Rush (3 page)

 

Miranda was due on a flight three days later. I took a taxi to the airport to meet her, arriving an hour early. The flight was delayed. I had spent my first few days in
Vietnam wandering the streets, through mazes of stalls, avoiding vendors who reached out or called to me. I saw the Giac Lam Pagoda, and stood outside the former US embassy and imagined people being airlifted from the cluttered roof. During the night I tried to sleep and drank or walked up and down Mac Thi Buoi Street. One time, a thin man had grabbed me by the arm and offered, ‘You want lovely women? Meet some nice women?' In the Cholon market I drifted aimlessly and eventually picked out a pair of earrings and took them to the airport, wondering all the while if they would complement her face.

There was a thin man with a sallow face lurking about the newsstand outside. Another hustler, I figured, a vulture circling the den of new arrivals. I bought an English language paper and moved on.

In the airport bar I sat and watched the neon clock, listening to flight announcements over the speakers. I restlessly smoked a cigarette and ordered myself a drink. The bar was mostly empty. There was a handsome man in a bright floral shirt and tattered jacket drinking a half-empty glass of something potently brown, stirring the ice with a finger. A young European couple wandered in and took a table near the window, talking quietly. There were three Vietnamese men who looked to be moto drivers come in from the heat for a drink and blast of cool air, hunched conspiratorially over a table.

The newspaper had little of importance to say, and I flipped through it in a matter of minutes. I looked briefly at an article about the upcoming festival, and then folded the paper shut.

‘Could I trouble you for a light?' the handsome man in the bright floral shirt asked, leaning across the bar. A
packet of cigarettes was clearly visible in the torn pocket of his jacket, an Asian brand.

I said nothing and slid the lighter over the polished surface of the bar, not particularly wanting to strike up a conversation. The man plucked a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and struck a light. His hair hung lankly about his face. As he inhaled, he nodded to the pack that I had placed on the bar. ‘You can tell a real Westerner by the brand he smokes.'

I straightened my back and said defensively, ‘I bought these at a local store.'

‘That's what I mean,' the man said. ‘They sell them, but nobody around here smokes those.'

He returned the lighter, saying, ‘I wouldn't worry about it. Just an observation.' The man shrugged and finished his drink, tipping his head back and crunching ice between his teeth. He pushed the empty glass away from him across the bar with the back of his hand. ‘I'll have another,' he told the bartender, who nodded.

I feigned disinterest, yet eyed the man curiously as we each of us puffed on our cigarettes. I had taken up smoking again after the news of the tumour. Why not? A friend who had been trying to quit had said that they were down to one pack a week. I had quipped in return, I'm up to three packs a day. It was growing to be an expensive habit, but when I cashed my life insurance I had at least enough money to smoke myself to death.

Pocketing my cigarettes, I pushed away from the bar and wandered to the bathroom, lightheaded. I trailed smoke behind me, the cigarette balancing lightly on my bottom lip, as I wiped my sweaty palms against my pants. The moto drivers were preparing to leave, to go outside
and brave the humid air again in an effort to secure easy dong. One of them, a short man with a narrow moustache, seemed to notice me and followed to the bathroom.

In the bathroom I stared at my tired reflection, red-eyed. I ashed my cigarette in the sink and splashed cool water across my overheated brow. There was a blinding pain above my eyes. The short Vietnamese man came through the door and stood beside me at the sink. There were dried sweatstains around the white collar and armpits of the man's shirt. He produced a comb from his back pocket and ran water through his hair, whistling.

‘You ha' money?' the man asked, calmly turning to me as he brushed his hair.

Slowly, I asked, ‘Excuse me?' wondering if I was about to be mugged in the bathroom.

‘Ten American dollar, I gi' you a blowjob,' the man said, grinning. He had no front teeth.

‘Fuck off,' I said, and pushed past him.

The man started laughing, running the comb through his hair as he watched me leave, and I heard him say, ‘Me love you long time.'

Back at the bar, the handsome man was poring over my newspaper.

I said, ‘That's my paper.'

‘Sure, sure,' the man said. He pushed the paper back toward me. ‘I don't need to read it anyway, not really. I work for this paper. It's a pile of shit.'

He waved to the bartender, who came sauntering over.

Realising I had left my cigarette in the bathroom, I lit another and drew deeply.

‘My friend,' the handsome man said. ‘You look like shit.'

‘Travel weary,' I explained. I didn't want to talk to this man but I knew I couldn't avoid it, so I ordered myself a drink.

‘I know the story. Came back from Hong Kong about a week ago. Now
that
was a bitch.' He wanted to finish his story, but I held up my hand.

When you travel for a long time, the only people you seem to meet are fellow travellers, and all they want to do is tell you their stories, and nobody seems to understand the complete insignificance of their stories and their lives.

Our drinks came, and I noticed that my hand was trembling lightly as I held the glass. My skin felt clammy. I couldn't tell if it was water drying on my face or whether I was beginning to sweat. I wiped at my brow and swayed dizzily.

I swallowed and said, ‘Don't give me another travel story. I've heard enough of those for a lifetime.' It sounded to me as if my voice were coming from far away, beneath the thump of the tumour in my skull.

‘Fair enough,' the man said.

We sat there in silence for a short while, and I could tell that there was something he wanted to say. I wiped my brow again. I took a drink from my glass and my dry tongue absorbed it like a desert. I watched the man from the corner of my eye. I massaged my temples and watched the runway through the big tinted windows, planes coming and going, and finally I told him to talk, just talk, because I couldn't stand him sitting there silently anymore.

He told me he was an American journalist who had been living in South East Asia for the last ten years. His father was a GI who died in Vietnam in '68, stabbed to death by a Vietnamese hooker with a stiletto heel. He had
never met the man and only owned one photograph that showed a soldier with a blank expression on his face in a cleanly pressed regulation army uniform. His mother had never spoken much of her husband, and she never remarried. She died when Hayes was twelve years old, overdosing on sleeping pills. She had always been a bad sleeper, and it was never determined whether her death was by accident or suicide.

He was forced into foster homes, which he described as places where people ‘gave you genuine love out of pity', before escaping to Europe. In London he found work with a newspaper, despite owning no official journalistic qualifications. He became renowned as the man with the keen eye for good developing stories, and would most often take the tasks that nobody else dared to touch. Eventually he found his way to Asia, going there out of a curiosity for the place where his father had died never knowing his son.

‘I was raised by the world,' Hayes said. ‘In some ways it's a better parent than your own could ever have been. In other respects, it's a harsh baptism. Today you get raised by television, and you learn the power of violence and the supremacy of the weapon. The television generation are seduced by these sorts of things because they're like a constant image, like subliminal advertising. Me, I don't watch television, never really have. In the real world I go to Cambodia and see a little orphan girl have her leg blown off when she steps on a landmine while chasing a buffalo. The buffalo is worth more to a peasant family than their own children.

‘Every morning I look down from my balcony onto the street below,' Hayes said. ‘And I see these young backpackers, and they're just like off-duty GIs, wandering the
streets with their cameras, bartering with vendors, dodging cyclists.'

Together we walked to the airport terminal, drunk and giddy. Security gave us wary eyes as we meandered in an exceedingly unsteady line. Hayes had a girlfriend who had been vacationing in America. She was due on the same flight as Miranda, the 3:30 from Hong Kong. I wondered aloud if the two of them might be sitting next to each other, figuring that one coincidence equalled another.

As it turned out, Miranda was not on the flight. Maybe she missed the plane, arriving at the airport late and running to the gateway screaming, ‘Stop, wait for me!' Maybe she overdosed on her precious cocaine in the seedy hovel she had been occupying in San Francisco. Or maybe she simply forgot that I was waiting here for her, like I didn't matter.

‘Looks like your package didn't arrive,' Hayes said later.

Hayes' girlfriend was a short American bottle-blonde who wore glasses with invisible rims. She immediately asked for a cigarette and Hayes obliged. She sniffed it with a frown. ‘Haven't you got any Western cigarettes?'

I offered her one of my own, and Hayes introduced us. Her name was Phoebe.

‘Are you waiting for someone from the flight?' she asked.

‘I don't think so anymore,' I answered, looking past her to the gate. I offered a description of Miranda, and Phoebe said, ‘No, I don't remember a girl like that on the flight.'

I nodded and turned away.

Hayes planted a hand on my shoulder. ‘You're catching
a cab with us into the city. I'm going to pick up three bottles of wine on the way.' He smiled like I was prey.

A month ago, Miranda had smuggled five pounds of cocaine out of Colombia, but by that time I had been waiting in Miami for three days to avoid indictment if it all went wrong. She said that the street value would be higher in New York or San Francisco than it would be anywhere in Florida. It would be even higher in Europe, she told me.

I met her in Mexico, where she was searching for spiritual enlightenment. I had been on the road for close to a year, searching and yearning aimlessly. She told me that she could teach me everything, give me meaning. I was foolish to think she could be an end to my search.

Miranda found spiritual enlightenment in mescal, among other things.

She said that enlightenment came when you experienced ‘terror, pain, and roadlessness'. Taking the mescal is how you see your own road, she said. She told me that our roads could wind together and she would guide me. We'd go to Europe and follow our road until we truly
knew ourselves
. And I was tired of roadlessness, not knowing who I was.

I thought Miranda might actually be able to teach me something, but for half the time I knew her she was out of her mind. She moved from one place to another and never settled for long. Drugs paid her way, aided her search, rattled her mind.

Shortly before I met her, Miranda had been swimming off the Mexican coast and had an encounter with a shark. She had been alone, she told me, naked and treading water a mile out from the shore, when she first spotted
the shadow circling at the bottom. She had not been afraid. The water was a brilliant blue that sank to navy toward the floor, where sand sloped like drowned dunes. The shark was nothing but an outline, a shape in the dark. She made a gradual move for the shore. The shadow followed, staying low along the ocean floor. When next she checked, the shadow had disappeared. Her relief had yet to set in when a fin surfaced about fifty feet in front of her, like the periscope of a submarine coming to surface. It was a dull grey, chipped with age along the curve. It sliced effortlessly through the water toward her.

She didn't move, treading water and watching as the fin circled her. The water seemed to chill around her with each pass. She wasn't sure if she should make a break for the shore or remain where she was, pedalling up and down to keep herself afloat. Her heart was beating furiously in her chest. She waited it out and the shark disappeared, fin dropping below the surface, and then the shadow was gone into the depths.

She waited a while longer, and there was no sign of it. She swam for the shore, always thinking that it would come up from beneath her, jaws wide. When she made it to the shore, her brush with death had left her feeling more alive than ever before. The adrenaline and endorphins flooding through her body had left her almost euphoric.

That was Miranda's theory—that to stare death in the face and walk away alive gave you enlightenment. It re-affirmed your life and gave it meaning.

I didn't buy into that theory. Not at first.

In Miranda I thought I'd found a kindred soul,
another searcher. But that was all a lie. She was only ever searching for the next score. Without her, I felt the same way I'd felt so long ago when my mother remarried. Abandoned, worthless, left behind. Now I was alone in Vietnam, where she told me that she'd follow.

But then I got to thinking that maybe she never showed up in Vietnam because the shark finally caught up with her.

 

Three bottles of wine later: Hayes lived in a large apartment on the north side. I didn't ask how he could afford a place like that, and he made no mention of it. As he and Phoebe took a shower I paced back and forth, swaying drunkenly, my eyes glossing over the hundreds of framed photographs on the walls. Most of them were in black and white, some featuring Hayes with small Vietnamese children, others merely capturing landscapes or villages. I wondered if he had taken any of them himself.

Phoebe emerged from the steaming bathroom wearing a towel and made a beeline for the kitchen.

‘How long have you been in the country?' she called over her shoulder.