Dragonfish: A Novel

by Vu Tran

  My first knock was gentle. The knock a maid would make. After some moments, I knocked again, louder this time but still polite. I could feel her standing behind the other side of the door.

  “Suzy?” I said, leaning in. “It’s me. It’s Robert. Please open the door.”

  I took a step back so that I could stand in full view of the peep hole. I would have stood there for hours if I had to. But then the knob turned.

  The door opened halfway, revealing the face of a young woman who stood partly behind it, staring out at me, cautious but unafraid. She was Vietnamese, in her early twenties, and wore faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a tight brown leather jacket zipped all the way up like she’d just come in from the cold. No jewelry and no makeup, though she needed neither.

  Her boyishly cropped hair muted the resemblance at first, but it was impossible not to recognize the cheekbones and the dark glaring eyes, the shade of familiar stubbornness there. She even had the same long, proud neck, that way of holding up her chin like she was ready to stand her ground against anything. I felt a childish urge to blink and see if she’d disappear, wave my hand in front of her so that something might change.

  But my eyes did not lie. Suzy stood there before me, twenty years younger, both something found and something I had lost.

  “Who’re you?” she said. “And who is Suzy?”

  part two

  On our second night at sea, you disappeared. I awoke and found your shorts by my side and had to keep from screaming your name. Where could you have gone with all the sleeping bodies around us? I’d seen a few mothers tie string from their wrists to their child’s wrists, and I cursed myself for my laziness.

  Then I saw you, and it was like seeing a ghost. You were outside the boat looking in, calmly holding on to the gunwale as though you were ready to let go, as though you were levitating. I grabbed your arms and hauled you back inside. You were naked from the waist down. I looked over the gunwale and realized that you had been squatting over the sea, balanced on some wooden trim along the side of the boat, all to avoid the boat’s latrine, which apparently frightened you more than falling into the sea.

  You flinched when I touched your cheek. I must have been glaring at you as if I was ready to spank you. But my heart was pounding. If you had fallen overboard, no one could have known. The night would have swallowed you whole. Your presence now seemed such a miracle that I was overcome with shame at having ever wished you away. I loved you more in that moment than at any other moment in your life. I cradled your head, smoothed your brow, and won dered what had possessed me those last few days. Don’t ever do that again, I told you, but I was saying it to myself. I held you fast until you slept and did not close my eyes until images of your death faded into the night.

  There are things that people do poorly for lack of talent, and things they do poorly for lack of desire. Then there are those things that all the desire and talent in the world cannot make possible, cannot make fit, no matter how often you pray and how hard you pretend.

  On the day you were born, I lost my voice. Words came out like gasps, and during labor my pain had no sound. The nurse held my hand.

  Your father had been gone for five months, vanished without a word, and no one knew if he had fled the country or been imprisoned or if he was even alive.

  You must have sensed it. A baby’s cries at birth are full of vigor, but yours were weak and willful, a stubborn crying, as though you were already disappointed in me and mourning him.

  When I held you for the first time, you refused to nurse. You struggled in my arms and kept crying softly. Even when my voice came back, I found I had nothing to say. I remember a deep, instant love for you that felt like a locked room inside me. It’s only now as I write this, as I say these words to myself, that I begin to understand it.

  I wonder what you remember of our fifth night, when that strange tragedy began. It was a moonless night, the darkest so far of our trip. A woman began wailing and awoke the entire boat. Where is my son? she shrieked. My son is gone!

  The engine stopped and lanterns were lit. People were already looking overboard. Although a few men stood ready to jump into the sea, we all knew there was no sense in it. We had only just stopped the boat, and the calm black waters around us showed no sign of anything. If the boy had fallen in, it was already too late.

  People were consoling the mother, restraining her. Like me, she had no one else on the boat but her child.

  I remember him. He spent most of the first day retching into a plastic bag as she stroked his hair and patted his back. The yellow stains on his T-shirt were still visible the last time I saw him. He was your age, your height, thin and sickly, and his disappearance cruelly echoed what might have happened to you three nights before. What I had miraculously avoided, this woman was now suffering.

  People searched every corner of the boat. There was no trace of the boy. The captain finally restarted the engine, which got the woman screaming again. No! No! You can’t leave him behind! I must find him first!

  Somehow you had remained asleep through all of this. But now you were wide awake and clutching my shirt. Why is she screaming? you asked me. I had no idea what to say and could only turn you away and cover your ears, but you peeled off my hands and repeated your question until I finally snapped at you. Even as the shadows obscured her, you kept staring.

  She wept for hours. We could hear her over the boat’s engine, moaning in the darkness. No one could comfort her, and no one could sleep, not even you. As her fits turned hysterical, my pity for her was replaced with something like hatred. At one point I even considered quieting her by force, but at dawn she suddenly stopped, exhausted apparently, and people at last were able to fall asleep.

  It rained late that morning. Everyone’s mood improved. We collected rainwater in as many containers as we could find, and the storm was cool and soothing after days of scorching weather.

  I watched you sit nearby with two older kids. It surprised me, since you rarely played with other children, or with anyone for that matter. But then you went still as you faced the stern of the boat. I figured you had grown bored, as you often did in the company of others. You were drenched in the rain, your hair matted on your forehead, your eyes salty.

  Someone screamed. By the time I turned around, I caught only a flash of the woman’s head and arms disappearing overboard in the haze of rain. You must have seen everything, her climbing onto the gunwale and standing there for a heartbeat, for one final breath, before leaping into the sea.

  Two men dove in after her. The boat again was stopped. The storm had gotten worse and it took some effort just to get the two men back on board. Neither had seen or laid a finger on anything.

  The boat was quiet for hours save the sound of the engine and the old women reciting their rosaries. I prayed alongside them, but only for the boy.

  I remember the minutes after it happened, when people peered overboard and waited breathlessly for the swimmers to come back up with the woman’s body, and all I could think was how melodramatic it was, how cowardly. She had no right giving up. To come all this way, and then to do that.

  It turned out, of course, that she died for nothing. Hours later, someone below decks lifted the tarp that covered the fuel store and found the boy wedged between the twenty-gallon cans, lying amid a pile of filthy gasoline-soaked rags. He had a burning fever and could barely move or make a sound. Who knows why he had wandered down into the hold that night, or how he even got there, weak as he was. He must have passed out beneath the tarp, hidden from people lying arm’s length from him, and deaf to his mother wailing his name for hours.

  He was carried above deck where two older women forced water down his throat, cooled his forehead with a damp rag, and rubbed hot oil over his chest. I prayed for his recovery, yet dreaded it. What would we say when he was strong enough to ask for his mother?

  He ended up surviving the boat trip somehow, despite hardly moving for the final four days. Once we made it to the
camp, he disappeared onto the floating hospital, that white ship moored off the island’s shore, and we heard three months later that he recovered and was sponsored by his uncle in Australia.

  He’d be a grown man now, with children of his own and stories about his childhood that he might not be able or willing to tell. He’s probably forgotten what his mother looked like. I still remember, more than I want to, her writhing in the arms of a consoler, tearing at her white blouse until the neckline ripped, her long equine face crumpled behind the tangles of her hair, mouth ajar and eyes clenched shut, that howling mask.

  She must have felt she lost everything when she thought her son was gone. Until then, she had only lived for him. What was she now to herself or to the world if she was no longer a mother to anyone?

  It was shame that welled inside me after they found the boy that day. I imagined myself losing you, and realized that I could not have done what she had done. I would have mourned you for the rest of my life, there is no doubt, but your death would not have been, back then, the death of anything inside me.

  As I write down these thoughts, I wonder if you can read Vietnamese, if any of these words make sense or if they are as foreign to you as the sound of my voice. It is the only way I can speak honestly to you because it is the only language, the only world, in which I truly exist. I wish that weren’t so. I’ve always wanted it otherwise. My suspicion is that you’ve grown up to see things as an American would and that you live your life for yourself alone. It saddens me that you might be so distant from the world I still dream about every night, but I feel envy for you too and a strange relief.

  A few months ago, I came across the jade rosary your father gave me when we first got together, tucked away and forgotten in an old cigar box of trinkets I saved from the refugee camp. I had clutched that rosary all nine days we were at sea. You once wore it like a necklace, sitting startled on our bed in Vietnam and gaping at your father, who took the photograph. It was black and white, bent and tattered from the trip across the ocean. I discarded it years ago, along with all the others.

  I have wondered often if you’ve grown into some version of me or become someone entirely different, someone better. In my mind, I can only see you as your five-year-old self. Your pursed lips and cracked brow. Your eyes always bruised with thought. When you were angry, curious, you glared at people until they either looked away or scolded you. When you were pensive, you wandered into yourself like a lonely old woman.

  People said that you resembled me in every way, that even at a month old, you already had my eyes, my cheekbones, and most of all my temper. Something about our likeness to each other bothered me back then. It was as though you had come into the world to remind me constantly of myself.

  Your grandmother always said that I was the most stubborn, the most selfish, of her three daughters. Growing up, I never shared sweets or toys with my sisters and constantly argued with them, sometimes hitting them since I thought it was my right as the oldest. I talked back to everyone, even your grandfather, a former soldier who had cut men’s throats and spent days on the jungle floor listening for enemy footsteps. He spanked me often for my loose mouth, though secretly, I believe, he admired it.

  He used to hit us with a wooden rod as thick as his finger. We’d stand before him in the family room, arms crossed, and confess our offense, and after he told us how many rods we deserved, we would have to turn around and face the wall and await them. If we uncrossed our arms or tried to dodge them, it would earn us an extra blow.

  One time, when I was ten, I refused to bow and apologize to him after getting five rods for breaking the porcelain Jesus on our family altar. I had been running in the house, but only in order to rush and answer my mother’s call. Why am I being punished for an accident? I demanded through my tears, I didn’t break Jesus on purpose! My outburst startled him, but only for a second. A sixth rod nearly buckled my legs. When I still refused to bow, he hit me twice more until I bled through my shorts.

  That night, when everyone had fallen asleep, I retrieved the rod from its home atop the bookcase and brought it out to our front porch, where I set it on fire with his matches. I watched it burn, then stomped on it. I left it there on the porch in three charred pieces, right by his smoking bench, fully aware that he was always first to rise and that smoking was the very first thing he did. When I came out the next morning, the mess had been swept away. He must have suspected that I had done it, but he never said a word. Two days later I saw a brand-new rod atop the bookcase.

  Your grandmother liked to say that I was the fearless one in the family, that I would challenge the Lord if I ever met him. It was a compliment, but also a criticism of my temperament, which I suppose made her blind to everything I was actually afraid of.

  The rosary also reminded me, of course, of your father. Not that I still yearn for him. I am not so romantic as that. It’s just the way of memory and loss. We never truly forget the things that have passed out of our lives. We merely move further away from them in time, until they become either less important than they actually were or more profound than we might have ever imagined.

  Had your father lived, I would never have left you. What happened on the island would never have happened. And of course I would not be writing these words. I know it sounds ridiculous to attribute all these things to one event, to one person, but that is how I have always seen it.

  He was a farmer’s son, your father, and a captain in the air force. He grew up raising ducks and pigs, and by the time he met me he had authority over hundreds of men.

  I was seventeen the first time he arrived at our house in his perfectly pressed olive uniform, accompanying a fellow soldier who was pursuing one of my sisters. They drank tea with your grandparents for two hours.

  It was not his uniform or his stature that impressed me. Everything about your father was easy. The way he smiled and sat back in his chair and seemed to know everything about every topic. The way he asked questions as though your grandparents were the most interesting people in the world. They soon ignored his friend and started boasting to him of my sisters’ talents at school and in the kitchen, and of my skill at cutting hair. Your father nodded politely and never once looked at me. Although he was only twenty-four at the time, he seemed as old to me as your grandfather.

  Two days later he returned alone with a tin of French biscuits. He was on his way to work at the Saigon airport, yet still spent an hour visiting with my parents. They spoke mostly about religion, your grandmother’s favorite subject, and about the war, your grandfather’s. I understand now that what impressed them, what impressed most everyone who met your father, was the certainty of everything he felt. He offered it to people not as a criticism or a play for superiority, but as a gift, as though he were a soldier offering safety, a priest offering forgiveness.

  For more than two weeks, he stopped by every few days on his way to work. Always in uniform, always with a gift of cookies or candy, and never noticing me as I served him his tea. My parents wondered if he was interested in any of us. We soon just figured he enjoyed the company. He even started talking to me and my sisters, though he showed none of us any special attention. Everyone agreed that he carried a casual kind of loneliness.

  Then one day he came with a carton of American cigarettes for your grandfather and a bundle of expensive silk for your grandmother. But instead of sitting down with them on the couch, he remained standing and asked them if I could accompany him to Saigon for lunch. His manner was as casual as if he was asking for a glass of water, despite everyone’s surprise, not least of all my own.

  I thought his interest in me had come out of his visits, but at that first lunch in Saigon, he asked me questions as if he had been storing them up for those last two weeks. He confessed that he had loved me since the moment he stepped into our house, which frightened me at first, that someone could just love you so completely before you’d had a chance to return any of it. I realized that befriending your grandparents had been you
r father’s way of ensuring that he was the best man for me in their eyes, and that he already knew that my love for him was inevitable. I should have been offended, but something about that moved me deeply.

  He gave me the jade rosary that afternoon, a peculiar first gift, particularly as a profession of love. I suspect now that he already saw me as a creature of faith. He had no idea how wrong he was.

  We married five months later, in late 1974, when I was eighteen. I moved to his base in Pleiku, and despite the distance from my family and my home, despite my inexperience in almost everything, I was somehow never too afraid. In no time at all, he taught me how to take care of him, how to love him and be loved by him, how to believe in this entity we’d become as man and wife, even though I wondered where his own understanding of these things had come from. It was as though he’d been a grown man and a husband since the day he was born.

  We set up a simple home in the barracks, with two twin beds pushed together and a modest bathroom and kitchen your father built himself. He worked at his office during the day, but we spent our evenings together, reading the newspaper or an old novel to each other, or hosting his officer friends, who came for my cooking and stayed for mah-jongg and poker. Your father rarely lost. On the weekends, we walked to town to see a movie and always enjoyed the ones with Charles Bronson or Alain Delon, who both talked very little and always got the job done. On Sundays we strolled up the hill, along a path that skirted a mango orchard, and went to church.

  I struggle now with the idea that those days could’ve lasted much longer, perhaps even forever. That’s the naive and sometimes dangerous urge in all our memories. What might have been is a vast and depthless ocean that surrounds the tiny island of what actually happened, what was actually possible. You can either die of thirst on that island or wade out into all that endless water.