see my-self there, as in tiny dark mirrors, and then I felt another thing in my body, a flexing, a fierceness, and I wanted things for her and in that wanting I grew angry. I thought, Was it really for me that my mother stayed away? Things are different now in Vietnam. She could come to Ho Chi Minh City and she could come to the very street where she lived and she could find me in the very place where her own mother once lived and no one would harm her. The government does not care about that now. They do not care about the whores of the Americans. Is it really for my sake that she has never returned? Or is it for her own? Did she grow tired of her child?

  Or is she dead. Did she die for my sake. She was right to keep my American self hidden. The children who were clearly the sons and daughters of Americans were difficult for us all to understand after the nation was made one.

  But that was because the hearts of these children were still American. They still wanted the things of that country. My government believed this and they sent those children to America, where they might be happy. I was never like those others. I could keep my American self hidden because it never really existed. It died with my father even before I was born. I had no father. There was never a father. His blood was spilled before I was born and it spilled from me as well, even in my mother’s womb. His blood was gone. But did my mother’s blood fill me in its place? Or am I a cup half full?

  I thought these things on my bed on the day Ben was first here and I opened my robe and I was naked and I looked to the mat where he drank tea and I had filled his cup many times and he drank and my own cup sat before me full and growing cold. I did not think of myself. I was very happy sitting there and filling his cup and watching him drink what I had brought him. And my body in its nakedness yearned now and I understood that yearning and I knew I wanted him to touch me, as if I was the lucki-est of arranged brides in the whole history of Vietnam, as if my mother and my father had chosen for me a most beautiful man and he and I had come together on our wedding night as strangers, really, as is our custom, but we loved each other instantly and we touched each other and it was very beautiful and we thanked our parents for arranging this. But the more my body yearned for him as I lay there, the more I understood all that had gone before. Yes, I was a cup only half full. Yes, my father’s blood was gone and nothing had filled me in those empty places. But with this man I felt it was possible. I did not care that he was American. I held my child and the drop of jasmine water fell on her lips and she spoke his name. Ben.

  She says, “Ben.” When I put my hand on that place be­tween Tien’s legs, she speaks my name and I think, This is t
he moment it will all stop. I’ve gone too fast. And I stop and I’m ready to move my hand away and I’m beginning to curse myself inside because I don’t want this to end and I’ve fucked it up now. Fucked up the most important thing of all, for even that brief touch is different from anything I’ve ever felt and it is suddenly very important. All up and down the forefinger edge of my left hand is her softness and I’m stunned by that, it’s her, it’s Tien I touch, and I touch her in a place that seems so entirely part of her and so entirely secret that I am drawn out of myself and it feels as if I’ve just discovered my hand, I’ve never had a real feeling there before, but now I do, and I rise to her and I know that I will soon find other parts of me that I never knew I had, never did have. I raise my hand from her and it’s flushed and I feel my heart beating there and Tien says something to me in Vietnamese. It’s urgent, but it’s soft. Then I think she realizes how she has spoken and she re­peats it in English. “I didn’t mean for you to stop.”

  “You said my name. I didn’t know.”

  “I said your name because I was happy you touched me there.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “I told you before that it is all right.”

  “About your breasts. I didn’t know if it applied . . .”

  “It does.”

  “I’m hearing myself now,” I say. “I sound like a damn fool.”

  “You sound very nice.”

  “It feels like the first time for me, too.”

  Her voice grows eager. “Does it really feel like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Though you have done this many times?”