Fake House (18 page)

Mr. Mai said, “How long have you been a driver?”

“Just a year.”

“It seems like a great job.”

“You get to see places.”

“And you get to meet foreigners.”

Long chuckled. “There are classy foreigners, but there are some who are impossible to deal with.”

“Like who?”

“Last week I drove three Koreans. They were very unfriendly.”

“How are the Americans?”

“They’re actually not bad. Most of them tip.”

“Any women?”

“Huh?”

“You know, you meet any women?”

Long chuckled. “A couple.”

Mr. Mai waited for Long to continue. Long continued: “Most of them travel with a husband or a boyfriend. And then you have the old and Christian ones, who travel in pairs, but every now and then you catch yourself an odd single.”

Mr. Mai waited for Long to continued. Long continued: “For example, a couple months ago I drove three people from New Zealand: a couple and a single girl, all college students. I drove them to Sapa, where we stayed in two rooms at the Auberge. The girl’s name was Hillary. She was my girlfriend for a week.”

Mr. Mai, with a pained look on his face, made an unconscious sucking sound with his throat.

Long chuckled. “I evened the score a little, you know.”

“Ah.” Mr. Mai sighed. “But I’m an old man, and a grandfather.”

“And then there was this other one. American. Becky her name was. After I drove her to Halong Bay on a day trip, I would come to her hotel in Hanoi three or four times a week for a month. She was a sex maniac, this Becky was. ‘I’m not your girlfriend,’ she said, ‘I just want sex.’ ‘Fine with me,’ I said. She was sleeping with at least two or three other guys, as far as I could tell. This girl couldn’t get enough of it. She was delirious. She asked me, ‘Am I pretty?’ ‘Sure you are,’ I told her. And she was pretty. Maybe not that pretty, but pretty. She told me one night, ‘I’m a very ugly girl, a very ugly girl.’ She was actually crying over this, that’s how crazy she was.”

“Maybe in America they don’t think she’s so pretty.”

Long furrowed his brows. He wasn’t sure whether to become angry.

“You know, it’s the same with some of the Vietnamese girls we see hanging on the arms of foreigners. We think these girls
are ugly, but the foreigners think they’re very pretty. They think some of these girls the most beautiful on the face of this earth.” Mr. Mai glanced at the back seat: “At least these two,” he lowered his voice, “are not corrupting the chaste women of Vietnam with their decadent imperialistic materialistic pollution!”

“Ha! ha!”

“Actually these two guys don’t seem to like other white people. They requested that I take them somewhere where there’s no Americans.”

Long was glad the conversation had veered away from his sex life.
What a dirty old man this Mai is
, he thought. “But the whole country is crawling with Americans.”

“That’s true.”

“If not live ones, then dead ones.”

“That’s true.”

“How do you know there’s no Americans in Muom Village?”

“I’ve been there three times. It’s my wife’s native village.”

“How did she end up in Hanoi?”

“I kidnapped her!”

“Ha! ha!”

“Actually my wife served in the army. That’s how she made it to Hanoi.”

“I figured.”

“In my family the decorated veteran is a woman!”

“Ha! ha!”

“Hey, it worked out great for me: If she’d been near her family, there would’ve been no way they would have let her marry me.”

“And how do they treat you now?”

“Like shit!”

“Ha! ha!”

“Stop for a second.”

Long stopped the car to let Mr. Mai out. Dercum opened his eyes, saw the back of Long’s head, forgot where he was, panicked, recovered, closed his eyes again. Long thought,
What a concept: gay Americans!!! But they all seem so … so … so … thick! So macho! All body hair and meat and sweat and swagger. Well, maybe not the Skin Knee guy.… Were gays allowed in the U.S. Army? Can there be such a thing as a gay imperialist?
Mr. Mai climbed back in. “I feel much better.”

After they started moving again, Mr. Mai said, “You know, Brother, there’s an American ghost in Muom Village.”

“Really?”

“My wife said that, in ’69, a plane was shot down over Muom Village and they found the pilot’s leg in the forest.”

“Just his leg?”

“Yes, but it was a very big leg. My wife told me it was as tall as a man’s chest. This guy was a giant.”

“They’re all giants.”

“But this guy was really a giant.”

“People tend to be shorter in the mountains anyway.”

“It’s the lack of nutrients.”

“No sodium.”

“That’s right. The villagers buried this leg where they found it, but his ghost began to show up at night, knocking on people’s doors and asking for water.”

Long took a sip from his Heineken. “Why do ghosts ask for water anyway?”

“Not all ghosts. Only the ones who have lost a lot of blood while dying.”

“And did his entire body show up, or just his leg?”

“What do you mean?”

“When he knocked on people’s doors at night, what did people see: a leg, or the entire body?”

“You really don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

Mr. Mai raised his voice. “When you die, it doesn’t matter if all that’s left of you is your asshole, you come back as a whole person.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“That’s because you grew up in the city.”

“You’re right. There are no ghosts in the city.”

“There are a few, but not many. There are not many ghosts in the city because of electricity.”

“Tell me more about the American ghost.”

“This guy kept bothering the villagers, always showing up at night and asking for water, so they went back to the burial site and erected a little shrine. After that he stopped bothering them.”

“He’s getting more than he deserves for dropping bombs on them.” Long chuckled.

“But you can’t hold a grudge against a dead man. I’ve seen this shrine: There was a bottle of wine and a cassette player.”

“A cassette player?”

“Yes, a cassette player playing Soviet music.”

“Why Soviet music?”

“Because they didn’t have tapes of American music. This was in 1989, in a place where ‘monkeys cough, herons crow,’ where ‘dogs eat rocks, chickens eat pebbles!’ ”

“Whose idea was it to play him music?”

“I don’t know. But it makes sense if you think about it. They
probably thought that since he was so far away from home, he would appreciate hearing some Western music.”

Dercum made a little noise. Without opening his eyes he said, “Are we almost there, Mr. Mai?”

“We’re almost there.”

“The only Americans I want to see this week are these two guys back there,” Long said. “I don’t want to see any ghost.”

“Don’t worry.”

But Mr. Mai did not explain to Long why the American ghost could not go home again. Maybe it was because he did not know the reason himself—he is, after all, also a city person.

When the American pilot was shot out of the sky, his body was scattered across several bodies of water. And a ghost, as any peasant will tell you, cannot cross a body of water, even a tiny brook, unless his own body is whole. So this American had nowhere to go but to stay where he was. From that point on, Muom Village would have to become his village. His asking for water from the villagers was only a ruse to be allowed inside someone’s house. That is, until they decided to build him his own house: the shrine. What the peasants saw when they opened their door to the American was simply his wish to be whole again. They all noticed, for example, that his uniform was untorn, and unstained by blood.

They crossed a truss bridge spanning a deep, leafy ravine, then turned onto a twisting dirt road descending steeply into a narrow valley. Crowding the road on both sides were elephant grass, patches of daisies, mango trees, mangosteens, bamboo, creepers, and a hundred different vines even the locals don’t have names for. A copper-colored river appeared and disappeared through the foliage. Shafts of pale light pierced through the bluish-gray
clouds, and in the sky someone’s kite was spiraling. Now they saw the first villager: a small girl walking toward them alongside an albino buffalo. As they passed, she stared at them blankly and did not wave. Now came the village: thirty houses clustered together, surrounded by rice paddies. The encircling mountains were covered by mist.

T
HE
C
AVE
    
for Clayton Eshleman

B
ecause they chased after us for centuries, we had to climb higher and higher, until our village was perched at the top of the highest mountain in the land.

At the very summit of this mountain is a deep cave. It is the mouth of hell itself, and no one has ever been seen to go in there.

There must be many more entrances to hell, some within walking distance of each other perhaps, but we’ve discovered this one ourselves, and can claim it as our own.

Because we number less than two hundred, a single village on top of a mountain, there’s not much we can do against our enemies. And we cannot climb any higher.

We are considered by all (except the Vietnamese) to be the most handsome specimen of the human race: Our men are short, squat, with flattened faces, and our women are tall, hipless, with very high breasts.

Our language is sublime, yet direct. We like to call everything by its final condition. Thus a man is
a cadaver;
food,
shit;
a house,
a pile of rubble
.

We have many words for what’s on the skin, but almost nothing for what’s inside the body. Our names for the male and female sexual organs are interchangeable.

Lest you think our language unusually impoverished, I should add that we can distinguish between a thousand kinds of potatoes, as well as over a million species of fish. We know a great many words denoting things we have never seen, and a great many more words denoting nothing.

Aside from the bark of an elm tree, which we would swallow during sad or festive occasions, our only food is called, simply,
the chewed animal
.

We would cook the chewed animal by placing the marinated carcass on the roof of a house for a fortnight. Although highly nutritious, the chewed animal has a very subtle flavor, not unlike jasmine tea. Although no strangers to fire, we use it neither for food preparation nor for illumination. Twice a week we build a series of bonfires, into which we toss most of our meager possessions.

Accumulation implies linear movement, an inching toward the future. But as devotees, or, rather, connoisseurs, of tedium, we want each day to be exactly the same. Fresh beginnings.

Our numerical system consists of a single number. (The invention of a second digit would lead, catastrophically, to verse making and solipsism. A third, eternal torment and vanity. The concept of infinity, needless to say, was invented by either a Vietnamese or the devil.)

Our calendar stops at day one.

Our ancestors came to this blighted land from way up north.
Our legends tell of rocks turning into water, of water turning into rocks, and of a single day lasting nearly a lifetime, a paradise lost instead of this unbearably hot land, with its poisonous snakes, large, hairy spiders, scorpions, and tropical fruits.

Traveling is a great curse. Generally speaking, one should never leave one’s village. There is nothing to be gained from the next village but a loss of self, anger, and humiliation. Borders are not meant to be crossed (even for licit purposes). It is best to live naturally within one’s own confines.

We are citizens of a country called Vietnam, a word most of us can’t even pronounce. (Why Vietnam and not China? Why not call it the United States?) Twenty-three men from our village were drafted into their army. Only I came home. I fought against yellow, white, and black men, but the ones I despised most were my own comrades-in-arms—all of them, except for the twenty-two from my village.

People from different villages can never become like brothers. Even if you come from an adjacent village, you already look and sound different from me, pronouncing your e’s long instead of short, for example. You will never see me as Thzack, but only as someone who comes from an adjacent village.

When people ask, “What did you see during the war? What was Hanoi like?” I always tell them, “You’d find out by going inside that cave.”

The others think I know everything because I’ve been to a city like Hanoi. An evil, evil place. They assume I’ve been inside the cave. And they also fear me because they think I’ve killed a great number of people. A hundred men, maybe a thousand. As far as anyone can remember, there has never been a murder in our village.

While we are certainly capable of evil thoughts, our crimes are invariably petty in nature. We lack both the personal initiative and the social organization to commit decisive acts against God.

Although they said I killed a thousand men, most likely I killed none. I had no idea what I was shooting at. I always aimed my gun too high or too low. It was dust and confusion. Then afterward you gathered the cadavers. Once I snuggled inside a hollowed-out tree trunk during an entire battle.