by David Bergen
When he returned he knew she was sleeping, though her body was still shivering wildly. He sat on the edge of the bed. He rubbed her back and said her name, but she did not answer. During the night she called out and he woke and sat by her. He pressed a cool cloth against her forehead and forced her to drink water.
“Tastes like shit,” she mumbled, and then she slept.
In her sleep she was falling, but she never landed; she would drop with great speed and then stop and float and rise a bit and then fall again. She saw things: her father holding an ax; Del standing naked with no breasts, kissing Tomas; herself kissing Jon; Mr. Dat ’s gold tooth; a bird dropping out of the sky; her father’s eyes. She woke and called out for water, and when Jon brought it to her she swallowed and complained and asked for Tylenol. “My head is being cut in half,” she said as she sucked on the Tylenol and then washed it down. She lay back and said, “What time is it?”
“Almost morning.” Jon said she needed to see a doctor. He seemed worried and it was strange to be looking up into Jon’s face and seeing the fear.
He touched her neck and said, “Is this sore? Stiff?”
It wasn’t. She just wanted to sleep and so she turned over and closed her eyes.
At some point he pulled her from the bed and dressed her. Led her down to the street and put her into an air-conditioned taxi and they went to the hospital. There was a waiting room with cement walls and wooden benches and there were many people. Ada leaned her head against Jon’s shoulder and watched a baby wearing a wool cap crawl over the floor, chasing a line of ants. The baby talked and drooled and his mother, a girl really, squatted in her ao dai and plastic sandals and talked softly to him. An old woman coughed and coughed, and the man with her, her son perhaps, kept stepping outside into the courtyard to smoke. He wore a blue uniform, like that of a janitor or an electrician, and he stared at Ada and Jon.
The boy Yen appeared. He stood before them and said, “Hello, Miss Ada.” He stuck his hand out at Jon but Jon didn’t take it.
Ada stared at Yen with feverish eyes. She said that she was sick.
“I can see that,” Yen said. “And I will do everything to help you.”
Jon told him that they didn’t need help, that his sister would be seeing a doctor. Yen agreed and sat down on a bench not far from Ada’s side. He said, “Remember the day I took you to the American woman’s house? That night the typhoon came and much has happened, hasn’t it? Your father I heard about. For that, I am very sorry. And now Miss Ada’s sickness.” He took a book out from inside his shirt and placed it in Ada’s lap. “Thank you,” he said.
Ada looked down at her lap and said, faintly, “You stole my book. I was looking for that.”
“No, no, Miss Ada. No, I didn’t steal it. The book was in the sand after you left. I meant to give it to you, but I began to read and it was like a hook and I was the fish.” He opened his mouth, clicked his teeth, and shook his head back and forth. “Unfortunately, there were many big words and I grew tired. It is yours.” He whistled as he sat there and then he took some bread and a Coke from a plastic bag and offered them to Ada.
“She’s not hungry,” Jon said.
“She can decide for herself,” Yen said. “Please?” he asked Ada. She waved him away.
So, Yen sat down and ate the bread and drank the Coke, and he did this slowly, as if it were a communion of sorts. He told Jon, between bites, that he would be happy to get him whatever he wanted. He said he knew a woman who was experienced in herbs and potions and tinctures, and if science did not work, he would be glad to guide the two of them to the woman’s house. And she was not expensive.
Ada listened and was surprised that Yen would know the word tincture. She repeated the word to herself, as if it were something novel. She was dimly aware of Jon’s voice and she thought she heard him tell Yen to fuck off and then there were apologies and she felt Jon’s hand touch her arm and the sun fell through the openings along the top of the concrete wall and made egg shapes on the floor, eggs that the wool-capped baby broke and then put back together again.
When she woke, Yen was gone. Finally, a man approached and said he was Dr. Bang. In a small room in the back of the hospital he took her temperature and looked down her throat and then held his stethoscope to her chest and her back. He asked questions that, to her, seemed to arrive in waves. Had she been bleeding from the gums or the mouth? Had she traveled in the countryside? Was she using a mosquito net?
She was lying on a small cot and she saw his thick glasses and soft mouth and she felt safe. Behind his head was a poster on AIDS and condoms. She turned but could not find Jon. “Jon,” she said, and he answered, “Here.” He was standing in the doorway. A small woman wearing a stiff white nurse’s hat sat beside her and took blood from her arm. Ada watched the dark blood swirl up the container. The nurse pressed a cotton ball against her arm, held it there for a while, asked Ada to press against it, and then walked away.
The doctor talked in a slow but clear English about Japanese encephalitis. He said, “Pigs, bats, and egrets are all conduits, and there is a correspondence to the lychee season.” She heard the word conduit and thought at first that he had said condom. Vaccines were mentioned, and Dr. Bang shook his head. He said it was rare to see a case in the city. It might be dengue fever, he said. This was passed on through mosquitoes. He said they should always use nets.
A dullness had settled over her that wouldn’t allow her to speak or move. She slept in the taxi back to the hotel. As soon as she climbed into bed she slept. When she woke it was light and Jon told her that the doctor had called to say it was dengue fever. He would watch her. She heard him deliver the message and then she slept again. And woke. And slept.
One night she woke with a sudden clarity and called out for Jon. He came to her and she said, “Dad’s dead.”
“I know,” he said. “I know, Ada.” And again, she slept.
At one point she saw her father holding Jon by the ankles, dangling him above the rug in the living room. Jon’s mouth was an O, and their father was laughing and Del was dancing to “American Woman.” The tune flitted above Ada’s brain and then disappeared. She heard Jon’s voice but it was too deep for a seven-year-old’s. She lay back and called his name. He didn’t come. And then a softer voice, with a slight accent and perfect sentences. She saw Thanh. He was introducing a young man who held out his hand. She closed her eyes and opened them again and the two figures were gone.
She coughed and wiped her mouth with the sheet. Spots of blood. Not much, just a bit. She waited, and while she waited she slept, and then when she woke she turned and saw Jon sitting in a chair reading, and she said, “I’m bleeding.”
He got up and asked her to open her mouth. With his hands he held her jaw and she was surprised that she couldn’t smell him and she realized that some of her senses had been erased with the fever.
She reached for water and rinsed her mouth and spat into a bowl. Jon went out to find the doctor, and much later when he returned he forced her to swallow several pills. When it was dark again there were more whispers like mice scrabbling over paper and she called for water and was given some.
“The letter,” she said. Jon touched her forehead and told her to sleep. She did and in her dream her dead father came to her and sat beside her. They were in the kitchen back on the mountain. The fire was burning in the stove. She was drinking coffee, but he had nothing in his hands, which were folded. She knew that he was dead because his skin was gray like that of the man she had seen on the gurney at the morgue. She wondered if he understood that he was dead. They talked then of different things, in a manner that they had never done when he was living. She asked him about the boy and he said that there was not a day he did not think of him. He said that a human was more than just a collection of atoms, that people were not just bugs. He talked about the soul of the boy he killed. He said that he had been looking for him in the place where he was now staying. Ada understood then that her father knew h
e was dead. She asked him what place that was. She tried to touch him but could not lift her arm. She said that she had seen him dead at the hospital and that he had had no eyes. Can you see now, she asked, and when he turned toward her she saw the holes in his face and she woke with a tremendous thirst and called out for Jon. When he came to her and she had finished drinking, she told him about the dream. Her telling was convoluted and erratic and he did not seem to understand. He shushed her and laid a cool cloth across her forehead and she thought of his hands sliding across the body of a stranger.
The next day, a rash broke out over her body. Jon told her this was good, it meant the fever was breaking. She still slept. She saw her father; he was holding a gun and pointing it at something that was at knee level. She knew what he was aiming at but she didn’t want to look and so, in her dream, she forced herself to turn away and as she turned she saw a pig and a dog lying in a ditch. Then her father spoke. He was standing on a beach, in water up to his ankles. His mouth was larger than normal and he was holding the dead pig. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was crying and he was young and he looked like Jon. Dr. Bang arrived. He had grown to over six feet and he said that there were two provinces in North Vietnam where the disease was endemic. Ada said, “We have pigs next door.” He said, “Everybody has pigs next door. In any case you must have a combination of three of those factors. For example, pigs, egrets, and the lychee fruit.” “I’ve seen egrets as well,” Ada said, “standing on and eating from the back of a water buffalo.” Bang gestured with his hand. “Two million people died from bombs and guns and you worry about an egret.” He laughed and he had a gold tooth that Ada had not seen before and when she reached out to touch it she was riding on a bicycle past a woman selling flowers.
On the day the fever broke she drank from the bottle that Jon handed her; the water tasted sweeter and she finished it and asked for more. He told her that she had been sick for nine days. Her mouth was still sore and her joints swollen, but she sat on the rooftop and a breeze moved across her face and lifted the hair on her arms. She ate some rice and drank a 7UP. She had lost weight; her jeans hung loosely from her waist, and her breasts, when she looked at them in the mirror, were smaller.
The next morning when she was on the roof again, Yen appeared, startling her. She had been washing her hair, standing over the rain barrel, scooping the lukewarm water with a dipper and pouring it over her head as she bent at the waist. She was wearing shorts and a tank top, and when she thought about it later, she realized that the boy must have seen her from behind, as she was bent forward. He would have seen her bare thighs and the edges of her buttocks and the undersides of her arms. She had noticed him only as she stood and wrapped a towel around her head and turned to go down the stairs. He said, “Hello, Miss Ada.”
She paused, looked about, and then said, “What are you doing here?”
“Checking on you.”
“Go away.” She motioned at the rooftop, the space around them. “This is private. My place. I didn’t invite you here and you aren’t to come here, ever again. Do you understand?” She stepped toward him.
“I came to your door and knocked. And then I heard water splashing and I knew that there was a body up here. And it was yours.”
“I don’t want you sneaking around this hotel looking for me,” Ada said. “Do you understand that?”
Yen walked toward the table and the chair. He tapped a hand against the tabletop and plucked a single cigarette from his shirt pocket. He asked if it was true that her father had drowned. That his body had been found on My Khe Beach.
Ada said that it was not his business.
Yen nodded. He said that everything was quite clear. It was clear that she had lost what she loved, and now did not believe that she could love anything else.
The base of her neck hurt with a fierceness that she had not experienced even at the height of her sickness. She whispered that he should leave. “Go,” she said. She closed her eyes and waited for him to disappear.
He walked toward the door, and just before he went down the stairs she heard him say, “Miss Ada, my father is dead too.” Then he left.
Later, Ada was sitting in a chair looking out over the harbor when Jon came up to find her. Far out at sea the contour of a distant island rose from the water. Jon sat beside her. He said he had been at Christy’s. Had a beer. And then another. He pulled an envelope from his pocket and laid down their father’s letter on the table. “And I read this.”
She looked at him, and then away.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I wanted to.” She stopped talking.
Jon lit a cigarette, watched the smoke rising upward, and said, “So, you knew all along that he killed himself.”
“Lieutenant Dat said they believed it was a suicide.”
“How could you not tell me about it?”
“I don’t know, I was going to but I was sick. I wasn’t sure how you would handle it.”
Then he said that he could handle it just fine. Look at him. Wasn’t he fine? He said it almost made sense that their father had killed himself. It didn’t surprise him. Not really. “Does it surprise you?”
Ada said that she just felt really sad.
Jon said, “Remember those times he took us into the bunker and told us his war stories? Well, I guess they weren’t all true, were they. Or he didn’t tell us everything. Did he.”
Ada said that he had told them everything he was capable of telling. “He must have been tormented.”
Jon said that even if he was tormented, he shouldn’t have confessed like he did, in a letter. “What does he want us to do? Forgive him? For what he did, for what he’s now done? As if it’s that easy? Like a coward he tosses all this shit at us and then doesn’t hang around to discuss it. He didn’t even tell us why.”
Ada said that a person’s private horror wasn’t something to throw out for group discussion. The only reason he had confessed to them was that he knew he was going to kill himself. Ada talked about her sickness and the dreams she had had of their father, and how his voice had been so familiar and so lifelike that when she woke from the dreams she did not know what was real and what wasn’t. “Of course, I was feverish, but I still remember everything so clearly. I was holding a bucket and as it filled and water spilled over the top Dad took a large basin and held it under the pail and caught the water. He said that memory was precious and we mustn’t waste it.”
Jon didn’t answer. He waited and then asked, “What are we going to do?”
Ada said she didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine going home yet. “It would be like running away. He’s still here. The things he saw, what he was looking for, the people he talked to, they’re all still here.” She asked him if he wanted to go home.
He said that he couldn’t think beyond the moment. They sat there then and did not speak save for the occasional observation about their father, which evoked a memory and a rush of commentary, so that by the end of the evening they had exhumed a few scraps of their father’s life. It was, Ada said at one point, as if they were trying to pin him down.
That night Ada took out the novel her father had carried with him and looked more closely at the notes he had written. A few dates, the name Elaine Gouds, a sketch of a map of Danang, and some lines that read, “In Hue. It is raining. The room is damp and chilly. Ate fish the size of pencils. She is sharper than him by far. Than I am, as well.” Ada wondered if “she” was Elaine. One of the pieces of paper had the name of the author of the novel she was holding. And another had a street address, in Vietnamese handwriting, and a different name. Her father had never been one to write down his thoughts, and so all this recording, this keeping of notes, surprised her.
Over the next two days she read, and all the while she thought about her father and about his letter and the confession. When she was finished reading, she was not sure where or how the story fit into her father’s history. He had given no indication. He had been searching for
something, she felt that. She imagined that he had sat on this very chair and looked up at the same sky and at some point he had moved in a direction of his own choosing.
A breeze passed over her neck. She shivered.
6
MR. THANH HAD VISITED WHEN SHE WAS SICK. HE HAD COME WITH his son, Trang, and so the feverish memory of the two figures had not been a dream at all. Thanh had left her a marble ball the size of a baseball. It was black and red, and when she held it in her hand, it felt solid and smooth. He had also given her a note in which he said that he was very sorry about her father and that he hoped she would feel better soon.
He came again with his son one morning. Stood by the stairs that led to the rooftop and called out her name. She was happy to see him. He gave her gifts of mulberry wine, lotus tea, and fresh figs. He folded his hands and said, “How are you, Ada?”
She was sitting in a chair and she called him closer. He took two steps and stopped and then half-turned, gesturing at his son. “Have you met Trang?” Trang shook hands with Ada, and she apologized for her paleness, for her lack of strength.
“No, no,” Trang said. “My father keeps dragging me along, hoping that I will meet you. It’s all rather embarrassing. I am sorry.”
Ada waved this away, turned to Thanh, and asked if he knew anything about a boy called Yen. A boy who seemed to be around constantly, she said.
Thanh said that he didn’t know any Yen but that he might be a pimp or an orphan or a scoundrel or a beggar. “Or he might be all four,” Thanh said, “which is more possible. If you like, I can find the boy and have a word with him.”
Ada shook her head. “No, that’s not a problem. He seems so precocious and yet so helpless.”
“Boys like this are always seeming helpless. They aren’t,” Thanh said.
A light wind blew across the rooftop. Thanh held up a palm to the sky and commented on the sun and the lovely plants beside the table and the good fortune of being able to sit here with her. He said that the figs he’d brought were very special. His wife had found them in the market. Ada thanked him again and then she held up the novel she had found in her father’s suitcase and said, “My father was interested in this book and, I think, in the man who wrote it.”
