The Lotus and the Storm (41 page)

MR. MINH, 2006

U
nder a sequined sky, the ocean sways and shimmies. It glows in the evening's early flickering light, whitecaps glistening a silvery gray. In a stir of wind, currents ripple like arpeggios, swift and soft across an ivory keyboard. A flock of seagulls rises off the water and lifts skyward.

This must be the South China Sea. It is green, blue, and lushly textured. I can make out the outline of houseboats clustered along the distant shore. Beyond that unbroken line of moored, wooden barges, rice fields flourish in a bloom of deep emerald green. A half-moon offers its oblique silhouette faintly etched against the sky. A small, slender boat floats nearby almost within reach of the undulating land. And the shadow of yet another beckons. I bring myself completely to the serenity offered here, watching the ocean do what it has always done, rising and falling inside a larger finality. I am sitting alone, knees drawn up to my chin, awash in rivulets of light, inside a nebulous dream.

I feel a hand on my head, fingers combing my hair, and another hand caressing the scar that has closed over my old wound. I am eager to absorb the touch into my skin. There is a residue of memory transfigured. Is it an abstraction? Or is it real?

The soft twilight will soon slip away. I am caught inside this feeling of leaving and returning.

The sea wind shifts. Through a partial segment of my consciousness, I notice the change in direction. The water responds in turn. Its waves surge and fall, white-stippled and wind-whipped. For hours the ocean, besieged and battered, tosses and turns in counterpoint until it is becalmed once more.

Finally the burdensome quiet is broken by the humming of prayers, each chant synthesized to the next. The sound reverberates, flowering, expanding, unfolding. It calls for me. I bolt upward into an exquisite emptiness, searching for it, knowing immediately that it is what I have been looking for. The sound that is calling is momentary but delicious. Its familiarity engulfs me. I visualize overlapping memories. I see a woman in a purple
ao dai
praying and I see a child being born and I see a child dying.

Here, inside this warp of space and time, we are at last facing sadness and remembering our dead child together. We stop casting blame. We let go of rancor and accusations.

Shapeless clouds drift and dissolve into a purple evening. Everything returns, precisely configured and without effort. Blackbirds scatter in flight, going to school, or leaving and returning. I am in another land of once-familiar trees, tamarind, star fruit, mango, their leaves brushing against my face. A woman sings. A woman prays. I turn myself over to a profusion of purple, wholly tinged with expectation.

Quy. I whisper to her. I feel her name run through my body, like a wish and its immediate fulfillment.

The reply comes back in a shimmering glow. The moment lingers, holding itself together on a pinprick of perfect grandeur. It is possible to leave where I am and join it.

Quy, I say, tentatively, then loudly. She is a beam of light, moving through an unimaginable sweep of time and space like a wave that dances. She is like a guardian spirit, bright and warm and undispelled by death. She is within reach right here, determined and unfaltering, a perfect picture of herself.

The world expands for the sake of the heart. I am capable of more risk and more magnanimity.

Quy. She is by the door, giving me a farewell or maybe a welcoming bow and smiling. Joy spreads through me. Quy. The moment I say her name out loud, however, I am awake, and immediately, a cold, stark despondency overcomes me.

I close my eyes and hardly dare to breathe. Through the window I see the moon sinking. I am determined to return to where I was, but it is not to be. Instead, I remain here, in the present, inside the tantalizing shape that she once occupied.

I am back in my room in the nursing home, restless, and caught inside the adrenal surge of the dream I wish to prolong. My heart is too weak and irregular to remove fluid from my lungs but I can feel it surge when I think of Quy. There is a deep symmetry inside this backward-flowing time, like a return to the beginning, like watching the gestation of the earth.

I dream of it as a lover would. And I know this dream for what it is. A warm thrill runs through me and I am still prolonging the bliss.

I know I am expected. It is a knowledge born of a sudden, piercing consciousness. I am bathed in it, in this feeling of home, which was once barely imaginable. There is a place for me to go toward. There is a time when that will occur. And this recognition opens up into a sense of peace that envelops me completely.

I think of Phong's arrival by my bedside the previous week, spilling confessions. The stories he had harbored that I knew nothing about. I was overwhelmed by his admissions and his collusion and treachery, his scheming and connivance, his deceit underpinning more than fifty years of our lives together. Countries betray other countries. Why should I have been surprised that friends betray friends? There he was finally, inside an expectant silence that enveloped us like a ghost fog—like the white phantom fog that covered my paratroopers and me when we were set up by a local scout as we headed for enemy sanctuaries inside Cambodia. So many of my men were killed that night. I squeezed my eyes shut. I smelled the faint tang of cigarette. I wondered if Phong had anything to do with that ambush. But I will never know.

He was about to leave. He moved lopsidedly toward the door. The metallic hinge in his leg creaked and he almost stumbled. And suddenly, I could see his frantic search for absolution. It was clear to me. His face, his spirit, and his very being were rearranged in a way that pled for forgiveness. His life haunted him. He was still there, weary and used up but caught inside a deep regret.

I am thinking now not of his first two visits but a later one, the private one between him and me, without Mai's or Bao's knowledge. There was a knock and then he materialized by my bedside, watching me with dark, foreboding eyes. I have more to tell, he declared simply. His lips quivered as he mustered a tight-lipped smile for my sake. He was shivering. I steadied him with my hand and gave him time to regain his composure. His head was cocked, his face determined and fixed with a warrior's gaze. Then he began to talk, all in an unadorned rush.

Do you understand, he asked almost too aggressively when finished. His hands were pressed against his chest, fingers interlocked.

Do I understand? I pushed the bedcovers aside and steered my thoughts back to each revelation. This is what he said, I told myself as I combed through each of his astonishing disclosures.

“I left out something important in the letter I wrote when we landed in Malaysia. And I wanted to tell you about it yesterday but Mai was here.”

“What more could you have told me after you told me about Thu's death and your true face, Phong?” I asked.

My heart pounded erratically against my chest. But then immediately, I knew. I knew whatever hard little packet of news he had to share would involve not politics or war but my wife.

“Quy was pregnant in 1975. No one knew. I am quite certain you did not know yourself.” He paused. “She delivered the baby after the fall of Saigon.”

A sticky, panicky doubt took over. My first impulse was to pretend I had heard nothing, that this newly revealed truth had not touched me in the least. I could stare at the whitewashed walls and allow my eyes to take in everything and nothing at the same time.

Of course the child could not be mine. It must be Phong's, was my first thought. The bastard. I wanted to knock him out with a quick left hook.

He finally got what he had for so long wanted. My goosefleshed arms went cold and rigid. I recalled that brief interlude from the day before, the scintillating sense of peace that enveloped me when Phong's confession nudged us toward the path of reconciliation. But now I flashed him an angry, accusatory look.

“Her brother and I were there to help the midwife when the baby came in November. It was only seven months after the fall of Saigon but it was clear by then—a mixed-race child was out of the question.”

Phong covered his face with his hand. He looked at me in his obliging way to gauge my reaction to yet another volley of confessions. I could feel my mind drift, as if I were looking down on Phong and myself from an immense distance.

“It was not merely a sense of precautionary anxiety that made me do what I did,” he said in a husky voice, his hand clenching and unclenching. “These children were considered half-breeds, disreputable reminders of the much-hated Americans. I don't have to tell you any of this. I saw it all with my own eyes. These kids were being rounded up, their families became pariahs. Even our long-standing credentials with the Vietcong would not be enough to keep trouble away.”

His eyes narrowed and teared. His story was still unfolding, and in the middle of it, he let out a sob. He then began speaking at a furiously accelerating pace.

“She suffered a terribly hard labor. Two full days of contractions. I still remember how her skin was hot to the touch, flaming from within, how the muscles and tendons were stretched taut, and how she collapsed after the baby slipped with a damp, sucking sound into the midwife's hands. Then I saw the baby's scandalously half-American face. I caught the midwife's faintly pursed lips, the darting eyes, the snickering up-and-down appraisal. And I knew. I could feel it down at the molecular level—it would be suicide to keep this baby. All of us would suffer. I watched as it nuzzled against its mother's chest, fingers searching for nipples and breasts. Quy's eyes flicked here and there as she took in her child's face. Our eyes met for one anguished moment, and almost immediately after, she curled up and fell into a deep sleep.

“The silence was ruthless, unbearable. I did not have the vocabulary or the ability to tell her my fears. The baby stared at me glassy-eyed, its head cocked to the side. I must admit I felt drawn to it. But your brother-in-law and I knew what we had to do. I want you to know it wasn't from hard-heartedness. We had to do it. We took the baby from Quy as she slept, knees still drawn to her chest. I felt feeble in my legs. This little girl. Her round waxy head lying against my palm. Less than one hour old and already she could grab my pinkie and squeeze it. I washed the baby in our tub, her eyes peeking at us with a sparkle and glint. We took her to an orphanage in Vung Tau that very night.

“The next day when her brother told her what we had done, her body shook. She let out a long, sustained scream. Night after night we could hear her silky whisper, ‘My baby, my baby,' her body a tightly curled inert mass, like that of a sleeping animal that refuses to budge. What could he say after? What could I say? We both struggled against the numbness of what we had done. But we were convinced it was the only way. For the baby's sake, not just ours.”

Phong paused. “Not just ours,” he repeated almost hysterically. He was watching me intently, his breathing hushed, his eyes unblinking and impenetrably dark. Perhaps he was asking for forgiveness. I could not tell. How perverse, how ironic, how sad, I thought, that even the most calculating and ruthless act—taking a child from its mother—couldn't save them.

“This memory still haunts me. Loosening the baby's grip, taking each of her fingers and prying it from her mother's breast. Quy's long wail and the forlorn look on her face afterward.”

By what dispensation of force and authority did he think he had the right to do what he did?

“We were cowards,” Phong finally said softly, shaking his head. He stood there like a penitent hoping to be redeemed. “Of course you are right to have harbored contempt for me all these years.”

I swallowed hard. I tried to shrug it all off. His terrible predicaments—Thu's suicide and his Vietcong connections—were immediately unimportant. What struck me with a fury in the small hard center of my chest was Quy's baby deposited in an orphanage somewhere in Vietnam. A part of my wife, now a whole being, roaming the streets. I imagined her, lost and alone. The follies of thirty years ago interleaving with the here and now. Perhaps she is a street vendor in Saigon. Perhaps she has escaped Vietnam and is living somewhere in the United States or Canada or Australia.

An old grief coiled and uncoiled inside me. Phong let out a barely suppressed sigh, his hand resting tentatively on my shoulder. I cupped my hand over his. A long sadness defined him. Although it is almost unsayable—we are so far apart from each other—I too know the feeling, though in a different way, and I felt myself oddly bound to him. There is no cosmic perch from which to watch and judge, and I too have mourned for a world that is vanishing or already gone. Our true business has been with the past. But there before me stood this broken man. “Phong,” I muttered. He heard me call his name. I looked into his eyes and saw a man at the desultory end of his life, going over what should have been done differently and wishing perhaps for the proverbial second chance, to re-create the past for the present. Despite our different paths, we are here, bereaved and together, facing the essential elements of life in our final days. Despite our divergent and disjointed lives, they meet in the here and now, in a single point of pathos, inside this bleak nursing home.

For the first time, I understood his need to be truly seen and to be touched and forgiven. Its single-mindedness heightened my sense of life's surprises and its unending mutability. Who among us can truly know why we are moved to do what we do and why we are moved to undo it?

Life's flow, like an arpeggio of notes whose combination is seemingly limitless, lies beyond our grasp.

Phong was still standing mournfully by my bed, his metallic leg creaking. I felt no anger, only a radiating calm, like a wide-open lotus flower that rises from the mud and unfolds petals that float reassuringly on the water's surface.

I knew right then that I was confronted with two irreducible possibilities, each equally strong but mutually diverging. I could obdurately redouble the weight of our past, or I could release it. I could construct and fashion something different out of what we have been given. I trembled inside. Old images churned in my head. There was Phong in Hue that fleeting moment when he stepped on the mine and I did not. A whisper of a doubt had made me stop moving. I halted but did not warn him. Why, I still wonder to this day. Could I have alerted him? Inside this deep and unfathomable patterning of time, a decision one moment changes the landscape the next.