The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  I turn my back to him and move away and my flesh crawls with the desire to be hidden. This makes me very sad. I try to feel if my mother is here with us. Before me, the bathroom door is ajar and the light from the bulb is spilling out. I stop. As much as I want to leave Ben’s sight for now, I stop. I think it is her. I think I am her child again and she is there, behind the door, staying quiet, consider­ing her spoiled life without my eyes upon her, perhaps staring into her own eyes in the mirror, like she did years ago, and she has come back now, to make trouble. I am afraid that all I have to do is touch the door and it will swing open and she will be there, her face turning to me.

  But I am no longer her child. I am no one’s child. If she is there, if her ghost has spun itself into something visible and is waiting for me, then I am happy for that. We will finish with this right here.

  I step to the door and I open it fast. The bathroom is empty. My silk robe dangles on a hook on the back of the door. I take it down and I put it on. As soon as I do this, I feel better about my body, and as soon as I feel better about my body, I want to be naked again for Ben.

  This is a very odd time for me.

  But I draw the robe tight around me and I tie the belt and I do not like this bare bulb light. I step in and reach to it and I pull the chain. The darkness feels like a kiss on my eyes. I want it to be Ben’s lips.

  I come out of the bathroom and there is a shape in the dark, in the middle of the dark, and I fall back and it is large, filling the room, and I almost say aloud, Father, but the shape speaks, “What is it?” and it is Ben.

  “I thought you were a ghost,” I say.

  He comes closer. I am glad now I did not speak. I wish I had left the light on. I want to see his face. I love his face. But the only light is the neon behind him and his face is dark and ringed in red, like the aura I have read that people give off, the living ghost we carry around. Though I cannot see them, I could find his lips if I wanted to. But I know we must do this thing first.

  I say, “You want to hire a Saigontourist guide for a road trip to Nha Trang. Yes?”

  He does not say anything for a moment. I begin to hope that once we are away from this room, away from the spirits here, he might find the answer in himself, we might go to Nha Trang and simply swim together in the South China Sea without having to do more.

  I say, “It has a very beautiful beach.”

  He says, “Can you arrange this tour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it be . . . private?”

  “My driver will be happy to have a secret holiday. Yes.”

  He is silent again. I am suddenly restless in my hands: they yearned to touch him tonight but they know it will not happen.

  Then I say the thing that I want to feel but do not. “There is no reason to be afraid.”

  He says, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am to put you through this.”

  I know what he means but I am not ready to think how it might be to find her. So I push the thought of this away from me, as I have done for all these years. I will simply let him be sorry for leaving my bed tonight.

  “You will go to your hotel now?” I ask.

  I hear him draw in a breath at this. It had not occurred to him yet. I grow a little impatient: it must be so, my Ben; you have led us to this; just accept it now and go. But I do not even come close to speaking these words aloud.

  His shadow grows larger and he takes me in his arms and he lifts my face and kisses me on the lips, and though the kiss is brief, I feel if he lets go of me now, I will fall to the floor.

  “When will I see you?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow at noon in front of Ho Chi Minh,” I say.

  “The statue?”

  “If you can find Uncle Ho himself, I will meet you there instead. He is very wise. Maybe his ghost can save us a trip.”

  Ben laughs softly and I laugh too, though I think I hear a little anger in me when I say that, but I am glad if he thinks only that I am a great kidder.

  Then he is gone.

  Outside her door I take a step and another and another and my legs are trying to throw me down and I lean against the balustrade on this long back balcony and I’m in front of somebody else’s doorway, Tien’s neighbor, and the door is open and a dim light is burning and there’s a smell of kerosene and a wet, soupy smell—fish sauce and some cheap part of a pig—something like that, a food smell that’s suddenly mixed up with an image of Kim, the smell in a back alley like this coming in through the window while I’m naked with Kim and it’s been all these years and she’s near me now and it could be in a room in this very alley, along this very common balcony, the place where I went in to make love for the first time. I press on. Another doorway standing open, a woman combing her hair out, long and dark, right now, not the past, I try to move faster, keep my eyes before me, and Kim is combing her hair before her dead grandfather’s shrine and I am waiting naked on her bed.

  I go down the twisting staircase, holding on tight, and I can see myself coming up metal stairs just like these, Kim climbing a step ahead of me, her sweet cheeks swaying in my face, making my hands itchy, the night smells of Saigon around us, wood fire, incense, alley rot. I’m moving away from Tien’s rooms and all of this is coming back and I don’t want to touch Kim, not even in my memory, I try to take the covers in this memory and pull them across my body as she combs her hair, but I can’t, it’s already happened, whatever it was between me and this woman whose name may not even have been Kim, it’s happened and there’s no taking it back and when I go there in my memory, as I’m doing now, trying to hurry along this alley, I can’t cover myself, I remain naked and she crosses the room and I must pull her down to the bed with me, I must put my mouth on hers, I must feel her hand cup my penis, I must rise to her touch instantly.

  I grab at my head with my hand, squeeze tight at my temples. She will go away for good when I know who she is. Or who she isn’t. I’m out of the alley now and down the way is a pedicab and I move toward it and then I stop. I think that something here will tell me. I’ll look closely and it’ll be the wrong street altogether, the wrong part of town, the chances will turn long again. Another moment in a dark and distant night: I step down from a pedicab and I’m in front of a bar and I let myself be there, I try to see what it is in the window. Two Vietnamese words in neon, I think. Some of the bars had American names but not this one. This is the bar where she works and I can’t remember the Vietnamese name for it. I look now and there’s only the flickering fluorescence in the noodle restaurant, the tiny plastic tables in front ringed by the shapes of people eating. Was Kim’s bar near the mouth of an alley like this? I try to look as I stand before the pedicab in my memory, but I can’t see. The place floats in my head with nothing around and Kim is in the doorway, her face dark, the light from inside the bar ringing her head in gold. Was this the first moment I saw her? Hey GI, she says. Come in drink beer with Vietnam beauty, she says. My name Kim, she says.

  I look around now. For something familiar, though I want there to be nothing. And there is nothing. Bodies move past me. Soup. Flats Fixed. A tailor’s dummy in a window. It’s all changed so much. The bars are long gone. The things that might still be the same—the alley, a balcony, a row of second-floor windows—are all a blur in my memory, or darkness. I turn around and looming over me is a big thing I should be able to remember: a hotel, the Metropole. But it’s slick and clearly new. Or maybe remade. Was there a hotel across from Kim’s bar? This feels faintly familiar. But I don’t recognize this place. As big as this thing is, I can’t say either that it was there or it wasn’t. Something like panic revs in me, like the center of my chest is the engine for all these crazy feelings and it’s revving into the red. I need to move. I need to get out of this street now, I think. But fuck that. I have to fight for Tien. If I can possibly find something that can end it here, something that wi
ll let me go back up to her now, right now, and say, It’s over, we can be lovers forever, then I have to try.

  I face the shop fronts. I let myself see the past. And there’s nothing more. The street all around me is still black, like I’m passing out. There’s only the bar in front of me. I stride across this space and I’m before the woman in the door and I say in my head, You’re not Kim. That’s for the GIs. What’s your real name? She looks at me. I could have said those words at any time in those months I was with her. Just those few words and her answer—my real name is Kim—or any name at all except Huong—would put me in Tien’s arms right now. But once we were more to each other than GI and bargirl, she could have told me her real name, if it was different, without my asking. She would have done that. Surely. And she never did. Isn’t that as good? Isn’t that proof? I want it to be all the proof I need, but it isn’t.

  So I turn away, I move to the pedicab and I speak the address of my hotel and we go off into the night. The motorbikes race past and I close my eyes and if the worst is true, then the last time I was with Kim, Tien was already there inside her body. I try to remember that and I find nothing. These things that remain—a moment on an iron stair, across a room, in the doorway of a bar—they’re all snapshots—like a child under a tree, looking without a smile into the camera—they have no story to them, they tell me nothing. The thing between us just died. There was no revelation in the rush of our sex, there was no connection, there was nothing, and the cute words ended, I suppose, and there may have been money again, in the transaction, and then it was over for good. She wanted to come to America. A thing I couldn’t give her. I said no. It ended like that. If she was pregnant, she would have used that to try to go with me. But she didn’t. Unless she didn’t know. But the way things were, it feels impossible that a new life had begun from what we’d done. I never went back to her. I never even went to another bar. I was dead to her and she was dead to me.

  I shudder at this thought and I lean forward into the flow of the dark street beneath the pedicab. I went back to America alone and I married Mattie and I realized I was still alone and then I found my truck and the road, and on a run sometimes, I’d lean over my wheel and I’d watch the thin black track of exhaust burn on the highway as it rushed under me, and I felt it was leading me, sometimes I felt I was following this dark line into a future that held some big thing, like running after your fate instead of just driving another goddamn thousand miles one way to turn around and drive another thousand back again. There was more to me that I just hadn’t reached yet. Much more.

  Then I am lying in a bed on this night, in the dark, in my hotel in Saigon, and I wait for sleep and I wait for tomorrow. I know the road to Nha Trang, know it well: Highway One, where I watched the driver ahead of me, standing by the side of the road, part of him ripped away, and he was calm, very calm, wondering where that part might be. And there is the same stunned calm in me now, I think. I watch the paddle fan spinning above me and for the first time in my life, alone is not just the place I live in, sometimes with no one around, sometimes with a truck stop restaurant full of truckers, sometimes with a woman sleeping nearby in the bed. For the first time, alone means the absence of someone else: the crook of my arm, the point of my shoulder, the skin along my hip and thigh, all feel the prickle of her absent body, the shadow of her body still pressing there softly. I know the answer to the question that I share with the guy in the scrub grass by the side of Highway One. I know where the missing part of me is. She’s in her own bed right now, in this very city. I was there tonight. And I walked out her door. Is she naked again? I am not. From fear of all this I am still in my clothes, afraid of my body now. But I can still feel her body on my skin. I’m sweating and the fan moves in the dark and I am alone.

  When the door is shut, I cannot hold back my tears. For a few moments. But I stop them. I will not lose Ben. The room is dark. I go to the stand beside my bed and I turn on a lamp. The shade is thin and from the top comes light that is like the bulb in the bathroom. Is she here? Is she just out of my sight, keeping quiet? Someone knows the answer to that and I will talk to him now, as I have done every day of my adult life.

  I cross to the shrine and I kneel and my hands go through the motions they know so well. I draw the box of matches from beneath the skirt of the little table. I take a match from the box and I strike it and the flame hisses it­self alive and I touch the tip of the first stalk of incense, angling the match, putting the hot yellow point of the flame on the blunt edge and it begins to glow and then the incense seems to go dark, but smoke begins to rise and it is burning, I know. I do this for the second stalk and the third and I put the match flame before my lips and I blow the flame away. I drop the match beside me. I press my palms around the three sticks of incense and I pull them from the sand. I bow my head.

  Father, I say inside me. Father, I am here.

  I lift the incense, help the smoke go up and into the spirit world. I think of him turning his head. He smells the scent of my prayers, carried from this fire with no flame, and he moves from wherever it is that he goes in that other world—I try to see the place but there is noth­ing, only darkness—and he comes to me now.

  I say that I think of him turning my way, coming to me, but I cannot picture his face. I have tried, often, in my prayers, but whenever I see a face, I know very clearly that it is only me, only my own construction from the faces of other men: an Italian tourist, a Russian official, Paul Newman. But though I cannot see him, he does come to me here, my father. That much I do know, also very clearly, and he is not a figment of my own mind, he is real.

  Father, I say, I offer your spirit the peace that comes from the love and prayers and devotion of your child and I ask you for the harmony and the peace that a father can give to his family.

  These are the words I always say, following the custom of the Vietnamese people. I am told that even some of our government officials pray to their ancestors. We are a communist country, caring for the masses according to the truths of Karl Marx, but we are also Vietnamese. I think perhaps the spirit of Karl Marx is wandering lonely and afraid in the afterlife because he and his children did not understand certain other truths. They were from Germany.

  I place the stalks of incense in the sand once more and let the smoke rise on its own to carry the rest of my prayers.

  Father, I say. You do not have to fear this man who loves me. I will not forget you. I say this to you, thinking again that it is you who has taken offense. Forgive me if I accuse you falsely, if it is my mother who is the jealous one. I ask you to let me know the truth. Is she there with you in the spirit world, causing this trouble between Ben and me?

  I stop my own words and try to hear my father. He has spoken to me before, though not with the voice of a man. He puts his words into me whole and they grow there, from inside me. I wait for this to happen. My eyes are shut tight. There is only darkness. And the smell of incense. I am very still inside. And then I know he has told me. She is alive.

  I open my eyes. I lift my face. Behind the three ribbons of smoke is the empty space where his face should be. I want to look him in the eyes so he can see my anger at him. But I have only words.

  Father, I say, you must not try to make me choose. I am a living woman. Are you jealous of that, as well? You died a young man. Perhaps younger than I am now. But I have waited, Father. Until Ben touched me, no man had seen me naked in this room. Except you.

  I pray these words and I stop. My face grows warm. I bow my head again but not in reverence. I am glad now not to look into his eyes. This thing that I had not thought of until today is very real inside me now, my being naked before him. And I have not told him of the two others, who saw me naked in other rooms.

  I say to him, Why couldn’t you be alive? Why couldn’t you be alive and I could put the door between you and me and you could not see? And then I could dress myself and I could open the door and w
e could touch. You could take me in your arms. You could kiss my head. I could hold you close. I want that, too, Father. I ache for that too. But this man holds me in a different way. What we cannot have between us, you and me, is not replaced by what there is between Ben and me. I still yearn for you, Father. No less than before. See these tears streaming now from my eyes. They are for you. Not for the fear of losing Ben. For sadness at never touching you. Please take these doubts from Ben’s mind now. Take them away. Call him your son and give him the peace that a spirit owes to the family he leaves behind.

  I fall silent. I wait for his answer to this. But I sense nothing inside me. He is gone. He is in some other place, far away from me.

  Ho Chi Minh’s hand is on the head of the little girl. He’s in black stone, and from seeing him the other day I remember his one arm outstretched on the tree stump where he sits and I remember his arm around the girl, who holds a flower. But I’m seeing this left hand now for the first time as I wait for Tien. His hand touches the little girl’s hair and at first glance, it’s a tender gesture, a paternal gesture. But I stare at this hand as I stand here waiting for Tien, with a rush of people around me and out in the street, and the hand is bothering me. It touches lightly, open-palmed, at the back and slightly to the side of her head, as if it is stroking her there, stroking her hair. A paternal gesture, too, I tell myself. But the girl seems so deeply absorbed by the flower in her hand, unaware of this touch, vulnerable in her ignorance, and Ho is not looking at her, his face is forward and there is a darkly adult look in his fixed eyes, his faintly ironic mouth. The sculptor wanted it both ways. Ho the gentle father figure and Ho the tough, focused leader of a revolution. But this look informs his hand and I fear for the little girl and I can’t see this anymore and I find my own hands clenching, hard.