Given World (21 page)

I go home at four to shower, change, and eat, arrive at the bar at six, get a beer from Tho, retire to the window with Phượng. The sun sets as it does here, without prelude, and the sky goes from light to dark as if a switch has been thrown. Phượng leans her back into one corner of the window frame, her fingers laced across her middle and her head turned to gaze outside. Her expression tells me nothing, but I have seen her and Ian in deep conversation, laughing sometimes, sometimes not laughing.
They are going to keep the baby,
I think.
Together
. And I am jealous of what they have.

“Will miss Mister Clive,” she says.

“
Đó là sự thật
.” It’s true.

She looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “Been study?”

“Some,” I say.

“Phượng think a lot,” she says. “Good on ya.” She smiles, makes a small fist, and socks me lightly on the shoulder. “Me too.”

I say, “You are such a knucklehead.”

“Next week lesson,” she says. “Have to go now.”

“I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” is playing in the background. The line “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box” is the one that always makes me flinch. I picture my mother (Dad in a shadow behind her) looking out at the snowy buttes, tracing patterns in the frost on the insides of the windows, trying to imagine a place where there is no winter, where it is always hot, and when the rains come after weeks of threats and dry thunder and lightning in the west, people pour into the streets and squares to soak it up in the most literal sense—to express their gratitude for the one absolute requirement of a country like this one, a place where at one time, not all that long ago, what most of them probably wanted more than anything was to raise their families, farm their land, and be left the fuck alone.

I sit on the windowsill and watch Phượng walk away. Her
áo dài
is blue tonight. (
Of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day. The boy went blue, and I panicked.
) I know it is a special one she wears when she has a date. I expect Ian will show up to get her pretty soon, in his tattered linen sport jacket, and they will go to the roof of the Rex for dinner, stand at the edge of the terrace and watch the city: the young couples on their motor scooters, riding around and around the circle in front of the opera house on Nguyễn Huệ, slowly, hypnotically; the cyclos parked on the side streets, smoking, patiently waiting for passengers—someone, anyone who is prepared, however reluctantly and in whatever condition, to go home.

T
he ad says, “Sunny Potrero Hill flat. Share with two ‘males.’ Straight-friendly. Must like cat.” The only cats I’ve ever really known were the barn kind, wild and prone to grasshoppering at any movement that could possibly be considered untoward. I assume the cat in the ad will be different, will allow petting and behind-the-ear scratches, like Cash would, if he were still around.

I like the idea of an animal, of getting to know something gradually, little by little, with no obligation to converse. I’ve come home tongue-tied is why. From Saigon. After the equivalent, in time, of a tour of duty there, and then some. I’m shell-shocked, though not in the usual sense. It is no longer Vietnam but America, now, that shocks, with its shiny veneer, its heaps of shrink-wrapped paraphernalia. Besides which, the war has been over for a long time.

At least that war has. But there have been others since, ongoing and everywhere, and maybe they are partially to blame for the fact that something feeling quite like armed conflict still carries on in my head. Armed but deceptively quiet, as if all the combatants are required to use silencers, and the stealth missiles to remain stealthy clear to impact.

I didn’t want to come back. I had grown to love being one of the missing, living in a place where no one could find me, no one could just stop by or call me up. I was so far away from my memories, I could almost pretend they were someone else’s. I had learned that distance was a force field—so very useful—and my mind was so busy trying to get me through the city and the days, I could forget for long stretches of time I’d ever had another life.

But I had. It had not gone anywhere, maybe temporarily into witness protection.

It took several weeks and a serious effort just to go buy a plane ticket, and it killed me that it had been so easy. To leave Vietnam. In one piece. I did not think it should have been that easy.

When it became apparent that I would never do it by myself, Phượng went with me and coaxed me gently into the EVA Air office. “See? No problem.” She put a dainty hand on the small of my back and pushed while I resisted. Phượng is surprisingly strong for a five-foot-tall, ninety-pound girl, and I found myself moving forward, in a swimming-through-tar sort of way, despite my best efforts to stand still or, better yet, back up all the way to and out the door.

“Nice lady help you.” The way Phượng said “help,” it came out sounding like “hey-oop.”

I knew she was making fun of me, however lovingly, because I was acting like an idiot.

“I could do with a little less sarcasm,” I said.

“Yes, dear.” The tiny girl continued steering me toward the nice lady in question, whose smile I knew was almost certainly genuine, but to me she looked remarkably like a crocodile. Or a “coco-deal,” as Phượng would say.

“Maybe we should come back later. Isn’t it lunchtime or something?”

Phượng stopped and gave me a look. “Don’t want to go back? Don’t go.”

“I have to.”

“Tại sao?”

“
Tại vì.
” I knew how childish it was to answer a Why with a Because, but at that moment, I did not care.

Phượng called me on it. “Lousy reason.”

“It’s all I’ve got,” I said. But it wasn’t.

Aside from the beers and the cigarettes and the suicidal, helmetless motorcycle excursions with Luc up Highway 1 toward Phan Thiết or through the rice paddies west of town over slick wooden and rail-less bridges, there was that guy and his dog, so sweet and so safe, refuge; in a place I might get to go, to pull back and start—what do you call it?—
living
.

I called again. He answered anyway. He was still alone. Or he was alone again. This time I tried to explain what had happened to me, or to us, or hadn’t, or . . . He said, “Yeah, babe, come on home,” and I blithely skipped right over the hesitant part—the part where he was lying—because I didn’t recognize it as meaningful, because it was something I had never heard before.

Love is something I do not, obviously, know how to do, but some recalcitrant tendency keeps driving me to make the attempt. Because sometimes I think what will cure me is to be surrounded, consumed, crushed, forced to feel something besides the all-too-familiar duality of rootless and pointless. Luc was sweet, but he was crazy, and he was going back to Paris. He asked me to go, but I couldn’t learn another language. Words I already knew I would never know.

•  •  •

After eighteen months, I had finally done what I’d first gone to Vietnam to do: ridden out to Củ Chi on the back of that Russian motorcycle, roamed the tunnels, the command rooms, the underground hospitals, the reencroaching jungle. Tried to figure out which turn Mick must have taken last and how it could possibly be that he hadn’t left me a message. In a Tiger beer bottle. Carved with a sharp stick into a red-mud wall or with a bayonet into a tree.

But there was nothing. It didn’t even feel like a war zone. It felt like a museum, or a theme park. It didn’t feel real enough for anything important to have been lost there. No heart. No mind. No life. No war.

It had a souvenir stand. That killed me. I wanted to kill something back.

I rented an AK-47. Paid for a handful of bullets. Obliterated the target of an American bomber from fifty yards. The tunnel guides were impressed. “America number one,” they said. “American girl
số một! 
”

After a kiss from Luc, American Girl Number One put the gun down and said so long.
Au revoir. Hẹn Gặp Lại.
Sixty kilometers. Three hours. Ten shells. Done and done.

But I could still, too easily, avert my gaze and picture him setting up camp somewhere, living off the land. Maybe in Thailand. From where he could send a postcard. At least.

It came to me how tired I was of pretending I could see any distance at all. I thought maybe if I could find my way back to a clear image I could start over from there, and tried to figure how far back that would be. It turned out to be as far back as Mick, at eighteen, in a cave in Montana, a piece of quartz etched with a dinosaur-feather imprint, shining in his palm. I saw myself on the roof at home, aiming a plain gray rock, hitting him with it, and blood, but no one died; I saw us both in Missoula, hiking into the hills for another geology lesson. Then much blur, with highlights.

The two or so months after Củ Chi were necessarily (I told myself) but still only semi-blurry, and after finally trading all but my last few hundred bucks for thirty-six hours of airports, airplanes, counterfeit Valium, and three or four tiny bottles of bourbon, I was back in San Francisco, trying somewhat desperately to gain traction on slippery pavement in a very steep city. In addition to being jet-lagged and exhausted, I found that Frank was not there, this time, for me. He was done waiting. He tried to let me back in, but he couldn’t trust me an inch, and what he was waiting for was for me to go. Now. Not once he’d gotten used to having me around again.

When I was three days back, he got home from work and pulled my duffel bag out of the closet. He set it on the bed and unzipped it. He said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Riley. I really do. But you need to leave me alone for a while.” I started to pack. I took my time. I felt like I was drowning, waiting for the ocean floor to show up under my feet. He didn’t help or try to stop me.

He was right to give me the boot, but it still hurt, a lot. I didn’t ask him how long a while was but decided all by myself to believe that if I really needed him to, someday he’d let me back in. I don’t know why I thought I had to believe this about him. Us. Whatever we were. But I did. It helped a little. Enough to operate.

I had never told him why I went away so far and stayed gone so long. To do that would have required words, turned to sentences, I had no clue how to string together. And something told me it wouldn’t matter anyway. I was never meant to be Frank’s replacement ballerina, but no one can tell me I didn’t try.

Tried for the first time ever to say I was sorry for being so utterly useless when Lucas died. He told me not to worry about it.

“Honey child, it was the eighties,” he said. “No one was right.” I knew it still hurt him, ten years down the line, and that his studied nonchalance, about love, men, sex, friendship—anything ever meant to be serious—was a front, and one that might never come down. But he took me in, and he made me laugh. I began looking at ads in the paper for a place to settle. Regroup. Sleep. And if the dreams were going to be sad, or scary, quit dreaming them.

•  •  •

Since using telephones in Saigon had run five dollars a minute, I’d braved them only a few times, and they still unnerved me. When I call the number in the ad, though, the welcoming, soft southern accent on the other end of the line gives me the courage to speak. I manage to say hello and to ask if the room is still available.

“Sure, come on over. Can you make it this morning?”

“Yes.” I leave it at that, and an almost-whispered “Thank you,” so as not to sound too anxious or dazed or unbalanced. His name is Christopher, he says, and he is looking forward to meeting me.

Eddie comes along because he has a car and can give me a ride, but mostly for moral support and as evidence, I tell him, that I am not some sociopathic closet homophobe. When I say the last part, he looks at me so closely and earnestly, I think for a second he might put a hand to my forehead, to check for fever. “You get that you are in San Francisco, right?”

I nod, in what I hope is a convincing manner.

“You know it is not normal for you to imagine people might think that, right?”

“Right,” I say.

The place I am going to see is actually on a side street off Potrero Avenue, meaning it is not technically a Potrero
Hill
flat, but I can understand why anyone in search of a renter would advertise it as one. Down here in the flatlands, life is much more industrial, much less picturesque and trendy than it is up higher. But flat land is fine by me: level ground will probably come in handy for the more dissociative times, and those times will surely come around. Despite this new and somewhat disconcerting yen for stability, I know I’ll always look forward to—and if necessary find a way to manufacture—the occasional tectonic shift; the feeling of stepping off the curb and for a moment, due to certain smells or sounds or whatever other trigger, not knowing where the hell I am.

The street feels eerily quiet. It is the weekend, but even so, it seems as though there should be more people around, more noise, more traffic. I think about Saigon, the incessant sensory overload, and suppose anything short of an ongoing riot is going to seem strange for a while.

Here there are houses just like on any other block, but also a fair number of businesses, ones that do not cater to the Sunday-afternoon-stroll crowd: auto repair and machine shops, a fenced-in truck rental compound, a Texaco station, a screen printer’s studio in a pale-blue building at the corner. It isn’t really a neighborhood—is nothing at all like the blocks to the east, on which the coffee shops and florists and boutiques blend right in; they fool you into thinking maybe you aren’t in a city at all but in some lovely suburb made to look like one.

I think about trying to relate this bit of insight to Eddie, but don’t. I know there is probably something wrong with my reasoning but am unclear as to which parts I should leave out, or what I could add that would change that. It is good enough for now to be able to recognize this place is a little bit
outside
, and even though I can’t explain the concept (outside of what?), I can accept this recognition as a small but adequate step toward reentry.