by David Bergen
THE FOLLOWING MORNING THE HOTEL CLERK HANDED CHARLES an envelope. Charles folded it into his pocket and went across the street to the café and ordered a coffee. Then he took out the envelope and opened it. It was from Elaine. She’d written, “Charles. Last night during that fierce wind a lamp standard was knocked down just outside our house and a loose wire danced across the pavement. It was all chaos and pandemonium. And the largest moon ever. Over there. Don’t be so sure that you know what is at stake here. I can look after myself. You know where I am. Elaine.”
Charles laid the note on the table. Her handwriting was lovely, black looping threads like the strands at the back of her neck when she pulled her hair up. All chaos and pandemonium. He wondered if she was aware of her own perfection. Such ease with herself and the spaces she moved through, the effortlessness of language, the expectation that she should get what she wanted. This frightened him. Outside, on the street, a boy walked by carrying his shoeshine case and Charles thought of Hanoi, of sitting by Hoan Kiem Lake and of having his shoes shined, while above him in a blue sky a balloon had lifted into the air. The night before he had had a vivid dream in which a man whom he thought looked like Dang Tho was standing and staring across a river. If Charles was in the dream at all, it had been as an observer, but he had woken shaking, his mouth dry. He put the note back into his pocket and left the café and found himself at the airline office, where he bought an open ticket for Hanoi.
The next day he rented a motorcycle and rode up past Monkey Mountain and walked down to the empty beach that curved between two points of rock. In a grove of small pines, he sat on his jacket and watched the fishermen out at sea. Several times over the next week, he returned to that same beach. Once, a young soldier approached him and said, in broken English, that he must pay. Charles said that he did not understand. The boy was carrying a machine gun and he shifted it and stared out toward the sea and then turned back to Charles and repeated that payment was needed to sit on the beach. “One thousand dong,” the soldier said. Charles considered this and shook his head. The soldier moved a black boot through the sand and then turned away to walk up the beach.
That afternoon, returning to his hotel, Charles saw Elaine step through the lobby doors and out onto the street. Her back was to him and she walked purposefully, a black bag swinging from her left hand. She turned the corner and disappeared. In the hotel the desk clerk handed him a piece of yellow paper, folded once. He climbed the stairs to his room. Inside, he sat down and unfolded the paper. She wrote, “I came by and, again, you were gone. Where are you, Charles? Why are you doing this? We are old enough to follow our feelings and I sense that you have certain feelings. I have no patience for games, if that is what you intend.” She said that they would be leaving for Dalat the following morning. “This is childish,” she wrote.
He put the note down and then picked it up and reread it. Then he took a piece of blank paper and responded. He said that his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Everly, had looping handwriting just like hers. And in the early afternoons, during quiet reading, when the sun poured through the venetian blinds, dust motes floated around Miss Everly’s head. He said that only recently had he become aware of the mercilessness of time, of its cruel push. “I’m sorry, Elaine,” he wrote. And then he signed his name.
He put the note into an envelope and wrote her name on the outside. Then he went down to the lobby and asked the desk clerk to deliver the envelope to Mrs. Gouds and he described the house and the street it was on. He gave the clerk a sum of money and asked, “Do you understand?” The clerk said that he understood. He knew the house, and he knew the American family that lived there. The letter was safe.
Charles spent the next days wandering the city. Once, he found himself in her neighborhood and he went by her house. The windows were shuttered and the front door was padlocked. One evening in a small restaurant at the north end of the city Thanh walked in and sat with him and drank iced coffee. The night was humid. Moths banged against the glass of the lanterns that hung above the tables.
“You have been absent,” Thanh said.
Charles said that he had been walking, and then sleeping, and then walking some more. “I saw Dang Tho in a dream,” he said. “He was melancholy. He was standing and looking across a deep river. There was no view of the other side.” He shrugged and said that it was, in the end, just a dream.
“Yes, but dreams can warn us,” Thanh said. “Or indicate something.” He looked at Charles and said, “You are sad.”
“You sound like Elaine Gouds,” Charles said. “She says the same thing.”
Thanh offered him a ride back to the hotel but Charles said he would walk. He was slightly drunk, but this time he did not lose his way. On a corner close to the hotel a prostitute in magenta tights and a blue skirt teetered toward him and called out, “How many days?” Then she said, “You have hunger?” and she pointed at her legs. She was close to him and he saw her dark eyes, the light powder on her cheeks and forehead, the strap of her silver purse against her wrist. In the distance, leaning against the wall of the hotel, a boy was smoking and watching. Charles led the girl back to the hotel. He was aware, as they walked, of the boy following them. They passed through the lobby, where the night clerk, lying on the vinyl couch by the fish tank, raised his head and observed Charles and the girl and then put his head back down.
They climbed the stairs to the room. Inside, he turned on a lamp and the girl sat on a chair and crossed her legs. He took out the package of tinfoil and prepared his pipe. Lit it and inhaled. After he had released the smoke he asked her if she liked to smoke. She smiled and got up and began to lift her top. “No, no,” he said, and he went to her and took her arm and led her to the bed, where they sat, side by side, and shared the pipe. She did not seem to be a novice; she held the smoke and exhaled carefully. He saw that her fingernails were dirty.
When they’d finished the pipe, Charles stood and went over to the desk and laid it down beside the lamp. He turned and said that he was glad to be with her. Her skirt was short and she wore a black tank top with small rhinestones sewn along the edges. He told her his name, Charles, but she had a hard time pronouncing it. She tried, giggled, and tried again. Her voice was high-pitched. She uncrossed her legs and said the word want as if she were trying to capture Charles. He went over to her, touched her face and her hair, undressed her, and then undressed himself. They lay on their backs beside each other for the longest time. Their hips and arms touched. The fan above them seemed to turn slower and slower. At some point she lifted a bare arm and pointed at the ceiling, and his eye followed the line of her forearm and beyond to her index finger.
He rolled onto his side and studied her. Her breasts were small, almost nonexistent. He lifted himself onto an elbow and traced her collarbone with a finger. Her eyes were wide open and showed no emotion. Then, he put on his pants and stood by the open window, smoking a cigarette. She went to the bathroom and returned and slipped back into her clothes, and when she was ready to leave he handed her one hundred dollars.
She was surprised and perhaps even a little frightened by this, but she put it into her purse. When she left he stood by the open window and waited. It took a long time, but finally he heard the sound of her heels on the sidewalk below, and then nothing.
HIS DREAMS IN THOSE LAST DAYS WERE DARK. IN ORDER TO ESCAPE he fell back on drink and hashish. He found that the drug helped him float and the dreams that came to him then were softer and more fluid. He tried not to sleep, exhausted himself, and ended up on his bed in the late afternoon, waking to the sound of nightlife and the flashing of the hotel sign, disoriented, his mouth dry. He would walk then. Up and down the streets of Danang. He became familiar with the landmarks, the different shops, and came to know certain restaurant owners. Bartenders welcomed him as a regular. He tried not to think of who he was, of his children, of his past, of Elaine, or of anything else that might press some sort of anguish upon him. He grew to appreciate White Horse cigarettes. He b
ecame fond of a certain Vietnamese whiskey. He knew where he was going.
One night, at a small restaurant on Bach Dang Street, Charles ordered an iced coffee and smoked the last of his cigarettes as he sat and watched the fishing boats enter the harbor. He spoke to no one except the waiter, an older man who occupied his own table in the far corner and drank something dark and viscous from a small glass. When he finally rose and paid the bill, it was near midnight. A solitary cyclo was waiting on the sidewalk. He waved the driver away and walked up toward his hotel. The evening was warm and there was still some bicycle traffic and the occasional taxi. Otherwise it was quiet.
Close to the hotel he passed three prostitutes, who called out to him. One he recognized from the previous week. Her face was powdered white and the magenta tights she wore now seemed excessive. She called out his name, “Chawz,” and began to follow him, but he shook his head and passed on. She said something hard in Vietnamese and laughed and the other two women laughed as well.
He climbed five flights of stairs to the room. Inside, he turned on a lamp and sat on a chair, took out a glass, and poured whiskey and then drank. Then he went over to the small desk and opened a drawer and took out his pipe and prepared and lit it. His hand was trembling. He steadied it and focused on the small glow of the pipe. He went to the window and looked down at the three women on the corner. A motorcycle pulled up and idled, and when it left it took along the girl who had mocked Charles.
He put out the pipe and lay down on the bed and watched the ceiling fan turn. He closed his eyes and slipped in and out of sleep. From a great distance he heard rain and voices and then rain again and the banging of the shutter in the wind. He saw his children lined up, their faces pressed together, clamoring for his attention. He saw all the women he had known. He saw Elaine. She was standing under her awning, and she was telling him to step carefully. He began to speak and then he woke to the backfire of a motorcycle in the street. He sat up and saw the dark sky beyond the window.
It was very late. The wind had pushed the rain through the open window. He closed the window, and some time later he went to the desk, wiped it off with a towel, and began a letter. He addressed it to his children. He told them about himself. He told them what they had never known. He apologized, and then he folded the letter, placed it in an envelope, and put the envelope into a pouch inside his suitcase.
It was the middle of the night when he left his hotel and walked out onto the street. He was carrying a tote bag and in the bag were a rope and a ten-pound cinder block, which he had found at a construction site a few days earlier. The streets were empty and the rain and wind had let up. He walked up toward Bach Dang and finally found a driver sleeping in his cyclo. He woke the man and told him, “My Khe.”
The ride to the ocean was quiet, though roosters crowed and occasionally the soft echo of voices carried over onto the street. A ship sounded its horn and Charles heard the creak of the pedals on the cyclo and the deep breathing of his driver. He saw his own hands and considered them for a while and thought about how easily one could choose this path.
From the cyclo now he saw the outline of Monkey Mountain. He dismounted on the beach road, paid his driver a good amount, and then walked toward the shore. A dog appeared out of the darkness and stood before him, growling. Its rear end was furless and as the animal circled Charles could see it favored a hind leg; a reprobate creature that saw an equal in Charles. Charles picked up a stick and swung out, hitting the dog across the snout. It howled and backed away, its rear furrowing the sand. “Get lost, you piece of shit,” Charles said, and the dog tilted its head, as if the language it heard was unexpected. Charles continued toward the water. He intended to take a basket boat out past the breaking waves. There were numerous boats along the beach and he chose one close to the shore. It was heavier than he had imagined and he had to rest as he dragged it toward the water. More than once he went down on his knees and had to catch his breath. When he did this, the dog slid in closer and Charles threw things—sand, rocks, shells, empty cans—to keep the mongrel back. Even when the boat was in the water the dog sat near the shoreline and lifted its head and howled, as if aware of what was to pass.
Pulling the boat out into deeper water, Charles had difficulty fighting the surf. The waves kept pushing him back toward land. When the water became too deep, he hoisted himself up into the boat and landed heavily against the cinder block in the tote bag. He sucked air through his teeth from the pain. The boat rolled with the ocean. He took a paddle and worked his way past the breakers, out toward the open sea. He struggled for a long time and when he finally paused and looked back, the lights of the houses at My Khe were distant and foggy. The dog, both sight and sound, had disappeared.
He put the paddle down and looked at his bag. What he did next he did with speed and clarity. He opened the bag and took out the rope and the block. He tied the rope to the block, fitting it through one of the small openings, and he fastened it with a taut line hitch. Then he took the other end of the ten-foot rope and looped it around his left ankle. This too he tied with a hitch. Finally, he stood, picked up the block, and threw himself and the block overboard. The water was warm but even so he felt a quick shock and he sucked in air. He thought, briefly, of his children and he pitied them.
When the rope uncoiled to its full length, he was pulled down. He did not panic but sank with the weight of the cinder block. If he had wanted he could have loosened the rope and swum to the surface, but he didn’t. As he felt the pressure build on his ears and temples he released the air in his lungs and swallowed the ocean water. His last sensations were a burning in his chest and things brushing either side of his face. These were his arms lifting past his head and reaching toward the surface as if to grasp at the last of the bubbles that floated upward and broke into the night air.
The block hit the ocean floor first. Then Charles’s heels touched and his legs buckled slowly and he came to rest on his back. A school of blowfish circled above him and moved on. Within a few hours a cuttlefish had found him and slid past his mouth and ears and finally settled in beneath a raised shoulder. The following day, a tiger shark would stray from its group and nose the man’s leg, finally settling on the right foot, working the teeth through the canvas shoe into the flesh. But the man’s eyes would go first, nibbled at by the smaller animals on the ocean floor, until a blue swimming crab would appear and pry free first the right eye and then the left. Sea horses would study the holes, and then slide away.
On the surface, the basket boat would disappear, carried by the tides toward the shore. A Russian oil tanker would anchor above the corpse for several days. The stern anchor would land beside Charles Boatman and catch the rope and drag his body along for several hundred yards. For over a month the currents would toss the body until, finally, Charles Boatman would be delivered up onto the land from which he had come.
PART TWO
5
THE TYPHOON ARRIVED DURING THE NIGHT AND CONTINUED until early morning. All through the following day, the sky remained dark and the wind still blew and tossed muddy water onto the wreckage of the beach. Two days after the storm, midmorning, a local fisherman pulled his basket boat down toward the water and saw the movement of a large object in the waves. He thought it was a dead marlin or a dolphin, but as he approached he saw the arms and the head of a man. One of the legs was bent backward in an awkward position; there was a frayed rope tied to the left ankle. The man’s face was gray and bloated. The arms were swollen. Something had eaten away at the right leg; the foot was missing. The man wore jeans and a black T-shirt. No shoes. He had a watch, and the fisherman looked around and then bent quickly to remove it. He patted the dead man’s pockets, found his wallet, pulled out several waterlogged hundred-dollar bills, and put the wallet back, which was difficult because the body kept rolling with the tide. The fisherman saw the corpse’s face, the holes where the eyes had been. He stood and looked up the beach. Then he moved away toward his basket boat. He had been p
lanning on going out for the day, but now he wouldn’t. The dead man would weigh on the fisherman’s thoughts. His money would weigh in his pocket. Still, he would keep the money; for him, it was the equivalent of a year’s salary. He walked back up behind the restaurants that lined the beach and stepped over into the bushes and urinated. Then he climbed onto his bicycle and returned to his house. His wife was in the back, squatting and fanning the coals in the barbecue. He walked past her and she looked up but she didn’t say anything. He went into the room where he and his wife slept, took out the money and studied it, and slipped it into his dress shoes, the ones he wore for weddings and funerals. Then he went outside and got on his bicycle and rode down to the police station to announce that a white man had drowned at My Khe.
THE MORNING THAT CHARLES BOATMAN’S BODY WAS FOUND, A young policeman who barely spoke English knocked on Ada’s hotel door and announced that Lieutenant Dat required her to come down to the police station. The policeman, a boy really, had taken off his cap and lowered his head as he spoke. He talked too quickly, slurring his words, getting them all out in one breath, as if they had been memorized. Ada asked him to repeat himself. The boy looked horrified but said again what he had been told to say.
Ada was still half asleep. She noticed the boy’s eyes move up and down her bare legs and then he turned his head away.
Ada rode behind the boy on his green Czech-built motorcycle. He had on a wool jacket, and when she brushed against it with her arms and wrists she felt the roughness. At the police station, he led her straight to Dat, who was in his office. He told her to sit and then he announced that her father’s body had been found.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“His wallet was still in his pocket. I am sorry. It is your father.” He pushed a small hand up his forehead and through his hair. “In any case, still you must identify him.”
