The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (54 page)

Matt made a lunge for him, and the other soldier aimed the butt of his rifle at Matt's temple.

"Don't," Helen said. "Whatever happens, you can't stop it. I need you alive." Her knees trembled, and she tried to cave in her chest. Thoughts came in fragments, pulling themselves out slowly and with great effort. No use to announce they were press because that would be a death sentence. The color of their skin, the fact of their car, its contents--everything was against them. Her mouth filled with saliva, and before she could think, she pulled up to her full height and spat at the soldier who had touched her.

The boy looked startled and then burst out laughing. The others joined in.

Helen looked back and watched soldiers swarming over the station wagon. Such a terrible mistake to come. So unfair that one did not get a magic wish, that one could not undo at least one mistake a lifetime. Her biggest regret in dying in this way its effect on Linh. At the car, the soldiers pulled out all the equipment and lifted each camera over their heads and dashed them one by one against the pavement. One soldier flipped open the canisters, yanked the rolls of film from their dark cradles, screaming out in long, wet ribbons, exposed, the images flown off. And seeing that, Helen felt delivered, her job done, released as if from a spell. Endless destruction. War destroying objects, land, and people indiscriminately, with its appetite the only thing that was eternal. She watched, detached, as the soldiers piled up the rest of their belongings and threw a grenade on top of the stack, laughing at the explosion and scattering debris. Jumping up and down on the bags of food even though they probably had little to eat themselves. Smashing open the cans of C-rations. Next they poured gas inside the car and set it ablaze, but it only smoldered, releasing a heavy, black, oily smoke into the sky.

Then their vicious attention turned back to the three kneeling figures.

Helen looked up the road and tried to picture reaching the Thai border. She imagined it came to a dead stop at a river, although she couldn't remember from the map if there was a river, but in her mind's eye it was a clear and rushing one, and she knew she would have to swim across it if she wished to be saved, and the impossible price of that swim would be to leave everything that had happened during the war behind. She heard the words Darrow had recited their first night but that she had not understood till now:
Let her go home in the long ships and not be left behind
. She wanted to go home; she did not want to be left behind. She pictured a flimsy bamboo gate and Linh standing at it, waiting for her. It was his waiting that had always saved her.

A gun went off at close range, but she would not turn to look. She pressed the Buddha against the roof of her mouth, clamped her teeth until she thought she felt them cracking, a salty wash of blood in her mouth mixing with the iron that had become a part of her. Her reporter's mind registered surprise that they were using bullets, always special treatment for the foreigners. She heard a whimper--Matt's--but still would not look, looking would make it real. No sound from Tanner; now it was just two of them. The air thick with the mineral smell of blood.

Far away a rumbling sound, but she was in a trance, searching for god or peace or grace or void, making amends for things she had or had not done. The sound grew closer, like a dream, and she wondered if it was her own heart, the sounds of her body rumbling apart.

The hard crack of another shot made her ears ring, and afterward silence, and she was alone. As alone as one could ever be in life, and bad as it was, she endured long enough to take another breath. In that moment, she mourned the loss of those two innocents more than all the other lives that had been lost because she had known better. A hot wetness at her groin as her bladder released.

She bit down on the Buddha, pain a relief, a trickle from her lips as her mouth filled with blood, when suddenly there were hands at her sides, and she was yanked by her hair roughly to her feet. Legs so weak she fell back to the ground, afraid of what they planned to do with her before she was killed.

A new voice entered her consciousness, and when she braved turning her head, she saw a dusty pickup truck had pulled up next to the smoldering station wagon, and a middle-aged man had taken command of the group. Helen closed her eyes again. Her greatest wish that death would simply come fast now.

A hard shove at her back with the length of a rifle, and she was lifted to her feet. She stumbled forward, took one step, then another. Gravel bit her feet, but she did not register it as pain but simply as life. Life, beyond good or bad. No one followed her, no one at her side: They were playing with her, forcing her to march with them and have her later, and she wished to move faster, to run, but could barely manage a slow stagger of a walk down the middle of the empty road. Her ears still rang with the distancing sound of the fired shots, her two innocents gone, and she could hear the soldiers arguing behind her, and she willed herself to move faster but was unable.

She closed her eyes and saw herself rising into the air until she was flying. Had the winged thing already come? Ahead Angkor. Everything below--the road, the soldiers, the burning car, the two prone bodies--as faraway and unreal as the tiger that had appeared below the Loach that long-ago day. Time permeable. As real as the burning road under her bare feet, Darrow standing at the entrance to one of the temples, appearing as he had when she flew down to the delta to meet him. He wore his white short-sleeved shirt, eyes hidden behind glasses, and raked his good hand through his hair, his other arm still unhealed in its sling.

Helen took a bigger step forward and tripped over a stone, losing her balance, but she would not stop or open her eyes, afraid to lose her vision of him, afraid to look behind at the boy soldiers still arguing, but if she had, she would have seen two of them separating and jogging toward her, easy and carefree as two ravenous young wolves.

She choked on the Buddha, sharp gravelly pieces in her mouth that felt like bits of teeth or clay. Dust to dust, and weren't the teeth always the last to go? Her eyes closed so small and tight she could barely see. Afraid of death and yet not afraid, already inside it and moving through it. It would come and had already come a thousand times. She breathed relief at the thought that she was soon done with it.

She remembered the pictures of the Angkor bas-relief "The Churning of the Ocean of Milk," which Darrow and Linh had photographed years before she had loved either of them. Devils and gods churning the waves and fighting each other to extract the elixir of immortality. Violence had poisoned them all, Linh the least.

Poisoned Darrow.

And she, become Darrow, poisoned her.

A sudden clarity that he had been poisoned before she met him. His spell on her broken. She didn't want to join him on the temple steps; she knew what that burning brightness ahead was, death, and an invitation to join him in it. During her blindness, Linh there from the beginning, guarding her, and now she wanted only to live.

Would Linh know--she wanted him to know--that she did not go lightly, that she was not willing, that despite what it looked like, he had changed her and made her brave in all the ways she wasn't before, and if there was one last wish granted, she wanted him to know that she did not choose this.

She struggled to a half jog, determined that she could survive from mere desire.

The sound of running footsteps behind her, the flat slap of peasant sandals made of tires. A hard swing of a metal object across her back threw her facedown on the ground, unable to move. Her cheek and forehead burned. Air filled with blood. She was lifted to her knees. A soldier from behind grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, ripping out a fist of golden strands.

And then she closed her eyes, and they could no longer touch her. She no longer embraced what they threatened. Linh was there, and when she reached for his hand, her own had become stiff and brittle, her arms become branches, and from her knees to her groin to her belly to her breasts came a covering, an armor of gnarled bark, and her hair, when she reached for it, had the aspect of leaves. She opened her eyes, alive, and she turned to look deeply and without fear into her boy soldier's face.

She was in a state between dream and reality when she heard the chanting. They carried her back to the prone forms of Matt and Tanner, the new leader giving directions, and a miracle she couldn't fathom, Matt no longer dead but now sitting up, pressing his bleeding arm against his side. She huddled against him as the boy soldiers approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, in some kind of victory ritual, chanting. The riddle of the dream at last--a premonition.

Then the leader came and knelt down to look at Helen, and her mouth so full of liquid she gagged, spitting out Buddha and fragments of stone. The man picked up the small medallion and stared at her in wonder.

TWENTY
Dong Thanh

One Heart

When Linh arrived at
Camp Pendleton, he was weak in body and spirit. Helen's mother, Charlotte, recognized him from pictures, and they hugged as if they had known each other for ages, grief providing an instant history and bond. He was her only real link left to family. She had buckled him into the passenger seat of her Buick and driven up the coast to her home.

The wideness of the freeway, the speed at which the car traveled, dizzied him, and he forgot his tiredness, he was so taken up by his new country. More than its differences, he was struck by its likenesses. Just as in Vietnam, this was a place of land,
dat
, and water,
nuoc
. Ocean on one side, the grassy, burned foothills on the other; they passed all the things that Helen had promised him they would see together--dark groves of avocado and orange, small towns of white houses with red-tiled roofs, signs with the names of towns he remembered from her lips: San Clemente, Laguna, San Juan Capistrano. And then without warning they rounded a gentle curve, and as far as the eye could see were golden poppies.

"Gary contacted me, Linh. He overheard two other reporters talking to Helen about driving through Cambodia to get out of Vietnam. All three were gone the next day. No one has heard a word since then."

"Stop," Linh pleaded, and Charlotte, alarmed, pulled over on the gravelly shoulder. He tugged at the seat belt and threw open the passenger door, and she thought he was going to be sick, when he ran into the field and fell on all fours and bowed his head. Confused, she warily got out of the car, but he was oblivious to her, eyes filled with the flowers, his hands tearing at the soft orange petals within his reach.

On his first day in California, despite his exhaustion, he begged Charlotte to take him to Robert's office in Los Angeles.

Robert stood up from his desk, smiling, came around to give him a hug, but Linh was all business, not acknowledging the view out the window, twenty stories up, the highest building in the biggest city he had ever been in.

"I need to go to Thailand," Linh said.

Robert winced. "You look like you
need
a hospital." It had been more than seven years since they'd last met, and yet Linh acted as if it had been only yesterday. Was it the effect of the war that collapsed time? Robert could not account well for the last years in Los Angeles, yet his two years in Vietnam were as deep as a full lifetime. While Robert had grown plump, Linh was thin as a wire, as if all excess had been melted off him. The intensity of his eyes made the room suddenly too small.

"Helen went to Cambodia," Linh said in a tone like defeat. "I have to find her."

Robert had never gotten to know him that well; he had never really gotten to know many of the Vietnamese well during his time there. The whole country had remained a cipher to him. Too, Linh was always part of Darrow and Helen, and he recognized their willfulness and determination in him. For the first time, it occurred to him that the three of them were alike and had merely found one another in Vietnam. They had shared some understanding and obsession about the war, and he had never had a chance of befriending any of them. They had merely tolerated him.

"No way I can send you. It would be criminal in your state."

"You cared for her, too." Linh said it as accusation, but Robert's failure with Helen had been part of a larger failure of nerve.

"Her choice to stay on and then go to Cambodia. If that's what she's done."

Robert treated him with a politeness that masked disdain, a condescending sense of him as the Other. But he was a man of honor. Linh could bargain on that. Even at the beginning, Linh hadn't understood his letting Helen go without a fight, although the fight was clearly lost. Only a madman insisted on a fight impossible to win. Yet what kind of man used logic in matters of the heart?

"Over the years, I've developed contacts," Linh said. "I'll need your help now to use them."

Robert said nothing. "There always was gossip."

"People love rumors, plots. They always prefer the more complicated explanation."

"I'll say it again. It was her choice."

"It's my choice, also, to go. I need a press pass and a plane ticket. I need you to send some messages."

Robert sighed. Suddenly he felt less good than he had in all the time since he had been back; something about Linh's passion that was like a burning, the timbre of his voice in the room, how it changed the room physically. The thought, sacrilegious, crossed Robert's mind that perhaps he
had
missed something during his years in Vietnam, that perhaps by protecting himself too well from being involved, he ended up not being involved in the world at all. But he hurried away from this line of thought because it was indeed too late; as much as he might have loved Helen, he would be loath to consider getting on a plane now. He realized with a shock of sadness that he was incapable of action. "
If
I sent you, you'd have to promise to stay in Thailand."