Dragonfish: A Novel

by Vu Tran

  When we returned to our pallets, you hugged my arm and laid your cheek against it. You had not slept this close to me since our nights on the boat. A small part of me wanted you to remain this way forever.

  Our very first night in America, it happened again. We had moved into a two-bedroom apartment with your father’s uncle, who I had only met briefly one other time, and his wife and three teenage children, who I had never met at all. We were sleeping in the living room, you on the couch and me below you on the carpet. I remember waking with a start and finding you beside me, your eyes blinking in the darkness.

  You whispered that your father had just wandered through the living room and into the kitchen. You had said his name out loud, but he did not hear you. When you followed him into the kitchen, no one was there.

  I think it was a ghost, you declared as though you had just decided to believe in such things. When you rolled over to face me, I realized you were not lying beside me because you were afraid. You had come close to ask a question.

  Does that mean that Father is gone? you said.

  I did not let my thoughts give me hesitation. Yes, I said, and let that linger for a moment. The rest came out like a slow exhalation. A few months ago, I told you, your father went to sleep and did not wake up. He was very sick. There was nothing that anyone could do to help him. But he’s with God now, and he’s watching over you. He visited you tonight to let you know that.

  Your only reaction was to glance again at the dark kitchen. I had considered never telling you at all, just letting you find out on your own. Now I could see that you had already done that. The old people call it a sixth sense, but I knew it was that mystical connection you shared with your father. On some level, I truly did believe that he was watching over you, that he had passed me over and whispered his farewell in your ear alone. You needed nothing more from me that night than confirmation.

  After a while you said, I hope he visits me every night. You climbed back onto the sofa and wrapped yourself in your blanket. I waited for you to start crying to yourself, that distant lonely sound you made, but all I could hear were your cousins snoring in their room nearby.

  In the coming months, you would befriend your cousins, play games with them, learn their American ways and bicker with them like a stubborn baby sister, eventually sharing their room while I slept alone on the sofa. You started kindergarten and soon spoke words I could not understand. You enjoyed hot dogs and hamburgers and other foods I could not eat. You watched television and sang songs I did not know. Not once, that entire time, did you mention your father. If you mourned him, you did so in your own way and kept that part of you, as with every other part, closed to me.

  I wonder now if he did visit you again in the night. As you got older, did he ever appear at your bedside or walk past the doorway of your cousins’ bedroom? Or did you grow up and stop believing in ghosts?

  I should tell you now that I am writing these letters in a room that is not my own. I am alone and it is always night when I am here. Outside my hotel window, I see lights glittering and flashing. You’ve seen these same lights, I’m sure. They never stop, never go out, not even during the day. Perhaps that is why I’ve remained in this city for as long as I have. Here, the world outside always feels awake and alive with the stories it wants desperately to tell you, so long as you are willing to listen. Nothing here to remind you that the lights will one day go out, that all stories end whether you want them to or not.

  Son ended up telling us about his ear. It was drizzling at the promontory one afternoon, and as you and I and the boy sat together beneath some tree branches, Son sat happily in the open, shirtless as always, with water trickling down his lips.

  My father loved to drink, he said suddenly. When I was thirteen, he was stabbed in a fight and was too drunk to know how bad it was. I came home from school that day and the house was empty. Everyone had gone to the hospital. The only thing I found was a bloodstain on the couch the size of our cat.

  Son was grinning as he spoke. From the way the boy was listening, I could tell he had never heard this story. But Son was not looking at him or at you. He was speaking directly to me, as if sharing the proudest experience of his life.

  His father, he said, had fought the North Vietnamese for years, almost half of Son’s childhood, and he returned from the war a drunk and a gambler, disappearing sometimes for two or three days to booze and play cards with people who weren’t even his friends. He would then come home and pass out on his bed for an entire day.

  He had gotten into an argument that afternoon with a man who owed him money from a card game. In their scuffle in the street, the man pulled out a switchblade and stuck him in the belly. People tried to help, but Son’s father shooed them away. He walked the two blocks home all on his own, holding his belly like someone with a stomachache, and collapsed onto the front couch. When the family found him, they thought he was passed out as usual. They would have ignored him if not for the blood.

  The man who stabbed him owned the bar down the street and had a wife and two young children. He also had ties to the local gang. No one dared report the incident. Son’s father, after all, had walked away from the fight as if nothing had happened.

  So while his father lay in the hospital and his mother prayed all day at church, Son sat at a café across from the bar for over a week and watched the man eat dinner with his family, beat his kids in the street, yell at his wife, and play cards all day with his buddies. One afternoon, on a full-moon day, after the man and his family had walked off to temple, Son stole into their home through a back window. Even at that age, he was expert at prying open anything with a hinge.

  He was carrying a kitchen knife from home, which he used to slash their bedsheets and pillows, their couch, the posters and tapestries on their walls. In the kitchen, he poured out every liquid he could find. Milk, soup, alcohol, cooking oil, fish sauce. All over the floor. He opened their rice canister and urinated into it. He spit into their jars of bean curd and shrimp paste. He did all this as quietly as he could.

  The last thing he remembered doing was going to their Buddha shrine and breaking all the candles and incense sticks, shoving the banana offerings in his mouth and spitting out mush onto the Buddha figurine. This was when he felt a hand grab hold of his hair and jerk him backward. He saw the man’s calm yellow eyes for only a second before a punch knocked him to the ground. His face felt broken.

  Son was chuckling as he was telling this part of the story. I spit out bloody gobs of banana! he exclaimed and glared wildly at me. I tried to smile for him, shaking my head in disbelief despite not knowing what perplexed me more, the story he was recounting or the way he was recounting it.

  The man was a head taller than Son and twice his weight. He dragged him by his hair into the kitchen. Son was crying at this point. Bawling. He tried to get up and run but slipped on the wet floor. The man kicked him in the stomach, which knocked the life out of him. Then he planted his shoe on Son’s face.

  You think I don’t see you out there every day? he said. Spying on me like some Viet Cong? Tell me, what should a man do to someone who destroys his home? He unsheathed a switchblade.

  Son squeezed his eyes shut, too petrified to struggle as the man seized a handful of his hair and sawed it off, then another handful, then another, so rough and vigorous with the knife that Son hardly felt the blade slice the tip of his ear. Then he screamed, but the man did not stop.

  When he finally opened his eyes, the man was standing over him with an unlit cigarette between his lips. He pocketed the blade and tossed Son a towel for his ear. He pulled out his wallet, counted out some bills, and reached down and shoved the cash into Son’s mouth.

  Stop crying or I’ll cut your throat, he said. That’s the money I owe your father. I would have given it to him if he had asked nicely.

  Son’s ear hurt too much for him to know yet that he wasn’t going to die. What’s more, it spooked him how calmly the man spoke, how clean he looked despite
the mess around them.

  He ordered Son to stand up. Look at me, he said. Are you satisfied? Is all this enough for what I did to your father?

  All Son managed to say over and over was, I’m sorry, sir, I’m so sorry.

  The man shook his head. Don’t be sorry, you idiot. Be a man. Next time you want to get back at another man, stab him in the heart. Don’t piss in his rice.

  He called out a name, and a big ugly fellow appeared as though he’d been waiting outside the kitchen the entire time. After he was given instructions, he took Son by the arm and led him away. Son waited until they reached the alley behind the house, and then he threw up all over his own feet.

  At this last memory, Son laughed loudest and did not seem to mind that we were all silent and serious, waiting for him to continue. I glanced at you and was reminded of your expression on the boat when that woman jumped overboard. I had been too engrossed in Son’s story to see how disturbing it might be for a child your age. But it was too late at that point. And you were never a child your age anyway.

  It was still drizzling, and Son wiped his face with his hands. The grin vanished. That ugly man, he said, was the ugliest man he’d ever seen. He remembered staring at his acne scars and wondering if his own face looked worse. The man dragged him to a house at the end of the alley. An old woman lived there. She must have been a nurse or doctor of some kind because she gave Son medicine and stitched up his ear and bandaged it. She shaved his head and cleaned the cuts on his scalp and face, and then made him bathe and gave him new clothes. She handled him with care but never once looked him in the eye or uttered a word. The ugly man also remained silent until the very end, which was when he pointed at the door and said, Go home.

  When Son’s mother saw him, she nearly screamed. She was used to him getting into fights, but he had never come home like this. He told her he crashed his bike and that a farmer had found him and helped him. She didn’t believe a word of it, though she said nothing more. Her eyes were quiet with exhaustion. She was still busy waiting for his father to die.

  But his father did not die. Nor did he change his ways. Son never told him what happened that day, what he had done for him. And he never gave him the money. It was almost fifty thousand dong, the price of a new bicycle. He stashed it in a pair of old shoes for over three years until the day his father stumbled drunk into the street outside their house one rainy afternoon and was hit by an ice truck. The evening after his funeral, Son took out the money and bought into a card game at that man’s bar. He was barely seventeen, only two years away from becoming, like his dead father, a soldier and a killer of other men. The man recognized him immediately but said nothing. Son lost everything to him in less than an hour.

  When Son finished his story, he looked at me and shrugged as if none of it mattered. I struggled for something to say. In the silence that followed, he lay down on his back, closed his eyes, and let the rain beat down upon him.

  I wonder if he had ever told anyone this story before us. He might have once, before they were married, lain beside his wife in bed and, as they spoke of those things we all share before falling asleep, suddenly excavated this memory with a mixture of pride and shame and muted desire. What did she say to him afterward? Did she take his hand and squeeze it and whisper her astonishment? Or did she turn from him in the darkness and say nothing?

  On our way to the promontory a few days later, Son began speaking to me in an unusually quiet voice. You and the boy were ahead of us on the path. Their paperwork had begun, he said, and a Baptist church in Sacramento, California, had offered to sponsor him and the boy. This was great news for them because Son had no family in the States. And also because he knew your father’s uncle lived in Los Angeles and was sponsoring you and me.

  He said he would make his way to Los Angeles as soon as he could, and find work, in a restaurant or a garage, maybe on a fishing boat, and then he would save up money and open his own restaurant where I could cook and host and do whatever I wanted. He would buy a house for all four of us and put you and the boy through school, and also buy a car, one for me as well. He said all this as if stating facts.

  I couldn’t tell if marriage had no part in his plans or if it had already become, without my knowing, an unspoken agreement between us. In any case, I held my breath until he finished his day dream. I thought for a moment more and said, I want to ask you for something. You must promise not to think I am crazy.

  Son kept his eyes on the path.

  I will do everything you say, I said. I will work with you, live with you, cook for you, everything. All I ask is that you give me one year to be on my own. To be alone. Just one year. I will go somewhere, anywhere, I don’t know where yet. But I promise I will come back. I just want to know that you will take care of my daughter, and that you will not think I am crazy. I’ll come back and we can all be a family, and I will never ask you for anything ever again.

  Son would not look at me. His face was unchanged.

  I was waiting for his questions. Where could I possibly go? What would I do for an entire year, alone in an alien country, no money, no knowledge of anything? It sounded ridiculous even to me. And yet nothing made more sense. All I needed, I thought, was the chance to know what it was like to be unneeded, unwanted, unfettered. Only then could I return to the world as something other than what I had been for the last five years, this misshapen creature full of bitterness and barren of all desire.

  I believed at the time that Son would understand all this. His story the previous day had been a confession, if not out of shame then out of a need for me to see him for the man he was and accept it anyway. So now it was my turn. I was ready to tell him about your father and the years after the war, about the day you were born and what I’d suffered every day since, about what happened at sea with that woman and the boy she thought she lost, about my encounter with her on the beach and how I still saw her every night in my dreams, dressed like me and holding you by the hand, guiding you to the edge of a cliff. I was willing to tell him everything, no matter what he might think or say.

  But he remained silent for the rest of the walk.

  At the promontory, he went directly to his fishing spot down in the cove and ignored everyone. By then you already knew not to bother him during these moods, so you fished in silence next to the boy while I watched you all from above, sitting in my writing spot beneath the trees.

  The waters were choppy that day, and I called out for you to be careful. The boy moved closer to you and offered me a reassuring wave. You ignored me.

  Some time later, I saw you jump to your feet. You had a catch on your line, which rarely happened, and you were trying desperately to haul it in on your own. The boy was directing and encouraging you, but a moment later your hands were empty and you were peering into the water despondently.

  You turned to Son at once and apologized for losing the pole. He took no notice of you, so you wandered over to the far side of the cove to sit by yourself, as though that was your punishment, self-imposed.

  A brown gull soon landed on the steep stairway of rocks above you. You got up to get closer to it, and stood there entranced for some time, watching it preen its feathers. The next time I looked back, you were mounting the rocks.

  I called out to you and the boy looked up. You had climbed about three meters when the gull flew onto some higher rocks. This didn’t stop you, and again I called out your name. The boy had set down his pole and made his way over to scold you down the rocks. You were out of reach at this point, and still moving steadily up that craggy staircase. Again, the gull flapped its wings and this time alighted on a ledge that was high up enough now to be level with where I was standing on the promontory, watching everything. I had stopped calling you, afraid that my voice might distract you from your climb. You did not seem afraid though. You moved with such purpose and skill.

  But then your foot slipped and I screamed out, and that was when I saw Son hurrying along that far side of the cove. He vanished ar
ound the corner. A few moments later, he reappeared on the ledge above you. He kicked at the gull and it flew away, and then he leaned over the edge and waited for you with an outstretched hand. As soon as you were within reach, he grabbed your arm and hauled you up onto the ledge.

  He was kneeling in front of you now, holding both your arms and chiding you for your recklessness. As soon as I breathed a sigh of relief, I saw him slap you across the face. I heard the slap. It knocked you back a step, and you began crying instantly.

  Don’t touch her! I cried out.

  That’s when he finally turned his glare on me. Even from that distance, I could tell that his anger had nothing to do with you, that there was venom there, clarity in the way he clutched your tiny arm and gazed calmly at me.

  You’re hurting her arm! I shouted, weakly.

  You yelled something at him too, fearlessly for once, but he kept his eyes on me. When you wrested your arm away, he grabbed it again, muttering something to you as you shook your head vigorously. He pulled you over to the edge of the ledge and pointed down at the deep waters, more than eight meters below. You flashed me a frantic look and tried to pull yourself back.

  Stop it! I was screaming, but before I was halfway down the path, he had already thrown you over the edge.

  You hit the water hard and disappeared. The boy leaped in. By the time I reached the cove, he had you above the surface of the rough waters with your arms wrapped around his neck. As he swam you to the rocks, your face was too full of concentration to show any emotion, and when I lifted you out, you were heavier than you had ever been in my arms. You clung to me. I can still feel your violent breathing there on my neck, below my left ear.

  Son was peering down at us from above, a dark faceless figure in the bright sunlight. I was waiting for him to say something, to fling down his accusations.

  He barked at the boy, who gave me one final glance before grabbing the fishing poles and hurrying away to follow his father. We never saw them again on the island.