by Daniel Mason
At the Rex Hotel there were several Vietnamese men in expensive suits lunching with another group of Asian men who didn’t seem to be Vietnamese. Hayes told me that they are thuong gia, which basically means that they are trading people. A lot of big business happens at the Rex, Hayes said. Certainly not all of it above board, either.
There was a beautiful woman playing something classical on a cello in one of the lounges.
‘We can’t smoke at this bar,’ Hayes said.
I grumbled. It had taken a while to convince the doorman that I was dressed appropriately for entry.
We sat at the bar drinking rum with ice and Hayes nodded toward a group of men seated at a table in the far corner. He said, ‘The fat one-eyed man is a big player in organised crime in this city. He runs a bareknuckle boxing racket in District Six. It used to be martial arts deathmatches but that’s changed over the last five years or so. It takes place in registered dance halls, believe it or not. Apparently there’s a lot of money to be made in that sort of thing. He imports furs and exotic jewels, too. Owns several gas stations. He was acquitted on several charges relating to murder and manslaughter about two years ago. The police haven’t touched him since.’
After our drinks Hayes said it was time to go.
‘What? Now?’
‘I don’t like to sit for long in one place. I get like this for the first couple of days. Restless. I can’t sit here. We have to go.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’ I asked him on the way out. We had paused to light cigarettes in the lobby where they were playing cheesy instrumental music over the speakers.
‘I wanted to show you that man,’ Hayes said.
I didn’t question him. I stared at him over the length of my cigarette and I nodded like I understood. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I get it, baby.
Hayes laughed because he knew I didn’t understand.
‘If you’re HIV-positive, does that mean that Phoebe—’ I started to ask.
‘No,’ Hayes answered. ‘She’s not. Two people can be involved in a sexual relationship with one partner HIV-positive, and it is possible that the other won’t contract. We practise safe sex, of course.’
I nodded. We were standing in the living room of Hayes’ apartment. I had been back to the hotel for a change of clothes, and that dirty bed had seemed the most inviting place on the planet. Sleep is a dream for insomniacs.
‘Cambodian prostitutes,’ Hayes said, answering my next question before I could even ask it. ‘More than half of Cambodia’s prostitutes are infected. One hundred and twenty thousand people in Cambodia have AIDS, the greatest number of any one country in Asia. I was drunk, I wasn’t thinking.’
Phoebe emerged in a short black dress. Her hair was up.
‘Are you talking about me?’ she asked.
‘I don’t want you wearing that dress,’ Hayes said immediately.
‘Why not?’ she asked, smoothing it down. ‘I just bought this two weeks ago.’
‘You’ll get us into trouble if you wear that,’ Hayes told her. ‘Go and change.’
‘No way,’ she said. ‘I’m going out in this dress.’
‘Okay,’ Hayes said, seeming to give in. He turned to me. ‘You ready to go?’
I shrugged.
Phoebe said she just had to get her wallet.
Hayes gave a sigh and said, ‘Sometimes it’s better just not to argue with them.’
Through the bathroom door I saw her snorting lines of cocaine from a tray like Miranda’s ghost.
Hayes said, ‘Phoebe there thinks of herself as something of a feminist. In her mind, a dress that short and revealing is empowering. Shows she’s not ashamed of her body, knows how to use it. She doesn’t consider the idea that she looks like some kind of slut, or anything.’
She came back to the door, said, ‘Are you talking about me?’
Hayes said, ‘Get your wallet.’
We went to a nightclub on Mac Thi Buoi Street. The bright lights and loud music were hell on my aching head, but I tried to ignore it, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes and ordering two drinks at a time. I watched Hayes and Phoebe on the dancefloor among a sea of young backpackers and manic Asians. A young British girl asked me to join her on the dancefloor. She frowned in disapproval when I declined.
Hayes came to the bar for drinks, laughing and slapping people on the back. ‘After a testosterone injection you’re riding the high for about three or four days. Your mind races, your attention span is shot. I act impulsively. I’m filled with more energy than I know what to do with.’ I noticed that Hayes was tapping his foot incessantly. He gave me a wink.
He took his drinks and slunk away, back to Phoebe. I watched them with envy, bodies entwined and moving rhythmically together. The sharp pulsing pains in my head seemed to strike with each beat of the music. I felt very short of breath, like the world was closing in around me.
I crunched ice from an empty glass between my teeth.
I wanted to leave, to walk down to the hotel and just collapse.
I watched Hayes and Phoebe dancing.
By midnight I had lost count of how many drinks I’d had. Hayes was at the bar again, ordering. He shoved a glass in my general direction with a grin, nodding and saying, ‘Drink up.’
‘Looks like somebody’s trying to muscle in on your girl,’ I told Hayes, pointing to the dancers. There was a tall man with long sideburns dancing provocatively with Phoebe. She seemed to be enjoying the flirtation immensely. Hayes frowned. He said, ‘Fuck it. I told her that dress would get us into trouble. Hold this.’ He handed me his glass and disappeared.
I saw Hayes stepping between Phoebe and the tall man, grabbing her by the arm and moving her away. She looked shocked at his rudeness. The tall man reached out to stop Hayes, who turned on him. They might have been shouting, but I couldn’t make it out over the music. Beat, beat, beat. Their movements caught between the flashes of bright light. Red. Green. Orange. Purple.
I’m watching the fight and the song playing was The Prodigy, ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.
It was like watching a series of stills between the strobing lights. Hayes with his elbow cocked and ready for a swing. Red. Swinging, connecting with the man’s jawbone. Green. Man with his head forced to one side, blood looping from between his lips. Orange. Hayes swinging again, a punch to the man’s stomach. Purple. Man doubled over, dripping blood, clutching his stomach.
Hayes was kicked out and the police were called. The air outside seemed cooler, though it was filled with smoke and awful stenches. The tall man was a German. His nose was broken and jaw shattered. The front of his white shirt was soaked through with blood. I followed Hayes and Phoebe through the crowd, looking for a taxi before the police arrived. I watched as they hurried into the taxi without me, driving away. Hayes seemed calm, Phoebe manic. They were arguing in the back as the taxi disappeared into the traffic.
I walked to my hotel and collapsed on the bed. Outside, there was a full moon glowing fat and yellow over ugly clouds.
‘Women,’ Hayes was saying somewhere above me. I pried my eyes open and he was standing there in a neatly pressed suit, no tie. There was sunlight streaming through the windows. ‘They do it to you on purpose. They don’t mind an argument. They like to make you jealous. They will go hours without talking to you, just so you know they’re angry. They flirt in front of you to find out how much you care.’
I yawned and wondered how he’d gotten into my room, how he’d found me here. It was small and cramped, and he towered over the end of the bed. I reached for my cigarettes, and he offered one of his own.
‘I try to let her have her way. I try to be complacent. I try not to care. It’s the testosterone that fuels jealousy and gets you into fights. It’s like war; your testosterone is upped considerably during confrontation. Your body wants you to win, and it tries to fuel your engines. It drives you toward victory.’
There was dried blood on the pillow. I had suffered another nosebleed during my
sleep, the third in a week.
‘When you lose your fight, you have to back down. You crawl away, you aren’t ready for another confrontation for quite a while.’ Hayes lit his own cigarette, puffing smoke toward the ceiling.
Groggily, I told him, ‘You won your fight.’
‘He didn’t stand a chance,’ Hayes said. ‘The fighter with the higher level of testosterone is always going to win. It’s inevitable. For the first few days after the injection I’m an animal. But sooner or later depression kicks in, and we have to combat this. I’ll show you, soon.’
‘Okay,’ I said, mostly tired and disinterested.
‘I have to go to work. You look like you need your sleep. Get some rest, you’ll need it,’ he said.
Then he was gone.
I lay there for a short while, smoking my cigarette, back aching from the lumpy mattress. After a while I decided that some kind of breakfast might be in order, and I dressed and stumbled downstairs.
Phoebe was saying, ‘Did you know that at conception every embryo is female?’ I could see my reflection in the lenses of her glasses. We were at a café, sharing cigarettes and drinking coffee. It was terrible coffee.
‘No,’ I said, unable to care. ‘I was not aware of that.’ I ran a hand over the bristles on my face. I felt tired and dirty. The air was hot and damp, and my shirt clung tightly to my back.
‘It’s true,’ she said, sniffing. ‘If the foetus has a Y chromosome, it requires testosterone to turn it into a boy. This happens around six weeks after conception.’
I frowned and sipped my terrible coffee. ‘Does everybody around here talk like they’re quoting from an encyclopedia, or is it just me?’
She laughed. ‘I think it rubs off. He can be very preachy at times, can’t he?’ This was something that I had noticed during my brief time with Phoebe—she did not refer to Hayes by name, unless speaking directly to him. In his absence, Hayes was simply referred to as ‘he’, like we should all know who she was talking about. It sounded almost like it needed a capital H. She went on, ‘But I’m going somewhere with this, so bear with me, ’kay?’
I shrugged.
‘Right, so if all embryos are female at the time of conception, that would mean that female is the default sex, wouldn’t it? I mean, doesn’t that make sense?’
‘I suppose,’ I said, stubbing my cigarette into the ashtray. I was wearing sunglasses, so she couldn’t see my aching eyes. She seemed to be searching for them.
‘Oh, you suppose,’ she said.
‘So we should all be women?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ She crushed the life from her own cigarette. I yawned.
We sat in silence for a while, and I took to watching the people who wandered the street. When I spotted a foreigner, I asked myself which country they came from and why they were here.
Why come to Vietnam?
Phoebe broke the silence and said, ‘When I first came out here I decided to get to know a little history of the country. I went to one of the massacre sites from the war, up near Danang. It had been a small village, decimated by a group of South Korean mercenaries. These days it’s mostly an overgrown field, hidden away. It was raining and the earth was soaked through, but there were still fragments of bone and torn clothing, even thirty years later.’
‘That must have been very nice,’ I said.
‘Three hundred people were killed,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to take you there? We could leave this morning, probably get back by dark.’
‘This coffee,’ I said, ‘is terrible.’
‘Come on.’ She grabbed my arm and pulled me up. ‘We can leave now and take a bus, maybe. Do you know much about the Vietnam War?’
‘Not a great deal,’ I told her. ‘But I guess I know enough. It’s been the only major war for people of our generation, after all.’
She hooked her arm around mine as we walked, almost dragging me through the crowd.
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘What year were you born?’
‘1967.’
‘Really? You don’t look so old.’
‘I feel fifty,’ I answered dryly. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-five,’ she said. ‘And I feel nineteen.’
‘You look it, too,’ I said.
She stopped dragging me along the street. ‘Why, thank you.’
‘I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment.’
‘Well, I’ll take it as one, anyway.’
After a moment of staring into each other’s eyes, we resumed our movements along the crowded street. I didn’t want to ask what that was about.
Phoebe was a head shorter than I, approximately the height of most Vietnamese people we passed on the street. I realised that I knew next to nothing about her. Hayes was at work and she hadn’t wanted to spend the day alone in the city. She had not made any mention of his fight from the previous night, and I decided to remain mute on the subject too.
‘What are you doing in Vietnam?’ she asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I wanted to see Asia.’
She nodded as if she understood, when I didn’t even really understand it myself. There was no real motivation for staying in Asia. I just moved from one location to the next, searching for something that didn’t seem to exist. Searching for something, anything. If I waited long enough, maybe it would find me.
The only reason that I’d made it as far as Vietnam was because of Miranda, who had clearly now abandoned me. She had wanted to sell her drugs in Asia, or Europe. With that money we could travel the world and find ourselves, she’d told me.
‘I never would have seen myself living here seven years ago,’ Phoebe said. Her voice was low, and if she weren’t walking right beside me in the crowd I wouldn’t have heard.
‘But here you are,’ I said. She didn’t seem to be listening.
We found a bus that did chartered tours and were fortunate to find that they had two spare seats. They weren’t going to the same site that Phoebe had seen, but they would be visiting several other wartime sites, and she seemed quite enthusiastic about attending. I went along begrudgingly, tired and aching.
There were twelve other people on the bus, mostly Europeans and Americans, their ages ranging from twenty to sixty. These were people who had seen pictures of the war in old magazines or newsreels or movies. For a moment I felt saddened that the country would never be able to escape that history, and then I convinced myself that I didn’t really care. I looked over the people I shared the small rickety bus with: brightly dressed, chatting wildly and clutching their cameras. I felt out of place. Was I a tourist?
Was I here just to sightsee, or was I here to really look at things?
I had the feeling that I was waiting, for what I wasn’t sure.
Phoebe said, ‘What other countries have you been to?’ She didn’t keep her voice low and seemed almost oblivious to the presence of any other passengers. Her eyes were wide and curious. Her hand rested against my arm.
I told her South America.
She said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go there, but it’s so dangerous with all of the wars and everything. Political turmoil. They say it isn’t safe.’
I told her, ‘They say that Asia can be dangerous, too.’
She said, ‘I’ve never once felt threatened here.’
I said, ‘To me, a familiar location is far more threatening than the unfamiliar.’
Phoebe said, ‘Whatever.’
Hayes was saying, ‘Did you fuck my girlfriend?’ and I was half asleep, panicking at the accusation, struggling into consciousness and wondering if I had done what he accused me of.
This is jealousy. Testosterone-fuelled. Primal. Male.
‘I don’t think so,’ I answered. My head was on fire and I couldn’t see straight. Hayes was a blur at the end of my bed, standing there, looming. He seemed almost calm.
Yesterday. What had happened yesterday? I fell asleep on the bus full of tourists. I don’t remembe
r. It started to rain; Phoebe wanted to visit the war sites. I was floating.
‘You didn’t fuck her?’ Hayes was asking.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We went on a bus ride. Somewhere. I don’t remember.’ This is what happens to your brain when a tumour consumes it. Memory loss. Confusion.
‘You didn’t want to fuck her?’
No. I wanted to kiss her. I leaned over and I—
I sat up and hissed, ‘What? What is this? The Spanish Inquisition? Fuck.’
‘Okay,’ he said. He seemed to nod to himself, then lit a cigarette.
‘Give me one of those,’ I demanded, voice rasping.
‘You look like the walking dead,’ Hayes said as the cigarette tumbled through the air toward me.
I caught it with one hand and said, ‘You don’t realise how true that is.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I do. You have the same look in your eye that I see in the mirror every morning. It’s the look of a man who knows he’s just about out of time. You can see it in a man’s face when he knows he’s going to die.’
Hayes said, ‘My body is killing me. What I have can’t be cured. What is it with you? Not AIDS, no. Cancer? What?’
‘We’ll say cancer,’ I replied, lighting the cigarette.
‘Well I’m sure all of that cancer fuel will do you a lot of good,’ he said, nodding grimly to the cigarette I was drawing on.
‘I hope so,’ I said.
Hayes said nothing for a moment, staring out the window. Finally he spoke. ‘Keep tonight free. We’re going somewhere. I’m going to teach you a game. I’m going to teach you to live a little. It’s all us dying men can do.’ Then he was gone from my room again, leaving the door open behind him, footsteps trailing away down the hall. I lay there naked on the dirty sheets.
PLAY
Hayes says, ‘We play. We’re up.’
We are sitting in a Russian roulette gallery. There’s a dead Vietnamese man on the floor.
Hayes has just informed me that we are to play a game.
We’re up. No way.
‘What?’ I ask.
