The Best of Lucius Shepard (67 page)

“In
the morning I awoke and saw a bloody, jawless face with staring blue eyes pressed
close to mine, looking as if it were still trying to convey a last desperate
message. I clawed my way from beneath the corpse and staggered upright to find
myself the lord of a killed land, of a raw, red scar littered with corpses in
the midst of a charcoaled forest. I went down from the bunker and wandered
among the dead. From every quarter issued the droning of flies. Everywhere lay
arms, legs, and grisly relics I could not identify. I was numb, I had no
feeling apart from a pale satisfaction at having survived. But as I wandered
among the dead, taking notice of the awful intimacies death had imposed: a
dozen child-sized bodies huddled in a crater, anonymous as a nest of scorched
beetles; a horribly burned woman with buttocks exposed reaching out a clawed
hand to touch the lips of a disembodied head–these and a hundred other such
scenes brought home the truth that I was their author. It wasn’t guilt I felt
then. Guilt was irrelevant. We were all guilty, the dead and the living, the
good and those who had abandoned God. Guilt is our inevitable portion of the
world’s great trouble. No, it was the recognition that at the moment when I
knew the war was lost–my share of it, at least–I chose not to cut my losses but
to align myself with a force so base and negative that we refuse to admit its
place in human nature and dress it in mystical clothing and call it Satan or
Shiva so as to separate it from ourselves. Perhaps this sort of choice is a
soldier’s virtue, but I can no longer view it in that light.” He tapped his
chest with the tip of his staff. “Though I will never say that my enemies were
just, there is justice in what I have endured since that day. All men sin, all
men do evil. And evil shows itself in our faces.” Here he aimed the staff at
the audience and tracked it from face to face, as if highlighting the misdeeds
imprinted on each. “What you see of me now is not the man I was, but the thing
I became at the instant I made my choice. Take from my story what you will, but
understand this: I am unique only in that the judgment of my days is inscribed
not merely on my face, but upon every inch of my body. We are all of us
monsters waiting to be summoned forth by a moment of madness and pride.”

As
Tranh and I led him from the tent, across the damp grass, the major was
excited, almost incoherently so, not by the acclaim he had received, but
because he had managed to complete his story. He plucked at my sleeve,
babbling, bobbing his head, but I paid him no mind, concerned about Tan, whom I
had seen talking to Phuong in the bleachers. And when she came running from the
main tent, a windbreaker thrown over her costume, I forgot him entirely.

“We’re
not going directly back to the house,” she said. “She wants to take me to a
club on the square. I don’t know when we’ll get to your father’s.”

“Maybe
this isn’t such a good idea. I think we should wait until morning.”

“It’s
all right,” she said. “Go to the house and as soon as you’ve dealt with your
father, do exactly what I told you. When you hear us enter the house, stay out
of sight. Don’t do a thing until I come and get you. Understand?”

“I
don’t know,” I said, perplexed at the way she had taken charge.

“Please!”
She grabbed me by the lapels. “Promise you’ll do as I say! Please!”

I
promised, but as I watched her run off into the dark I had a resurgence of my
old sense of dislocation, and though I had not truly listened to the major’s
story, having been occupied with my own troubles, the sound of him sputtering
and chortling behind me, gloating over the treasure of his recovered memory,
his invention, whatever it was, caused me to wonder then about the nature of my
own choice, and the story that I might someday tell.

My
father’s house was on Yen Phu Street–two stories of pocked gray stone with green
vented shutters and a green door with a knocker carved in the shape of a water
buffalo’s head. I arrived shortly after midnight and stood in the lee of the
high whitewashed wall that enclosed his compound. The fog had been cut by a
steady drizzle, and no pedestrians were about. Light slanted from the vents of
a shuttered upstairs window, and beneath it was parked a bicycle in whose
basket rested a dozen white lilies, their stems wrapped in butcher paper. I
imagined that my father had ridden the bicycle to market and had forgotten to
retrieve the flowers after carrying his other purchases inside. They seemed
omenical in their glossy pallor, a sterile emblem of the bloody work ahead.

The
idea of killing my father held no terrors for me–I had performed the act in my
mind hundreds of times, I’d conceived its every element–and as I stood there I
felt the past accumulating at my back like the cars of a train stretching for
eighteen years, building from my mother’s death to the shuddering engine of the
moment I was soon to inhabit. All the misgivings that earlier had nagged at me
melted away, like fog before rain. I was secure in my hatred and in the
knowledge that I had no choice, that my father was a menace who would never
fade.

I
crossed the street, knocked, and after a few seconds he admitted me into a
brightly lit alcove with a darkened room opening off to the right. He was
dressed in a voluminous robe of green silk, and as he proceeded me up the
stairway to the left of the alcove, the sight of his bell-like shape and bald
head with the silver plate collaring the base of his skull . . . these things
along with the odor of jasmine incense led me to imagine that I was being
escorted to an audience with some mysterious religious figure by one of his
eunuch priests. At the head of the stair was a narrow white room furnished with
two padded chrome chairs, a wall screen, and, at the far end, a desk bearing
papers, an ornamental vase, an old-fashioned letter opener, and a foot-high
gilt and bronze Buddha. My father sat down in one of the chairs, triggered the
wall screen’s computer mode with a penlight, and set about accessing the Sony
AI, working through various menus, all the while chatting away, saying he was
sorry he’d missed our show, he hoped to attend the following night, and how was
I enjoying my stay in Binh Khoi, it often seemed an unfriendly place to
newcomers, but by week’s end I’d feel right at home. I had brought no weapon,
assuming that his security would detect it. The letter opener, I thought, would
do the job. But my hand fell instead to the Buddha. It would be cleaner, I
decided. A single blow. I picked it up, hefted it. I had anticipated that when
the moment arrived, I would want to make myself known to my father, to relish
his shock and dismay; but I understood that was no longer important, and I only
wanted him to die. In any case, since he likely knew the truth about me, the
dramatic scene I’d envisioned would be greatly diminished.

“That’s
Thai. Fifteenth century,” he said, nodding at the statue, then returned his
attention to the screen. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Very,”
I said.

Then,
without a thought, all thinking necessary having already been done, and the
deed itself merely an automatic function, the final surge of an
eighteen-year-long momentum, I stepped behind him and swung the statue at the
back of his head. I expected to hear a crack but the sound of impact was plush,
muffled, such as might be caused by the flat of one’s hand striking a pillow.
He let out an explosive grunt, toppled with a twisting motion against the wall,
ending up on his side, facing outward. There was so much blood, I assumed he
must be dead. But then he groaned, his eyes blinked open, and he struggled to
his knees. I saw that I’d hit the silver plate at the base of his skull. Blood
was flowing out around the plate, but it had protected him from mortal damage.
His robe had fallen open, and with his pale mottled belly bulging from the
green silk and the blood streaking his neck, his smallish features knitted in pain
and perplexity, he looked gross and clownishly pitiable. He held up an unsteady
hand to block a second blow. His mouth worked, and he said “Wait . . .” or
“What . . . .” Which, I can’t be sure. But I was in no mood either to wait or
to explain myself. A clean death might not have affected me so deeply, but that
I had made of a whole healthy life this repellent half-dead thing wobbling at
my feet–it assaulted my moral foundation, it washed the romantic tint of
revenge from the simple, terrible act of slaughter, and when I struck at him
again. this time smashing the statue down two-handed onto the top of his skull,
I was charged with the kind of fear that afflicts a child when he more or less
by accident wounds a bird with a stone and seeks to hide the act from God by
tossing his victim onto an ash heap. My father sagged onto his back, blood
gushing from his nose and mouth. I caught a whiff of feces and staggered away,
dropping the Buddha. Now that my purpose had been accomplished, like a bee
dying from having stung its enemy, I felt drained of poison, full of dull
surprise that there had been no more rewarding result.

The
penlight had rolled beneath the second chair. I picked it up, and, following
Tan’s instructions, I used the computer to contact a security agency in Danang.
A blond woman with a brittle manner appeared on the screen and asked my
business. I explained my circumstances, not bothering to characterize the
murder as anything other than it was–the size of my trust would guarantee my
legal immunity–and also provided her with the number of Vang’s lawyer, as well
as some particulars concerning the trust, thereby establishing my bona fides.
The woman vanished, her image replaced by a shifting pattern of pastel colors,
and, after several minutes, this in turn was replaced by a contract form with a
glowing blue patch at the bottom to which I pressed the ball of my thumb. The
woman reappeared, much more solicitous now, and cautioned me to remain where I
was. She assured me that an armed force would be at the house within the hour.
As an afterthought she advised me to wipe the blood from my face.

The
presence of the body–its meat reality–made me uncomfortable. I picked up the
letter opener and went down the stairs and groped my way across the unlit room
off the alcove and found a chair in a corner from which I could see the door.
Sitting alone in the darkness amplified the torpor that had pervaded me, and
though I sensed certain unsettling dissonances surrounding what had just taken
place, I was not sufficiently alert to consider them as other than
aggravations. I had been sitting there for perhaps ten minutes when the door
opened and Phuong, laughing, stepped into the alcove with Tan behind her,
wearing a blue skirt and checkered blouse. She kicked the door shut, pushed Tan
against the wall, and began to kiss her, running a hand up under her skirt.
Then her head snapped around, and although I didn’t believe she could see in
the dark, she stared directly at me.

Before
I could react, before I could be sure that Phuong had detected me, Tan struck
her beneath the jaw with the heel of her left hand, driving her against the
opposite wall, and followed this with a kick to the stomach. Phuong rolled away
and up into a crouch. She cried out my father’s name: “William!” Whether in
warning or–recognizing what had happened–in grief, I cannot say. Then the two
women began to fight. It lasted no more than half a minute, but their speed and
eerie grace were incredible to see: like watching two long-fingered witches dancing
in a bright patch of weakened gravity and casting violent spells. Dazed by
Tan’s initial blows, Phoung went on the defensive, but soon she recovered and
started to hold her own. I remembered the letter opener in my hand. The thing
was poorly balanced and Phuong’s quickness made the timing hard to judge, but
then she paused, preparing to launch an attack, and I flung the opener, lodging
it squarely between her shoulderblades. Not a mortal wound–the blade was too
dull to bite deep–but a distracting one. She shrieked, tried to reach the
opener, and, as she reeled to the side, Tan came up behind her and broke her
neck with a savage twist. She let the body fall and walked toward me, a shadow
in the darkened room. It seemed impossible that she was the same woman I had
known on the beach at Vung Tau, and I felt a spark of fear.

“Are
you all right?” she asked, stopping a few feet away.

“All
right?” I laughed. “What’s going on here?”

She
gave no reply, and I said, “Apparently you decided against using Mei’s herbs.”

“If
you had done as I asked, if you’d stayed clear, it might not have been
necessary to kill her.” She came another step forward. “Have you called for
security?”

I
nodded. “Did you learn to fight like that in Hue?”

“In
China,” she said.

“At
a private security company. Like Phuong.”

“Yes.”

“Then
it would follow that you’re not Vang’s niece.”

“But
I am,” she said. “He used the last of his fortune to have me trained so I could
protect you. He was a bitter man . . . to have used his family so.”