Fake House (20 page)

This is how he died: Do Thich, a mandarin, dreamed that a star fell into his mouth. He thought this meant that he would become the next emperor.

One night, as Dinh Bo Linh and his son, Dinh Lien, were passed out, drunk, in a courtyard, Do Thich slashed their throats.

As soldiers searched for him, Do Thich hid in the eaves of the house for three days until he became very thirsty and had to climb down for a drink of water.

A concubine saw him do this and went and told General Nguyen Bac, who had Do Thich executed. His corpse was then chopped into tiny pieces and fed to everyone in the capital.

The capital was Hoa Lu.

Everyone loved Dinh Bo Linh. There is a poem about Do Thich:

I told my best friend, Truong, this story, and he said, “Did they eat his hair too?”

“Probably not.”

“How about his bones?”

“Just the smaller bones.”

“How do you eat bones?”

“You chop them up real fine and cook them for twenty-four hours.”

Truong giggled. “How about his little birdie?”

“That they certainly ate.”

“You liar!”

Truong said, “A penis is so ugly to look at, so disgusting, so unnatural. Why do we have penises?”

I said, “They may be ugly, but women love to look at them.”

“No, they don’t!”

“They love to touch them too.”

“Who told you?!”

“They like to put it in their mouth!”

“You’re sick!”

“I know what I’m talking about.”

“Women are disgusted by the penis.”

“You’re an idiot.”

Truong sits behind me in class. One time he said, “You just farted, didn’t you?!”

“No, I didn’t.”

“How come I smelled it?!”

“I don’t care what you smelled. I didn’t
feel
it.”

One of the kids in my class has neither the middle nor ring finger on his left hand. No one really knows what happened. Someone said he picked up his father’s hand grenade and it blew his fingers off. Someone else said he lost his fingers in a motorcycle
accident. Maybe he was just born that way. When we see him from afar—say, from across the schoolyard—we raise our fist, with index finger and pinkie upturned, to salute him.

There is another weird kid in my class. The skin on his face has the texture of bark and he cannot close his mouth properly. We call this kid “Planet of the Apes.”

The Americans have made a special bomb called “Palm.” It’s like a big vat of boiling oil that they pour from the sky.

At school, during recess, we divide ourselves into gangs and try to kill each other. I have perfected a move: I feign a right jab, spin 360 degrees, and hit my opponent’s face—surprise!—with the back of my left fist as it swings around—whack! So far I’ve connected with three of my enemies. I hit this one kid, Hung, so hard he fell backward and bounced his head on the ground—booink! Ha, ha! Blood was squirting out of his nose. He was taken by cyclo to the hospital, where he was pronounced Dead On Arrival.

Soon people will catch on to this move, which means that I will have to come up with another move.

It’s important to overcome one’s ignorance: Our cook, who’s illiterate, once told me that a person gains exactly one drop of blood per day from eating. “Otherwise,” she said, “where would all that blood go?”

She’s very stupid, this woman, although an excellent cook. She knows how to make an excellent omelet with ground pork, bean threads, and scallions. She smells like coconut milk. Every
now and then I stand near her as she squats on the kitchen floor snapping watercress and peer into her blouse.

I walked into the dining room and saw Sister Lan—that’s the cook’s name—sitting by herself. She wiped her face with a hand towel and smiled at me. Her eyes were all red. I said, “You’re crying!”

“No! No! I’m not crying.”

“Your eyes are all red!”

“I was chopping onions!”

I ran out of the dining room, screaming, “Sister Lan is crying! Sister Lan is crying!”

I told my grandmother about it and she said, “She’s thinking about her boyfriend.”

Once the foreskin of my penis got caught in the zipper of my pants as I was dressing to go to church. I screamed, “Grandmother! Grandmother!” and my grandmother ran over and pulled the zipper down. That was twice as painful as having my dick caught in the first place.

My grandmother is a good Catholic. She paces back and forth in the living room, fingering her rosary while mumbling her prayer—hundreds of Our Fathers and thousands of Ave Marias—as fast as she can.

I only pray when I’ve lost something. Once I lost a comic book—my Tintin comic book—and God helped me to find it. I mean: He didn’t say, “There, there’s your comic book,” but as soon as I finished praying, I knew that my comic book was under a pile of newspapers in the living room.

My grandmother goes to church twice a day, once at five in the morning and once at three in the afternoon. Sometimes she makes me come along with her.

The worst part about going to church is having to hear the priest talk. You cannot follow him for more than a few seconds. It’s very hot in there. You look around and all the people are fanning themselves, some with their eyes closed.

Father Duong can go on and on and on: “Charity is the key, a camel cannot walk through it.… Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine and ten bulls, forty she-asses and ten foals.… The Lord will give thee a trembling heart, the sole of your foot will not know rest.… And so many cows besides?”

A whale spat Jonah out into the desert. It was noon. The sun was blazing.

Jesus felt sorry for Jonah and gave him a gourd for shade.

Jonah slept under this shade.

When Jonah woke up, he was no longer in the shade because the sun had moved.

When Jonah became angry, Jesus said, “And so many cows besides?”

At the end of each sermon, Father Duong always says, “O Merciful Father, please bring peace to this wretched land.” That’s when you know it’s almost time to go home.

As Father Duong walks toward the door, he shakes a metal canister at everyone. That’s “holy water.”

My patron saint, Saint Martin de Porres, was a black man.

Many beggars stand by the door outside the church. Once I saw my grandmother put a 200-dong bill into a blind man’s upturned fedora, then fumble inside it for change totaling 150 dong.

I often think about getting married when I’m in church. About how I’ll have to walk down the aisle in front of everyone. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that. I mean, what if you trip and fall as you’re walking down the aisle?

To kiss a girl would be like eating ice cream. Her lips will be cold. Her teeth will be cold.

To kiss a girl would be like eating ice cream with strawberries, with the pips from the strawberries getting stuck between your teeth.

My father said, “Women are like monkeys. If you’re nice to them, they’ll climb all over you.”

There’s a saying: A French house, an American car, a Japanese wife, Chinese food.

My grandmother has told me this one story over and over (usually when we’re having fish for dinner): During the famine of 1940, when the Japanese invaded, the villagers in Bui Chu, her home village, would place a carved wooden fish on the dinner table at mealtime “so they could just stare at it.”

My grandmother is deaf in one ear because, as a little girl, she punctured an eardrum with a twig when an ant crawled inside her ear canal.

My grandmother said to me, “Are you going to be a priest when you grow up?”

My grandmother was trying to teach me how to tie my shoes. It’s the hardest thing in the world, tying your shoes. I could never figure it out. My father screamed, his face red, “You’re an idiot! An idiot!”

I would think about shooting my father, only to have to force myself to think,
I do not want to shoot my father
. Then I would think, once more, about shooting my father, only to have to force myself to think, again,
I do not want to shoot my father
.

C
HOPPED
S
TEAK
M
OUNTAIN

F
rom the top of Chopped Steak Mountain, you can see everything: Tibet; the next mountain; Ypsilanti, Michigan; and, on a clear, sunny day, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Three kinds of palm trees on Chopped Steak Mountain: coconut (to drink), betel (to chew), and rattan (to make furniture with).

An awesome variety of edible animals on Chopped Steak Mountain: hedgehogs, boa constrictors, mongooses, howling monkeys.… Although edible, they ain’t too easy to catch. That’s why I subsist on a diet of bananas and coconuts.

I live in this hut here, beneath this banyan tree. There’s nothing inside it but a cot and a rifle. The mud walls are decorated with pages torn from a Sears catalog. Just looking at this lawn mower can bring tears to my eyes. There’s a gargling brook nearby where
I perform my ablutions. I wash a hundred times a day, just to cool off.

You don’t need a fancy wardrobe in this weather. No winter coats. No three-piece suits. No hats, gloves, or socks. No pants, actually. If you walk around with all your gear hanging out, no one says shit.

There are no other live souls on top of Chopped Steak Mountain but me.

During the day, I wander in the forest and dig up the odd cassava and eat it. I climb a tall tree and just perch on it for a while. I never enter the forest at night. Too many eyes in the forest at night. Lots of dead souls on Chopped Steak Mountain.

The light slanting through the trees is most beautiful at dusk. Everything is bathed in a pink glow. The brook is aquamarine.

There is this peculiar monkey in the forest. They should name it after me; I discovered it. What it is, is a chameleon monkey. Sometimes it has black limbs, a white head, and a brown body. At other times, brown limbs, a black head, and a white body. I’ve seen it switch colors right in front of my eyes. Each time it spots me from afar it grabs its dick and jabbers on in monkey gibberish.

The ghosts are just apparitions and I don’t pay them no mind. They’re just phantoms.

One time I found a ghost napping on the ground. His cammies
were caked in red and brown. He heard me coming, woke up, snapped a salute, and shouted: “USMC! First Marine Division! ‘Mike’ Company! Third Battalion! Second Regiment! Fourth Platoon! Fifth Squad!”

I’ve found out on another occasion that this ghost’s name is Chuck.

I sit down on this burnt log to write myself a postcard: “Au
contraire
, mother, I’m still alive. I hope you are too. I don’t know what year it is in Kentucky, but here it’s always 1969, the year of the
White Album
. Until I hear from you, that’s a joke, say hello to my sweetheart, another joke. Before I enlisted, I politely asked Janny to put on her wet and wily birthday suit to take a dip in the golden pond with me, but the bitch had the balls to turn me down. I love you, anyway.”

I wrote that postcard in my head because I had no pen to write with. I write a postcard a day. I’ve penned at least a million postcards during my time on Chopped Steak Mountain.

Here’s how I fish: I cut a finger and dip it in the brook. A blue fish comes up and bites it, hard!, but it’s well worth it. Stubborn and stupid, the fish won’t let go even as I yank its wiggly ass out of the water. Sometimes, though, my bleeding finger droops and drools in the brook for hours on end, wasting all that blood, with nothing to show for it.

There is no salt or sugar on Chopped Steak Mountain. What I miss most is ketchup. Mustard also. The cheap, yellow kind. What
I wouldn’t do for a nice c-rat of ham and lima beans. Good Lord! The good times now seem better and the bad times not so bad.

I came here on a 707, with a camera slung around my neck. I was only twenty-one years old then. When we sighted land, I thought,
What a beautiful country!
I also thought they were going to shoot us right out of the sky. As I deplaned the heat slapped me on the face. Why didn’t they tell me about this frigging heat?!

When I first came here, I thought,
Let’s hope the changes this place makes on me will be minimal, and I can go home as my true self
.

But what began as an interruption of my life has turned into my life. Now I would sit on top of a tree and think, I do not care where I am. I have no memories. I was never born in Kentucky.

Every now and then a plane flies over, always an airliner, never a Huey or a Chinook, and I aim my M-16 at its gleaming fuselage, just in jest, and make popping sounds with my mouth.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
I ain’t got no bullets left.

I ain’t got no teeth left either. They rotted off years ago. They hurt so bad at one point I thought my skull was rotting.

Should a Via Kong be ambling up this way, I’d level my rifle at him,
Hello, Charlie!
, but, like I said, I ain’t got no bullets left.

Halfway down the mountain, there are these houses on stilts, a village inhabited by montagnards. That’s a French word, meaning “mountain retards.”