The Lotus and the Storm

by Lan Cao

  • • •

  I knew the moment I saw the doctor’s face. Blood rushed to my head. There was to be no good news at all. When I visited him in the hospital, I knew he would lose most of his right leg. The wound had become severely infected. The doctors agonized over the level at which to perform the amputation. There was too much contaminated tissue that had to be removed. There was only one option—amputation at a level considerably higher than the original injury. Particulate matter had been driven into flesh, in between muscles. The first operation lasted almost a full day. They had to pluck out each piece of foreign matter to forestall infection. When I saw him, his flesh was perforated; his body required extensive suturing. I was reassured he was not feeling pain. The doctors understood Phong was a VIP, someone in the president’s inner circle. Everything possible was done for him at this hospital. He looked up and asked in a soft voice, “Doctor, is there any chance I can see my leg? The one you cut off?”

  I cringed inwardly. Miraculously they had kept it and granted his request. I knew this was not the usual protocol. I had just passed a giant canvas bin in the hallway filled with amputated body parts.

  He proceeded to hold his severed leg, as if it were a baby.

  When I saw him after his first operation to remove damaged tissue and suture the clean wound, he was calmly sitting on a wheelchair with an imperturbable expression on his face. I was assured he had been given the maximum allowable dosage of painkillers, both epidural and intravenous. He knew that there would be more to remove, only it would be done incrementally. He sat absolutely still in a pool of light under the fluorescent tubes, busily folding and unfolding a page from the newspaper. I could not tell if he recognized me, except for a slight nod of the head in my direction. He did take me in but without exhibiting any hint of recognition. I embraced him, the top part of his body, the torso that already felt wholly disembodied from the flapping trouser leg, the nub and remnant of bone and flesh below. He resisted my touch. I could feel his bony shoulders, the true thinness of his very being, the pure unadulterated sorrow. It was horror I felt most of all. I cast my eyes downward. My bodily presence before him, whole and intact, seemed glaringly inappropriate. I was acutely aware of my limbs. The distance that had existed between us deepened. His would be a life of pain from the moment the mine exploded.

  “Phong,” I called out. “You will leave here soon,” I improvised. I was willing to say anything. “Thu is waiting for you.” I kept my voice evenly modulated. I wanted to gather him up and hold him.

  My voice failed to reach him altogether. He kept silent, mindlessly rubbing a corner of the newspaper between his thumb and forefinger. With prodigious effort, he pulled his slumping body up, digging his elbows into the cushioned armrests.

  I went toward the window and opened a shutter to enlarge the square of natural light entering the room. The room smelled of ointment, of petroleum. I was ever mindful of the simple, undemanding act of walking, of taking footsteps, of the sound of booted thuds on the floor. I made as little noise as possible. Phong muttered a few sounds, a muffled groan, then lapsed into silence. Occasionally he glanced at me through the sides of his eyes. I could no longer read him. I listened and watched.

  During the next few days, he appeared more gaunt, almost tubercular, as he exhaled shallow, ragged breaths. But at times he was more animated. His eyes flared, perhaps reflecting an imminent fit of agitation. They were bright, almost delirious and bewildered, and then alert and focused again.

  Maybe it was the drugs.

  I did not know what to expect. He did not ask, “Why me?” He did not challenge. He did not once say, “Why not you?” There was no hint of righteous indignation.

  I struggled to fill my lungs with air. No, he did not say, “By stepping on it, I saved your life. Again.” I shuddered. I wanted to avoid the terrain of obligation and gratitude.

  What would I have said in response? No, you did not save my life again, Phong, because I would not have stepped on it.

  Ah, so you did see it. And said nothing to warn me?

  But I did not see it. Not really. I just would have known to avoid it.

  I wondered. It was but a mere second in my mind’s eye. My heart suspended in midbeat, I saw it again, the small mound. The anthill. I heard it as well. The explosion. I heard over and over the penitential murmurs of voices inside my head.

  He pushed a bundle of pages from the newspaper at me, his head cocked to one side. His eyes were dark and focused, and his mouth grimly set in a straight horizontal line. I had not heard him speak since I first visited him after the explosion. I glanced at the bold headlines. I could hear his breath rattle, the ragged effort to take in oxygen. The stories were about Tet.

  I rose. I did not want him to read about battles. I picked up the pages and placed them on a table away from his reach. Phong, his eyes now glazed over, returned to a deep silence, submerged inside himself. His hand caressed the empty space where his right leg had been. There it was, stroking not the ragged protuberance that remained but the naked fleshlessness immediately below. I cleared my throat, unsure what to do or say. Phong turned toward me and said softly, “Please hand me a blanket.” And when I did, he draped it over the portion of the leg that had been removed, the phantom limb itself.

  “Oh, Phong,” I muttered.

  “It feels very cold,” he murmured. “I feel a lot of tingling and tightness there. All cramped up.”

  “There’s nothing there,” I said.

  His eyes teared up. For a moment he looked confused. “But it hurts. It really hurts,” he said.

  Two weeks later he was released. We would return to Saigon for the final phases of his recuperation. As the helicopter took us to Cong Hoa Hospital, all I could feel was the solid iron floor and the surge and swell of the engines. Phong slept, curled inside a dream. His belongings, Tet newspapers, our half-finished report on the massacre at Hue, and a few clean shirts, had been gathered inside a duffel bag.

  From above, even as the chopper’s propellers whirled and rotated, the city below, a welter of neighborhoods from Saigon to Cholon, blossomed and glittered with the profound conviction that victory was indeed close at hand. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to embrace it wholeheartedly. My reservations were sourceless. Nerves, I thought. Anxieties. There was Phong beside me, afflicted and lost inside a tortured and stormy hush.

  • • •

  What I wanted after Tet was the resumption of a pre-Tet life. I knew we would still be in a state of war, just not the kind of post-Tet war that departed so radically from the reassuringly plain version I knew—the version that focused on the military, instead of the political and psychological. There was no doubt Tet was a devastating blow to the enemy. On the fields of battle, fire had been met fiercely with fire. Despite the element of surprise, the North had not achieved a single military objective. And in the strategic gamble to overwhelm us with multitudes of attacks and trigger a popular uprising, they failed miserably. Due to a series of miscalculations, they had instead choreographed their own defeat. Enraged by the enemy’s treachery and brutality during Tet, young men volunteered to join the armed forces. The number of volunteers surged, especially in Hue. Even Vietcong guerrillas rallied to the government’s side, and the number of defectors increased fourfold after Tet. Seizing the momentum, our government did what it had not before dared. It decreed full mobilization. The draft categories expanded to include eighteen- to thirty-eight-year-olds, compared with twenty-one to twenty-eight previously.

  “The Vietcong is virtually destroyed,” Cliff proclaimed ecstatically. “Look, they lost almost sixty percent of their troops in the South.” He handed me a sheaf of paper marked “Top Secret.” “Sixty percent,” he repeated in a clipped, excited voice. I read the report. American military intelligence concluded that by the end of 1968, enemy losses had reached a staggering 289,000 men, with 42,000 dead during the first two weeks of Te
t alone. Most disappointing to the North was the fact that there was not one uprising against the government during Tet. Faced with a choice of life and death, people everywhere fled from them and toward government-controlled territories.

  The country rallied in the weeks after Tet. Balloons flew from homes. Confetti scuttled on sidewalks and pavements. Everywhere, the streets were colorful with banners that boasted ostentatiously of victory. Saigon stood up straight and erect and held its pose amid debris and rubble.

  On that day, as I stood resolutely next to Cliff and surveyed the troops, I thought that the fundamentals of war were clear, that we had beaten back the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. But I soon found out, after a memorable visit to Phong, that a different, more duplicitous reality would soon take over.

  • • •

  My wife and I often went with Thu to visit Phong. All of us were together again, inside the sparseness of a military hospital. There was the remaining nub, a blunt protuberance that swelled and bulged purple. It was still wrapped in elastic bandages and, with clinical certainty, elevated. Phong shivered as my wife touched him. Her hands settled on his. She felt his hopeless flesh and took in the fact of his new, ambiguous being—one that hovered between existence and nonexistence. And then she got to work. There were massages to be administered, lotions to be applied, joint contracture to be prevented. The experts could do only so much. Thu and my wife would take turns. My wife placed the palms of her hands against his stump, massaging it to prevent muscle atrophy. Softly, slowly, she pushed against the residual limb. Their movements had to be long and supple, smooth and synchronized. She pushed. And waited for him to push back. When he did not, her face dipped, almost touching his chest, her eyes latching onto his, pulling him back into their fluttering orbit. I closed my eyes. Sometimes he simply lay there, a silent man whose remaining muscles had to be worked, whose wounds would be unwrapped, who must be resurrected by a series of resistive and isometric exercises my wife had learned from the hospital’s therapists.

  I knew what all this preparatory work was for, what he had to look forward to. There would be ambulation on crutches, and in the end he would be fitted with a prosthesis.

  One evening, after I walked Quy and Thu out to the car and then returned to spend some time alone with Phong, what I saw nearly broke my heart. He was on the bed, with his one remaining leg stretched straight out. He was holding a mirror in his hand and watching with intense scrutiny the reflection of the intact leg against the mirror. Occasionally he moved his healthy leg this way and that, and watched the parallel movement in the mirror. For a moment, even I thought the mirror image of his leg was real.

  There he was, on the bed, seemingly with two legs, not one.

  When he saw me, he simply said, “This makes me feel better. Like my leg is finally unstuck. Unpinned.”

  I understood his need to feel whole. I smiled and nodded. “I can find you a longer mirror,” I offered. The mirror he had captured only a part of his healthy limb.

  He asked me to turn on the television. It was now late and his face was haggard. Although I sat next to him, we were each alone inside ourselves. Our connection was most comfortable when my wife and Thu were also present. Phong turned from the screen to look at me, blinking rapidly as if there were something in his eyes. He was shaking under the sheets. Reports of battles—ambushes, deaths, wounds—were delivered in a hectoring clip by foreign commentators on television. Tanks and helicopters flashed by, framed by the rectilinear television frame. I saw Phong’s defiant stare fixed on the images, his calculated breathing. I got up and turned the television off. This was not peaceful. It could not be good for him.

  “Turn that back on,” he barked.

  Startled, I obeyed, eager to demonstrate my harmless intentions. Perhaps the monotony of the television made him feel safe.

  “Phong,” I whispered.

  He shushed me to keep quiet and pointed toward the television screen. “I want to listen,” he hissed. He smelled of hospital powder and of something stale, a long-simmering sourness that seeped from within the pores. He jabbed a determined finger in the direction of the television. Briefly, through the soft crackle of television static I watched the camera pan the aftermath of the Vietcong attack at the American Embassy. His face was no longer vacant, uninhabited. I said nothing. It was already well known that Vietcong sappers had temporarily breached the security structure of the American Embassy. With his chin, Phong continued to point toward a pile of newspapers by his bedside. His eyes came alive. He signaled that he wished to read the paper.

  Courtesy demanded that I comply. I looked at the grasping fingers, the jumble of newspapers and magazines. The front page of every newspaper covered the same story. I looked over his shoulder. Nineteen Vietcong commandos had blown their way through the eight-foot-high outer walls and overrun the five MPs on duty in the early dawn hours. With antitank rockets the Vietcong tried to blast their way through the main embassy doors. They were pinned down by the embassy marine guards, who kept them sequestered and immobilized until a relief force of the American 101st Airborne landing by helicopter succeeded in turning the tide by midmorning. It had taken the South Vietnamese and the Americans six hours to regain control of the embassy. All nineteen Vietcong were killed along with the five American MPs and four South Vietnamese.

  On television, the prowling camera swept left to right. Phong was transfixed.

  “It’s hardly a significant battle,” I said. “The embassy was never in serious danger.” That was a fact but I could tell by Phong’s expression that he thought it was the most trivial statement I had ever uttered.

  “Hmpph,” he replied. “True enough.”

  In the scheme of all that was going on, it was one of the most small-scale incidents of the Tet Offensive. But the cameras were all pointed there, at the embassy.

  “It’s the American Embassy, after all,” Phong said with a suppressed sigh. Of course the cameras had to be there. One more camera here meant one less camera there. “American territory.” His mouth was dry, lips cracked. I handed him a paper cup filled with water.

  American reporters were converging on the scene.

  “The American papers are saying the Americans are losing,” Phong said. His face darkened. He breathed wet, muffled breaths. I did not want him to talk but this matter of the American Embassy seemed to preoccupy him.

  I waved a hand as if to flick a minor irritant away. “Don’t let it bother you. It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Minh,” he said in a voice concocted to impart impatience. “This war is going to be much less about the military than you think,” he explained. “It will be measured by nonmilitary intangibles. You will understand if you read the papers. The more murderous the enemy assault, the more doomed the prophesies, the deeper the quagmire.”

  I grimaced. I scanned the newspaper headlines. Here were the nameless defeats. Here was the beginning of our inexorable fall.

  “Look here,” Phong said quietly through heavy breathing. He was pointing at the television. “Turn it up.” There was Walter Cronkite, donning military helmet, declaring with staunch certitude that the war was lost. This was the new orthodoxy, sullenly issued. The security of the American Embassy had been breached. The war was now officially unwinnable. Another scene showed the hurl and heave of Tet. There was the same photograph, shown almost in slow motion. Here was the camera’s zoom shot. A pistol at the end of an outstretched arm, a dead-on aim by a South Vietnamese general. One shot and a Vietcong prisoner simultaneously collapsed onto the ground in that fatal instant.

  Phong shook his head. Something like a worried wrinkle settled above his eyes.

  I wanted to divert his attention. “Concentrate on the fitting for your legs tomorrow,” I said. “Don’t think about these things.”

  He waved me away and shook his head. One shake. Then another. I kept my eyes fixed elsewhere, obliquely away from
the dressings, the cauterized stump. There was his body, a slight silhouette beyond damaged, beyond bullets, beyond shrapnel. Phong was receding, his agitation muted. His eyes were closed. The lids flickered, as if they were reflecting every tick of a scarred dream.

  I walked out, filled with a smoldering sadness. My heart swelled. And then a thought occurred to me. Perhaps politics itself, for a long time now, had served as a cover for him, a comforting sanctuary. Perhaps his anger over the big things provided him with an acceptable outlet for anger over the more personal but less manageable, more biting things, like love and other matters of the heart.

  15

  Circling Time

  MAI, 1975

  The sight of her, a big, scowling shadow like a darkened, angry girl crouched in a corner, staring at the exaggerated faces of masks from Bali that hang on the walls of our house, once frightened me. The warrior masks are elaborately detailed. I see large swollen lips and huge upper palates, bared fangs, flaring nostrils and menacing eyes that open wide. There she sits, this nameless she, in front of the masks and makes her face like theirs. It is then that our worlds meet, the outside layer that I think of as mine and the inside depths that I think of as hers.

  These meetings once wiped me out but seemed to give her renewed power. They used to be occasions in which she vanquished me and took over. I would be obliterated and sent into lost time. Her appearance was violent, a hot fire that swerved and threaded itself into a terrible deceit through the shock and echo of my body. Now it is more straightforward. The hot bright orange and red that collided when we first met have now cooled into something deeper, an icier, stealthy disturbance of paler, muted colors. Somehow we have managed to accommodate each other. I still dread her appearance, but it no longer carries with it the threat of total destruction.