Dragonfish: A Novel (12 page)

That was the first time your father died. For the first two years of your life, I did not know if I should miss him, mourn him, or hope for his return. He existed in some hazy region between death and life, where thinking of him was like choosing between a memory and a ghost. What made it worse was that I could not look at you, as you began teething and walking and settling into your own personality, without also thinking of his absence for all of it, and then hating him for believing any of this was avoidable. So I tried not to think of him at all, until gradually you became a marker for when my life changed from something solid and hopeful to something as unknowable as the sea at night. Perhaps that was when I started blaming you for making me erase him from my life.

Twenty months after his disappearance, the family received a letter. He was alive. It was his handwriting but not him completely. We could tell that they had inspected every single word he wrote, all 155 of them, informing us of what we had both hoped for and dreaded all along. He had been taken to the camps, but they would not let him tell us where or when he would ever come home. Only that he was working hard and honoring his reeducation, whatever that meant. Months passed without any more letters, from him or the authorities. We were left again to imagine the worst.

Finally, at the end of that year, a second letter arrived, this time from the government. He was to be released early for undisclosed reasons.

You were three years old when he returned. He was many shades darker now, his skin leathery and his eyes sallow and dry. He had lost so much weight that he seemed both smaller and taller. What struck me hardest was his smile. I had never seen him smile weakly as if he was uncertain of his happiness, embarrassed by it.

The first time he met you, he held you for a full minute. He wept quietly into your chest, the first time I had ever seen him cry. He was a complete stranger to you, and yet you did not struggle out of his arms as you did with everyone else. You stared at him wide-eyed and with understanding, as though his tearful smile was the first genuine thing you had ever encountered in your life. That night, you slept between us, cradled in his arms.

I asked him many times what had happened in the camps. He’d only say that they worked him hard and fed him next to nothing, and that they had little mercy for slow learners. It was clear from his reticence that he had rejected his reeducation and that that had cost him much more than he was willing to share.

One night, months after his return, I awoke to him crying in bed. The second and last time I saw him cry.

You two must leave, he whispered. Things will get worse.

But I refused to consider it. Not without you, I said.

And that was when he confessed that he was sick. They had diagnosed him in the camps and told him he had a year or less to live. That’s why they had released him early. He was not strong enough to make the trip with us. He’d be a burden. He could even get us killed.

I could barely get the words out. I told him anything could get us killed, and if I were ever to leave without him, it would only be after he was gone. I’d wait until then, no matter how long it took.

He shook his head and stared at the ceiling. He could not bear the thought of his daughter seeing him die.

You must go now for her, he said. I’ll never forgive you if you stay.

Your father died three weeks after we arrived at the refugee camp. He had held on a year longer than anyone expected. I was holding your hand when I read my mother’s telegram. I crumpled it and tossed it away, saying nothing to you, and started for the beach with you in tow, and once there we continued walking along the shore, through the sand and over the rocks, past the jetty and up the tree-lined cliffs as though we were actually headed somewhere, silent the entire time as you tugged at me and said you were tired and didn’t want to walk anymore. But moving was the only thing I could do. The words could not come to my lips, for you or for myself. We walked in an hour-long circle until we came back to our hut and I fell onto the pallet and went instantly to sleep.

I sometimes forget how young your father was. He had always seemed like a much older man, someone I had to catch up to. In the end we were only together a year before he disappeared, and for one more year after he returned. I have spent so much more time missing and remembering him than I ever spent knowing him. Though how long does it take to truly know anyone? Had your father lived, had he crossed the ocean and returned to us, to me, would I still love him now?

His favorite meal was one he cooked himself. A simple pork dish sautéed in fish sauce with a little sugar and pepper and minced ginger. After eight days at sea, when none of us had eaten or drunk anything for days, after we had lost three more people, two of them babies that had to be thrown overboard, our boat stopped dead in the water. We had no more oil or grease for the engine, so the captain mixed some pork fat with gasoline, which got the engine run
ning again except the oil smelled so good that people could hardly stand it.

You said, That smells like Father.

This is the part I’ve never told anyone. I swear it is all true.

We met a man on the island. He had been on our boat. A man named Son, whose presence you might remember even if you’ve forgotten everything else about him. On our sixth night at sea, a storm rocked and flung us against each other for hours, thrashed us with blinding choking rain, and in the end took his wife. She had been thrown from the boat when it heeled and nearly capsized, and in the calm after the storm’s passing, whispers traveled of how he had tried to save her but she had slipped from his hands and tumbled into the sea. He was still onboard somewhere with their young son. We heard no moaning or crying of any kind. I imagined him staring silently at the tranquil sea and reliving his last glimpse of his wife as she vanished under the waves.

She was the second woman drowned in less than a day. She had not flung herself and she had not gone willingly, but she and the other woman quickly became one person in my mind. At that point, there was no room left in me for separate tragedies.

Two months into our stay at the camp, with nothing to do one afternoon, I decided to take you to the untainted beach on the other side of the island. The main beach at the mouth of the camp was always crowded with swimmers and barterers and supply boats from the mainland. But this other beach was over an hour’s walk from camp and cut off from all facilities, so few people went there unless they were young, in love, or in need of time alone. The easiest path there was along the base of the mountain, which skirted the shoreline, and we were walking the path that afternoon, about
halfway to the beach, when we came upon a wall of trees. You saw something and stopped us, and when I followed you through the trees, I saw that we had discovered a small promontory that overlooked the shore.

You pointed him out to me. We stood at the edge of the promontory, with a quiet view of the untainted beach in the distance and a steep path below us that led down to a small rocky cove. There was a platform of rocks at the bottom, and he was sitting on one of the rocks with a fishing pole he’d made from a tree branch. I’d seen men in the camp sneak out into the open waters on makeshift rafts, or with nothing but a life vest made of empty plastic bottles, risking their lives to catch fish they would then barter around camp. Son’s brand of fishing had no industry. He was there for the silence.

You asked me who he was, and though I had never actually set eyes on Son, not even on the boat, I knew immediately. You can’t live elbow to elbow with thousands of people without hearing stories. Son’s boy was only a few years older than you, and in their first week on the island, some man had improperly touched the boy and threatened him with a knife, so Son confronted the man with a cleaver and hacked off three of his fingers. He left him the thumb and part of the pinkie. That’s what I heard. The man deserved it, I suppose, and everyone agreed that Son was merely protecting the one thing he had left in the world. But still, people kept their distance. The Malaysian police jailed him for two weeks, and some said they shaved his head as punishment. We knew he had already done it himself to mourn his wife’s death.

Let’s go down there, you said.

I hushed you, afraid that he might hear us. But you kept tugging my hand. It had been so long since I’d seen that kind of recognition and vigor in your eyes. Your father, of course, had also shaved off all
his hair months before we left, lest you see him lose more and more of it every day.

I want to fish! you insisted.

I was about to cover your mouth when Son turned and saw us. He yanked his pole out of the water and marched halfway up the path until he was a few meters below us. I wanted to flee but stood transfixed by his childish outrage. He seemed embarrassed for some reason, and angry that he could not hide it.

Why are you watching me? he demanded. His voice rang across the empty promontory.

I pulled you close to me, behind me a bit, as you squeezed my hand. I shot back at him, This is not your island! We can be here too if we want!

You were watching me, he insisted and glanced accusingly at you too.

Why would we watch you? We’re here for the same reason you are.

He was taken aback, unsure of what I meant.

I added, And we’ll come back here as often as we want, whether you like it or not! I pulled you from the edge and decided it was better to return to camp. We would
save the beach for another day.

As we rushed away, me pulling you along, you kept glancing behind us.

The next day you said you wanted to visit the beach again. I knew why. And I admitted to myself that I was drawn back too. We were poking a wild dog, but something about him felt familiar to me as well. It might have been his recent loss, or simply the frightening loneliness in his anger.

He was fishing at the same spot, accompanied this time by his son, who, like his father, was shirtless and had a pole in the water.
They each sat on a separate rock without talking or acknowledging one another.

We watched them in our own rapt silence, though this time from a more concealed spot beneath some trees. It felt strange, the fact that you and I were finally sharing something. I was pleased by it, but also saddened.

The boy jumped to his feet. He had a bite on his line and was trying to lift it carefully out of the water. Son watched him without saying anything. The boy struggled with the pole and seemed on the verge of success, but when he grabbed the line with his hand, it went limp. He turned immediately to his father, who came over to inspect the line and promptly rapped his knuckles on the boy’s crown and admonished him loudly.

The boy sat back down, rubbing his bowed head.

I felt sorry for him. He had seen his mother drown and watched his father lop off another man’s fingers. What must have filled his head at night?

Son returned to his spot and to his fishing and seemed, once again, absorbed in the deep waters of the sea, oblivious again to the boy.

Their bare backs looked bronzed in the sun, the son’s a smaller and more delicate facsimile of the father’s.

We visited the promontory twice more that week. Son and the boy never seemed to change. It was as though we were returning each day to look at a painting.

They fished mostly in silence, but every now and then Son’s loud voice broke upon the air and he’d begin talking at length. He could easily have been talking to himself. I understood very little from our distance, but I could see that the boy, who hardly spoke at all, hung
on every word. He clearly feared his father and might have loved and admired him too. How much of that had he inherited from his mother?

Her memory hovered around them. The boy often sat with his face turned toward the sea, the pole forgotten in his hands. The first time I saw him cry, his father scolded him and he had to set down the pole and wipe his eyes with both hands. The other time it happened, Son merely looked over and watched until the boy recovered himself. Then Son started speaking. His tone was even and gentle, whatever he was saying.

I tell you all this because I saw a love there that was circumstantial and yet more real because of it. In another life, had they not lost the woman they both loved, they would not have tried at all.

For as long as an hour, we’d watch them as the trees swayed above us. Once or twice, the boy glanced up in our direction. If he saw us, he made no mention of it to his father.

It was around this time that I started having nightmares of us back on the boat, except it was just the two of us and we were drifting on the ocean, sitting under moonlight by the stern until we heard something crawling up the side of the boat, and finally a wet hand reached over the gunwale.

I also had dreams of you drowning in the nearby well or eaten by rats in the night, or your body washing up on the beach after a terrible storm. Strangely, in the dreams of us on the boat, you were always alive, and in the dreams of us on the island, you were either dead or missing.

Not coincidentally, it was also around this time that you began going off on your own. We shared our hut with seven people, and I would come back from an errand or wake up from a nap and find that you had disappeared without anyone noticing.

The first time it happened, I was frantic, those dreams of you inflaming my worst fears until I finally found you at the chapel watching people pray. I scolded and spanked you. It did no good. You continued your daily excursions into other people’s huts, peeking through the windows of the sick bay, exploring the cemetery on the hill. At sunset one evening, I found you sitting on the beach looking seaward as metal skiffs shimmered on the horizon.