by Vu Tran
She admitted to Victor that she’d blamed herself too for a time, that her own dark moods often scared her more than Sonny’s did and had come to pollute both their lives. A year in the desert had dried up whatever hope and happiness the move there initially promised. She felt walled in by all the mountains, oppressed by the barrenness of the land, the emptiness of the sky, and all that constant sunlight. She told me once that she preferred the nighttime to the daytime because at night most things are hidden, and it made her feel safe. Back then, that made no sense to me.
She went back on her old medication, but it no longer helped her sleep as it once had, so she turned to sleeping pills, even during the day. Mixing that with alcohol made things worse, and she was doing that daily now, just as she had with me. Two or three beers at lunch. A bottle of wine every evening.
Her bad dreams returned. They crawled around inside her all day. She started seeing the people from her dreams. They would walk past the bedroom door or the bedroom window, trail her on her walks through the neighborhood in the middle of the night, vanish behind trees and fences and into shadows. She dreaded the nighttime now—a choice between not sleeping at all or taking pills that would unleash all the terrors inside her.
But Sonny didn’t care. He had no interest in her nightmares or her visions. He slept soundly, I imagine, through all her trembling in the night, her nonsensical murmuring, her waking up with a start and grabbing your arm, your hand, ready to tell you all the horrible things she’d just dreamed. She had no one to tell them to now. Maybe that’s why she got to hating him so.
She started arguments over things she barely cared about, like which lights should stay on or how hot the tea should be. She couldn’t stop herself. As soon as she began antagonizing him, it was like some pulse inside her would quicken and overtake her with an intensity she no longer felt for anything else. I remember it well. That dark eruption of fire in her eyes. A rage I’ve since suspected felt good on some level. She used to lock herself in the bathroom after our arguments and weep quietly for as long as an hour, and I wonder now if—more than shame or sadness—it was out of relief that she was still alive inside.
I doubt Sonny had patience for talking things through, for seeing doctors or finding solutions. They simply stopped doing whatever it was that had made them happy that first year of their marriage, if they were ever happy. They even stopped making love, an urge that had apparently dried up in her. With me, she used to blame her medication or her drinking or her period. Who knew what reasons she gave Sonny, but I doubt if any would have made a difference.
The night of the fall, she awoke to him kissing her hard on the mouth. He’d come home late from the casinos, his breath reeking of alcohol. She pushed him off her, and that’s when she saw the kitchen knife in his hand. He stood up, completely naked. He demanded she take off her clothes. When she refused, he plunged the knife into their mattress. When she tried to run from the room, he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her back to the bed. In their struggle, she grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door and whacked the knife from his hand. He screamed out in pain, cursing her as she fled the room. At the top of the stairs, he caught her again by the hair, but she turned and kicked him in the groin, which was when he grabbed her face and shoved it like he was taking off her head. She remembered stumbling back and gripping the top of the bannister, then losing her grip and nearly all memory of what happened thereafter.
She awoke on a hospital bed with Junior sitting beside her. He looked even more severe than usual. He insisted his father was devastated, had not known what he was doing, would never do anything like it again. Junior would see to it. He’d make him quit drinking. He’d move back into the house with them both if necessary. She just had to try to forgive him and say nothing to the police. He swore to protect her from then on.
Who knows whether she actually believed him, but in that hospital bed she must have already been planning her escape from them both. She told Victor that the first time Sonny saw her at the hospital with her arm in a cast, he knelt and wept in her lap. For months, he stopped raising his voice around her, came home early to eat dinner and watch TV with her, and went to bed with her every night. He treated her again with that quiet kindness he showed no one else, not even his own son. But she knew it wasn’t going to last. She was just biding her time until her arm healed.
And then, out of the blue, I charged into Vegas with my death wish and must have wrecked all her plans. Was she lying to Sonny when she promised to stay with him if he spared me? Or was she trying to contain the damage, the rage I had reawakened? No wonder she never reached out to me. No wonder she put all her trust in a confused Vietnamese kid, a reluctant thug.
What finally broke her, of all things, was perfume. She’d never worn it in her life, and one day she smelled it on his clothes in the closet. It could have been knee-jerk jealousy, residual love even, or simply one betrayal too many—but this rage, her own, she could not contain. She drove at once to the restaurant to confront him, and only when he vehemently denied everything was she sure that it was true. He was a liar, but he’d never been able to lie to her.
She went mad. She threw things in the kitchen and screamed and cried until finally he seized her car keys and forced her into his office and onto the couch, and then he held out her pills in his hand. When she refused, he shoved them into her mouth.
He must have treated those pills like I used to, like they were magic. Take them and voilà! you become your old self again, or someone else entirely, someone new and preferable—though the truth is that that broken person inside you still lives and breathes and merely hibernates until reawakened.
Hours later, she opened her eyes and found herself alone in the office, lying on the couch in darkness. She’d never been in that office before. The door was locked. It was one in the morning and everyone in the restaurant must have gone home hours before. There was no telling when anyone would come for her. For the first time in a year, however, she felt safe.
All his drawers were locked, so she started sifting through the papers on his desk, opening random books on the shelf and peering under the couch. She told Victor that she was not searching for anything in particular, just seizing an opportunity to rummage through his things and maybe see him in a way he did not want to be seen.
That’s how she stumbled upon the safe, concealed behind a painting of storks. It didn’t surprise her at all since he liked hiding things the way they do in movies, and also because he had installed a similar safe at home, a smaller one hidden in their bedroom closet where she kept all that jewelry he bought her that she never wore.
She tried the same combination on this safe—the date of his release from the concentration camps. It didn’t work. She tried other dates: his son’s birthday, the day he left Vietnam, the day he first arrived in America. She knew about his obsession with dates. It was a gambler’s superstition—a way to hold on to the past, I guess, so you can control the present and the future.
She tried everything she could think of, forward and backward, with no success, and it was finally in giving up that she punched in one last-ditch combination, which turned out to be the right one. Her own birth date.
The safe was a mess. Hundreds of cash bricks stacked every which way, tossed inside like the ziplock bags full of colorful pills and the five or six handguns piled on top of each other.
She counted as much of the cash as she could without moving anything, and that’s when she noticed the videotapes at the very back of the safe. Six of them, labeled only with dates from the past six months. She knew about his closet of surveillance tapes at home, so it immediately intrigued her that he was keeping these six here. At random, she chose one and put it in the VCR.
IT BEGINS WITH HER standing in their kitchen at home and washing dishes. The date onscreen is from two months ago. It’s morning or maybe the afternoon. The only sound is running water. You can’t see her face or understand at first why he would keep video of her
doing something ordinary like this. Then you fast-forward two minutes, then five minutes, and slowly you see it. For a good quarter of an hour, she washes the same glass over and over without rinsing. She stops only to pump more soap onto her sponge.
The video cuts abruptly to her standing at the living room window, still in the same clothes, arms crossed and staring not so much out of the window as at it, like she is praying to her reflection. Again she stands there for twenty minutes without once turning away. As the video fast-forwards, her body hardly moves.
Then it is evening, still the same day, and she’s sitting empty-handed at an empty kitchen table, then brushing her hair on their bed, then watching the snowy TV screen in their bedroom, all for extraordinarily long periods of time.
What must she have thought when she saw herself this way? Perhaps it’s the grainy footage, the distance and the bad lighting, but in each new scene she looks more and more unrecognizable—her body too long, her skin too dark, her face too angular. It’s like Sonny videotaped an impostor in their home, a famished twin of her pantomiming these mindless acts. If she did indeed see those people from her dreams, then maybe this is what they looked like, this creature, this unfamiliar shade of her.
The next footage is dated a week later. There’s only darkness until suddenly a light flicks on and it’s from the bathroom in their bedroom. You can see Sonny lying facedown in bed, with only his pajama pants on, sound asleep. Then you hear the toilet flush and you see her appear in the doorway of the bathroom in her white nightgown, the same one she always wore with me. She used to wake up three or four times at night to go to the bathroom, sometimes locking herself in there for God knew how long. But now she is just standing in the column of light that spills onto their bed and onto Sonny’s broad naked back. She’s staring at him, her profile barely visible. Maybe he looks kind when he’s asleep and she’s rediscovering a tenderness for him. Maybe she’s imagining him suffocating under a pillow. Whatever is on her mind, she seems entranced by it, and it probably doesn’t go away after she clicks off the light.
The tape cuts to another day, another afternoon of her rearranging the same twenty or thirty books on the bookshelf for over an hour, more of her standing by the window and brushing her hair and wandering naked around the house, like she’s looking for her clothes.
Then it’s nighttime again, and this time it’s Sonny standing by their bed and her lying asleep. The small lamp on their nightstand is the only light, but you can see that he’s naked as he stares at her, and you can see very clearly the kitchen knife again in his hand. It seems at first that this might be the night of the fall, but the date is months later. And after a minute, though only his backside is visible, you realize that Sonny is touching himself. You can barely hear him groaning under his breath as he holds the knife, pointed at the ground, in his other hand. Finally his body trembles, and then he is still. She has not yet moved on the bed. He continues staring at her for a long time, swaying ever so slightly. Then he trudges into the bathroom, knife still in hand.
You wonder now why he would include this footage of himself —why stitch together all this video of her bizarre behavior, alongside his own, and keep it locked up in a safe? It’s like a secret affirmation of their connection to each other. An act of communion with someone he has already lost.
The video stutters, and you skip to the next scene, which is again at night and looks at first like a replay of the previous scene. Sonny is naked again, his back to the camera, the knife again in one hand as he’s touching himself with the other. But it’s another night. She’s lying on the bed beside the long pillow she always hugged in her sleep, her slender arms visible atop the blanket though her face is obscured in the shadows.
A moment later he sets the knife on the nightstand and draws back the blanket. Slowly he lifts her nightgown, drags her underwear down her legs. He crawls on top of her. His movements are careful, unhurried, soundless. His broad back conceals her face entirely, but you can see that her body has not yet moved, not on its own.
THIS WAS THE MOMENT, she told Victor, that stopped her heart. She wanted to turn off the video, throw the remote at the TV. But she couldn’t look away. She forced herself to keep watching, to confront it all no matter what new horror came into view, until suddenly it did: she saw those thin arms beneath him move and snake themselves around his back, the hands clawing now at his head, his neck, his spine. The legs were moving under him too, wrapping themselves around his backside. She heard a voice groan in the video, a distant sound, and realized it was her own voice, though it sounded deep and throaty and alien.
When at last he finished and moved off into the bathroom, the body fell still as though it had never awakened, the face a shadowy blur. He returned with a towel to clean the body, but it might as well have been a corpse on the bed.
Only then did she flip off the TV and rush to the light switch. She retched into the wastebasket. The office door remained locked no matter how much she wrenched the knob. The room must have felt a mile underground.
They had not touched each other in over half a year. The last time he kissed her, she insisted to Victor, was the night he threw her down the stairs, months ago. The last time he saw her naked was when her arm was in a cast and she couldn’t bathe herself. She was convinced of all this, that she could not have tolerated being intimate with him that entire time—except for the possibility that she had somehow forgotten, or been drugged, or been out of her mind. Was that truly her on the video? What else had he done and what else had she forgotten? What else was on those other five tapes?
She didn’t have the stomach to see anymore. What made her most ill was her last reaction, when those thin arms awakened and started touching him all over and she found herself more horrified than if the body had not moved at all.
It was now two in the morning. He must have locked the office and expected her to sleep through the night—that deep and impenetrable sleep of hers that was more an affliction than a rest from anything.
She ejected the tape. She put it back inside the safe, but then changed her mind and pulled it back out, along with one of the handguns. She buried both at the bottom of her handbag.
She turned off the lights and lay back down on the couch after swallowing two more sleeping pills. The darkness swam around her, she said, for hours.
It was Junior who woke her in the morning with a bowl of ramen, a cup of coffee, and another apology for his father.
VICTOR WAS LOOKING from Mai to me, gauging our thoughts.
“Anyway,” he concluded. “That’s what finally did it for her. She said she had to leave after that—no matter what.”
He fell silent, averting his eyes like he’d run out of things to say.
Mai drank from her watered-down Coke. His story had disturbed her, and she was trying not to show it. She wiped her mouth with her fingers. “So you believe her, then. That Sonny’s capable of killing her.”
“Mr. Nguyen is capable of anything. But your mother was afraid of herself too.” He nodded at the videotape in front of us. “Especially after she saw that. She told me to keep it in case something bad happened to her. As proof, I guess. I’m giving it to you now.”
Mai shook her head slightly. She nudged the tape toward me. “You’ve told me enough.”
I fingered the tape, inspected it, and knew I would have to watch it, that I both wanted to and was afraid to. I imagined Suzy sitting alone in that dark locked office, petrified in the white glow of the TV screen. What horrified her most about seeing herself in the video—what she had forgotten, what she didn’t know, or what she recognized?
“Proof of what?” I said. “This tape doesn’t prove anything—except that she’s sick and that your boss is a perverted fuck. What use is that to anyone? Victor . . . why have you been telling us all this?”
The question startled him. He seemed sheepish for a moment, as though realizing that he’d gotten carried away with what he’d divulged, even with what he felt.
“She wanted me—” he replied meekly before beginning again. “The last time I saw her, a week ago in the hotel room, before she disappeared, she asked me if I was sure I wanted to help her. When I nodded, she asked me to kneel on the floor and close my eyes, and then she prayed over me. I didn’t like that. It made me feel like all those people, the ones I’ve had to hurt, begging me not to hurt them.”
He spoke haltingly, and it made his face appear pathetic.
“Before I left, she gave me an envelope. She asked me not to open it until I was home alone. It was a letter. Things she couldn’t say in person, I guess.” Victor looked at Mai. “The last thing she wrote was that if something happened to her, I had to protect you. And no matter what, even if it meant hurting her, I had to make sure you got the money. Every last dollar.”
Mai wasn’t even blinking, probably thinking about the money again, but no doubt reminded of her own letters too, wherever they were. I could see it clearly now, the orphan in both of them.
“So where is she now?” she asked.
“She didn’t share that part of her plan—and I have no way of reaching her. We figured the less I know about that, the better.”
“Your mother’s probably long gone then,” I said.
“I’d say yes,” Victor agreed as he pocketed his cell phone.
Mai sat up. “You never told us how you got your share of the money.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want it.” He rose heavily from the table to put on his jacket, then stood before us with a philosophical air. “She said something. That she’d been asleep all these years, ever since the night she left Vietnam. Got me thinking, I guess—of my last night in Vietnam, the last thirteen years of my life here.”
