Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

Tien crosses to her and the old woman greets her and they speak for a moment. First Tien and then the woman and then Tien again and the woman nods her head and it is a clear yes she is saying and she motions beyond the cistern, off down another path, and I try to keep still but I can’t, not for a moment, I come forward and Tien is turning to me and her face is drawn tight.

“She’s here,” I say.

“There’s someone here with my mother’s name,” she says.

“Where?”

Tien says another few words in Vietnamese to the woman who is smiling broadly at me and nodding her head over and over and Tien moves off and I follow and it’s hard just to walk, just to put one foot in front of the other in a regular way, but we do walk, slower than before if anything. Tien is having trouble moving.

“It’s okay,” I say to her. “I’m with you. This won’t take long.”

She smiles up at me. My words sound confident. Maybe I am. Maybe I am or I wouldn’t be wanting to bolt down this path to wherever it is we’re going. She touches my hand, briefly, and my penis instantly stirs. But this first. This first.

And we are moving through another maze of growth, and chickens scatter before us, clucking furiously, plunging into a tiny break in the bamboo, and we come out of the maze and Tien stops.

There are two small thatched houses before us. She turns to the one on the left and two women are crouching flat-footed in front, their knees up by their faces, two sexless middle-aged women, dark from the sun, their hair put up in buns, straw hats beside them. And between them is a small package, cut open, of lime paste and a scattering of rust-colored arcea nuts and the pale green betel leaves, and one of the women, the nearest one, has just rolled a hit of this stuff to chew. Two aging women getting high on a Saturday morning. And the nearest one puts the roll in her mouth and she looks up at us and I am looking only at her mouth, and her teeth and gums are red from this stuff already, and then I look at her eyes and they are glazed a little and they look into mine and I don’t know how it is that I know but I do, because I never carried her face with me, except her eyes, and her eyes always seemed memorable from being like all the other eyes in this country, but now they’re before me and they’re Kim’s, the woman is Kim, and I’m taking all this in slow, and I hear Tien’s voice start up in Vietnamese and it is very distant and Kim’s eyes swing away from me. There is a moment now. Tien’s voice fades in my head but Tien remains, the smell of her and the press of her body remain, and I realize that I am complete. But I am complete only with her body and through her body, hers, my child’s, the body of my child, and Kim’s face is on her daughter and it stays and stays and there is no sound in the world and I am poised in some high place and will fall, but in this moment of suspension I am whole, at last, whole, and now in this moment a sound breaks in me, the South China Sea, and in this moment the dark beneath me is the dark of the shore beneath a golden moon, and Tien’s body is imprinted on mine, and in this act of our love, her heart and her mind and her voice are there too, and she is in my blood, and I am in her, in all ways in her, and from this moment, I feel the lift of my penis for her, and now it is a gesture that will tear us apart, my child and me, because it is for her that my body is doing this, for my child, and a terrible heat begins in that lift, in that place of my sex, a deep, hot roiling that spreads fast from my groin to my legs to my hands to my head and Kim’s face is on mine now and her eyes have gone wide and I look at my daughter, my lover, and my body yearns for hers, yearns even as this thing spreads through me like the fire that I wish had taken my father, taken him in that fiery hole and killed the seed of me that lies now inside my own child, my own.

Ben and I come out of the path and the house has two figures before it and my heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat and these figures are both women and they are coarse women, low-class women, drugging themselves with arcea and betel, and the house is ragged and of the worst construction, unplaned sticks and bamboo tied with palm cord, and I am not even looking at the faces of these women. There is a sour rushing in me, like the fumy wind of motorcycles in the city, and I want this over now. I say in my native language, “I am looking for Le Thi Huong.”

The face nearest me turns and the rushing stops. I go very still inside. Her eyes rise to me and they are blank. She does not recognize me. I was only a child when she last saw me. But I know this face. She is not dead. She has been crouching here all along, chewing and forgetting, and she saved her own life from a threat that never was, and after that, she wanted nothing from the past, including her daughter. And I have nothing to ask her now. Nothing to say. There is only one thing more and I do not even need her for this. Ben already knows she is a stranger to him. But I hear my voice shaping the words anyway. I say, “Do you know this man?” and I already know the answer and I will hear it and Ben and I will walk away and I will never tell her who I am.

I follow the movement of her face, the lift of her eyes, back to Ben, and I look at him and his eyes are wild, though they are fixed, fixed hard, not moving, but I feel the wildness behind them, and I look at my mother and her own eyes widen, as if she has looked into the morning sky and a great ragged body had suddenly appeared, blocking the sun, ready to fall with teeth and claws flashing, and they flash now in me, the shape falls into me and begins to slash away, and I turn to Ben one last time, desperate to see a flush of relief there, a laugh, but he turns his wild eyes on me, and they are so beautiful, these eyes, these dark eyes, all the gentleness I have ever dreamed of is here in these eyes, and my hands ache to plunge to that sweet hard center of him and draw his body into mine, at this moment, at this very moment, I want to cling to my father’s secret body, and I cry out, I hear myself cry a wordless thing and I know that whatever horror is in this sound, there is also my woman’s love for him, I ache as a lover for my father, and I break away and I move into the bamboo shade and I turn in the path and I am running now and my foot falls and falls and each fall strokes that secret part of my body and he is in my head and we are by the sea and it is night and he falls in me and falls and strokes and I burst from the path and across the little square and past the cistern and I know where I am going now and I pulse in my sex and I pulse there and I cry out again at this terrible thing and there is nothing to stop it but this thing I must do and I am in the path again leading from the village and then I am in the open field.

I slow, I slow, I quake in my sex and I am nearly blind from the sun here and I push my body on, I push on, and the South China Sea waits and my eyes clear and the sea is enormous and it is green darkness like the dark inside the banyan tree and I move and I think of my child and the quaking makes it hard to put one foot before the other now and this is the child of my father inside me, and this much the quaking knows, this much is clear in the secret path I follow now across this field: we cannot all of us remain here in this life together, we cannot remain.

And I move more quickly and the sea grows larger and the edge is near and the wind beats at me but I am stronger I will go now and the clean cut of the cliff edge will be mine, another step another and a hard thing suddenly circles me, an arm is around my waist and jerks me back and Ben’s voice is in my ear. “Tien.” And the arm loosens and I turn and his face is above me filling the sky and his eyes are deep and I could leap there, I think, I could drown there and he pulls back from me, only a little bit, only for a moment, and we are touching eyes we are touching still and I say the word I do not mean to say, I do not want to say, I say “Father,” and we try to hold on to that word, I feel him straining like me trying to hold that word between us and the ache is wild in me and I feel it in him and then we are in each other’s arms and our mouths are touching from that ache and from what I know is good-bye and I am ready to go but he says, “Only one of us, my darling,” and his arms slip away and he is a blur now I cannot move he turns and he steps and he leaps and he flies he flies and he is gone.