The Beauty of Humanity Movement (125 page)

“What’s he talking about?” T
asks.

“Perhaps he hit his head. He seems to be confused about the year.”

Confused about the year, thinks H
ng, but the year that the Americans bombed Bach Mai Hospital was a year of confusion. He just wants to go home to his shack. “Bình,” he says. “Are you taking me home?”

“No.”

“Not the hospital,” H
ng repeats.

“You’ll come to our house. We’ll send for a doctor.”

“But my flower,” says H
ng.

“Don’t worry about your flower,” says Bình. “I’ll go and check on all your plants tomorrow.”

“
Lan
,” says H
ng. “I mean the orchid.”

“Yes, I know,” he hears Bình reassure him as he closes his eyes.

O
ld Man H
ng’s body is broken, but there is more energy in his voice than T
has ever heard. He is yelling something from T
’s bed, where he has been resting for nearly a week now, his leg tied to a splint Bình made in his carpentry workshop.

H
ng was hit by a car, but he doesn’t remember what the vehicle looked like; the rain was heavy that day, the fog thick. T
just wishes he could tell them something about the vehicle because he’d find that car and make the driver pay.

In his confusion, the old man’s stories are frequent and revealing, and T
wonders if he might get him to talk about the lady who lives in the shack next to his.

T
’s bedroom smells musty with woody teas and ointments and general old-manness. T
feels guilty every time he comes in here, ashamed by the thought of Old Man H
ng lying on a mattress that has
absorbed thousands of T
’s fantasies, a good percentage of which lately have involved Maggie. He absolves his guilt by thinking of these nocturnal acts as practice for married life. He needs to develop lasting power and can only do so by training the muscles. Thus far he can’t manage to hold on for more than two and a half minutes, and only then when he deliberately conjures up someone ugly.