On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  The veins green over his wrists, the boy raises the M-16, blond hairs sweated brown along his arms. The men are drinking and laughing, their gapped teeth like mouthfuls of dice. This boy, his lips pulled at an angle, green eyes filmed pink. This private first class. The men are ready to forget, a few still have the scent of their wives’ makeup on their fingers. His mouth opens and closes rapidly. He is asking a question, or questions, he is turning the air around his words into weather. Is there a language for falling out of language? A flash of teeth, a finger on the trigger, the boy saying, “No. No, step back.”

  The olive tag stitched to the boy’s chest frames a word. Although the woman cannot read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat. She knows the first letter in the name is C. Like in Go Cong, the name of the open-air market she had visited two days ago, its neon marquee buzzing at the entrance. She was there to buy a new shawl for the girl. The cloth had cost more than what she had planned to spend, but when she saw it, day-bright among the grey and brown bolts, she peered up at the sky, even though it was already nightfall, and paid knowing there would be nothing left to eat with. Sky blue.

  * * *

  —

  When the door opens, the men put down their glasses, some after quickly draining the dregs. A macaque monkey, the size of a dog, is led, with collar and leash, by a stooped man with combed white hair. No one speaks. All ten eyes are on the mammal as it staggers into the room, its burnt-red hair reeking of alcohol and feces, having been force-fed vodka and morphine in its cage all morning.

  The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having.

  A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?

  The force of the soldier’s voice pushes the woman back. She wavers, one arm flailing, then steadies, pressing the girl into her.

  A mother and a daughter. A me and a you. It’s an old story.

  The stooped man leads the monkey under the table, guides its head through a hole cut in the center. Another bottle is opened. The twist cap clicks as the men reach for their glasses.

  The monkey is tied to a beam under the table. It jostles about. With its mouth muffled behind a leather strap, its screams sound more like the reel of a fishing rod cast far across a pond.

  * * *

  —

  Seeing the letters on the boy’s chest, the woman remembers her own name. The possession of a name, after all, being all they share.

  “Lan,” she says. “Tên tôi là Lan.” My name is Lan.

  Lan meaning Lily. Lan the name she gave herself, having been born nameless. Because her mother simply called her Seven, the order in which she came into the world after her siblings.

  It was only after she ran away, at seventeen, from her arranged marriage to a man three times her age, that Lan named herself. One night, she brewed her husband a pot of tea, dropping a pinch of lotus stems to deepen his sleep, then waited till the palm-leaf walls shivered with his snoring. Through the flat black night, she made her way, feeling one low branch after another.

  Hours later, she knocked on the door to her mother’s house. “Seven,” her mother said through a crack in the door, “a girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest. You know this. How can you not know?” And then the door closed, but not before a hand, gnarled as wood, pressed a pair of pearl earrings into Lan’s grip. The mother’s pale face erased by the door’s swing, the lock’s click.

  The crickets were too loud as Lan stumbled toward the nearest streetlamp, then followed each dim post, one by one, until, by dawn, the city appeared, smeared with fog.

  A man selling rice cakes spotted her, her soiled nightgown torn at the collar, and offered a scoop of sweet rice steaming on a banana leaf. She dropped down in the dirt and chewed, eyes fixed on the ground between her coal-shaded feet.

  “Where are you from,” the man asked, “a young girl like you wandering at this hour? What is your name?”

  Her mouth filled itself with that lush sound, the tone forming through the chewed rice before the vowel rose, its protracted ah, pronounced Laang. Lily, she decided, for no reason. “Lan,” she said, the rice falling, like chipped light, from her lips. “Tên tôi là Lan.”

  Surrounding the boy soldier, the woman, and the girl is the land’s verdant insistence. But which land? Which border that was crossed and erased, divided and rearranged?

  Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of sky stolen from a clear day.

  Sometimes, at night, the girl asleep, Lan stares into the dark, thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.

  * * *

  —

  Due to their ubiquity and punitive size, macaques are the most hunted primates in Southeast Asia.

  The white-haired man raises a glass and makes a toast, grins. Five other glasses are lifted to meet his, the light falls in each shot because the law says so. The shots are held by arms that belong to men who will soon cut open the macaque’s skull with a scalpel, open it like a lid on a jar. The men will take turns consuming the brain, dipped in alcohol or swallowed with cloves of garlic from a porcelain plate, all while the monkey kicks beneath them. The fishing rod cast and cast but never hitting water. The men believe the meal will rid them of impotence, that the more the monkey rages, the stronger the cure. They are doing this for the future of their genes—for the sake of sons and daughters.

  They wipe their mouths with napkins printed with sunflowers that soon grow brown, then start to tear—soaked.

  After, at night, the men will come home renewed, their stomachs full, and press themselves against their wives and lovers. The scent of floral makeup—cheek to cheek.

  A sound now of dribbling. A liquid warmth slides down the hem of her black trousers. The acrid smell of ammonia. Lan pisses herself in front of the two boys—and holds the girl tighter. Around her feet a circle of wet heat. The brain of the macaque monkey is the closest, of any mammal, to a human’s.

  The raindrops darken as they slide down the blond soldier’s dirt-baked cheeks before collecting, like ellipses, along his jaw.

  * * *

  —

  “Yoo Et Aye numbuh won,” she says, urine still dripping down her ankles. Then again, louder. “Yoo Et Aye numbuh won.

  “No bang bang.” She raises her free hand to the sky, as if to let someone pull her right up to it. “No bang bang. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won.”

  A tic in the boy’s left eye. A green leaf falling into a green pond.

  He stares at the girl, her too-pink skin. The girl whose name is Hong, or Rose. Because why not another flower? Hong—a syllable the mouth must swallow whole at once. Lily and Rose, side by side on this breath-white road. A mother holding a daughter. A rose growing out of the stem of a lily.

  He takes note of Rose’s hair, its errant cinnamon tint fringed blond around the temples. Seeing the soldier’s eyes on her daughter, Lan pushes the girl’s face to her chest, shielding her. The boy watches this child, the whiteness showing from her yellow body. He could be her father, he thinks, realizes. Someone he knows could be her father—his sergeant, squad leader, platoon partner, Michael, George, Thomas, Raymond, Jackson. He considers them, rifle gripped tight, his eyes on the girl with American blood before the American gun.
r />   “No bang bang . . . Yoo Et Aye . . . ,” Lan whispers now. “Yoo Et Aye . . .”

  Macaques are capable of self-doubt and introspection, traits once thought attributable only to humans. Some species have displayed behavior indicating the use of judgment, creativity, even language. They are able to recall past images and apply them to current problem solving. In other words, macaques employ memory in order to survive.

  * * *

  —

  The men will eat until the animal is empty, the monkey slowing as they spoon, its limbs heavy and listless. When nothing’s left, when all of its memories dissolve into the men’s bloodstreams, the monkey dies. Another bottle will be opened.

  Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.

  Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. Hands up. Don’t shoot. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. Hands up. No bang bang.

  The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force. The first soldier steps back. The second one moves the wooden divider, waves the woman forward. The houses behind her now reduced to bonfires. As the Huey returns to the sky, the rice stalks erect themselves, only slightly disheveled. The shawl drenched indigo with sweat and rain.

  In the garage, on a wall of stripped paint, spotted brick underneath, a shelf hangs as a makeshift altar. On it are framed pictures where saints, dictators, and martyrs, the dead—a mother and father—stare out, unblinking. In the glass frames, the reflection of sons leaning back in their chairs. One of them pours what’s left of the bottle over the sticky table, wipes it clean. A white cloth is placed over the macaque’s hollowed mind. The light in the garage flickers once, stays on.

  The woman stands in a circle of her own piss. No, she is standing on the life-sized period of her own sentence, alive. The boy turns, walks back to his post at the checkpoint. The other boy taps his helmet and nods at her, his finger, she notices, still on the trigger. It is a beautiful country because you are still in it. Because your name is Rose, and you are my mother and the year is 1968—the Year of the Monkey.

  The woman walks forward. Passing the guard, she glances one last time at the rifle. The muzzle, she notices, is not darker than her daughter’s mouth. The light flickers once, stays on.

  I wake to the sound of an animal in distress. The room so dark I can’t tell if my eyes are even open. There’s a breeze through the cracked window, and with it an August night, sweet but cut with the bleach smell of lawn chemicals—the scent of manicured suburban yards—and I realize I’m not in my own house.

  I sit up on the side of the bed and listen. Maybe it’s a cat wounded from a skirmish with a raccoon. I balance myself in the black air and head toward the hallway. There’s a red blade of light coming through a cracked door at the other end. The animal is inside the house. I palm the wall, which, in the humidity, feels like wet skin. I make my way toward the door and hear, in between the whimpers, the animal’s breaths—heavier now, something with huge lungs, much larger than a cat. I peer through the door’s red crack—and that’s when I see him: the man bent over in a reading chair, his white skin and even whiter hair made pink, raw under a scarlet-shaded lamp. And it comes to me: I’m in Virginia, on summer break. I’m nine. The man’s name is Paul. He is my grandfather—and he’s crying. A warped Polaroid trembles between his fingers.

  I push the door. The red blade widens. He looks up at me, lost, this white man with watery eyes. There are no animals here but us.

  * * *

  —

  Paul had met Lan in 1967 while stationed in Cam Ranh Bay with the US Navy. They met at a bar in Saigon, dated, fell in love, and, a year later, married right there in the city’s central courthouse. All through my childhood their wedding photo hung on the living room wall. In it, a thin, boyish Virginian farmboy with doe-brown eyes, not yet twenty-three, beams above his new wife, five years his senior—a farmgirl, as it happens, from Go Cong, and a mother to twelve-year-old Mai from her arranged marriage. As I played with my dolls and toy soldiers, that photo hovered over me, an icon from an epicenter that would lead to my own life. In the couple’s hopeful smiles, it’s hard to imagine the photo was snapped during one of the most brutal years of the war. At the time it was taken, with Lan’s hand on Paul’s chest, her pearl wedding ring a bead of light, you were already a year old—waiting in a stroller a few feet behind the cameraman as the bulb flashed.

  Lan told me one day, while I was plucking her white hairs, that when she first arrived in Saigon, after running away from her doomed first marriage, after failing to find a job, she ended up as a sex worker for American GIs on R&R. She said, with barbed pride, as if she was defending herself before a jury, “I did what any mother would do, I made a way to eat. Who can judge me, huh? Who?” Her chin jutted, her head lifted high at some invisible person across the room. It was only when I heard her slip that I realized she was, in fact, speaking to someone: her mother. “I never wanted to, Ma. I wanted to go home with you—” She lunged forward. The tweezers dropped from my grip, pinged on the hardwood. “I never asked to be a whore,” she sobbed. “A girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest,” she repeated the proverb her mother told her. “A girl who leaves . . .” She rocked from side to side, eyes shut, face lifted toward the ceiling, like she was seventeen again.

  At first I thought she was telling another one of her half-invented tales, but the details grew clearer as her voice stammered into focus on odd yet idiosyncratic moments in the narrative. How the soldiers would smell of a mixture of tar, smoke, and mint Chiclets—the scent of the battle sucked so deep into their flesh it would linger even after their vigorous showers. Leaving Mai in the care of her sister back in the village, Lan rented a windowless room from a fisherman by the river, where she took the soldiers. How the fisherman, living below her, would spy on her through a slot in the wall. How the soldiers’ boots were so heavy, when they kicked them off as they climbed into bed, the thumps sounded like bodies dropping, making her flinch under their searching hands.

  Lan tensed as she spoke, her tone strained as it dipped into the realm of her second mind. She turned to me afterward, a finger blurred over her lips. “Shhhh. Don’t tell your mom.” Then she gave my nose a flick, her eyes bright as she grinned maniacally.

  But Paul, shy and sheepish, who often spoke with his hands in his lap, was not her client—which was why they hit it off. According to Lan, they did, in fact, meet at a bar. It was late, nearly midnight, when Lan walked in. She had just finished her work for the day and was getting a nightcap when she saw the “lost boy,” as she called him, sitting alone at the counter. There was a social that night for servicemen in one of the ritzy hotels, and Paul was waiting for a date that would never arrive.

  They talked over drinks and found a common ground in their shared rural childhoods, both having been brought up in the “sticks” of their respective countries. These two unlikely hillbillies must have found a familiar dialect that fused the gap between their estranged vernaculars. Despite their vastly different paths, they found themselves transplants in a decadent and disorientating city besieged by bombing raids. It was in this familiar happenstance that they found refuge in each other.

  One night, two months after they met, Lan and Paul would be holed up in a one-room apartment in Saigon. The city was being infiltrated by a massive North Vietnamese advance that would later be known as the infamous Tet Offensive. All night Lan lay fetal, her back against the wall, Paul by her side, his standard-issue 9mm pistol aimed at the door as the city tore open with sirens and mortar fire.

  * * *

  —

  Although it’s only three in the morning, the lampshade makes the room feel like the last moments of a sinister sunset. Under the bulb’s electric hum, Paul and I spot each other through the doorway. He wipes hi
s eyes with the palm of one hand and waves me over with the other. He slips the photo into his chest pocket and puts on his glasses, blinking hard. I sit on the cherrywood armchair beside him.

  “You okay, Grandpa?” I say, still foggy from sleep. His smile has a grimace underneath it. I suggest that I go back to bed, that it’s still early anyway, but he shakes his head.

  “It’s alright.” He sniffles and straightens up in the chair, serious. “It’s just—well, I just keep thinking about that song you sang earlier, the uh . . .” He squints at the floor.

  “Ca trù,” I offer, “the folk songs—the ones Grandma used to sing.”

  “That’s right.” He nods vigorously. “Ca trù. I was lying there in the damn dark and I swear I kept hearing it. It’s been so long since I heard that sound.” He glances at me, searching, then back at the floor. “I must be going crazy.”

  Earlier that night, after dinner, I had sung a few folk songs for Paul. He had inquired about what I had learned during the school year and, already steeped in summer and drawing a blank, I offered a few songs I had memorized from Lan. I sang, in my best effort, a classic lullaby Lan used to sing. The song, originally performed by the famous Khánh Ly, describes a woman singing among corpses strewn across sloping leafy hills. Searching the faces of the dead, the singer asks in the song’s refrain, And which of you, which of you are my sister?

  Do you remember it, Ma, how Lan would sing it out of nowhere? How once, she sang it at my friend Junior’s birthday party, her face the shade of raw ground beef from a single Heineken? You shook her shoulder, telling her to stop, but she kept going, eyes closed, swaying side to side as she sang. Junior and his family didn’t understand Vietnamese—thank god. To them it was just my crazy grandma mumbling away again. But you and I could hear it. Eventually you put down your slice of pineapple cake—untouched, the glasses clinking as the corpses, fleshed from Lan’s mouth, piled up around us.