by Alfredo Vea
As he drove down Mississippi Street toward the Hall of Justice, Jesse wondered what that single word on the tape would be? He opened the envelope and pushed the cassette into his car radio, then he waved at Eddy, who was driving toward the Bay Bridge in his own car. The radio was turned off so that the 911 tape wouldn’t begin playing until Jesse was perfectly ready to hear it.
After a long thoughtful pause at a stop sign, he turned his car down Sixteenth Street, turned left on Market, and began driving toward Twin Peaks. It was then that he realized that he needed to decide what his destination was before driving any farther. He could go to Glen Park, where Carolina would be having her dinner and watching the news, or he could drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and spend the night alone in the little room he kept at the Sonoma Inn Motel. This might be as good a night as any to “communicate” with her. He winced at the thought of it. Those conversations always ended the same way: with a paralyzed and mute Jesse leaving in the middle of a vegetarian meal, and with Carolina frustrated and sobbing. Might as well get it over with, he thought, though he couldn’t decide which he dreaded more, the communication or the tofu. Suddenly his fingers reached for the radio and turned it on.
He fully expected to hear Benny Green, the Modern Jazz Quartet, or the Horace Silver quintet. The question of where to sleep had caused him to forget for an instant that there was a tape lodged in the radio, ready to play. What he heard first was the monotone voice of the communications technician as he announced the date and the exact time of the incoming call. Then Jesse heard the single spoken word: a long airy vowel, a soft consonant of pressed lips, a short and guttural vowel, and, finally, a moment of sibilance that faded off to eternity. He began to finger his dog tags once again as he heard the consonants and vowels that would serve to punctuate a lifetime, the single word that would have to suffice.
He sped past Carolina’s house, up Sloat Boulevard, down Nineteenth Avenue, and back toward the city. She had been home, her front room lights had been on. She was probably in her darkroom wondering when, if ever, he was going to come by. Jesse could see her in his mind’s eye, carefully rinsing a photograph, the acrid scents of acetic acid and melancholy filling her lovely nose.
He drove erratically and carelessly, crossing double lines and running stop signs as he played and replayed that single word. When the sound of two gunshots filled his ears for the fifth time he pulled to the side of the road to compose himself before driving on. He passed Balboa Street, turning down Geary, and pulled over at the Dublin City Bar, leaving his car running and the driver’s door wide open. He ran into the bar and stood impatiently at the cash register, his face glistening with sweat. His old friend Hollis had seen him come in and greeted him with a wide smile.
“Hollis, get me a bottle of mezcal and a six-pack of Mexican beer,” he shouted, ignoring the other patrons seated at the counter. Hollis the bartender nodded at Jesse. He pulled a tall bottle from the shelf above his head, then reached into a nearby refrigerator for the six-pack. It took some time to move all the Irish beers aside so that he could reach the Mexican beers.
“What’s the hurry, Jesse?” asked the bartender. “We haven’t talked about old times in two or three months. Why not have a seat and join the living? Two pints for two poets, eh?” Even as he asked, Hollis saw the negative answers to his friendly inquiries written on Jesse’s frenzied and pallid face. “Some other time, eh, sarge? Some other time.”
Jesse nodded both impatiently and apologetically as he tossed twenty dollars onto the counter. Then he grabbed the liquor and ran out of the bar. As he drove off, Jesse knew that Hollis would understand such a rude entry and departure. Hollis understood everything—he had fought at Ia Drang. He had reenlisted twice and had done three tours in Vietnam. He had done heroin, cocaine, and transcendental meditation. He would not need an explanation.
On the road north Jesse played the tape over and over again, his hand shaking with internal resistance each time he reached up to rewind the cassette. By the time he reached the motel he had downed half the bottle. With each swig his lips came closer and closer to the pink gusano, the worm that crawls toward everyone’s bedsheet. Is that what the Mexicans meant by their tradition? wondered Jesse. Was it good luck to swallow death? To taste it while still alive? Hadn’t he already done that? All at once the thought of eating the gusano was no longer repugnant. He had tasted death before.
He swallowed the worm just as his car skidded into the parking lot of his motel. In a moment of lucidity he realized that he had no memory whatsoever of having driven across the Golden Gate Bridge. He opened the trunk of his car to retrieve a small cassette player, then staggered to his room, leaving the trunk wide open.
That night he finally fell asleep at six in the morning. By daybreak he had thrown up twice, the first time on the sheets. He had finished the bottle and tossed it heedlessly onto the floor. He had followed a liter of mezcal with five bottles of Corona. He had sobbed each time he heard that voice and that single word. The soft sound of air passing through Persephone’s larynx, over her palatine tonsil, and past her lips had staggered Jesse, jolted him like a bolt of ball lightning down his spine.
Persephone had not cried out for help. In fact, there had been no hint of fear in her voice. Her tone had been one of quiet supplication, almost prayerlike. The final word to resonate in her nasal con chas was a name, the name of a man: Amos.
“Amos Flyer!” Jesse had screamed at the spinning walls of his motel room. The sleepy motel clerk at the front desk had been del uged with angry calls complaining about the horrid noises coming from within room 27. Jesse knew Amos Flyer. Why hadn’t he made the connection before? He knew Amos Flyer! He loved Amos Flyer! And even more than that, he knew precisely what the second voice had been screaming just after the first gunshot and just before the second.
She hadn’t been screaming “ten lands,” as one of the witnesses had stated. She had been screaming words that Jesse had heard once before, words that had been burned into his memory. Those words had certainly been Mai Adrong’s final words as she ran forward to embrace her dear friend. Both women had done what they had to do, and neither had been afraid. Jesse’s tumbling mind seethed with a hundred ironies.
When he finally lost consciousness, Jesse dreamed a dream unlike any before—the hardest dream, the cruelest, the kind that contains no mystery at all, no deep meanings sequestered within vague and skewed symbols. Rolling and sweltering, his closed eyes dancing madly beneath his lids, Jesse whimpered while knitting a smoky skein of siege and embrace beneath his brow. The man’s body tossed wildly as the wounded mind of the seventeen-year-old soldier came forward once more: the boy assuming command of the man. He came forward beseeching all impostors, piling calumnies upon every lover, balking at any splendor, and leering madly at the lustrous deafening of guns.
Jesse lay his head down where there were two ghostly hills, one upon the other, the hardest pillows on earth. They were eerie hill-sides of shanties and sorties where tender, practiced movements of arabesque and grand jeté were set to the billowing, profane music of battle. Between his ears grew the tumult of toe shoes beneath a callow rank of pale-blue dancers suddenly cut down by combustion. The troupe performed in a florid grotto where the sweet lure of jeopardy is effaced by chagrin, endless braids of chagrin. At stage left the grace of bedlam was chained to couplets of dalliance.
There were soldiers coming up the rise, and screaming in the yellow light of drifting flares. The faceless had faces. There were young soldiers coming up, flaunting their last instant of human wholeness for carefully positioned machine guns. Jesse fired madly through the hotel room’s plaster ceiling, through the roof and through the universe. One of the enemy soldiers refused to die.
Down below, there were sudden, wet plumes of crimson, spreading out like horizontal geysers. Chiaroscuro: a canvas of innards covered his hotel bed; his legs were lathered in bile and acid. There was hot distemper in his dreams, sordid squalls of dismay. There was a mae
lstrom upon his sheets, body counts a world and decades apart. A friend gone insane is walking toward the Mekong River. Jesse buckled violently as a screwdriver coldly disengaged his mind. The stabbing pain was replaced by a vision of bodies arrayed, shredded and cooling, bodies all craving the mundane. Boys once so addicted to breath were all craving the mundane.
Then there was the dying voice of Julio Lopez speaking from below the bed. Jesse saw that his slender brown body was just beneath his own, sewn into the mattress, sealed in and suffocating. Cotton filled Julio’s mouth as he tried to speak. A sorrowful dance step and its entangled shadow, the man’s variation moved across the stage, followed by the woman‘s, claustrophobic and clutching and moribund. There was a slavish dance in his dreams: a woeful pas de deux on two separate stages, one upon the other, years apart.
A mad elopement of pariahs commingled an ablution of yeast and opium. A line of green boys, prescient and listless, circled his forlorn bed in a tight and noiseless three-meter spread. On Jesse’s pillow, his bile-ridden sweat smelled of the ancient docks at Marseille. His shoulders beneath his shirt and tie were galled by straps and web belts and by the weight of canteens and taped magazines.
Finally, at the darkest part of the morning, Jesse dreamed of the young padre who had walked through a minefield and away from a war.
“What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces?”
Clutched in Jesse’s fingers were two dog tags, his own and the one that had emerged from the surface of a metal wall in the same way that Japanese carp break the surface of a pond, the dog tag that once hung on the neck of a Creole sergeant named Amos Flyer.
At the first blush of dusk, just minutes before merciful sleep, the radio alarm came on. Jesse heard nothing. There was a sweet coda on a radio, a soulful rendition of “L‘Amour Suprême” performed by Jean Jacques Kainji, the magnificent French-Nigerian saxophonist who, in another world and in another time, would have been named John Coltrane. There was the late-breaking news flash that the Martian probe sent into space by the United States almost a year before had landed on the surface of the red planet.
The first photos from the surface would shock the entire world. There on the surface, hastily left by the side of one of the canals, were six empty bottles of cerveza Bohemia, a giant, unopened bag of chicharrón, eleven cigarette butts, and three discarded tin cans that had once contained menudo.
9
the spider’s banquet
It begins in the frozen grasses and rarefied air of Tibet as a small, thirsting spring. Its small visage at that altitude is pure and infantile. Little more than a feeble trickle, it is helplessly swaddled in lichens and moss. Up here, a jackboot could stifle it. A tank tread could reroute it. A thirsty bulrush could swallow it whole. Here at the roof of the world it is just one of many supplicant springs, mere novice flows tugging at the hemline of lofty snow, suckling there at frost and here at lowly sleet.
It learns to toddle in these highlands and begins to walk where the yak, a tiny bullock, is slaughtered reverently and is so fiercely venerated. It gathers its strength in southern China and becomes a wide flow as it skirts the Zadoi temple of Jingding, where celestial prayers rise up like startled larks and naked Buddhist monks and Hui Mus lims go down in silent droves to bathe. It begins to darken and deepen near the Golden Triangle, where it hears the voices, feels the hulls, feeds the children of the people called Blang, Kongge, Han, Van, and Aku.
It passes by brimming ladles of rice wine, lime-green papayas sautéed with peanuts, hidden caches of fermenting fish heads, and mile upon green mile of poppy fields fringed by irrigation ditches and the bending people who tend them. Beyond these are endless fields of tea, mint, and lemon grass. Behind those are the never-ending patchwork of rice paddies, the serenity and steam of countless tea ceremonies, and the davening, clouded mutters of a legion of heroin addicts.
Hidden within fields such as these, spread out in an unnatural array, are skulking squads of Pathet Lao, Khmer Rouge cadres, platoons of Vietcong, and battalions of North Vietnamese regulars. They are all venerable orders, replenished each day by newly sewn uniforms covering newly recruited flesh. The grassy fields are littered with the rusted paraphernalia of a dozen wars. As with all armies, the barked commands and the cold machines always outlive the men.
New to these grasses and valleys are razor-wired encampments of ARVN from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and … there are Americans—noisy, brash, and brimming with slick and polished mythologies of good and evil and tales of technical invincibility.
The river that flows beneath American gunboats has seen the Mongols, the Burmans, the Toungoo and Chakri dynasties. It has heard the names beneath the names: ancient Upper Chenla, Lower Chenla and the eternal Kingdom of Champa. Now it has heard of Watts, Echo Park, Buttermilk Bottom, and Staten Island. Now the river has heard Janis Joplin and Smokey Robinson.
The crystalline head of this river is twenty-five hundred miles from its murky, splayed legs. In south China, its given name is Lan cang, the force of a million gray elephants that rampage and rumble headlong into Laos. There, its huge belly is replenished by Luang, the monster dragon who spits torrents of fresh rain. At full strength it flows by the ruins of Angkor Wat and blithely sloughs off Tonle Sap, a tiny tributary that soon becomes a great lake where Cham and Khmer fishermen gracefully cast their white butterfly nets, pulling back generation after generation of slippery, brown wives and flapping children, harvesting century after century of life.
It listens to prayers as it travels; it has always listened to prayers. There are gentle Cao Dai sentiments sunk deep in its sediment, and Christian prayers clinging like fervent froth to its wide banks. Its responsive face is ever changing in reaction to endless Taoist chants. Its waves have heaved and sighed forever, moved by the birth of mountains; moved by the words of the Koran. Unlike all other rivers on earth, this one is driven down to the sea by the dew and sweat of orchids, by the unceasing hopes of men.
Each trough is a cruel frailty, each crest an anonymous act of morality. This river was busily flooding the banks of Southeast Asia for ten kilometers on either side when the ancient schism between Ma hayana and Theravada split the heart of Asia.
Miles downriver the Mekong divides twice. It becomes the Tien Giang and the Hua Giang long before it flays itself into the nine-headed serpent of the delta called Cong Cuu Long. He is the dragon who is doomed to do eternal, elemental battle with the sea. For hundreds of miles up the delta, salt water invades the flow of rain and melted snow.
The color of this conflict is a bluish-green whose deepest moods are black as obsidian. It is here that the floating markets flourish, clotting small harbors like giant, woven water lilies. It is here in the humid delta that the trees of the mangrove forests interlace their roots and thicken into impenetrability.
The lieutenant from the Chaplain’s Corps walked, then ran, then staggered toward this river. With the voice of a young Chicano sergeant still ringing in his ears and the sad, confused gaze of Tiburcio Mendez probing at his back, he walked heedlessly through a minefield, his senseless feet setting off trip flares as he moved. He crossed a small ravine and then staggered past a hastily hidden pile of NVA dead. They had been dragged from the field of battle in order to skew the enemy’s body count.
It was obvious that they had been moved from the scene in a frenzy of fear and disrespect; bloodless cheeks had been torn and scuffed by rocks, and sightless eyes had been punctured by exposed roots. Their bodies had been stripped of weapons and food. Any insignia of rank had been torn away. More than anything else, they looked like a cord of expressive firewood or a gothic frieze depicting the everlasting pain of Hades. The bitter, cloying scent of the rotting corpses wafted into his nose, enraging his nerve endings, but it did not enter into his soul.
The lieutenant blessed them all with a sweeping motion of his hand. It was not a learned but an uncommitted wave. That would have been a staunchly Unitarian gesture. The pain behind the movement of t
he hand was not the staid, bloodless echo of an ancient passion—it certainly was not Catholic. Rather, it was a calm gesture of recognition, a gesture of acknowledgment and acceptance—as though the horror of these fields was little more than yet another blow struck by an old, familiar foe. For some unknown reason the chaplain felt like singing, but singing was not the word that properly described his desire. He wished to chant. There was a dyslexic song of stilted, unfamiliar rhythms and unrhymed words that stuck in his gorge and could not rise.
Minutes later he stepped into a deep crater, suddenly falling waist-deep into soft, collapsing soil. Around his rooted legs was a large, circular depression that was all that remained of an extensive underground hospital complex. There were muted groans just yards beneath his feet, painful sighs of hope and surrender that invaded his consciousness as if in a dream. His ears heard muffled, suffocating cries for help, but his mind did not. The blaring sounds within his own skull were much too deafening.
If he had gazed downward, he would have seen traces of a ruined enemy medical installation—unsterilized needles and ragged bandages, the splinters of handmade surgical tools. A once enormous complex of rooms cut deep into the soil had been instantly transformed into an endless maze of catacombs. A bomb had found its target.
He walked until the sun set once more, stopping only because the night was as profoundly black as total blindness. Though the sky was ablaze with stars, he could see nothing at all below the horizon. Considering neither safety nor comfort, he found a small depression in a grassy hillside and dropped down to wait for morning. He may have slept. He may have dreamed. How could he know? Even in the deep quiet of midnight, the eclipse of reason behind his eyes raised a sheen of sweat on his brow and tightened the muscles of his jaw into an eternal grimace.
