The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (4 page)

She stood by the window drinking tea, looking at the overcast sky, roiling clouds in varying shades from light pewter to the muddy, brownish gray of scorched earth. The breeze had turned sharp, the smell of rain and thunder promising a strong monsoon shower. Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable--its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hovering doom.

At the sound of a creaking bedspring, she turned and saw Linh awake.

"What are you thinking?" he said.

"Time to go to the airport. Our bags are here. Your papers are on top."

"We agreed you would go to the docks, get shots of the boat evacuation. Then the airport."

"Does one more shot matter?" She spoke so faintly he could hardly hear her.

"Either they all matter or none of them did."

She nodded, unconvinced. "I have a bad feeling."

"We have plenty of time." He was reeling her back, gently, from wherever she had been.

Jittery, she moved over to the bed and unwrapped Linh's dressings. Skin puffy and inflamed, hot to the touch. It puckered over the nurse's crude stitches like yeasted dough. Helen bit down hard on her lip as she rewrapped him. A new hollowness around his eyes.

"Another shot of antibiotic even though it's early," she said. "I'll be back by noon. Leave the radio on. Listen."

Linh nodded but seemed distracted, and Helen feared he was getting worse. She helped him up to the bathroom and then back to bed. She would have to hire a cab or cyclo to move him. She placed a pot of tea and a cup in a chair next to the bed.

"I should skip Newport, and we'll just get started."

"Go," Linh said. Then he began to sing: " 'I'm dreaming of a white Christmas....' "

She smiled, but her mind calculated potential problems each way. She assumed she could get out at any time but worried Linh was getting too weak. The trip would be hard on him until he reached a medical facility.

"Hurry," he said. "Go have your final affair with Saigon. No regrets."

She opened the refrigerator, the only one in the building, and filled the pockets of her smock with rolls of fresh film. At the door she pulled the neck strap of her camera over her head, then buttoned her smock.

She opened the door but stood, still undecided. "If I'm late, have Chuong help load everything on a cyclo and go ahead. I'll meet you at the airport. Do you hear?"

He was silent, staring at the ceiling.

"Linh?"

"If you don't return, I stay," he said.

"Of course I'll return." The halfhearted ploy failed; he would not let her off so easily. "You just be ready."

"You got it, Prom Queen."

She pretended she had not heard him, banging the door shut and running down the splintering wood stairs that smelled of cedar and the sulfur of cooking fires. She was out into the street before she registered the continued absence of Chuong in the stairwell. That was what she had come to dread most, the continual disappearance of what she most relied on.

A cyclo stopped at
a busy corner, and Helen jumped in before the driver could protest. After a wheedling argument, he grudgingly accepted three times the normal rate to go down to the Saigon River. People had decided to come out of hiding despite the twenty-four-hour curfew and the frequent pops of small-arms fire all around. A mile away from the port, the cyclo driver jumped off his seat and refused to go any farther. When Helen complained, he pointed a crooked finger to the solid wall of people. She got out, telling him she would pay double again his going fare if he waited an hour for her. Without a word, he calmly turned around and headed back downtown. Time more precious than money for once.

A rumor went through the crowd that two men had fallen into the water and had been crushed between evacuation boats. The fetid air smelled of unwashed bodies and fear. As Helen stood deciding whether to risk plunging into the crowd and getting caught out for hours, she spotted Matt Tanner behind a concrete barricade with another photographer. In the false camaraderie of shared danger, she was happy to see him. He waved her over.

"Madhouse, huh?" Tanner was tall and slope-shouldered, with a narrow, wolfish face, and when he laughed, which was seldom, he showed a forbidding mouthful of jagged teeth.

"This is new blood, Matt Clark. We're the two Matts."

"It doesn't look good," she said.

"Are you staying on, too?" the new Matt asked. He was young, with white-blond hair in a ponytail and wearing a black T-shirt with astrology signs all over it. She didn't like the vultures dropping in now and made no effort to hide it.

"Heading out this afternoon." Watching the crowd, Helen rubbed her hand along the rough concrete of the barricade, which was already crumbling. Cheap, South Vietnamese government-contract stuff that had been undercut for profit so much that it was already disintegrating back into sand from the constant humidity. For what USAID had paid for it, it should have been stainless steel. She looked down and saw a smear of red. The jagged edge had reopened the cut on her finger.

Tanner pulled out a handkerchief and wound it around her finger. "No need to shed blood. This isn't even your country."

"I forgot."

"The airport's worse than this. ARVN shooting at the crowd. Especially Vietnamese with tickets out. Hurt feelings and all, huh?"

"I hadn't heard that." A mistake to come. The embassy had told her it would be at least a week if not longer before the real squeeze began. Wishful thinking.

"If I wanted my ass out I'd head for the embassy,
di di mau
, quick quick. My guess is that it's today, and they're not announcing to avoid a panic. The hard pull is on."

Helen shook her head. She disliked the way he looked at her, the smugness of his smile. The press corps knew all one another's secrets, like an extended, dysfunctional family. Tanner used the long fingernail of his pinkie to scratch the inside of his ear.

"I meant to ring you up. Do you still have that Vietnamese working for you?"

"His name is Linh."

"A couple of us are staying on for the changeover. Cocktails on the roof of the Caravelle to toast in the victors. Macho stuff. We need someone to translate."

"He's going out with me." She looked Tanner in the eye, daring him.

He squinted back. "You two married?"

Everyone had suspicions but didn't know. Helen shrugged.

"Then, honey, I'd get there yesterday fast."

"Why are you staying?"

"Miss the biggest story in the world? You're right. Crazy." He looked out as the crowd swelled, then drew back. "To be frank, I'm thirty-five and haven't won the Pulitzer yet. If I don't come out of this place with it, it'll be damn hard to win back in Des Moines. I'll gamble being dead."

Her desire was to stay, work her way down to the water as the bodies were fished out, record the faces desperate to leave, but she found Tanner's reasoning so distasteful it made her decision clear. She bit the inside of her cheek as she put the lens cover on. The time she had banked on to get Linh to the airport was gone.

"Sorry you're going to miss the party," the new Matt said.

"Me, too."

Tanner looked at her hard. "Take care of yourself. You know, you've paid your dues already, right?"

Helen made her way back toward downtown, fighting against the stream of evacuees. A rushing river of people, each intent on his or her private fate, blind to those around them. Even though Helen stood a full head taller than most of the Vietnamese, she had a hard time avoiding being pushed back toward the docks. Men and boys shoved with their arms and shoulders; a middle-aged woman knocked Helen hard in the shoulder with a cart loaded up with belongings. Did they really think they'd manage to escape with their lives, let alone with television sets and curio cabinets? But she understood the instinct--too hard to let go of what had been acquired with such difficulty.

What did she herself take? What did she have to show for ten years of devotion? A kimono, cameras, a few old photos of a life now gone?

Farther away from the docks, the pull of the traffic lessened. People eddied around her as if she were a rock in a stream. Her body ached, spent and tired. She tried to flag down a cyclo, but all had been commandeered by families to haul away house hold belongings. So she began the long walk home. It was only ten o'clock in the morning.

By the time she
walked through her own building's door, she felt as if she had been up for days, not hours. It had taken her twice the usual time to retrace her way home. On the first step of the stairway, the boy, Chuong, stood, his eyes big at the sight of her. He was one of the few plump street children, actually bordering on fat, and Helen felt chagrined that it was her money that led to his overindulgence in food. His red-striped T-shirt pulled tight across his belly.

As she opened her mouth to speak, they both heard a loud thud overhead as if something heavy had been dropped. They looked at the ceiling, but there was no further noise.

"Where did you disappear to?" Helen asked. "You've been gone for days."

"Many important things. This morning soldiers come to building. Looking for good American things to steal. I tell them everything already stolen. Just old Vietnamese man dying upstairs. They go away."

"Good," Helen said, fear feathering along her back, a quick shiver. Just as likely Chuong had led them to the building in order to "liberate" her things. She no longer trusted the boy, and now it was simply a matter of figuring out how dangerous he was. "You did good."

The boy held his ground on the bottom step like a cranky landlord.

"Oh... I'll pay you now." Helen pulled out a thick roll of piastres, as soft and crinkled as tissue. As they lost value each day, it took more and more paper, small, tumbling stacks, to get anything done. "Here. This will buy as much as your old salary."

The boy looked at the bills in her extended hand, unimpressed, licked his index finger and smoothed his eyebrows. "Very bad soldiers. Kill anyone who lie to them."

Helen took the rest of the bills out of her bag, paying out again as much. The piastres were almost all gone, but she figured they would be worthless to her soon anyway.

"Very good. You not number-one liar like other Americans."

Helen did not bring up the delicate matter that she was paying him even though he had not been there for days. To save face, she should press him on the point, but she had lost her will. For his part, he showed none of the gratitude he had when she first helped him, years ago. Now she received only a smirk. Before she could ask him to commandeer a cyclo for them, Chuong jumped off the step and brushed past her, out the door.

Inside her apartment, the air was blue with the opulent scent of incense. Linh sat stiffly in a chair by the window. He never turned his head at her arrivals, and she always felt a small disappointment at this indifference.

"How're you feeling?" she asked.

"Did you get your pictures?"

"Sure." She put her arms around his neck. "I got them." Instead of sweat and ointment, his skin smelled of soap. "Were you up?"

"Better. A shower and some packing."

She knelt next to his chair and stared out at the flutter of red blossoms in the heavy, wet wind. The twisting gray branches bent under the corpulent flamboyant flowers, crowded so tightly not a hint of green leaf was visible.

"The rains are early this year," Linh said. "The tree is blooming early."

"The same time as last year. And the year before."

"It seems early," he said.

"I wish we could stay in this room and never leave it," Helen said.

A gun lay on the floor next to the wall--the source of the sound she had heard in the stairwell. But she wouldn't ask, just as Linh didn't press if she got the boat evacuation shots. The usual delicate dance they did around the truth. Her truth was she longed to hide in this room, become invisible. As if the flimsy papered walls and thin door could save them. Out on the streets, without her camera, she felt vulnerable. No one knew of her panic attacks. What internal price she paid for exposure. Preferable to be shot through a door or curtain and to have the source of death anonymous and to die in privacy and alone.

Helen went to the table and mechanically labeled the rolls of film she had taken the day before. Nothing extraordinary. Or rather the extraordinary had become ordinary. Linh had repacked the film cases much better than she. On top lay a folded white shirt, as perfect as in a store display. When she saw the hopefulness of the neatly creased folds, a fresh shirt to begin a new life, she had to turn away. And then it took over as if steel had entered her bones. Everything, including love and fear, squeezed out of her body, and all that was left was determination.

"Chuong told me about the soldiers," she said.

"What soldiers?"

"They came in downstairs. He sent them away."

"No soldiers came. I watched from the window since you left."

Helen nodded, still surprised at her own naivete. "Were you going to guard the apartment?" she asked, pointing her chin toward the weapon.

Linh studied the gun as if seeing it for the first time. "If they came, I planned to kill myself."

Helen sucked in her breath. No matter how long she had been in Vietnam, she still took things lightly, like an American. Linh's quick acceptance of the worst case reminded her that it was not as hard to be brave with the promise of helicopters waiting to whisk you to safety, to home.

"We're going now."

She gave Linh the last two shots of morphine, hoping it would last till the embassy and American doctors could give him more. She put on her smock, retied a scarf over her hair.

As she picked up the two cases, the corner of one gave out, spilling out film rolls. The cases were worn and battered, the cardboard corners turned mushy. Helen had patched them with electrical tape, the only thing that didn't disintegrate in the humidity. "Just a minute," she said, running to get more tape and wrap the corner.

"Why don't you get a new case?" Linh's face set in impatience. The case was just another example of her difficult ways, her willfulness that was putting them both in danger. Yet he knew if he pushed at all, like a high-strung horse, she would balk.