Rush (5 page)

I'm watching the fight and the song playing was The Prodigy, ‘Smack My Bitch Up'.

It was like watching a series of stills between the strobing lights. Hayes with his elbow cocked and ready for a swing.
Red
. Swinging, connecting with the man's
jawbone.
Green
. Man with his head forced to one side, blood looping from between his lips.
Orange
. Hayes swinging again, a punch to the man's stomach.
Purple.
Man doubled over, dripping blood, clutching his stomach.

Hayes was kicked out and the police were called. The air outside seemed cooler, though it was filled with smoke and awful stenches. The tall man was a German. His nose was broken and jaw shattered. The front of his white shirt was soaked through with blood. I followed Hayes and Phoebe through the crowd, looking for a taxi before the police arrived. I watched as they hurried into the taxi without me, driving away. Hayes seemed calm, Phoebe manic. They were arguing in the back as the taxi disappeared into the traffic.

I walked to my hotel and collapsed on the bed. Outside, there was a full moon glowing fat and yellow over ugly clouds.

 

‘Women,' Hayes was saying somewhere above me. I pried my eyes open and he was standing there in a neatly pressed suit, no tie. There was sunlight streaming through the windows. ‘They do it to you on purpose. They don't mind an argument. They like to make you jealous. They will go hours without talking to you, just so you know they're angry. They flirt in front of you to find out how much you care.'

I yawned and wondered how he'd gotten into my room, how he'd found me here. It was small and cramped, and he towered over the end of the bed. I reached for my cigarettes, and he offered one of his own.

‘I try to let her have her way. I try to be complacent. I try not to care. It's the testosterone that fuels jealousy and gets you into fights. It's like war; your testosterone is upped considerably during confrontation. Your body wants you to win, and it tries to fuel your engines. It drives you toward victory.'

There was dried blood on the pillow. I had suffered another nosebleed during my sleep, the third in a week.

‘When you lose your fight, you have to back down. You crawl away, you aren't ready for another confrontation for quite a while.' Hayes lit his own cigarette, puffing smoke toward the ceiling.

Groggily, I told him, ‘You won your fight.'

‘He didn't stand a chance,' Hayes said. ‘The fighter with the higher level of testosterone is always going to win. It's inevitable. For the first few days after the injection I'm an animal. But sooner or later depression kicks in, and we have to combat this. I'll show you, soon.'

‘Okay,' I said, mostly tired and disinterested.

‘I have to go to work. You look like you need your sleep. Get some rest, you'll need it,' he said.

Then he was gone.

I lay there for a short while, smoking my cigarette, back aching from the lumpy mattress. After a while I decided that some kind of breakfast might be in order, and I dressed and stumbled downstairs.

 

Phoebe was saying, ‘Did you know that at conception every embryo is female?' I could see my reflection in the lenses of her glasses. We were at a café, sharing cigarettes and drinking coffee. It was terrible coffee.

‘No,' I said, unable to care. ‘I was not aware of that.' I ran a hand over the bristles on my face. I felt tired and dirty. The air was hot and damp, and my shirt clung tightly to my back.

‘It's true,' she said, sniffing. ‘If the foetus has a Y chromosome, it requires testosterone to turn it into a boy. This happens around six weeks after conception.'

I frowned and sipped my terrible coffee. ‘Does everybody around here talk like they're quoting from an encyclopedia, or is it just me?'

She laughed. ‘I think it rubs off. He can be very preachy at times, can't he?' This was something that I had noticed during my brief time with Phoebe—she did not refer to Hayes by name, unless speaking directly to him. In his absence, Hayes was simply referred to as ‘he', like we should all know who she was talking about. It sounded almost like it needed a capital H. She went on, ‘But I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me, 'kay?'

I shrugged.

‘Right, so if all embryos are female at the time of conception, that would mean that female is the default sex, wouldn't it? I mean, doesn't that make sense?'

‘I suppose,' I said, stubbing my cigarette into the ashtray. I was wearing sunglasses, so she couldn't see my aching eyes. She seemed to be searching for them.

‘Oh, you suppose,' she said.

‘So we should all be women?' I asked.

She sighed. ‘I don't know. Maybe.' She crushed the life from her own cigarette. I yawned.

We sat in silence for a while, and I took to watching the people who wandered the street. When I spotted a
foreigner, I asked myself which country they came from and why they were here.

Why come to Vietnam?

Phoebe broke the silence and said, ‘When I first came out here I decided to get to know a little history of the country. I went to one of the massacre sites from the war, up near Danang. It had been a small village, decimated by a group of South Korean mercenaries. These days it's mostly an overgrown field, hidden away. It was raining and the earth was soaked through, but there were still fragments of bone and torn clothing, even thirty years later.'

‘That must have been very nice,' I said.

‘Three hundred people were killed,' she said. ‘Would you like me to take you there? We could leave this morning, probably get back by dark.'

‘This coffee,' I said, ‘is terrible.'

‘Come on.' She grabbed my arm and pulled me up. ‘We can leave now and take a bus, maybe. Do you know much about the Vietnam War?'

‘Not a great deal,' I told her. ‘But I guess I know enough. It's been the only major war for people of our generation, after all.'

She hooked her arm around mine as we walked, almost dragging me through the crowd.

‘That's true,' she said. ‘What year were you born?'

‘1967.'

‘Really? You don't look so old.'

‘I feel fifty,' I answered dryly. ‘How old are you?'

‘Twenty-five,' she said. ‘And I feel nineteen.'

‘You look it, too,' I said.

She stopped dragging me along the street. ‘Why, thank you.'

‘I wasn't sure if that was a compliment.'

‘Well, I'll take it as one, anyway.'

After a moment of staring into each other's eyes, we resumed our movements along the crowded street. I didn't want to ask what that was about.

Phoebe was a head shorter than I, approximately the height of most Vietnamese people we passed on the street. I realised that I knew next to nothing about her. Hayes was at work and she hadn't wanted to spend the day alone in the city. She had not made any mention of his fight from the previous night, and I decided to remain mute on the subject too.

‘What are you doing in Vietnam?' she asked me.

‘I don't know,' I answered. ‘I wanted to see Asia.'

She nodded as if she understood, when I didn't even really understand it myself. There was no real motivation for staying in Asia. I just moved from one location to the next, searching for something that didn't seem to exist. Searching for something, anything. If I waited long enough, maybe it would find me.

The only reason that I'd made it as far as Vietnam was because of Miranda, who had clearly now abandoned me. She had wanted to sell her drugs in Asia, or Europe. With that money we could travel the world and find ourselves, she'd told me.

‘I never would have seen myself living here seven years ago,' Phoebe said. Her voice was low, and if she weren't walking right beside me in the crowd I wouldn't have heard.

‘But here you are,' I said. She didn't seem to be listening.

We found a bus that did chartered tours and were fortunate to find that they had two spare seats. They weren't going to the same site that Phoebe had seen, but they
would be visiting several other wartime sites, and she seemed quite enthusiastic about attending. I went along begrudgingly, tired and aching.

There were twelve other people on the bus, mostly Europeans and Americans, their ages ranging from twenty to sixty. These were people who had seen pictures of the war in old magazines or newsreels or movies. For a moment I felt saddened that the country would never be able to escape that history, and then I convinced myself that I didn't really care. I looked over the people I shared the small rickety bus with: brightly dressed, chatting wildly and clutching their cameras. I felt out of place. Was I a tourist?

Was I here just to sightsee, or was I here to really
look
at things?

I had the feeling that I was waiting, for what I wasn't sure.

Phoebe said, ‘What other countries have you been to?' She didn't keep her voice low and seemed almost oblivious to the presence of any other passengers. Her eyes were wide and curious. Her hand rested against my arm.

I told her South America.

She said, ‘I've always wanted to go there, but it's so dangerous with all of the wars and everything. Political turmoil. They say it isn't safe.'

I told her, ‘They say that Asia can be dangerous, too.'

She said, ‘I've never once felt threatened here.'

I said, ‘To me, a familiar location is far more threatening than the unfamiliar.'

Phoebe said, ‘Whatever.'

Hayes was saying, ‘Did you fuck my girlfriend?' and I was half asleep, panicking at the accusation, struggling into consciousness and wondering if I had done what he accused me of.

This is jealousy. Testosterone-fuelled. Primal. Male.

‘I don't think so,' I answered. My head was on fire and I couldn't see straight. Hayes was a blur at the end of my bed, standing there, looming. He seemed almost calm.

Yesterday. What had happened yesterday? I fell asleep on the bus full of tourists. I don't remember. It started to rain; Phoebe wanted to visit the war sites. I was floating.

‘You didn't fuck her?' Hayes was asking.

‘No,' I said. ‘We went on a bus ride. Somewhere. I don't remember.' This is what happens to your brain when a tumour consumes it. Memory loss. Confusion.

‘You didn't want to fuck her?'

No. I wanted to kiss her. I leaned over and I—

I sat up and hissed, ‘What? What is this? The Spanish Inquisition? Fuck.'

‘Okay,' he said. He seemed to nod to himself, then lit a cigarette.

‘Give me one of those,' I demanded, voice rasping.

‘You look like the walking dead,' Hayes said as the cigarette tumbled through the air toward me.

I caught it with one hand and said, ‘You don't realise how true that is.'

‘No,' he said. ‘I do. You have the same look in your eye that I see in the mirror every morning. It's the look of a man who knows he's just about out of time. You can see it in a man's face when he knows he's going to die.'

Hayes said, ‘My body is killing me. What I have can't
be cured. What is it with you? Not AIDS, no. Cancer? What?'

‘We'll say cancer,' I replied, lighting the cigarette.

‘Well I'm sure all of that cancer fuel will do you a lot of good,' he said, nodding grimly to the cigarette I was drawing on.

‘I hope so,' I said.

Hayes said nothing for a moment, staring out the window. Finally he spoke. ‘Keep tonight free. We're going somewhere. I'm going to teach you a game. I'm going to teach you to live a little. It's all us dying men can do.' Then he was gone from my room again, leaving the door open behind him, footsteps trailing away down the hall. I lay there naked on the dirty sheets.

Hayes says, ‘We play. We're up.'

We are sitting in a Russian roulette gallery. There's a dead Vietnamese man on the floor.

Hayes has just informed me that we are to play a game.

We're up
. No way.

‘What?' I ask.

‘We're up. It's our game.'

‘No,' I say. ‘No way. No fucking way.'

‘I signed us up for a game.'

‘I didn't consent to that.'

‘Well it's too late now,' Hayes says innocently. He shrugs.

‘This is ridiculous,' I protest.

‘Look, man,' Hayes says. ‘It's one shot. That's all. Just like the testosterone injection. One lousy shot is all it takes to make you feel on top of the world.' Sure, just one shot. Tie it off. Push it in. Top of the world, Ma. I am unconvinced. Roulette is a drug, like heroin is a drug. Testosterone is a drug, like cocaine is a drug. And it all looks to me like the morphine that keeps the pain away when you're dying in the hospital. Reality sets back in as soon as the drug fades.

‘It's one shot that ends another man's life,' I answer.

‘Life? What do you or I care about life? We're going to die, at least we can do it on our terms.'

‘These aren't my terms.'

‘Would you rather spend the rest of your days floating miserably around until you drop dead?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Define the difference between living and existing for me.'

‘What?'

‘Right here. Right now. Tell me: would you rather live, or just exist?'

‘I don't know,' I answer. Nobody in the room seems to be paying attention to our conversation. The cleanup has begun; the body of the dead player is being carefully removed. Already the gun has vanished. The surviving player seems to have disappeared too, and I scan the crowd but I don't see him among the sea of unfamiliar faces.

‘Right,' Hayes says. ‘We are going to have a game. One of us is going to die. At the end of the game, the surviving player is going to know the difference between living and existing.'

‘Why me?' I ask. ‘Why do you have to play me?'

‘We're both terminal,' Hayes says with a shrug. ‘What does it matter? If I get up there and I lose, my life has been worth the sacrifice so that you can understand what it truly means to be alive. And if you die, then your death is my fuel, you keep me alive, you keep me riding the high. Either way, each one helps the other. If it weren't you tonight it would be some other player, but somebody far less worthy.
You
can understand what this is all about. The others, I don't know if they have any comprehension.'

I say nothing. My head is aching. I want another cigarette, need another drink.

‘Don't act like you don't understand,' Hayes tells me. ‘Quit pretending you're uninterested in this shit. Quit acting like I don't have anything to offer you.'

‘What do you have to offer me?' I ask.

‘This,' Hayes says.

‘So let's do it,' he says.

Let's do it. One shot. Click or boom. One shot, game over.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,' I say.

‘Sure, sure. Don't want to die with a full bladder,' Hayes says. He lights a cigarette. ‘Piss all over the floor, stinking up your corpse. No, get rid of that fluid.'

I push away from the table. I'm very light on my feet, like I'm not really walking. The pain in my head reduces everything around me to background static. I stumble blindly to the bathroom and wash my sweating brow. I look deep into the mirror, searching for whatever it is that Hayes tells me he can see in my eyes. Is that it? No. There? Maybe. Something, some kind of hollowness. An emptiness that the growing death inside of me has created. And I think to myself, what if I can put a bullet right into that tumour?

Blast the cancer out one side of my head; paint the wall with its growing mass.

Boom.

I'm fondling the reflection of my face in the mirror, as if I can really feel something. There's a crack in the surface just above the reflection of my left eyebrow, and it seems to follow me as I tilt my head. I press at the crack with the tips of my fingers and it seems to widen, rippling the surface until the crack doubles in length, then triples and sends a series of cracks running outward from it like
little vines. The mirror falls out at me in a thousand shredding shards, collapsing downward in a wave. The sound of breaking glass echoes as the pieces dance and tumble to a stop. Then there is silence again and I'm staring at a blank space of wall where my reflection used to be.

I exit the bathroom and Hayes is at the table beneath the floodlight, the game table. He's tied a red bandana across his forehead.

He beckons me, like a ghost calling me to the other side. Silently I take my seat across from him on the opposite side of the table. I am tall and my knees scrape against the underside of the wooden surface. Around us people are talking among themselves, sitting at their spectator tables, waiting and watching. Hayes smiles at me dreamily and says, ‘Do you know how many men have died at this table?'

I say, ‘Three hundred.'

He says, ‘I haven't got a fucking clue.'

‘Neither do I.'

A man comes to the table with a six-chamber weapon and one bullet. I don't get a good look at the bullet because he inserts it immediately into one of the six empty chambers. He produces a coin and looks to Hayes.

‘Heads,' Hayes says. ‘Always heads.'

The man nods and flips the coin. ‘Tails,' he says.

He pushes the firearm toward Hayes on the other side of the table, and then he walks away. The rest is left up to the players. Hayes does not seem frightened of the weapon before him, though at first he does not pick it up. He looks at it, his eyes dark and serious, contemplating. Then he reaches.

He takes the gun. Spins the chamber. Wraps his fingers around the butt. Lifts the weapon. He presses the muzzle against the side of his head, filled with confidence. He keeps it there long enough to wink at me, and then he pulls the trigger.

Have you ever seen a man blow his brains out the side of his head at close range?

What I see is a look of surprise on Hayes' face which lasts the briefest moment, just as he understands he has drawn the losing chamber. Then there is the explosion and I blink my eyes shut because I've never heard anything so loud so close in my entire life. I've blinked for a short second and then I am seeing brain and skull and blood and—

I am seeing a lifeless husk, alive and thinking a few moments earlier.

I am staring into its eyes, looking death in the eye.

I am seeing a body tumble sideways with the force of an explosion, and there is blood spraying against my hands which are pressed flat on the table. I don't hear the smack as the body hits the cold floor because my ears are still ringing.

I am still staring at a space where once there was a man.

The soundtrack resumes a steady rhythm, rising above the scene.

Fade to black.