Fire Summer. Thuy Da Lam
girl. The woman was sitting coyly on a lotus blossom, her thin stone legs dangling over its petals.
“Soaked like a field mouse,” Xuan mumbled and stripped off her wet clothes. He took off his shirt, and using it like a cloth, he tried to pat her dry. He pulled her hair back and placed a sweaty palm over her forehead. He then put his ear on her chest and listened for a minute. He left suddenly, his footsteps fading. Moments later when he returned, he wrapped her in a cool cottony sheet.
“I’d never be caught in yellow,” the red-haired girl said to the white marble woman. She fingered her polished bob. She was suited in black armor. “Couldn’t he find something else to cover her?” She hoisted her spear and leapt from the lantern onto a golden dragon. They floated across the blue starlit ceiling.
Xuan pressed hard against her chest and released, pressed and released, making her insides coil and tumble in painful waves. He pinched her nose and blew warm smoky breath into her.
“I was once a man,” the marble woman said. “Did you know I was a man a thousand years ago?”
“I think I am a man; therefore, I am,” claimed the chap with a head full of chestnut curls. He spoke deliberately to no one in particular.
“I’m with you. Whatever you are, I’m with you.” A voice reassured him, echoing in her head, but she couldn’t see the speaker. It wasn’t the bald gent with an egg-shaped face, for he was arguing with another bald fellow who wouldn’t look at him but peered instead into the distance. Two elders in flowing imperial gowns, half-listening to their argument, grumbled about three submissions and four virtues.
Xuan pried her mouth open and poked a finger down her throat. He straddled her and resumed pressing on her chest, hard and fast. He breathed into her mouth and scolded her for swallowing too much dead water, coaxing her not to keep it in.
The red-haired girl in black armor was playing with the dragons and piercing clusters of white clouds with her spear. The man with the egg-shaped face smirked. “To be or not to be.”
“Fine words. Fine words,” commended the elder in the blue imperial gown. “Then again, fine words don’t necessarily mean true virtue.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed the man who was peering into the distance. “Impossible without a violent revolution.” He looked down at her.
She wanted to agree but her throat was blocked. Her lips trembled.
The red-haired girl was making rainclouds with the tap of her spear.
Lightning struck.
Voices thundered, and the rain came, rapping against the tile roof and glass windows, splashing cold beads onto her face.
“Accept, child. Let things go their own way. Don’t impose your will on nature.” A soothing voice coaxed her into a float-like sleep like a boat adrift at sea until she shuddered and coughed and waves of water surged from her body.
“Ah, the girl is awake.” Xuan was sitting on his haunches beside her. He wiped the corners of her mouth with the back of his hand. “Get dressed. I’ll be outside.”
At the door, he called, “Nous partons, adieu Oncle!”
A Vietnamese voice croaked back, “Vous fermerez la porte, s’il vous plaît.”
Maia reached for her clothes and saw the jade locket in the pile. She tore a thin strip of the yellow curtain, drew it through the locket, and tied it around her neck. She put on her damp clothes and became aware of the raw welts around her wrists and ankles.
Light slanted through the holes and cracks in the lattice windows along the walls. At the center of each window, a left eye set in a triangle stared out. Apart from an old sweeper grumbling in French about the persistent dust blown in from outside, the temple was deserted under the glowing lantern suspended from the ceiling.
Xuan’s eyes fell on her locket when she emerged on the steps. “You shouldn’t carry the dead with you,” he said.
At the foot of the mountain, they found the Honda Dream intact, except for a missing rearview mirror. The fruit boy was nowhere in sight. The motley tents had been taken down, and the wind dispersed traces of what remained, only an imprint of the crate and camel tracks were left on the ground.
The trail along the lotus ponds through the rubber forest to the highway had turned into muddy rivulets after the rain. Xuan had not uttered a word to her since they left the mountain. He muttered to himself, his mouth moving ani matedly, as if to assure his points would get across. She could not make out his speech, even leaning forward, but smelled smoke and the drizzling jungle, sometimes a musky pine.
She held onto him as they picked up speed. The wind stung the welts on her wrists and ankles. Bright colors and long leaf-shaped eyes appeared, and voices whirred in her head. Light and hollow, she slipped into the flowing surroundings along the rain-swept highway. She was a tiny tadpole twirling in a brook, a rice grain ripening in the field beyond, a raindrop on a leaf tip waiting for the sun.
She was an orphan—no link with the past, no apparent threat to the present regime. This was how the Independent Vietnam Coalition had rationalized her selection as the replacement after Vinnie Huynh’s disappearance. A young woman could pass through Tan Son Nhat International Airport more easily than a man, they had predicted. Her not breaking under a second interrogation proved to them that she could detach herself from her bodily existence and be still amid the spinning world.
The ferry was set to leave when Xuan and Maia arrived at a Mekong tributary.
“Sold out,” the ticket man said. “The next comes at four.”
He pointed to a cluster of plastic tables and stools beneath the shadow of a tamarind tree where they could wait. On the trunk hung the vendor’s menu painted in a flowing white script: Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang, Dừa Tươi & Bia Hơi.
They watched the last passengers boarding the ferry. They saw a marble-skinned woman and a red-haired girl. They spotted a chap with a head full of chestnut curls and a bald gentleman with an egg-shaped face and another bald fellow and two elders in blue imperial gowns. A middle-aged bearded man with a staff stood apart from the group. The motley travelers wanted free passage for their old camel and wooden crate.
“Big but not heavy,” said the fruit boy from the mountain. “There’s nothing inside. The empty crate floats, and Charlee swims like a swamp buffalo.” The boy led the camel into the red muddy water and climbed atop her hump. They began across the river. The sun glared off the mirror in his hand. Behind them, the ferry lugged the crate that bobbed in and out the Mekong like a remnant of a shipwreck.
“Foreigners,” the soup lady muttered, “finally rounded up and kicked out.” She set a plate of fresh herbs, chilies, and limes on the table and offered Xuan loose imported cigarettes without names.
He had ordered three soups, two beers, and a coconut. He placed a soup, beer, and cigarettes before the empty seat between them. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a lighter, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag.
Maia watched him from the corners of her eyes as she mixed the noodle, immersing the chopped scallion and cilantro and sliced raw onions into the steaming broth. He appeared less distant. She had first thought his name, which meant “springtime,” was ironic but now seemed almost fitting. She wondered whether it was she who had changed. Maybe it was all that time in the eyeball, all that water she had drunk and coughed up. She knew enough to guard herself against him. He had taken her to the interrogation and pretended to care afterward. In spite of her caution, she felt her inside shifting, like the earth around dormant seeds about to sprout.
She realized then that he had been talking to her father’s ashes.
She stirred her soup and watched a shrimp, all curled up, back slit open and tail intact, spin along the edge of the bowl. Calamari cut cylindrically and fish processed into dumplings bobbed around her bamboo chopsticks. She added fresh mint leaves and chili to the bowl, turning the broth red. The soup filled her mouth, rushed down her throat,