The Lotus and the Storm (28 page)

“The Vietcong is virtually destroyed,” Cliff proclaimed ecstatically. “Look, they lost almost sixty percent of their troops in the South.” He handed me a sheaf of paper marked “Top Secret.” “Sixty percent,” he repeated in a clipped, excited voice. I read the report. American military intelligence concluded that by the end of 1968, enemy losses had reached a staggering 289,000 men, with 42,000 dead during the first two weeks of Tet alone. Most disappointing to the North was the fact that there was not one uprising against the government during Tet. Faced with a choice of life and death, people everywhere fled from them and toward government-controlled territories.

The country rallied in the weeks after Tet. Balloons flew from homes. Confetti scuttled on sidewalks and pavements. Everywhere, the streets were colorful with banners that boasted ostentatiously of victory. Saigon stood up straight and erect and held its pose amid debris and rubble.

On that day, as I stood resolutely next to Cliff and surveyed the troops, I thought that the fundamentals of war were clear, that we had beaten back the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. But I soon found out, after a memorable visit to Phong, that a different, more duplicitous reality would soon take over.

 • • • 

My wife and I often went with Thu to visit Phong. All of us were together again, inside the sparseness of a military hospital. There was the remaining nub, a blunt protuberance that swelled and bulged purple. It was still wrapped in elastic bandages and, with clinical certainty, elevated. Phong shivered as my wife touched him. Her hands settled on his. She felt his hopeless flesh and took in the fact of his new, ambiguous being—one that hovered between existence and nonexistence. And then she got to work. There were massages to be administered, lotions to be applied, joint contracture to be prevented. The experts could do only so much. Thu and my wife would take turns. My wife placed the palms of her hands against his stump, massaging it to prevent muscle atrophy. Softly, slowly, she pushed against the residual limb. Their movements had to be long and supple, smooth and synchronized. She pushed. And waited for him to push back. When he did not, her face dipped, almost touching his chest, her eyes latching onto his, pulling him back into their fluttering orbit. I closed my eyes. Sometimes he simply lay there, a silent man whose remaining muscles had to be worked, whose wounds would be unwrapped, who must be resurrected by a series of resistive and isometric exercises my wife had learned from the hospital's therapists.

I knew what all this preparatory work was for, what he had to look forward to. There would be ambulation on crutches, and in the end he would be fitted with a prosthesis.

One evening, after I walked Quy and Thu out to the car and then returned to spend some time alone with Phong, what I saw nearly broke my heart. He was on the bed, with his one remaining leg stretched straight out. He was holding a mirror in his hand and watching with intense scrutiny the reflection of the intact leg against the mirror. Occasionally he moved his healthy leg this way and that, and watched the parallel movement in the mirror. For a moment, even I thought the mirror image of his leg was real.

There he was, on the bed, seemingly with two legs, not one.

When he saw me, he simply said, “This makes me feel better. Like my leg is finally unstuck. Unpinned.”

I understood his need to feel whole. I smiled and nodded. “I can find you a longer mirror,” I offered. The mirror he had captured only a part of his healthy limb.

He asked me to turn on the television. It was now late and his face was haggard. Although I sat next to him, we were each alone inside ourselves. Our connection was most comfortable when my wife and Thu were also present. Phong turned from the screen to look at me, blinking rapidly as if there were something in his eyes. He was shaking under the sheets. Reports of battles—ambushes, deaths, wounds—were delivered in a hectoring clip by foreign commentators on television. Tanks and helicopters flashed by, framed by the rectilinear television frame. I saw Phong's defiant stare fixed on the images, his calculated breathing. I got up and turned the television off. This was not peaceful. It could not be good for him.

“Turn that back on,” he barked.

Startled, I obeyed, eager to demonstrate my harmless intentions. Perhaps the monotony of the television made him feel safe.

“Phong,” I whispered.

He shushed me to keep quiet and pointed toward the television screen. “I want to listen,” he hissed. He smelled of hospital powder and of something stale, a long-simmering sourness that seeped from within the pores. He jabbed a determined finger in the direction of the television. Briefly, through the soft crackle of television static I watched the camera pan the aftermath of the Vietcong attack at the American Embassy. His face was no longer vacant, uninhabited. I said nothing. It was already well known that Vietcong sappers had temporarily breached the security structure of the American Embassy. With his chin, Phong continued to point toward a pile of newspapers by his bedside. His eyes came alive. He signaled that he wished to read the paper.

Courtesy demanded that I comply. I looked at the grasping fingers, the jumble of newspapers and magazines. The front page of every newspaper covered the same story. I looked over his shoulder. Nineteen Vietcong commandos had blown their way through the eight-foot-high outer walls and overrun the five MPs on duty in the early dawn hours. With antitank rockets the Vietcong tried to blast their way through the main embassy doors. They were pinned down by the embassy marine guards, who kept them sequestered and immobilized until a relief force of the American 101st Airborne landing by helicopter succeeded in turning the tide by midmorning. It had taken the South Vietnamese and the Americans six hours to regain control of the embassy. All nineteen Vietcong were killed along with the five American MPs and four South Vietnamese.

On television, the prowling camera swept left to right. Phong was transfixed.

“It's hardly a significant battle,” I said. “The embassy was never in serious danger.” That was a fact but I could tell by Phong's expression that he thought it was the most trivial statement I had ever uttered.

“Hmpph,” he replied. “True enough.”

In the scheme of all that was going on, it was one of the most small-scale incidents of the Tet Offensive. But the cameras were all pointed there, at the embassy.

“It's the
American
Embassy, after all,” Phong said with a suppressed sigh. Of course the cameras had to be there. One more camera here meant one less camera there. “American territory.” His mouth was dry, lips cracked. I handed him a paper cup filled with water.

American reporters were converging on the scene.

“The
American
papers are saying the
Americans
are losing,” Phong said. His face darkened. He breathed wet, muffled breaths. I did not want him to talk but this matter of the American Embassy seemed to preoccupy him.

I waved a hand as if to flick a minor irritant away. “Don't let it bother you. It's nothing,” I said.

“Minh,” he said in a voice concocted to impart impatience. “This war is going to be much less about the military than you think,” he explained. “It will be measured by nonmilitary intangibles. You will understand if you read the papers. The more murderous the enemy assault, the more doomed the prophesies, the deeper the quagmire.”

I grimaced. I scanned the newspaper headlines. Here were the nameless defeats. Here was the beginning of our inexorable fall.

“Look here,” Phong said quietly through heavy breathing. He was pointing at the television. “Turn it up.” There was Walter Cronkite, donning military helmet, declaring with staunch certitude that the war was lost. This was the new orthodoxy, sullenly issued. The security of the American Embassy had been breached. The war was now officially unwinnable. Another scene showed the hurl and heave of Tet. There was the same photograph, shown almost in slow motion. Here was the camera's zoom shot. A pistol at the end of an outstretched arm, a dead-on aim by a South Vietnamese general. One shot and a Vietcong prisoner simultaneously collapsed onto the ground in that fatal instant.

Phong shook his head. Something like a worried wrinkle settled above his eyes.

I wanted to divert his attention. “Concentrate on the fitting for your legs tomorrow,” I said. “Don't think about these things.”

He waved me away and shook his head. One shake. Then another. I kept my eyes fixed elsewhere, obliquely away from the dressings, the cauterized stump. There was his body, a slight silhouette beyond damaged, beyond bullets, beyond shrapnel. Phong was receding, his agitation muted. His eyes were closed. The lids flickered, as if they were reflecting every tick of a scarred dream.

I walked out, filled with a smoldering sadness. My heart swelled. And then a thought occurred to me. Perhaps politics itself, for a long time now, had served as a cover for him, a comforting sanctuary. Perhaps his anger over the big things provided him with an acceptable outlet for anger over the more personal but less manageable, more biting things, like love and other matters of the heart.

MAI, 1975

T
he sight of her, a big, scowling shadow like a darkened, angry girl crouched in a corner, staring at the exaggerated faces of masks from Bali that hang on the walls of our house, once frightened me. The warrior masks are elaborately detailed. I see large swollen lips and huge upper palates, bared fangs, flaring nostrils and menacing eyes that open wide. There she sits, this nameless she, in front of the masks and makes her face like theirs. It is then that our worlds meet, the outside layer that I think of as mine and the inside depths that I think of as hers.

These meetings once wiped me out but seemed to give her renewed power. They used to be occasions in which she vanquished me and took over. I would be obliterated and sent into lost time. Her appearance was violent, a hot fire that swerved and threaded itself into a terrible deceit through the shock and echo of my body. Now it is more straightforward. The hot bright orange and red that collided when we first met have now cooled into something deeper, an icier, stealthy disturbance of paler, muted colors. Somehow we have managed to accommodate each other. I still dread her appearance, but it no longer carries with it the threat of total destruction.

I think of what the
thay phap
said about a snail that looks for a shell in which to house itself. I think of myself as the snail that is expelled. I see the shadowy others, like disembodied spirits on the outskirts, circling time, waiting to enter, to hug the overlapping whorls and swooping imprints that spiral against the small grandeur of my shell. There they are, circling and circling inside the same coiled refrain, waiting for the perverse moment in time when I am defenseless so they can take over and lay claim to my territory, its every space, its every echo.

I am slowly learning how to carry on calmly, projecting a singular, unified self, even as she buzzes about. I am practicing how to be a statue even as her sensation grows slowly inside me. When she exerts herself, I can hear the noise she produces as if it were a background buzz of static.

I have come to expect them both. There are two. I wonder if one of them is my sister or even her ghost. Both are a cross-stitch of personalities that lie languorously about, waiting to be released from sorrow and pain, waiting to enter the darker solitude that I too long for.

Our mother is lying on a hammock, deep inside her own unrelinquished sadness. She is the central riddle in my life. Here she is, alone in the brightness of a beautiful day. Our father is away. Ever since he became commander of the airborne division, and not just the brigade, he is almost never home.

I hear a shuffling sound. A little girl, smaller than I, emerges from a mysterious place, not much different from that delicately balanced space in time when dawn first becomes morning and dusk first becomes night. Her face is sweet and soft, framed by fine black hair that curls like mine used to when I was little. The girl reaches over and gives our mother a squeeze on her arm. Mother neither responds nor pulls away. She looks indifferently at the little girl. Cecile, I think. No, I don't think—it's nothing so rational. I sense or feel that it is Cecile. Playmate to the mynah bird. Still miraculously a little child somehow immune to the passage of chronological time. When Cecile emerges, I am edged out, lost inside time, but not completely. I am both in and out of consciousness. I see the world before me, but it is more like a mirage.

In this shifting, parallel world, Mother's face remains expressionless. With childlike fussiness, Cecile gives her arm another tug. Mother stares into the direction of Cecile's face but she does not tip over into the present. I watch in this dreamlike moment. I see the bony edge of her withdrawn hand and an imperviousness to her surrounding space. I can feel the agitation of Cecile's efforts. She caresses Mother's face, like a blind person who counts on her sense of touch to open up the world for her. I watch her fingers as they trace Mother's nose and eyes and mouth. Our mother briefly stirs and puts her arm around Cecile, like a hug, but not quite. Cecile is held but not comfortingly. A few moments later, Mother rises, disowning the touch.

With surprising clarity, I see disappointment on Cecile's face. She is not able to dislodge Mother's attention from that other world she is in. She cajoles and pouts and climbs into the hammock with her favorite
Arabian Nights
book. “Read, Ma, read for me.” Her desires are ravenous, like those of a little child. Mother shifts her body. She is busy pursuing mental errands of little consequence. It is a repudiation. Cecile gives up, embracing herself in her own arms instead.

There is nothing more except a half-light stillness that expands everywhere I look. I know Cecile has given up and I have been returned fully to the present.

Later, after our mother has left, I lay my body on the hammock, and I feel her hypnotic presence blue-glowing against my flesh and bone.

 • • • 

On a thin strip of molten asphalt, a few sunken lanes away from the air traffic control tower, planes take off and land as they always do. One plane takes off and runs into trouble. It tries to return to the airport but crashes. Its wheels slip left and right, as its twisting torque of a body vibrates violently. The tail jumps and spins. The wings hang on to the metal body, barely tethered by the hinges. It makes a lot of noise. We are silent, watching the plane's jackknifed carcass on the television, its floating, windblown remnants scattered along the flooded rice fields.

The news is terrible. The American military plane carried hundreds of orphans—127 infants died. Its bloated, orange corpse has faltered and fallen, trembling in the water like a bewildered fish. One lone headlight can be glimpsed even if most of its body is submerged under- water.

“Why were they leaving on a plane?” I ask Mother.

“Because they are orphans and parents have been found for them in America,” she answers, unblinking.

The war is not going well for us. But it hasn't gone well before and we have always recovered somehow. This war has always been here and we live with a continuing expectation that it will remain a part of our lives.

I keep my eyes on the television. Parts of the plane continue to burn, their glossy reflections cast against the black glass screen. Rescue helicopters hover above, their rotors whipping up debris. Babies are carried out of the plane. Tan Son Nhut Air Base has been shelled for the past several days, its runways bashed to bits. Night after night the sky turns fire opal. Mother's eyes are fixed on the sky. She is finally drawn to something and cannot be diverted from it.