The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  “It’s not as uncommon as you’d think,” he told her defensively. He, too, had heard the implications in her tone. “Especially with a rider of Austin’s caliber.”

  She challenged him: “I don’t know. It’s one thing to let a person disappear on her own in Siena. It’s another thing here.”

  “I’m sure you don’t mean anything by that, but it sounds a little provincial. Don’t you think? We’ve been bringing riders to this country for years. You’ve seen yourself how kind the people are.”

  “No foul,” she said, raising her hands, palms open, to lessen the tension. “It was just an observation.”

  “Look, we can discuss our company’s policies when he’s back. I think now I’ll just go retrieve him,” Scott said. “I’ll tell Colleen I’m going, and then I’ll get Giang and one of the vans.” Their leader seemed to feel the aesthetics of the van with its bulky bike racks on the roof were too coarse for the villas and the small boutique hotels where they stayed, and so the guides always parked them out of view. They were the deep yellow of a perfectly ripe banana. Here that meant parking the eyesores behind a stone outbuilding a few hundred yards distant that once had housed pigs.

  Alexis took a long swallow of the wine. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You don’t need to,” he said, and she could hear in his voice a small ripple of apprehension. It was as if he, too, expected the worst.

  “I do need to,” she said definitively. “Remember, I work in an ER.”

  There was the napalm, of course. That’s what a lot of Americans think of first, regardless of whether they’ve ever set foot in Vietnam. Apocalypse Now, right? I mean, that’s what I thought of. We all hear in our heads the guttural howls of pain as it burned through flesh. The naked little girl in the photo. The images of the creosote corpses, smooth and black. The teeth—God, we’ve all seen those pictures, too—in the lipless, open mouths of the dead. The fingers, splayed and curled like the tines of a garden claw. (I used to garden. The claw was my favorite tool.)

  Napalm was a jelly—think marmalade, someone once told me—and when it was lit, it clung like pine pitch to plants and people and birds and rats and water buffalo and whatever else was in its path. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit; napalm burned at temperatures six to ten times hotter. The flames were two thousand degrees. Can you imagine? (I can’t. I just can’t.)

  The stuff was made by mixing naphthenic and palmitic acids. Hence the name. Then the mixture was weaponized with gasoline. The chemists who created it worked at Harvard in the 1940s. Initially, no one saw it as a jungle weapon. The first napalm bomb, ever, fell on the city of Berlin in 1944, and it was over Tokyo in 1945—five months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that it created the firestorm that would kill over one hundred thousand people in a night.

  Two decades later, however, it was sprayed from flame throwers in Vietnam to burn down the swaths of brush in the American soldiers’ paths, eliminating the cover for guerrilla fighters. But one scared little soldier with a couple gallons of the gel in a tank on his back was far less efficient than an F-100 that could swoop in and drop exploding bombs of the goo, obliterating whole forests. A dragon taller than palm trees exhaling a tsunami of fire. That’s what I think. A fairy-tale dragon.

  Again, the movies gave me that. They gave us that.

  Eight million tons of napalm cocktails fell from the skies on Vietnam, a decimation that was volcanic. I mean, it was revelatory. It was biblical.

  And yet it was the herbicides that stayed with us and changed the world. Figuratively. Literally. That’s my point. That’s what interested us. I don’t mean they’ve stayed with us in terms of visual memory, because nothing augured deep into the brain’s amygdala quite like the horrors of a charred corpse or those three- and four-story rolling pinwheels of flames. (In our minds, the sky is always sapphire, right? It’s like Hollywood never imagined we’d napalm a forest on a cloudy day.) It was the chemical poisons that lingered.

  The name of the operation was Ranch Hand. Twenty million gallons, much of it Agent Orange, dropped on our ally, South Vietnam. We wanted to defoliate the jungles so the Viet Cong would have no place to hide and to deprive the fighters of their food. No one knew for sure then what it did to people. But on some instinctive, visceral level, someone must have suspected. The researchers. The chemists. The soldiers on the ground. The farmers in the rice paddies and the fields.

  It couldn’t be good.

  Still, no one really pondered the question until we looked at the cancers and the birth defects in America and Vietnam—the children of the men and women who’d been sent there or lived there, the babies with their devastating deformities nursing at their devastated mothers’ breasts—as the war receded into memory. The dead that we saw from napalm, each mouth a rictus of agony, and those end-of-the-world infernos that turned rain forest to ash became fading photos we could repress.

  But the herbicides? We saw what they did to humans years and years later.

  What we didn’t see, but people smarter than me began to contemplate, was what those chemicals had done to the wildlife that somehow managed to survive the firestorms.

  Or, to be precise, the way those chemicals had changed the descendants of the survivors that scurried now through the jungle and brush.

  2

  He saw them emerge from the elephant grass that grew high along the side of the road, and initially he was only surprised. Two men appearing ahead of him out of nowhere. Farmers? No. Clearly not. He felt the hair on the back of his neck start to rise, and he glanced behind him, over his shoulder, hoping there was a vehicle approaching. A truck or a car or even one of those scooters. Someone to witness whatever was about to unfold. There wasn’t. He considered pedaling faster, falling into the handlebar drops and accelerating.

  He considered turning around and pedaling in the other direction.

  But wouldn’t that be an overreaction?

  Worst case, wasn’t this only a robbery? It had to be. It couldn’t possibly be more, he told himself. But, of course, it could. He knew.

  All of these thoughts moved through his mind in little more than a couple of heartbeats—and he was sure his heart was beating fast now. It all happened so quickly. And then his decision had been made for him, and there was nothing at all he could do, because he was upon them.

  He unclipped his right shoe and skidded to a stop because the two of them were standing smack in the middle of the road and wanted him to, and at least one had a gun—and the weapon looked, as he approached, like a Russian assault rifle. He’d been shot once before, a bullet from a very different sort of gun in a Manhattan dive bar, and it hadn’t been pleasant. This one looked like it was capable of doing a hell of a lot more damage to flesh and bone.

  He stood for a moment with his right foot on the ground and his left still attached to the pedal.

  Instantly he offered them money—and he used the word for money because his mind was racing and he couldn’t remember the Vietnamese word for wallet. He held up his hands, even though the kid with the gun (and he was a kid; he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old) wasn’t pointing it at him. Then, slowly, keeping one hand in the air, he reached into the back of his cycling jersey with his other. He felt his wallet and the small packets of Psych energy gels. He grabbed the wallet and extended it out to them, palm flat, as if it were a plate with hors d’oeuvres. The other fellow, a man older than he was—midforties, Austin guessed—smiled at the kid with the gun, and it was then that the cyclist’s fear began to mushroom into something considerably more visceral. Not terror. Not even panic. But the dawning realization that he was in over his head and this wasn’t likely to end well. They didn’t want his wallet. They shared a joke and laughed, but they had spoken so quickly that he hadn’t understood most of what they were saying. But he thought, from the few words he had picked up, they were mocking the idea that he though
t this was a negotiation.

  “My bicycle?” he asked. “Take my bicycle, please. It’s a good one I rented,” he told them. He unclipped his left shoe and swung his leg over the top tube and held the bike a couple of inches off the ground. “It’s worth a lot, even used.”

  The fellow who seemed to be running this show rolled his eyes. And it was then that he saw, rounding the bend perhaps a hundred yards distant, a van. A tourist van of some sort. It even had bike racks on the roof, though they were empty now. It was white with a cheerful logo with a waterfall in its center, but he couldn’t translate the Vietnamese wording beside it. Here, he thought, was the cavalry. Here was his rescue. It was a different company from the bike tour he was on, but it was still other human beings who might, by their simple presence and mere witness, stop whatever was about to go down. He felt relief that he might survive this, after all. But then, when he looked at the guns, he began to wonder if a greater calamity was simply about to occur. A more significant slaughter. Increased collateral damage. They’d kill him and whoever happened to be driving down this road at this moment.

  He saw a fellow hopping out of the passenger side of the van, and he was wearing a black blazer and a white oxford shirt.

  Tour guides didn’t wear blazers and dress shirts. At least not usually.

  Which meant this probably wasn’t a tour guide.

  And then, when the newcomer got closer and pulled off his sunglasses, Austin recognized him. A tall American, a fellow perhaps a decade his senior. It was Douglas—never Doug, never Dougie. Always Douglas. (Occasionally, Austin had wondered if this was his real name. One time when they’d been tossing darts in a bar, he’d noticed that the fellow had looked up twice, reflexively, when someone at a nearby table had hollered for a guy named Karl.) His presence here in Vietnam meant one thing: He knew. He had followed him here. Come all this way. Austin considered dropping the bike and collapsing onto the ground, literally onto his knees, and begging for mercy. To plead for his life. But he wasn’t sure how much time it would buy him. Still, if they wanted him to beg, he was confident he could disgorge all manner of degrading and pathetic entreaties, and he could do so with his shins in firm communion with the earth.

  When the other American reached him, Austin nodded. “I’m guessing you didn’t come here for the darts,” he began, hoping his comment sounded innocuous enough to mask his terror.

  “Alas, I did not,” Douglas told him.

  “Whatever you want, it couldn’t wait until I got home?” he asked. “Until I was back in America?”

  “It’s easier here.”

  “For you.”

  “And you.” He took Austin’s wallet, which was still in his hands, and dropped it into his front blazer pocket. “Give me your phone.”

  Obediently Austin handed it to him. The other American turned it off and took a paper clip from his pocket. Carefully, as if he were doing very small piecework or repairing something fragile and small—or, perhaps, doing the exact opposite and pulling a wing from an insect—he unbent it so that it was a long, thin metal tube. Then he pushed one end into the hole on the side of Austin’s phone and ejected the SIM card. He held it up to Austin as if he were a magician performing a card trick, and then put both the SIM card and the paper clip into one pocket, and the phone into the other.

  “There now,” Douglas said, smiling. Austin looked down and noted a thick crack in the asphalt that ran parallel to the road. It was the sort of chasm that caused bicycle flats. On a downhill, it was the kind of gouge that caused bone-shattering bicycle crashes.

  “You won’t need it where we’re going,” the fellow said.

  Austin said nothing, but he felt his chest growing warm. He tried not to pant, because he didn’t want to telegraph his fear. He knew Douglas had removed the SIM card from his phone so it couldn’t be used to track him. He took a little comfort from the idea that the other American hadn’t just walked to the side of the road and hurled the phone as far as he could into the swamp. In his head, he could imagine the small splash it would make. He could hear it. Not destroying the phone might be a good sign: it meant there was still some negotiation to be had.

  Douglas took a canvas bag with a drawstring from his pocket—it had been flattened and pressed practically into the size of a handkerchief—and Austin took additional comfort in its existence. It was a hood. He almost felt exhilaration when they walked him to the vehicle, one of them lifting his bike off the ground and carrying it with him, because the hood—along with the fact that Douglas had merely extracted the SIM card from the phone—meant they weren’t going to kill him.

  At least not yet.

  They sat him in the second row of the van, and the other American told him to take off his helmet. He did, placing it in his lap. He stared straight ahead as they took it away from him, tossing it into the row behind them, and draped the hood over his head. He pressed it against his forehead, mopping the sweat there with it as if it were a towel. He heard one of the Vietnamese hoisting his bike onto the roof and locking it into the rack.

  “I trust you can breathe?” Douglas asked.

  “I can,” Austin answered, and he nodded vigorously, obligingly. It was strangely courteous.

  He sat back in his seat as they started off and was aware of how different his cycling jersey felt without his phone and his wallet. But then he felt, in their absence, something else. The pockets were completely empty. He reached his hand back to search inside first the left pocket and then the right and then the middle. But they were gone. No doubt about it, they were gone. The lemon-yellow Psych energy gel, as well as the two chocolate-flavored packets. They must have fallen out when he had reached for his wallet. They were, in all likelihood, back there on the road. He thought he was going to be sick, and carefully brought his hands to his lap and breathed in slowly and deeply in his hood, trying to calm himself. He couldn’t tell them; he didn’t dare.

  “You probably know this, but last year’s floods in the Mekong Delta obliterated the rat population there. Decimated it,” Douglas was saying.

  “Yeah. I’d heard that,” Austin told him, hoping the panic he was feeling was not evident in his tone.

  “It was a real yin and yang sort of moment. The rats were always a plague on the rice harvest. But they were also really good eating for some of the farmers. Rat sour soup. Rat curry. Grilled rat. The rat is an excellent source of protein.”

  This was all so collegial, despite the bag on his head, that he allowed himself a slight disagreement, if only to take his mind off the packets he had accidentally left behind on the pavement: “I would say a common source of protein. Excellent? That might be a stretch.”

  “Maybe. I’m supposing you’ve never eaten one.”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. I’m told they taste just like chicken.”

  Austin nodded. “People say that about a lot of things.”

  “They do. They really do.” Then: “You shouldn’t have come here, Austin.”

  “Yeah. I know that, too. But it really is just a bike tour.”

  “Right. Of course it is.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  A thought came to him as he felt the van accelerating. If Douglas had followed him here to Vietnam and knew right where he was today, that meant he knew where Alexis was, too. And if that were the case, what in holy fuck had he just done to her?

  3

  In their guest room, Alexis went straight to her cosmetics bag on the dresser and pushed aside her toothbrush and lipstick and found the Xanax. Once upon a time, she had popped them like M&M’s, but these days she only swallowed one before flying. Not now. Not this afternoon. She unscrewed the top and took one. She washed it down with the last of the wine that Talia had given her downstairs. She didn’t bother to change out of her bathing suit, which was dry except for her sweat, and simply pulled over it a pai
r of jeans and a T-shirt. She knew there was an emergency aid kit in the van, but she’d never bothered to look inside it. She wondered now what was there and whether she’d need it.

  The bike tour’s support vans always brought their luggage to the next destination, and she saw Austin’s suitcase on a rack just outside the closet. She remembered his laptop and his tablet were in the front pocket, and an idea came to her. She took out his computer and booted it up. She’d use it to find his phone—and him. They were linked by the Cloud. But then she saw that she would need a password to log on to the device, and she had no idea what in the world it might be. For a long moment, she stared aimlessly at the screen. Then she shut it off and tried his tablet, and saw instantly that she would have the same problem.

  She shook off her disappointment and ran back downstairs. She was moving quickly now: there it was, the adrenaline from the ER. She was doing something instead of stewing beside the swimming pool. Already Giang had pulled the van up to the roundabout at the front steps to the villa, and Talia was offering to come with them.

  “No, we’ll be fine,” she told the woman, and Talia surprised Alexis by giving her a hug.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she answered, though she certainly wasn’t. She tried to walk herself in from the ledge, reminding herself that things were rarely as dire as they seemed in her mind. Even in the ER.

  No, that wasn’t true. Things could get gnarly fast in the ER. The construction worker who’d been impaled on three rebar spikes when he’d fallen two floors onto them? That had been pretty damn grisly. He’d been brought in after hanging atop them nearly ninety minutes while the EMTs and the firefighters figured out how to cut him down. He’d arrived with the spikes still skewering him, however, piercing his abdomen and his shoulder and his leg. He’d lived. She’d helped keep him alive long enough to get him into the OR. And then there were the two teen boys who’d had a gunfight on meth with a pair of nail guns: they had nails in their feet and forearms, and one had them in his back. There was the woman who had wedged a potato into her vagina to prevent her prolapsed uterus from spilling out onto the kitchen floor.