Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

Ben laughs softly and I laugh too, though I think I hear a little anger in me when I say that, but I am glad if he thinks only that I am a great kidder.

Then he is gone.

Outside her door I take a step and another and another and my legs are trying to throw me down and I lean against the balustrade on this long back balcony and I’m in front of somebody else’s doorway, Tien’s neighbor, and the door is open and a dim light is burning and there’s a smell of kerosene and a wet, soupy smell — fish sauce and some cheap part of a pig — something like that, a food smell that’s suddenly mixed up with an image of Kim, the smell in a back alley like this coming in through the window while I’m naked with Kim and it’s been all these years and she’s near me now and it could be in a room in this very alley, along this very common balcony, the place where I went in to make love for the first time. I press on. Another doorway standing open, a woman combing her hair out, long and dark, right now, not the past, I try to move faster, keep my eyes before me, and Kim is combing her hair before her dead grandfather’s shrine and I am waiting naked on her bed.

I go down the twisting staircase, holding on tight, and I can see myself coming up metal stairs just like these, Kim climbing a step ahead of me, her sweet cheeks swaying in my face, making my hands itchy, the night smells of Saigon around us, wood fire, incense, alley rot. I’m moving away from Tien’s rooms and all of this is coming back and I don’t want to touch Kim, not even in my memory, I try to take the covers in this memory and pull them across my body as she combs her hair, but I can’t, it’s already happened, whatever it was between me and this woman whose name may not even have been Kim, it’s happened and there’s no taking it back and when I go there in my memory, as I’m doing now, trying to hurry along this alley, I can’t cover myself, I remain naked and she crosses the room and I must pull her down to the bed with me, I must put my mouth on hers, I must feel her hand cup my penis, I must rise to her touch instantly.

I grab at my head with my hand, squeeze tight at my temples. She will go away for good when I know who she is. Or who she isn’t. I’m out of the alley now and down the way is a pedicab and I move toward it and then I stop. I think that something here will tell me. I’ll look closely and it’ll be the wrong street altogether, the wrong part of town, the chances will turn long again. Another moment in a dark and distant night: I step down from a pedicab and I’m in front of a bar and I let myself be there, I try to see what it is in the window. Two Vietnamese words in neon, I think. Some of the bars had American names but not this one. This is the bar where she works and I can’t remember the Vietnamese name for it. I look now and there’s only the flickering fluorescence in the noodle restaurant, the tiny plastic tables in front ringed by the shapes of people eating. Was Kim’s bar near the mouth of an alley like this? I try to look as I stand before the pedicab in my memory, but I can’t see. The place floats in my head with nothing around and Kim is in the doorway, her face dark, the light from inside the bar ringing her head in gold. Was this the first moment I saw her? Hey GI, she says. Come in drink beer with Vietnam beauty, she says. My name Kim, she says.

I look around now. For something familiar, though I want there to be nothing. And there is nothing. Bodies move past me. Soup. Flats Fixed. A tailor’s dummy in a window. It’s all changed so much. The bars are long gone. The things that might still be the same — the alley, a balcony, a row of second-floor windows — are all a blur in my memory, or darkness. I turn around and looming over me is a big thing I should be able to remember: a hotel, the Metropole. But it’s slick and clearly new. Or maybe remade. Was there a hotel across from Kim’s bar? This feels faintly familiar. But I don’t recognize this place. As big as this thing is, I can’t say either that it was there or it wasn’t. Something like panic revs in me, like the center of my chest is the engine for all these crazy feelings and it’s revving into the red. I need to move. I need to get out of this street now, I think. But fuck that. I have to fight for Tien. If I can possibly find something that can end it here, something that will let me go back up to her now, right now, and say, It’s over, we can be lovers forever, then I have to try.

I face the shop fronts. I let myself see the past. And there’s nothing more. The street all around me is still black, like I’m passing out. There’s only the bar in front of me. I stride across this space and I’m before the woman in the door and I say in my head, You’re not Kim. That’s for the GIs. What’s your real name? She looks at me. I could have said those words at any time in those months I was with her. Just those few words and her answer — my real name is Kim — or any name at all except Huong — would put me in Tien’s arms right now. But once we were more to each other than GI and bargirl, she could have told me her real name, if it was different, without my asking. She would have done that. Surely. And she never did. Isn’t that as good? Isn’t that proof? I want it to be all the proof I need, but it isn’t.

So I turn away, I move to the pedicab and I speak the address of my hotel and we go off into the night. The motorbikes race past and I close my eyes and if the worst is true, then the last time I was with Kim, Tien was already there inside her body. I try to remember that and I find nothing. These things that remain — a moment on an iron stair, across a room, in the doorway of a bar — they’re all snapshots — like a child under a tree, looking without a smile into the camera — they have no story to them, they tell me nothing. The thing between us just died. There was no revelation in the rush of our sex, there was no connection, there was nothing, and the cute words ended, I suppose, and there may have been money again, in the transaction, and then it was over for good. She wanted to come to America. A thing I couldn’t give her. I said no. It ended like that. If she was pregnant, she would have used that to try to go with me. But she didn’t. Unless she didn’t know. But the way things were, it feels impossible that a new life had begun from what we’d done. I never went back to her. I never even went to another bar. I was dead to her and she was dead to me.

I shudder at this thought and I lean forward into the flow of the dark street beneath the pedicab. I went back to America alone and I married Mattie and I realized I was still alone and then I found my truck and the road, and on a run sometimes, I’d lean over my wheel and I’d watch the thin black track of exhaust burn on the highway as it rushed under me, and I felt it was leading me, sometimes I felt I was following this dark line into a future that held some big thing, like running after your fate instead of just driving another goddamn thousand miles one way to turn around and drive another thousand back again. There was more to me that I just hadn’t reached yet. Much more.

Then I am lying in a bed on this night, in the dark, in my hotel in Saigon, and I wait for sleep and I wait for tomorrow. I know the road to Nha Trang, know it well: Highway One, where I watched the driver ahead of me, standing by the side of the road, part of him ripped away, and he was calm, very calm, wondering where that part might be. And there is the same stunned calm in me now, I think. I watch the paddle fan spinning above me and for the first time in my life, alone is not just the place I live in, sometimes with no one around, sometimes with a truck stop restaurant full of truckers, sometimes with a woman sleeping nearby in the bed. For the first time, alone means the absence of someone else: the crook of my arm, the point of my shoulder, the skin along my hip and thigh, all feel the prickle of her absent body, the shadow of her body still pressing there softly. I know the answer to the question that I share with the guy in the scrub grass by the side of Highway One. I know where the missing part of me is. She’s in her own bed right now, in this very city. I was there tonight. And I walked out her door. Is she naked again? I am not. From fear of all this I am still in my clothes, afraid of my body now. But I can still feel her body on my skin. I’m sweating and the fan moves in the dark and I am alone.