***
He arranged to meet her for lunch the next day. He was a little surprised she would agree to this, American or no American. It felt odd to actually see her walk into the restaurant to join him, as if she were some nocturnal creature – a vampire, a succubus – that could not exist in the day. It was a nice, clean “pho” restaurant that to him had a Japanese feel to it, within walking distance of his hotel here in the resort city of Vung Tau. Over their soup and coffee, thick with sweetened condensed milk, he showed her photos from a file he had brought with him.
“What are these?” She squinted, turning one photo around in her hands.
It was a photo of the cast from a footprint supposedly of an ape-like hominid called Nguoi Rung. French told No how last summer he had looked into sightings of this creature with the help of the Zoology Department of Teachers Training College-Viet Nam National University, and the Viet Nam Cryptozoic and Rare Animals Research Center.
With people from these institutions he had ventured into Viet Nam’s so-called “Lost World,” the Vu Quang Nature Preserve, where in recent years previously unknown deer, birds, fish and a yellow-shelled tortoise had been encountered, to much excitement in the international scientific community. He showed her more pictures, a kind of bestiary of creatures living on the border between the mythical and the dustily cataloged.
And for this trip, he went on to explain, he had come to look into reports of several aquatic enigmas. There was the Con Rit, a sea monster described as a giant centipede or prehistoric whale with a segmented body, a sixty-foot specimen of which was said to have washed ashore in the nineteenth century. This beast was theorized by some to be the inspiration for dragons in Asian folklore.
French had had better luck, though, investigating the massive turtle that lived in Hoan Kiem Lake, up north in the heart of bustling Hanoi itself. There was a legend about a giant turtle that lived in this lake, that had stolen a magical sword from Emperor Le Thai To. French handed No a few photos he himself had captured of this legend in the flesh. They showed a turtle’s head breaking the surface, the face with its wide nostrils and lighter muzzle looking oddly more mammalian than reptile. It had reminded him of the faces of Asian dragons, which looked partly mammalian to him, and had conversely called to mind how the “foo dogs” outside palaces and temples appeared partly reptilian. Seeing this real life chimera’s head arise from the water had given him shivers. One of the most religious moments of his life. Until about six years ago he had never seen a photo of this creature – like architeuthis dux, the giant squid, not so much a disputed animal as an enigmatic and elusive one, the more so because it appeared there was only a single specimen left in the lake – and yet now he had photographed it himself. It was almost as if, of late, the giant turtle had decided to become more visible, for whatever reason.
“One professor’s suggested,” he told No, “that it might even be old enough to be the very same turtle that inspired the story about the magic sword.”
She handed him back the pictures quickly, as if they disconcerted her. “He was big as a house?”
“Big as a house? Not quite,” French laughed. “But six feet long – that’s pretty damn big enough.”
No was shaking her head. “No...maybe this is another turtle. Maybe one of Con Rua’s babies. Con Rua is big as a house. When he comes out for people to see, it means something important will happen soon in Viet Nam.” She still appeared shaken to have viewed the creature even in this manner, as if it might be a bad omen for her. “Why do you look for these things?”
Again, how to explain this to her? That it wasn’t the Lost World that seemed lost to him, but the rest of the world instead?
“Why do you do what you do?” he asked her in return.
There was a subtle flare in the inky pools of her eyes and her full lips drew into a tight smile. “You don’t like what I do?”
“I like it,” he stammered, though he knew he shouldn’t like what she was doing. “I like you,” he amended. It sounded better.
“I don’t like what I do, okay? I am not a bad woman, but I take care of my family. Two of my brothers don’t have jobs, and my parents are too old to work now.”
“I’m sorry. I know it can be very rough making a living here.” He sounded so patronizing that he wanted to wince at himself.
She sucked the sweet, thick residue of coffee off her spoon without it even seeming to be consciously seductive; a distant, pensive action instead, as she collected her equanimity after French’s unintended challenge of her character. Womanly pride, and he knew it was vital that a Vietnamese not lose face.
She had apparently thought better of telling him that she disliked having to do what she did, because she similarly amended, “But I like you very much.”
“Yeah? Why is that?”
Back to the No he had met in the bar, she gave her most winning smile, like that of a would-be model who would never make the cover of Vogue. “You’re very nice, of course. And you’re very handsome.”
“Huh...you mean I’m very American.”
She thrust out her full lower lip, but her wounded pride was coquettish this time “You think I only like you because you’re American, huh? You don’t believe I think you’re special?”
“I’m nothing special where I come from.”
“I’m not very beautiful in Viet Nam. But you think I’m beautiful, I hope?”
“You’re very beautiful to me, yes.” He joked, to feel less uncomfortable, “A remarkable specimen of womanhood.”
She said, “But I think you like terrible things more than you like pretty women.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he replied uncomfortably, wanting both to defend his normal urges and deny that one of his primary reasons for having lingered in Vung Tau was to work up the courage to submit to the baser instincts he had repressed until now, on his previous visit and this one. Until No, he had valiantly clung to the notion that he was a professional, in possession of a personal dignity, had more respect for women than to become some lecherous john. He did not want to contribute to a woman’s self-degradation, buy her flesh like savory meat, or objectify her. But he was fascinated with biological specimens, nature in all its obsessive detail, and so he pickled the distinct cuts of her body in the formaldehyde of his mind: her protrusive dark brown nipples, the glossy hard balls of her shoulders, her small and unnaturally smooth bottom that reminded him of his sister’s old Malibu Barbie doll, which as a boy he had fondled and ogled like some primitive tribe’s stolen idol. He was almost clinically intrigued with her long hair, so black it shimmered blue, and the skin color that he couldn’t decide how to label: brown, yellow, or even a subtle olive-like green.
“I can show you some things I know about,” she told him. “In Vung Tau and in Saigon, too. Some terrible things you might like.”
So, for more money she would double as a tour guide? It would be easier to justify that to himself than the money he was already paying her, but if he could only afford renting her for one of two services...
“I’ve already seen some terrible things in Saigon.”
He described several pickled fetuses – deformed into something less or more than human, like examples of a mythical race preserved as holy relics – that he had seen amongst the catalog of horrors at Ho Chi Minh City’s War Remnants Museum. Accompanying these had been mounted photos of living Vietnamese, also monstrously distorted, the cause of all this given as Agent Orange. While in the city he had also gone to the Fine Art Museum, housed within an enormous yellow Art Nouveau mansion, specifically to view the sculpture of Kala, a temple-guarding creature which his guidebook claimed possessed distended eyes and fearsome fangs. Sounded rather like another dragon to him, but he hadn’t been able to locate this artifact from the ruins of ancient My Son within the short time he’d budgeted for the museum, and had been too shy to ask for help. He had, however, on the second floor – among the contemporary art – stumbled upon a painting that seized his interest.
It was hard to miss, though, as it all but filled an entire wall. It was titled Tragedy of Agent Orange, a Boschian extravagance of misshapen hybrids, which surely got its point across. On the right of its hellish surface loomed lumpen disfigured faces, on the left an infant apparently born without a brain, and further left a baby with a cleft palate and parasitic twin besides. After gaping at this colossally grotesque work for several long minutes – as if in awe of a tribe of giant, maimed deities – French had finally backed out of the room meekly before someone saw the American in the presence of these horrors and met his eyes with reproach. He could barely stand the painted eyes of the mutants as it was.
“You like seeing those things in bottles?” No asked him. “I can show you more. Very strange animals – I’m sure you would love them.”
He’d never been seduced with pickled animals before. But not all eyes that gazed upon Americans were reproachful; in this time of peace, it was more likely they were covetous. He understood that what No ultimately wanted was not a handful of bills, but for him to fall in love with her over the two weeks he had left in her country, and sponsor her to the USA as his wife and his assistant in exploring the wonders of nature, and the wonders of her crafty little body. But French chuckled resignedly and said, “I guess that sounds up my alley.”
***
In what passed for English translation, a promotional packet he’d been given for the Suoi Tien Theme Park said: “In the Fairy Stream Paradise also has Long Hoa Thien Bao, when your spirit is inclined to the good, your pray will be got and your wish will be seen.” Well, his wish to see the mummified hand of a Nguoi Rung or a larval Con Rit stuffed into a jar of formaldehyde was not realized. Overdressed in a clingy black dress with a high collar and no sleeves, No had mistaken crytozoological animals for debased members of quite ordinary species.
It wasn’t that the stuffed and bottled monstrosities in the freak tent with its glaring twin totem faces outside didn’t fascinate him – they gave him a nostalgic thrill, reminding him of similar specimens and human “pickled punks” he’d gawked at during the Brockton Fair of his youth, marveling then at what got past nature’s quality control department, what nature dreamed up in the delirium of fever and illness. In the freak tent, there were fowl with extra legs, a stuffed deer with two faces, but mostly there was an abundance of pig fetuses in every manner of wretchedness: conjoined at the body, conjoined at the head with two snouts but sharing a third eye, pigs spilling an overabundance of limbs behind them. Some looked sadly cute. Others seemed to be squealing for all eternity. Still others had odd, demonic leers.
“Do you think Agent Orange had anything to do with all this?” French asked No, after she had patiently waited while he pored over each and every display.
She only shrugged. For all their modern mobile phones and motorbikes, French had found that the Vietnamese believed heavily in luck, and the lack of luck, in predestination and curses, ghosts and demons. Maybe to No, this had simply been these creatures’ lot in life. They were what they had been fated to be.
They bought cans of orange soda, strolled together like boyfriend and girlfriend. French even indulged in the fantasy that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have a lovely girlfriend like her to stroll with back home. If only she were strolling with him because she actually loved him.
But his fantasies were swept aside as he came in view of an immense monster. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What is that thing?”
It appeared like a gigantic sculpture, the color of terra-cotta, a chimera with a turtle’s shell but a lion or dragon-like head tilted up toward the sky, two catfish whiskers curling back from its snout like tentacles. The leviathan stood in the middle of a man-made pond, a ferris wheel looming behind it. He could see at least one smaller, more terrestrial-looking turtle clinging to the behemoth’s back.
“It’s a...a,” No said, struggling to explain it. “You can go inside it.”
“Go inside?”
“It’s scary inside.”
“You mean a ghost train ride?” he asked, grinning.
“A what?”
He took her hand. “Come on...”
They entered the belly of the beast through a hole in its side, reached by a bridge. It was indeed a kind of ghost train ride that one walked through, like the multiple haunted houses French enjoyed even now every autumn in Salem, Massachusetts. But it wasn’t clear to him what he was seeing inside this attraction, its interior and significance both too murky for him. A sub-aquatic hell? A crude skeleton lurched at them, and French saw dioramas of battles, and a man apparently talking to a giant fish (he could make no sense of the attraction’s ominous narration). But it was when No started screaming, sobbing, spilling soda on herself and fighting with French to retrace their path that he really became disoriented. All the more confused, when she began grabbing his ankles. How had she gotten down there? Finally it dawned on him that it wasn’t her grabbing his ankles, nor was it him clutching at hers; mysterious hands were lunging at both of them in the darkness.
French managed to get No out the other end of the turtle monster’s digestive track, and she was a hysterical wreck, sticky with soda. A passing couple laughed at her. But despite her sobbing, No apparently had enough presence of mind not to rebuke him. He slipped his arm around her shoulders, cooing in her ear and apologizing as he led her away. He still couldn’t help chuckling, though. A seasoned bar girl getting frantic over a few papier-mâché boogeymen? He reassured her, “Come on, No, it wasn’t real...nothing to be afraid of, huh? A big little girl like you?”
She raised her wet eyes to him, and said, “It makes me think of things my cousin’s husband used to talk about. He told me, too, when I visited her one time. He saw horrible things in his dreams...but he believed them.”
“What kind of things?”
“He said someday when the time was right, Hell would open up, and all over the world scary things would come out and kill everyone.”
“Scary things? Like demons?”
“Like gods.”
“So is that some kind of a Buddhist belief?” he asked. As far as he knew, Buddhism had no myth of Armageddon – but then, Viet Nam had a large Catholic population, as well.
“No, it isn’t,” she said pointedly, walking on ahead of him.
***
They had come to Saigon – the name even the Vietnamese still seemed to prefer over the official Ho Chi Minh City – by crossing the South China Sea itself from Vung Tau, in a Russian hydrofoil ferry, and so they had rented a Honda to get around. They had decided to stay over in Saigon for another day, and once they had secured a hotel that wouldn’t give them difficulty about their unmarried status they went out to taste the nightlife and some seafood in a sidewalk restaurant, French again riding behind No through streets so noisily, deeply packed with other motorbikes that elbows or knees sometimes brushed his own. Leaning forward a little to shout in No’s ear over the hornet’s nest buzzing all around him – which never stopped in Saigon, only diminished in the wee hours – French observed, “It’s exciting, huh? Every night’s like a festival.”
“You should see it at Tet!” she called back to him. “Then it’s really fun!”
Tet. He thought of the Tet Offensive, of course. “That’s the Lunar New Year, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the same as the Chinese New Year?”
“Yes.”
“What year are we in now?”
No glanced over her shoulder at him, confused. “What?”
“I mean, what animal is it this year?”
“Oh,” she said. “This is the Year of the Dragon.”
***
On his first trip to Viet Nam, French had visited the Jade Emperor Pagoda because his guidebook had told him it contained a room colorfully called the Hall of Ten Hells, wooden reliefs depicting the tortures of the afterlife. He recalled now that this temple – its outer walls painted red as if with old, fading blood – had a pond on its grounds filled wi
th large turtles, so many that they piled their bodies atop each other. He also recalled that when he had climbed to an upper level to look out at the green-tiled roof, he’d found a man – a monk? – lying on a cot playing a handheld video game.
When No asked him where in Saigon he might like to go today, and he told her he found Buddhist temples beautiful, she said, “I think I know one you would like.” The temple she took him to sat like an island out in a body of water, and they had to ride in a little ferry or barge to reach it (hardly a Russian hydrofoil; one could see the water through the raised boards of its floor). A man offered to sell French a large turtle, a basket of them to his side, to release into the water for good luck, but No had already taken him to a pet store and bought two bags of goldfish for that purpose – which French had tucked delicately between her back and his front as they continued on their Honda. While crossing on the rickety little ferry, No instructed French to release the fish, and they spilled into the water like gold coins.
When French stepped off the ferry onto the temple grounds, he struck his head on the lower jaw of a stone dragon. He rubbed at the spot, trying to look casual about it. No was right, though: he did like this temple. It had an aquatic theme, with sea life depicted on its outer walls. And up in the roof tiles (from which an incongruous TV antennae or two jutted up), he spotted a sizable wasp’s nest built right onto the body of a sinuous dragon, like a pregnant belly, the hovering wasps like larval dragons.
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