The Man From Saigon (21 page)

He thought of the all-day deluges, the washed-out roads, the sucking mud that went up to his knees. Not here in Saigon, of course. Here it was only a matter of constant rain and steam and floating garbage and people with worsening health.
You might need more than…uh…that
, he said, meaning the plastic rain hat. He held a log of soggy newspapers under his arm. The floor below them was darkening with water.

I keep losing my umbrellas.

You’re not losing them. They’re being stolen.

She had her keys in her hand. Her fingers were wet, the cuffs of her blouse, her shoes.
Why weren’t you at the briefing if you were in town anyway?

I couldn’t face it
, he said.
Give me your keys.

I can do it.

Well, come on, then.

He told her he’d been at the student protest. She’d been at the protest, too, but had arrived too late to see anything. He told her briefly about the girl and about the wall of students who challenged the police. He didn’t mention the fight for the camera, that Murray was beaten, that a gun was dropped on purpose. She wanted to hear more of what he’d seen, but he didn’t feel like talking. He shouldn’t have arrived like this, in this condition. He felt everything inside him was coming unglued; he could only be a burden to her in this state. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he’d been in Vietnam too long.

She finally pushed the door open.

You want dinner?
he said.

She shook her head, dropped her keys on the arm of a chair, kicked her shoes off.

You’re probably hungry
, he said.

I’m not. I’m fine.

The room had a stagnant feel and smelled vaguely of dust and insect repellent, like all hotel rooms in Saigon. She set the fan in motion; he felt the movement of air across his cheek, caught the scent from her hair. He looked at her portable typewriter with its set of skeletal keys, the ribbon beside it which she’d apparently been trying to wet down or re-ink. In a better mood he’d have offered to send her a carton of new ribbons. Instead, he looked at the bed, the rumpled sheets, the inviting pillow, and wanted to lay his face on that pillow, stay there for ever.

Shut the door
, he said.

She smiled uneasily, shook off her coat, rubbed her watch against her blouse, drying it. There was a drumming of rain along the rooftop, the mild mechanical sound of the revolving fan.

Is
he
here?
He took in the walls of Son’s prints, the elaborate iron tea set, an empty bird-cage which was most certainly his, as were the lens filters, the small pouch of tobacco. In the corner, next to the window, was a box set upon one end in which someone—undoubtedly Son—had made a pair of thin shelves.

No. Son’s away. What’s the matter with you? You’re acting funny. Is something wrong?

Nothing’s wrong. Same old stuff. You know.

He dropped into a chair with a sigh. She regarded him as one might a bad-tempered dog. He handed her his jacket and she hung it up over the bath with her trenchcoat, stuffed some dry newsprint into his shoes. His socks were stained from the dye in the leather. She knelt on the floor and removed them, then put her head against his knees.

Keep going
, he said. He let her coax off his shirt, unbuckle his pants. He wanted her to get her clothes off. It was really all he wanted right now. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had
begun earlier and the room rapidly filled with too much light.
Hang on a second
, he said. He went to the window, pulled down a blind. He rifled through her small record collection. She waited for him by the bed.
Don’t move
, he told her.

He couldn’t think of this now, traveling in the taxi through Cholon, remembering that horrible day—the riot and the dying girl, the camera being wrenched from them, the planted gun, Murray on the ground and the awful, shrill screech he made, thinking that he and Locke were more police when they lifted him. He couldn’t bear to remember how he’d stormed into Susan’s hotel, how he’d yanked shut the curtain in that small room, swung the needle carefully on to a record, then much more recklessly attended to her skirt.

He has no idea where she is now. No idea.

He hadn’t been able to calm down that night. And that was why later they’d left in the taxi, the one with the window stuck into position, the tear in the seat, the smell of cabbages and stale sweat and ash. The one he was reminded of now. He couldn’t sleep and so they headed through Saigon’s doomed, impoverished neighborhoods, the alleyways of shacks with dark, doorless entrances that Locke always called mouseholes, the gangs of children who no longer acted like children but prowled and scrounged, and yelled at you if you didn’t give them enough money. They wound through streets and then crossed out among the canals, where the people lived in sampans, their clothes strung up with fishing line, motionless in the still skies of the heated night. Arriving finally at a fragile, undecorated squat little house, closed and bare and flimsily decorated with scarves and bright gauzy draperies that separated the small rooms.
Here!
he told the driver, and tapped the roof of the taxi. He paid the driver and stood in the street. It was a nice night, apart from the smells all around them—sewage, rotting food, fires and burning fuel. Susan said nothing about where they were, this alley they’d come through barely wide enough for
the taxi, the derelict little shacks that stood end to end. It was a kind of slum, really: that’s where he’d brought her.

The house where they went was better than the others. It had several rooms, a cement floor, solid walls, a door. Inside, waiting for the opium he’d come for, he looked at Susan differently, a well of emotion building inside him. Maybe it was sex that made him feel this way, a kind of chemical afterglow that played upon the emotions. Maybe it was because he’d brought her out here to this awful part of the city when it was entirely possible to avoid such places. He wished they hadn’t come. There were so many beautiful parts of Saigon, yet they rarely went anywhere but to a restaurant and then back to his hotel. He always treated Saigon like a bus station, like a place from which he was waiting to leave. But he wished at that moment to find a quiet spot within the core of the city, to take her hand and lead her to a terrace decorated with flowering plants and oil lamps, to kiss her among all those glossy foreign leaves. He wanted to wander with her in the gardens behind the sports club, where lovers touch fingers and learn to walk as one; and they whisper, and they tell each other things. To go there and sit with her on a bench, studying her eyes in the glow of the evening’s vigilant moon: that was what he wanted.

She was wearing the white peasant blouse, her jeans with a flower sewn on, and her hair picked up the gold from the glow of the small flame in front of which the hostess worked the opium into a ball, then a series of smaller balls. She turned to Marc, opening her face to his. She pressed her palm to his palm, and he felt a fluttering of nerves as though her fingers were electric. He wished they’d never left the hotel. He wished she were sitting in the armchair at the foot of the bed, that he was kneeling in front of her, removing her shoes, touching her ankles, her knees, that he could bury his face in her lap, wrap himself around her. They shouldn’t have come here at all.

Mr. Davis, good man
, the hostess said now. The hostess had
the fragile frame of an addict. She warmed the opium over the fire of a wax lamp, kneading it between her fingers and on the back of a metal cup. She smiled as she did this. Her teeth were black, her lips pulled away in a tight grimace. She might have been Marc’s age, but she looked much older. Her cheeks were so drawn it appeared as though someone had taken a piece from each side. The bones stood up beneath her eyes, her collar lolled around her neck. She had no breasts, this woman, no shape at all except the casing of her bones. She had a wide, proud forehead, a well-defined nose, the outline of her face regular and even. She might once have been beautiful. She spoke to Marc in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, encouraging him to lie back among the dusty cushions on the floor as she molded the opium.

Are you all right?
he asked Susan. He wanted to know if she was comfortable, content, if he’d scared her this afternoon, arriving through the rain, pushing her on to the bed. She nodded and he nodded with her, whispering. He watched the hostess select a small, black nugget of opium, spearing it with an iron rod and setting it above the flame once more. Susan glanced toward him, then away again, her attention taken by the bubbling in the charred bowl. He directed his eyes on the hostess as she concentrated on the sizzling ball of opium, noticing the glazed, pleased expression on the hostess’s emaciated face. He saw how thin her wrists were, the way in which her body seemed nothing more than a hanging place for her skin. He suddenly wondered if she’d be dead next time he came, if he would arrive at the door and see everything shrouded in funereal white. He had experienced the profound pull of the drug, had at times craved it, sought it out, then broken free of its hold once more. He understood how the hostess had come to look as she did.

He took up the long, arched pipe, pulling the smoke inside him. Drugs were a way of calming down, a way of revving up.
He remembered, or thought he remembered, that William Burroughs once said that the single greatest appeal of heroin was how it simplified life, by which he understood there was no longer fame, aspiration, wealth, relationships, family, country, and certainly not war—only high or not high. Marc hoped Susan wasn’t frightened by the sight of the addicted hostess. He understood it had been a mistake to come. But he took in the drug and felt almost instantly better, once more that familiar peace, that easy presence that enveloped him, held him. He allowed no one to give him what the drug delivered, that soothing, elegant calm. He breathed out, lifted the pipe again. He felt a change inside himself, as though finally the clockwork of the war was winding down. He stopped worrying about where he was, why he’d come, even how they would get home. The drug gave him a nice place to occupy, containing him within its aura.

Your turn
, he told Susan, passing the pipe, lying back on the addict’s pillows. He finished a second bowl that evening, then a third, allowing Susan to take charge, lead him home. He cannot remember the rest of the night. He told her he loved her. He did love her, but he told her so that night.

He woke with a start at four in the morning; they were in his room, with its high ceilings, its green stucco, the windows taped in case of air raids, the shutters drawn against the city lights. He was staring up at the ceiling fan revolving on its short stem and thought for a moment that the revolving blades were lowering down upon him, to kill him. Even after he understood this was just some kind of nightmare, a play on his imagination, he still felt an urgency to run. He often felt the need to go somewhere but with no idea of a destination. A flight response, sprung out of some place in his brain that suddenly came alive, as though an electrode had passed over it. It happened like this more often than he wanted to admit; it had begun happening all the time.
This is the problem
, he
said, meaning the need to run, the confusion.
This is what is wrong.

You’re dreaming
, Susan whispered. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, the sleeves reaching down to her elbows. Her hair smelled of chamomile and opium resin. Her skin was hot where she’d been sunburned. He wanted to hug her, but he was sweating so much.
You might have overdone it last night.

I’m not dreaming.
He was thinking about the gun that had been dropped purposely next to Murray. He was thinking how he would have found it impossible in those circumstances not to pick up the thing and shoot, and how he would, in turn, have been shot. It felt so sure a thing, as though it were happening right now: his hand on the grip, the stony muzzle of the police’s gun pushed against his skull. He wanted to tell her he was afraid, not of any one thing, just afraid, but he said nothing. She thought it was a dream; she thought it was the opium. He wanted to say,
Look, if you keep going out there, this is what is going to happen to you.
He wasn’t talking about the drugs. He was talking about the war.

He found a fair-sized roach in the ashtray, just a few tokes. It gave him another hour or two of sleep.

The next day he fought the urge to return to the opium den. Instead, he and Locke headed out to a firebase in the Highlands where he heard there were daily small-unit battles going on. It was this search for news—for the most recent battles and missions and losses, and sometimes, too, the oddly measured, unmaintainable gains—that allowed him to shake off whatever remnants of violence lodged in his mind. One set piece replaced another set piece, one chopper of wounded lodged into his memory against another chopper of wounded, seeming almost to erase it. The sound a bullet made entering flesh, that dull thud, became in his mind just a single bullet, a single body, something he witnessed once, not dozens of times. Everything could be forgotten under the hammering noise of heavy artillery. If he kept moving,
he felt better. The flooding of images drowned each other out, so he put himself in the worst places, worse and worse. Perhaps he hoped that by doing so he would one day remember nothing.

It had worked, this strategy, which was not so much a strategy as his job. Until now, it had worked very well. But the war was a kind of horrendous wind, like one of the many tropical storms that blew over the narrow country, making water out of land, scattering the animals in every direction so that you found a snapping turtle in the middle of the jungle, a crocodile in a garden pond. The careening, blind power of the war seemed to suck up, dislodge, or destroy everything, and these days he was struggling to forget.

With Susan gone, there really is no forgetting. He’s been tossed so thoroughly into the war he cannot bow out, as he’d believed he would do someday—even a day very soon. It is not the first time he has realized that he cannot leave, but it is different now. He cannot leave the country without her. He cannot leave her behind.