Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

I can see this in Mister Thupak’s eyes: You do not exist. You eat nuoc mam,you eat phosoup, you read comic books I give you, but you do not exist. You are nothing.

“You have no orphans,” the Englishman says.

In my dream.

In other dreams I do—I let him save me. I let him come to my room. I let him take me in his arms, and hold me. I feel his skin against mine, my cheek against his chest. I touch his arm with my fingers. He wants nothing from me. I let his cape surround me, so that I will be invisible to the men who visit my room.

This is the dream I love best. The dream I dream to feel happy.

The room smells of the salt and rotten fish of nuoc mam. I have gotten nuoc mam on the comic books. I have been careless. I turn off the light and look out the window into the night. I do not see him on the pagoda roofs of the tourist streets. I do not see him by the statue of the Chinese men who long ago helped build a train track in this country, or in the dark alleys to the west, where you can watch the sun set. For a moment, in the darkness of this room, I am afraid he is gone, he has given up because he is tired of looking. After all, he is only one man.

But then I see him, and it is not a dream. I am not asleep. I see him from the window. He is walking in an alley, one where I have never seen him before.

He keeps his eyes on the pavement, as if looking for something—a footprint, something I might have dropped.

I have never called out to him—because of what Mister Thupak would do to me—but I do it now.

I slide the window open—the one too high for me ever to jump from—and before he can disappear, the way he does in dreams, I shout at him. I shout in my father’s language:

“ Chin lo cang! Chin lo cang! ”

I am here! I am here!

He turns.

“ Muong ki, Captain China!” I shout. “ Muong ki! ”

The children playing at the hoop look up. They hear me. They shout back, laughing: “ Muongchi ki tip! Muong chi ki tip! ”

I blink my eyes, looking for him in the shadows of the alley. He was there. I know he was. He turned—I saw him turn. He heard me and he turned—

As the children shout and laugh I see him again, his body still, his eyes looking up at me at last. And then my face hits the window. I cry out. I am jerked back into the room.

I do not know what happens next. I am on the floor. My head is under the bed. Mister Thupak is beating me. He beats the parts of my body that are not under the bed. He beats them with his piece of wood.

I wake up in the morning with my head under my bed. My lips are hurting. My face feels like fire. I cannot move my arm.

I do not want to move. I want to lie here forever. I want to be nothing.

I have tried to keep it from Mister Thupak—these marks on my skin, this cough. I hide my arms from him. I scratch my face and arms so that he will think it is only scratches—ones left by some man—and he will shout at me for that. If I am ill, the men will not want me, I know, and what would happen then? What would Mister Thupak do then?

I have not looked out the window for many days. I have not dreamed of him.

When I go to the window I shake. It is as if Mister Thupak were standing behind me, waiting.

I am weak. I have been weak for thirteen days.

I do not see him when I close my eyes. I see nothing because I am nothing.

I dream of the lepers on the beach at Can Tho, the ones I saw with my mother and my aunt. I dream of the camps where the skin peeled from our feet like white rubber, hurting us.

I dream of skin.

Why would Captain China want to see me this way, my skin like this?

Mister Thupak points to the scratches on my face and asks questions. I do not understand the words, but I know what he asks. He grabs at me. I step back. He grabs at me again, catches my arm and holds it, looking at the scratches. He looks at my face. I am thinner. He can see this. The marks, the thinness, and my cough—which he has heard through the door. He is thinking:

The men will not want him now.

When he leaves, I lie down. I am breathing hard and I cannot stop.

Please, I say. Please.

Mister Thupak comes to my room and puts a cream the color of my skin on my face and arms, where the marks and scratches are. He makes a coughing sound and shakes his head. If you cough, I will beat you. He will. He changes the sheets on my bed. He opens the window to let in air, to let out the smell of nuoc mam and illness. He points a little can in the air and sprays it. It smells like familiar flowers.

A man comes to me two days later. He is thin like a wire and his eyes are like empty jars. But when he looks at me, his eyes fill with happiness. He is thinking of death—my death—how he will do it—and it makes him happy. I tell myself I am mistaken, but when I look at those eyes again, I know I am not. I have not seen eyes like his since the South China Sea, but I argue with myself. I say: He will only dreamit while he is with you. Chu — he will not really do it. Mister Thupak will not let him. Mister Thupak can hide your illness with cream and still make money from you.

I say this to myself, but I am weak. I cannot think clearly. I cannot stand up without shaking. I am afraid.

He gestures to me, like the others. He knows I do not speak his language. I take the position he wishes me to and no longer have to see his eyes. I feel him against me and then something cold against my neck.

I jerk away. He swears, angry, but the cold metal—I have never felt this before—makes me jerk. I cannot help myself.

I know what it is.

It is a gun. He likes to do this, I tell myself. He likes to scare his young men. He likes to imagine things when he is with them—like that man two years ago who paid Mister Thupak to have me cut myself, so that he could see my blood; that man a year ago who wore a special shirt with buttons to hurt me; that man six months ago who wanted me to believe he was going to blind me with his knife… so that he could feel my fear.

No. I am wrong.

This is the last man, I realize now.

He has paid Mister Thupak more money than I can imagine to kill me—to be inside me when I die.

Because Mister Thupak no longer wants me. Because I am sick and no one will want me now. If he can get this money—so much—before people hear how sick I am, he has not lost everything.

This man will grow ill and die. He doesn’t know it, though I do. But it doesn’t matter. I will die now, instead of later—that is all.

I close my eyes. He has begun to move against me. I feel his bones. It is difficult for him to stay still. A cough slips between my teeth. He should sound like an animal to me, but he does not. He sounds like a man, that is all. A man hurting me a little but not as much as some.

The metal wobbles. Can he do it? Can he hold the gun long enough?

He makes his sounds. The cold metal presses harder on my ear and I know it will be soon. It will be sooner than he imagined, because he is so excited. He wants his moment to be the same as mine, and my moment, the bullet from his gun.

I see Captain China. He is standing in front of me, so close that I could touch him, or him, me. I try to see his face clearly and cannot. He has no face. No eyes, no lips—

I do not understand this.

And I do not understand what happens next.

A window breaks, the screen tears, something slips in. The room fills with a wind. It is a dream, I tell myself, something I am dreaming from the illness. The cold metal at my neck jerks away, the body against me jerks away, the man is screaming. The door into the room opens, slamming. I hear Mister Thupak’s voice. Then he is screaming too. The room explodes with the bullet. I hear nothing else. The screams are gone. The voices are gone. I am deaf. I feel only the wind rushing through the room.