Dukkha Reverb. Loren W. Christensen
vehicles. He waves at me, and puts his thumb to his ear and his little finger to his mouth.
“Never a dull moment with you,” Mai says, watching her side mirror as she jockeys her Volvo out into the chaos that appears to be the traffic pattern here. She does some kind of wave out the window, which is either a “thank you” or a “cram it up where the sun don’t shine” gesture. Either way, it sets off a cacophony of honking. A motorbike roars around her driver’s side, its accelerating engine deafening through the open window. A second one passes so closely that Mai nearly loses her side mirror. Another cuts around us and comes within four hairs-width of clipping her front fender.
“My God, Mai. This is nuts. Has there been a coup d’état? Is everyone fleeing the city? Is China attacking?”
She laughs, a sound that’s big, like it’s coming from a 300-pound opera singer, a trait I really like. “No, everything is fine,” she says, closing the window. “If any of those things were happening, traffic would be really—” She brakes hard when a white truck cuts into our lane, just inches from our hood. “Really bad,” she finishes. A motor scooter shoots from the right lane between the truck and our front end, swoops into the left lane, and disappears around the truck.
“Mother of Buddha!” I cry.
She laughs again. “We will be out of this airport traffic in a minute and then it will be even more crowded, but there will be some organization to it.” She looks over at me and croons. “Oooh, don’t be scared.”
“Watch the road, will you?” I relax my clenched fists and try to retrieve my machismo. “I guess I’m just not used to it—” Two motorbikes pull up along side us, one by my window and one by Mai’s, the riders are young, both wearing pale blue shirts and wrap-around sunglasses. “These guys want to get inside our car?”
Mai smiles. “Personal space, even in traffic, is different here than in Portland. After a year in your city, it took me three weeks to get used to this again. Same thing when I returned from my year in Paris. I see now how crazy our streets might seem to foreigners, but as you say in America, ‘It is what it is.’”
The motorbikes are still close enough for their drivers to tap on our respective windows.
“I can’t believe I’m here. It’s surreal.”
“I am so very happy now. I hope you will like it here.”
I make a big motion with my head as I look her up and down. “I like the scenery so far.”
She giggles and punches me in the thigh.
“Ow!” I blurt, not faking. She hit me in the nerve just above my kneecap.
“Sorry,” she says with phony concern. “Was that too hard?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess I shouldn’t undress you with my eyes, huh?”
She laughs. “I am not sure what that means but it sound very, very good.”
“Well,” I say rubbing my leg. “When someone looks at…”
The motorbike rider on Mai’s side turns toward her and for a second I can see her profile in his mirrored sunglasses. When he lifts his head ever so slightly, I see my face in them. He smiles and lifts his left hand from the handlebar, his pointing index finger and upright thumb shaped like a gun, and shoots at me.
“Hey!” I shout, and he “fires” at me again. “Mai, that guy on the motorbike—”
“What?” she looks toward me.
The motorbike driver banks hard to the left.
She jerks her head toward her side window. “Guy?”
I look out the rear side window and see him merge into a mass of traffic moving down a side street.
The one outside my window is gone too.
“The rider next to your window looked at us and then did this with his hand. You know, like he was firing a gun at me.”
“Are you sure? Oh, I’m sorry, Sam. Of course you’re sure.”
The white truck hangs a right, revealing hundreds of motorbikes, bicycles, cars, and pedicabs, randomly cutting right and left.
“Could it have been Lai Van Tan’s people?” I ask. “Were you followed, maybe?”
Listen to me. I’m a hysterical teenage girl. Get control of yourself. Try to impress the woman a little.
“I do not know, but I don’t think so.”
“Then who was the guy? Is that how you welcome newcomers here—make bang bang gestures?” So much for impressing her.
Mai looks at me, eyebrows bunched. “Sam? Are you okay?”
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know. Just tense I guess. It’s been a crazy few weeks. Meeting you, meeting my father, my school burns down—and everybody was kung-fu fighting and dealing with all the legal stuff, and then Mark coming to me telling me he knows what happened. The whole time I was at the airport in Portland, I kept waiting for the detectives to show up and put me into handcuffs. I’m finally here, and I’m exhausted and jet lagged, and the young man I flew with turns out to be a runaway who kicks cops. Now motorbike guys are pretending to shoot at me.”
She shrugs. “It could be… just a moment.” She maneuvers the car to the far left lane, slows, then tapping her horn, begins to inch across the oncoming lane. Actually, it’s more like an oncoming, thunderous tsunami wave of about a billion cars, motorbikes, scooters, and odd-shaped large and small vehicles that I’ve never seen before. They stream around the front and back of us as if they were a surging river and we were a rock, except we’re moving too. Incredibly, we make it across in one piece. The new street is a tad less congested.
“The man could have been just teasing,” Mai says.
“Teasing?”
“Not the best word? Being a… jerk?”
“You don’t think he knew us?”
“No. Maybe he does not like white people, especially a white man with a Vietnamese woman.”
My cop instinct is telling me otherwise but then what do I know? I’m a white guy in Saigon who’s been here less than two hours. “Will there be much of that? People not accepting me with you?”
“You are going to be with me?” she asks, struggling against a smile. She leans on the horn and swerves around a Toyota.
“Thinking about it,” I say, faking a lack of enthusiasm.
“I see.” Her smile begins to win the struggle.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask, then blurt, “Holy!” as half a dozen motorbikes from a side street to my right accelerate directly across our lane.
Mai leans on her horn and swerves just enough not to kill them, still wearing that faint smile. “I am taking you… here,” she says, turning onto what appears to be a dirt, potholed alley between two buildings. She guides the car a short distance and pulls into a small parking lot next to one of the structures. Scaffolding on its front extends all the way to the roof, one, two… eight floors. Tape crisscrosses some of the windows on the ground floor.
“You live here?” I ask, not having to shout this time since the buildings and trees substantially reduce the traffic roar.
“I wish. No, this is a new building, called Vinh Tower One, owned by a friend of my father and me, mostly Father’s friend. It is still a few months away from being finished. He has a… what do you call..? A business on his side?”
“A side business?”
“Yes, a side business. He is a building contractor