The Lotus Eaters_ A Novel Part 38

PFC Simmons walked beside her. "You here to make us f.u.c.king famous?"

She tried to sound normal, although she felt like a ghost floating above the scene.

"Yeah. Sure."

"f.u.c.king A. Ought to be some kinda reason for this. Besides you getting your pictures to Danang and having a scoop, talkin' about how brave you were."

After Helen had the film she needed, she sat on a rock and waited. She had not film she needed, she sat on a rock and waited. She had not eaten for twelve hours, had not slept in twenty-four. Sound still came to her muted, as if she were underwater. Linh photographed a mortar crew who had been there the whole three days. Since her return, a new dynamic to their professional relationship: Linh, a photographer now in his own right. They traveled together, but when they reached their destination they went through the professional courtesy of pretending to be invisible to each other.

As they made their slow way back down the hill, following the wounded, they pa.s.sed living soldiers with dead eyes who did not even glance at them; Helen felt reinforced in her ghostliness. The piles of the dead had not been moved but were powdered in lime, which hid the features, making the bodies anonymous, making the living feel they were moving through a bizarre kind of catacomb.

They waited hours while the wounded were loaded and flown away.

As the infantry stretched chain-link around the LZ secured only hours before, peasant girls drifted in singly or in pairs from the nearby hamlets. They stood barefoot, dressed in faded cotton tops and black pajama bottoms, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, wordlessly soliciting. When a helicopter came in they forgot themselves, rushed up to the fence and poked their fingers through in their thrill to see the flying machines. Their fingers were as tiny and delicate as children's, a few with chipped nails painted in gaudy pinks and reds.

One of the guards went up to the fence and said something to a young girl with jet shoulder-length hair and a shiny turquoise shirt too large for her slight frame. Curious, Helen raised her camera as he took something out of his pocket, and as he unwrapped it, she saw it was a roll of Life Savers. He pushed his fingers through the fence and fed the candy to the girl, placing it directly on her tongue.

That was the shot. Helen had endured the previous hours of terror to reach it, and yet when it came it satisfied her that the sacrifice had been worth it. Only in her stripped state would she have noticed something so small and so fraught. Later it turned out to be a cover and then led to her first award, but for her the value of the picture was that it returned her purpose--to find small glimmers of humanity.

Helen and Linh caught the last helicopter out and were dropped at a supply base the last helicopter out and were dropped at a supply base that was supposed to be running more cargo flights from Tan Son Nhut. By the time they landed, the last flight had left, and they had no choice but to spend the night. The whole Highlands was in a state of emergency, and press seating was not a priority. Soldiers waiting to go in joked that the military powers were trying to get as many of them killed as possible before the rumored troop withdrawals.

The next day they waited again, Helen in the mess tent nursing a coffee, Linh stationed next to the air traffic controller, supplying him with cigarettes and sharing a flask of bourbon.

Their location was in a depressed bowl with ragged foothills all around, allowing only a short runway. The jungle seemed to bear down on their small patch of denuded territory, its tinsel of concertina wire, its hastily scratched-out bunkers. The jungle stood dense and majestic and unapproachable. The land itself against them; rice paddies and jungle and plateaus and mountains, all conspiring and waiting for their demise and disappearance.

Linh came in the mess tent and walked over to her table. "You doing okay?"

"What do the flights look like?"

"No one getting in or out now. We could be days."

The wind was knocked out of her. She had to admit she was more shaken up than she thought; she needed to escape, although escape was getting harder to come by.

"The good news is that n.o.body else is getting in or out, either. The pictures are still in play."

She could not blame him--this was their life--but the private's words about a scoop echoed in her head in a nasty way. By late afternoon, she despaired that they would get out that night, but Linh came running into the mess after having talked his way onto the last cargo plane headed for Tan Son Nhut.

As they approached the plane, one of the flight crew came up to her with a white scarf, but the roar of the engine and her own m.u.f.fled hearing made it impossible for her to make out his words, and finally he motioned for her to tie it over her nose and mouth.

"I don't understand," Helen yelled over the roar, and he pinched his nose. The scarf was greasy, and she brought it to her nose and smelled the sharp smell of Tiger Balm slathered in the center. She shook her head and handed it back to him.

Linh walked up the cargo ramp and stopped at the sight in front of him. Inside the hold, body bags filled the s.p.a.ce from floor to ceiling. He walked backward down the ramp; speechless, he pointed. He stood on the ground, arms wrapped around his sides, while Helen found the hara.s.sed air controller who had not told Linh what the cargo was on the flight. He shrugged, unimpressed. If they refused this flight, he said, they would spend at least another night or two out.

"It doesn't matter," Helen said. "One more night."

"Let's get out of here," Linh said.

They sat in the three feet of cleared s.p.a.ce at the forward-most section of the cargo cabin. The smell penetrated, and she wished she had taken the offered scarf. A solid wall of broken bones and sliding flesh, the sight cleaned up and made civilized by being zipped away in rubber bags. She had to put something between herself and this sight and so she raised her camera. The great dark ma.s.s in front of her had power, but it was not her picture anymore. It had similarities with the photo she had taken years ago of soldiers piled on the convoy truck. Then she had been in shock at the carnage, determined to show it. Now each of the bodies before her were no longer anonymous, each was Michael, Darrow, Samuels, and all the others. The image valid, but she was unequal to it and lowered the camera. She had to find the smallest bit of redemption in a photo, otherwise taking it would begin to destroy her. Even if it meant risking the misconception that war was not as horrific as it was.

They sat and waited, cameras useless in their laps. Linh had made no motion toward photographing the scene.

Once they were airborne, the wind whipped through the open doors, diluting the stench but also creating a frightening ripple of bags, a hard flapping and flaying that was as bad as the earlier smell. Helen closed her eyes and tried to think of anything but where she was.

During the steep descent into Tan Son Nhut, fluids from the seeping bags sloshed forward in a small wave, and Linh felt a cool, viscous liquid soak through his pants.

When the source of the wetness became evident, he put his hands down to try to stand up, but the slickness was like egg white against the metal floor, and he slipped back.

Everything blacked in on him. He opened his mouth, but the engines drowned out sound.

Helen pulled him to her, her arms a vise around his waist, turned him away from the sight until they both stood clinging to the webbed wall, but even after he had regained his balance, still she kept her hold tight on him. This she could do. She would not let him go.

SEVENTEEN.

Nghia Love His heart had been locked away for a very long time. locked away for a very long time.

From the moment he shifted the weight of Mai's body from his own arms to the earth, he chose not to feel again. He hadn't held another woman in his arms until he picked up Helen from the sidewalk and carried her back to the room in Cholon.

One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, a patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched others, strangers, only fleetingly, without hope.

The weight of Helen in his arms broke open memory. She invaded his heart, first in Darrow's pictures, and then later through the casual touch of her hand, the smell of her hair, and finally the weight of her pain in his arms.

After she returned to Vietnam, he would wait for her in the crooked apartment, and while waiting he would roll an earring of hers in the palm of his hand, comforted by the thought that it had been against the delicate skin of her earlobe. He did not intend for Helen to know of these feelings; he was perfectly content not acting on them. The invisible carrying just as much weight as the visible in his world.

After Dak To, Helen asked Linh to take her back to the hamlet in the delta where asked Linh to take her back to the hamlet in the delta where she had stayed with Darrow. She wanted to recapture that sense of serenity she had glimpsed there. But the hamlet was nothing but ashes now, the villagers refugees. "They declared it a center of enemy activity."

"We were there. It was safe."

Linh shrugged. "Maybe we were wrong; maybe they were wrong. Either way the village is still destroyed."

Helen was silent for a moment. "Don't you care what is happening to your country?"

He turned away, angry, intending to leave until he regained possession of himself, but instead, for the first time, he turned back. He'd been around Americans long enough to get used to their blurting out feelings, and the desire in him to do so was overwhelming. "My war has been going on for nine years so far. I can't take a vacation from it and go home and come back. The war is in my home."

"I didn't mean--"

"It is like a medic performing triage. You determine who will die anyway, and you move to those you can save. You You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That's a tourist's sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographers who are tourists of the war."

"Why are you any different than us?"

"I was on both sides. Left both sides. Only they don't let you leave. Being a photographer was my only choice."

"And they allow it?"

"I pretend that I'm influencing coverage. I give them bits of information I pick up after the fact. Only to convince them I have value alive."

Now Helen was the one to turn away. Her face burned at the memory of herself playing at war when she first came, how Linh and the whole country had merely served as backdrop for her adventure.

"I will take you to a place that is peaceful," he said.

They caught a ride on a cargo plane to Nha Trang, then took an army jeep to a on a cargo plane to Nha Trang, then took an army jeep to a small village of a dozen houses tucked against a crescent of beach. The sand was bone white, the ocean the color of unripe green papaya. The houses closest to the water stood in the violet shade of a thick grove of coconut palms. The quiet of the place was the first thing one noticed--no sounds of war, no sounds of people--so rare.

The house was owned by Linh's aunt. It was large, made of stone with a red tile roof. Sheltered by trees, the front garden contained a half-moon pond of stone. Inside, the two rooms were bare of furnishings but clean.

"Where is everyone?"

"They evacuated the village six months ago. The old people escaped the center and returned to care for things until the rest are released."

"Where is your aunt?"

"Visiting relatives."

By the quick way he said it, she knew he was lying. "She didn't have to leave. I would have liked meeting her."

Linh nodded. "Maybe it's better for her to pretend she doesn't know I brought an American visitor."

It was the end of the dry season, only afternoon showers, the sun baking the sky into a hard mineral blue each morning, the air heavy and wet as if it could be wrung out.

The rains were late, refusing to come. To the east the sky remained empty over the ocean; to the west, by noon one would see a lone tall c.u.mulus cloud hang over the mountains, gathering others around it until by mid afternoon a white-cloud mountain range lay on top of the solid one of earth. But the clouds did not spread; the sky remained hard and dry.

Helen spent whole days hiding in the lukewarm shade inside, sleeping on a woven mat on the floor. She stripped down to shorts and T-shirt but still woke in the late afternoon drenched. Her dreams stopped, and she felt a relief in the black denseness of sleep.

Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in a limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game.

At dusk Linh came with a tray of food prepared by a neighbor woman, Mrs. Thi with a tray of food prepared by a neighbor woman, Mrs. Thi Xuan, usually grilled fish or shrimp, a bowl of rice, and eggplant in soy sauce. They ate at the open doorway, waiting for the evening breeze off the ocean, sitting cross-legged on mats. They stared out at the garden and the ocean beyond it until it grew too dark to see.

Then Linh would strike a match and light the oil lamp between them and bring out a deck of cards.

A few months before, Helen had taught him gin, and they played at every opportunity. At first Linh had lost every game, but gradually he racked up wins. Now he was obsessed. He kept a note pad and pencil by his side, recording wins and points with the precision of an accountant. They played deep into the night; at particularly close games, one or the other would let out a loud laugh or howl that would wake up nearby villagers.

In those evenings he learned the intricacies of her face--the curve of her mouth, the laugh lines that ran lightly from the corners of her lips to her nose, the delicate arch of eyebrow, the vertical furrows between her brows when she frowned, which was often, as if she were studying a problem located deep inside her.

Although conversation had been easy between them, here it moved clumsily, by fits and starts. They both praised the food and the night to excess. Neither dared look into the other's face unarmed with words. Moments pa.s.sed, absorbed in eating or card playing, the only sounds the waves and the soft scurrying of geckos running up and down the walls.

"Thank you for this," she said.

Linh nodded, peeled an orange, and laid a section into her outstretched hand.

It occurred to her that even when Darrow had been alive, she had spent most of her time in Linh's company. Now there was a new weight when they were together, each conscious of a pull toward the other that had been hidden before. She thought back to the time in the delta, the only time she had been alone with Darrow and away from work.

Although they had been in love, there had always been a sense of jealousy, her suspicion of where his thoughts were. Always he had seemed focused elsewhere. Always a small element of friction and compet.i.tion between them. Darrow had not wanted a relationship of smoothness and satiety.

After their meals, Helen took her bath, pulling a screen around the half-moon pond. Then, still damp, she would be asleep again before the first stars appeared.

Still the rain did not come. The water in the cisterns sc.r.a.ped low, then became not come. The water in the cisterns sc.r.a.ped low, then became brackish with silt along the bottom of the clay jars.

At night, the air did not cool but remained hot and p.r.i.c.kly, weighted with rain that would not drop. Linh chose a hammock strung between two palms in the garden, hoping to catch any breeze that came off the water. The thick, overlapping fronds of the palms sheltered him from both the sun and the rain, if it came.

This is how the invisible became visible.

The sound of waves filled his head before he drifted off, and made its way into his dreams so that he was surprised one night at the sound of splashing water that woke him.

Although his hammock was in the deep shade, a place of perfect darkness, the full moon illuminated everything around him. Again, splashing. He turned his head toward the halfmoon pond.

Helen was submerged in the pool, only her head showing, her hair slicked back.

She bent back and stared up at the moon, her face a lily pad on the water's surface. For a brief moment, Linh had the image of a Vietnamese princess out of legend who drowned herself from sorrow in such a pond, sorrow for a missing lover. He had not told Helen this legend. He pushed it from his mind. Americans didn't do such things.

He felt strange, confused, sure that Helen knew where he slept but guilty nonetheless for being there. Could it be a dream? Resolutely he turned over, his back to the pond, and squeezed his eyes shut. Still, he held his breath, straining for the sound of splashing water. He grabbed his shirt from the end of the hammock and wadded it up, putting it over his head to m.u.f.fle the sound. He longed to see her body once, but he willed himself not to. Lines from Kieu Kieu came into his mind: came into his mind: In the fragrant water of her In the fragrant water of her bath Kieu immerses her body, a spring flower Purity of jade...

He woke, shocked that he could have fallen asleep, then certain again the whole thing had been a dream. How long had he slept? His shirt fallen to the ground, he turned over toward the pond and saw Helen still there, standing with her back to him, the long blade of her body in the moonlight.

She turned, face in her hands, then looked up, straight to the darkness where he lay. She hungered, and felt guilt over the hunger. "Cover me."

Was it the sound of the wind in the palm fronds, perhaps his own desire playing tricks on him?

And then she said it once more. "Cover me."

If he went to her, his life would change, and if he didn't go, his life would change also, withering away. He had no choice but to go to her. He rose, the wrist of one hand braceleted by the fingers of the other. Five years since he had lost Mai. He walked into the pond, the water cool on his burning skin, and covered her shoulders in the wings of his shirt, holding her to his chest, tight under his heart.

He didn't expect more than this moment, already more than he thought he would ever have again.

His hands trembled as his fingers traced the tender cliffs of her collarbone. She reached with her fingers under his chin, brought his eyes up to hers.

"It's okay if you don't love me," she said.

He shook his head at the absurdity, it being so obvious that he had loved her from the moment he first saw her, the love only growing and deepening in time. Darrow's greatest gift that he never mentioned the obvious infatuation so that Linh did not have to remove himself from their friendship.

Desire made them again strange to each other. They walked hand in hand to the house, Linh leading, and lay down on the mats. Urgent, after all this time, suddenly intolerant of another pa.s.sing moment without knowledge of each other. A whole Braille of touch--tooth on lip, eyelash on nipple, pubic bone on swell of calf. He explored her body in the smallest of increments, the width of a finger, as if she were the unknown s.p.a.ce on a map, and he knew it was her he desired, and not simply his desire for desire.

She cradled his head in the hollow of her hip bones. He ran his tongue along the scar on her belly that sealed the future.

He heard the rough breaths that pa.s.sed through her lungs, cries that no one else could hear, meant only for him. The frailty of her closed eyelids, the blue veins visible underneath the skin; he was protective of the long curve of her back, the soft indentation of the spine. He bandaged his fingers and then his wrists in the healing strands of her hair.

They woke each day in the tangle of each other's limbs. Relieved and content in the tangle of each other's limbs. Relieved and content simply to find the other within reach. Long hours spent in the shade of the palm trees, watching the movements of the villagers among the houses and down to the ocean and back. They didn't speak for long periods of time, talk unnecessary. This new stage of intimacy simply the fruition of their prior ease in each other's company. In the late afternoon, they went down the beach, away from curious eyes, walking separately until they found a deserted strand. Entering the water the temperature of blood, swimming easily in the warm salt liquid, tunneling toward each other like electric sea animals.

Touches glancing: hand against hand, arm against chest, trunk against back.

Spent, they returned to the house, fell on mats, warm and heavy-limbed. Pa.s.sion a narcotic. Linh rested his head on her lap, feeling the heat of her through the thin sheet, pressing his nose against the fabric to inhale the salty scent of her.