The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  "So how do we get to the Thai border? With no running into Khmer? We take--" Matt pulled out a Baggie of marijuana to show him. "No problemo?"

  Chan talked and gestured as Matt wrote down his directions. Tanner again pulled out a thick stack of money and peeled off more bills for him. Chan pointed to the car and Helen, and then motioned taking a picture.

  Matt nodded sagely and motioned to Helen. "Girlfriend. Wants to take pictures of Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat." Matt grimaced and took him aside. "How far to Angkor? Otherwise no--" He made an obscene poking gesture with his hands, and the ferryman laughed. He gave another set of equally convoluted directions, taking Matt's pen and drawing part of a picture on the paper. Tanner peeled off more bills and handed them to him.

  "You go Phnom Penh. Much goodest."

  "No dangerous?" Tanner said.

  "Much goodest." The man insisted. He slapped Tanner's stomach. "Womans."

  At last he moved to take down the rope barrier, and the three men pulled over the ramp to drive the station wagon off. "You go Phnom Penh?" he insisted like a worried mother hen.

  "Yes, Phnom Penh."

  Matt wagged his head lazily and waved as they drove off. He lifted both hands off the wheel and again made the poking gesture so Chan laughed.

  "Definitely avoid Phompers," Matt said.

  "So we go up and over the long way?" Tanner asked.

  "Chan expects us to do that."

  "No, Chan expects us to double-cross him. Take the shorter route under."

  "So we triple-cross him and do what we said."

  They set off in high spirits, convinced they had thoroughly confused the ferryman, but the trip became a horrendous series of wrong turns and dead ends. "The little bastard lied to us," Tanner said, pounding on the steering wheel.

  "I should have offed him," Matt said. At dusk they stopped because of the danger of being spotted by their headlights. Not wanting to be taken by surprise, they hid the car in the trees and slept in a ditch.

  Helen settled down into a pile of leaves. "Listen," she whispered.

  "What?" Matt asked.

  "No sound. Nothing. No birds even, or insects."

  "You're the lady in love with silence."

  No one spoke for a few moments.

  "Bizarre," Tanner said. "Tomorrow at lunch we'll be in the best hotel in Bangkok, popping a bottle of champagne."

  Helen stared up at the sky, but even in the pitch black of the country, not a single star appeared. A blanket of lead; even the heavens had been extinguished. "I'm ready to go home," she said.

  "What took you so long?" Matt asked.

  She shrugged to the darkness. "I got lost."

  Helen closed her eyes. She thought of the rolls of film in the car, the images cradled in emulsion, areas of darkness and light like the beginnings of the universe. She herself full of latent images taken over the years, and yet what she had seen would stay inside her, hidden. Linh had covered her eyes during the mission out of Dak To, because he understood that for them the eye was the most important thing. We close our eyes to spare ourselves or those we love. To see demanded responsibility. To gain power over their enemies, armies blindfolded prisoners. In the fields, the Khmer Rouge had the people turn away so that the executioners would not see themselves in their victims' eyes.

  Tanner was probably right--the pictures were good and were taken at great risk, they had a shot at some of the prizes--and so she was catching up to Darrow. It was like chasing the tail of a comet. She had done her final job for the war and was proud of that. But even as she got closer, she understood his contempt had not been feigned, that by the time one earned such accolades, one had paid many times over what they were worth. And yet she was still there.

  As she fell asleep, she wondered again where Linh was--still on a carrier or already on his way to California? She saw herself back in the embassy compound, smoke and burning paper swirling in the air. Then she was on the roof, tucking Linh into the cocoon of the helicopter, but this time she stayed on, felt the familiar weightlessness as they flew over the dark city and then over the darker water. She held Linh's hand, free for the first time in so many years, maybe for the first time ever. Somewhere out in that darkness the future was rushing toward them. Had she tricked her fate?

  She thought of her brother, not the imagined, damaged Michael of the war, but as he had been before, laughing and dancing around her. His hands up in a mock-boxing stance, his hair slicked back, white teeth shining. She had forgotten that he had a life before the war. In guilt and rivalry, she had given away the chance to have her own. But then Michael tossed his head like a horse throwing off the bit, refusing her memory of him.

  Helen saw the young Cambodian girl she photographed in the mass grave earlier. Imagined tearing at the gossamer fabric of her shirt, brushing the long strands of hair like threads of silk, like the tendrils of morning glories in the spring, plunging into the hollow cave of ribs and the small dried grottoes of eyes. The dead entered the living, burrowed through the skin, floated through the blood, to come at last to rest in the heart. Stirring through the bits and pieces of the mystery of the young girl, Helen imbibed her, would leave trans-muted, brave and full of courage, knowing her fear and determined enough to ignore it, courageous enough at last to return home. Time to give up the war.

  At dawn, Helen woke before the men did and felt as rested as if she'd had eight hours in her own bed. She snuck over to the car and pulled out a clean shirt from Matt's bag. An unlikely baby-blue with a peace symbol emblazoned on it. As she tugged her old one off, she brushed the scar on her belly. Linh had traced his fingers over it, the glossy raised skin as pale and iridescent as fish scale.

  "No more bikinis for me."

  "This makes me love you more," he had said.

  "Why?"

  "It proves that you will be brave in the future."

  But she no longer felt brave. Since she had first arrived in Vietnam, she had been obsessed with courage. Such an ancient quality in modern life, called for only in extreme circumstances. She had admired it in others, in Linh and Darrow, but found it only sporadically within herself. A combat journalist's life mea sured in dog years. She felt old compared to these young savages like Matt. She was softening, but she pushed that thought away, too. As she turned, pulling the T-shirt over her head, she saw Matt watching her.

  "That was beautiful," he said.

  She picked up his bag and threw it at him. "Pervert."

  Trading cigarettes for directions to isolated villagers working the fields, using their smattering of Cambodian and French, they reached Route 6 by midmorning. They let out whoops of joy. "Bangkok here we come," Tanner yelled. "I'm getting me the prettiest hooker I can afford." Helen thought of the images rocking in their cradles of film, gestating in emulsion. She would insist on doing her own darkroom work. The road ahead was empty, leaf strewn, unused. Depending on driving conditions, Tanner figured they were a day's drive from Thailand.

  When Helen couldn't put off emptying her bladder another minute, they stopped in the middle of the road. She made the men turn away and peed behind the car, too dangerous to go in the bushes because of mines. As she squatted, she saw a few feet away a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses like the old Cambodian man's, crushed.

  They were half an hour away from Angkor when a loud explosion created a small hurricane as the back windows were blown out by automatic rifle fire. Splinters of glass flew through the car like steel filings, most absorbed by the equipment, enough reaching them to nick arms and faces.

  The back window blocked, Helen couldn't see behind, and she peered through the side-view mirror, but the car was bouncing too hard; she caught only a glimpse of a boy, then sky, the boy, earth. Tanner floored the accelerator; the station wagon lurched forward as another round of bullets swept through the car doors. The tires blew, and the car skidded into the ditch.

  "Shit, shit, shit," Matt moaned. One blue lens of his sunglasses was shattered, and he pulled off the glasses,
revealing a gash around his eye.

  "Shut up. Don't look worried," Tanner said. "Are you fucking kidding?" Matt said.

  The car was surrounded by two dozen boy soldiers. Circling the car, they pounded on it with small, violent fists. They wore tattered uniforms with red-checked kramas, scarves, wrapped around their heads or necks to signify the Khmer Rouge. AK-47s hung off their small shoulders. The leader was barefoot but wore a bowler hat and orange-tinted aviator sunglasses that matched the fiery sky, a getup so strange it made him seem less dangerous. He banged the butt of his rifle on the hood of the car, leaving long, elliptical dents, while two other soldiers flung the driver's-side door open, motioning with their hands for the three to get out.

  First Tanner, then Matt, and then Helen wiggled awkwardly out with their hands folded up behind their heads. Using rifles, the soldiers pointed up the road. Helen hoped that they would simply take the car and let them go, all she could think of was the lost pictures, but when the three had walked about twenty yards, she could hear a barking of orders, and one of the soldiers ran up behind them and used his rifle like a baseball bat to hit Matt in the back of the knees.

  The soldier, no older than ten or eleven, had a narrow face and large, crowded teeth, and when he yelled, his voice was high and girlishly shrill. He motioned for the other two to kneel in the middle of the road. When they did, he smiled broadly, pleased, and patted Matt on the back.

  "You're welcome, filthy little fuck," Matt said.

  Helen closed her eyes. The whole thing unreal, make-believe. She wanted to stand up and tear the gun away from the boy and slap him. So unlikely, it felt like at any minute someone should laugh and admit it was all a game.

  At the sound of a groan from Matt, she opened her eyes to see the soldier miming for them to bring their hands down and take off their shoes. The boy soldiers were so inexperienced they had not even known to frisk them for weapons, but the gun Matt carried was safely back in the car. Not that they'd have a chance of shooting their way out. All three sat in the road and worked with numbed fingers at shoelaces, exchanging looks. Helen dipped her fingers in her pocket and slipped the small Buddha into her mouth, unseen. The saving bitterness of iron. Then, barefoot, they were ordered to kneel again and put their arms behind them, elbow to elbow. Other soldiers ran over and bound their arms with a crude rope made of twisted vines. Helen cursed herself for not bandaging her chest down as two of the boy soldiers stood in front of her, giggling and pointing. The smaller boy, with a spiky shock of hair, looked furtively back to the leader preoccupied with the car, then bent down and quickly tugged at her breast.

  Matt made a lunge for him, and the other soldier aimed the butt of his rifle at Matt's temple.

  "Don't," Helen said. "Whatever happens, you can't stop it. I need you alive." Her knees trembled, and she tried to cave in her chest. Thoughts came in fragments, pulling themselves out slowly and with great effort. No use to announce they were press because that would be a death sentence. The color of their skin, the fact of their car, its contents--everything was against them. Her mouth filled with saliva, and before she could think, she pulled up to her full height and spat at the soldier who had touched her.

  The boy looked startled and then burst out laughing. The others joined in.

  Helen looked back and watched soldiers swarming over the station wagon. Such a terrible mistake to come. So unfair that one did not get a magic wish, that one could not undo at least one mistake a lifetime. Her biggest regret in dying in this way its effect on Linh. At the car, the soldiers pulled out all the equipment and lifted each camera over their heads and dashed them one by one against the pavement. One soldier flipped open the canisters, yanked the rolls of film from their dark cradles, screaming out in long, wet ribbons, exposed, the images flown off. And seeing that, Helen felt delivered, her job done, released as if from a spell. Endless destruction. War destroying objects, land, and people indiscriminately, with its appetite the only thing that was eternal. She watched, detached, as the soldiers piled up the rest of their belongings and threw a grenade on top of the stack, laughing at the explosion and scattering debris. Jumping up and down on the bags of food even though they probably had little to eat themselves. Smashing open the cans of C-rations. Next they poured gas inside the car and set it ablaze, but it only smoldered, releasing a heavy, black, oily smoke into the sky.

  Then their vicious attention turned back to the three kneeling figures.

  Helen looked up the road and tried to picture reaching the Thai border. She imagined it came to a dead stop at a river, although she couldn't remember from the map if there was a river, but in her mind's eye it was a clear and rushing one, and she knew she would have to swim across it if she wished to be saved, and the impossible price of that swim would be to leave everything that had happened during the war behind. She heard the words Darrow had recited their first night but that she had not understood till now: Let her go home in the long ships and not be left behind. She wanted to go home; she did not want to be left behind. She pictured a flimsy bamboo gate and Linh standing at it, waiting for her. It was his waiting that had always saved her.

  A gun went off at close range, but she would not turn to look. She pressed the Buddha against the roof of her mouth, clamped her teeth until she thought she felt them cracking, a salty wash of blood in her mouth mixing with the iron that had become a part of her. Her reporter's mind registered surprise that they were using bullets, always special treatment for the foreigners. She heard a whimper--Matt's--but still would not look, looking would make it real. No sound from Tanner; now it was just two of them. The air thick with the mineral smell of blood.

  Far away a rumbling sound, but she was in a trance, searching for god or peace or grace or void, making amends for things she had or had not done. The sound grew closer, like a dream, and she wondered if it was her own heart, the sounds of her body rumbling apart.

  The hard crack of another shot made her ears ring, and afterward silence, and she was alone. As alone as one could ever be in life, and bad as it was, she endured long enough to take another breath. In that moment, she mourned the loss of those two innocents more than all the other lives that had been lost because she had known better. A hot wetness at her groin as her bladder released.

  She bit down on the Buddha, pain a relief, a trickle from her lips as her mouth filled with blood, when suddenly there were hands at her sides, and she was yanked by her hair roughly to her feet. Legs so weak she fell back to the ground, afraid of what they planned to do with her before she was killed.

  A new voice entered her consciousness, and when she braved turning her head, she saw a dusty pickup truck had pulled up next to the smoldering station wagon, and a middle-aged man had taken command of the group. Helen closed her eyes again. Her greatest wish that death would simply come fast now.

  A hard shove at her back with the length of a rifle, and she was lifted to her feet. She stumbled forward, took one step, then another. Gravel bit her feet, but she did not register it as pain but simply as life. Life, beyond good or bad. No one followed her, no one at her side: They were playing with her, forcing her to march with them and have her later, and she wished to move faster, to run, but could barely manage a slow stagger of a walk down the middle of the empty road. Her ears still rang with the distancing sound of the fired shots, her two innocents gone, and she could hear the soldiers arguing behind her, and she willed herself to move faster but was unable.

  She closed her eyes and saw herself rising into the air until she was flying. Had the winged thing already come? Ahead Angkor. Everything below--the road, the soldiers, the burning car, the two prone bodies--as faraway and unreal as the tiger that had appeared below the Loach that long-ago day. Time permeable. As real as the burning road under her bare feet, Darrow standing at the entrance to one of the temples, appearing as he had when she flew down to the delta to meet him. He wore his white short-sleeved shirt, eyes hidden behind glasses, and raked his good hand through his hair
, his other arm still unhealed in its sling.

  Helen took a bigger step forward and tripped over a stone, losing her balance, but she would not stop or open her eyes, afraid to lose her vision of him, afraid to look behind at the boy soldiers still arguing, but if she had, she would have seen two of them separating and jogging toward her, easy and carefree as two ravenous young wolves.

  She choked on the Buddha, sharp gravelly pieces in her mouth that felt like bits of teeth or clay. Dust to dust, and weren't the teeth always the last to go? Her eyes closed so small and tight she could barely see. Afraid of death and yet not afraid, already inside it and moving through it. It would come and had already come a thousand times. She breathed relief at the thought that she was soon done with it.

  She remembered the pictures of the Angkor bas-relief "The Churning of the Ocean of Milk," which Darrow and Linh had photographed years before she had loved either of them. Devils and gods churning the waves and fighting each other to extract the elixir of immortality. Violence had poisoned them all, Linh the least.

  Poisoned Darrow.

  And she, become Darrow, poisoned her.

  A sudden clarity that he had been poisoned before she met him. His spell on her broken. She didn't want to join him on the temple steps; she knew what that burning brightness ahead was, death, and an invitation to join him in it. During her blindness, Linh there from the beginning, guarding her, and now she wanted only to live.

  Would Linh know--she wanted him to know--that she did not go lightly, that she was not willing, that despite what it looked like, he had changed her and made her brave in all the ways she wasn't before, and if there was one last wish granted, she wanted him to know that she did not choose this.