Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Skip’s new home had running water from a tank on its roof as well as indoor plumbing, a bathroom downstairs with toilet and sink, and upstairs another with toilet, bath, and bidet, and wallpaper depicting mermaids, burnished by a strange mold. When he opened the shutters in this bathroom, half a dozen moths flew out of the toilet bowl and attached themselves to his scalp.

Nothing electric. He had butane lamps with copper shades, and rooms of rattan furniture shedding its finish in flakes. If rain came, and it would come daily for months now, there were wooden louvers to wind shut. Small leaks came down through the upstairs into several lacquer bowls set around the parlor. But the house was well situated for the breezes and had a homey feel. Things were sensible here. They spooned the salt and pepper out of tiny cups, like sugar, rather than clumping it into shakers; and his bed upstairs took up a screened corner of the house just off the modest master suite, open to every movement of the sultry night atmosphere.

By the day’s last light he toured the villa, a two-story structure mainly of a damp, rough material like concrete or adobe. Small black wasps crawled in and out of bullet holes in the outer walls—during the time of the French, the region had seen battles. A concrete gutter ran around the foundation of the house and carried off the rain into a fat, slow creek in a gulley behind the grounds. He had a look down there: adventurous children sailed past on water wings patched together out of absolutely any buoyant thing—kindling, coconuts, palm fronds—calling out to him.

The villa’s owner, a French physician, had passed away leaving, as Sands understood it, no trace of his physical body other than a film on the walls of a tunnel, but his shoes stood by the front door in a row, three pairs, sandals, slippers, bright green rubber boots. His walking shoes had disappeared with the rest of him. The physician, a Dr. Bouquet, had arrived from Europe early in the 1930s with a wife who had returned, according to the papasan, Mr. Tho, very shortly to Marseilles, and of whom no evidence remained anywhere in the house, unless she’d chosen the wallpaper in the upstairs bath, the innumerable tarnished mermaids. But the absent doctor constituted a pervading presence; since the day of his death nothing had been done with anything, all of it waited. In his high-ceilinged study off the living room the surface of his massive mahogany desk hid under books and journals held down by a porcelain model of the human ear—inner and outer—with detachable parts, an inkwell, an ashtray, and so on, his rack of three meerschaum tobacco pipes turned at a slight angle, shreds of newsprint or coarse, beige toilet paper marking places in several books stacked beside it, one of these pages surely holding the last word he’d read before he’d set his glasses aside, gone out walking, and been vaporized. Except for the clutter of his studies the office was clean and neat, the furniture draped with pages of the Saigon Post and Le Monde and the shutters closed. Skip pried gently under the covers of the books, careful not to shift their places, as if the owner might come checking. The physician had been cruel to the pages—tea stains, inky fingerprints, lengthy passages outlined boldly. Each volume bore inside its front cover the inscription “Bouquet” in an identical hand above

the date of its purchase. He failed to find a single one without it. In addition the doctor had collected seventeen years of Anthropologe, a book-sized periodical, sixty-eight numbered issues with paper covers of heavy stock, all beige. And several scholarly reviews, each bound by year in the same brown paper. A damp, burgundy-cloth-bound Nicholas Nickleby was the only book in English. Skip had read it in college and could remember nothing about it except that somewhere in its pages Dickens called human hope a thing “as universal as death.”

In a week Hao came out again, as promised, delivering many flattened cardboard boxes for Dr. Bouquet’s effects, along with Skip’s mail. He was glad for the boxes—he hadn’t asked for them, Hao had just guessed. There was a crazy, despairing letter from Kathy Jones. Apparently these days she acted as liaison between the ICRE and several orphanages, and her life now, the things she witnessed, had turned her Calvinist fatalism— or, Skip thought, her fatal Calvinism—completely black:

Maybe I shouldn’t read certain things. But I might as well tell you I came to believe in it some time ago, even before I learned for sure that Timothy was dead. Certain people are fated from the foundation of the world to spend eternity in Hell, and I say they never even get a taste of regular life, but just begin their Hell right at birth, we’ve seen that, you’ve seen it at least in Damulog, I know, and if you’ve come to Vietnam, you’re seeing it in technicolor no doubt and I pity you, but I laugh.

Maybe some are in Heaven, some in Hell, some in the Limbo Zone, or maybe the worlds get separated geographically—in fact, did I tell you I found the reference to “different administrations” you asked about when we made love night after night in our own little psychedelic passion pit in Damulog? First letter to the Corinthians, was it Chapter 12?

Right-I’ve checked now, 12:5&6.

But I didn’t recognize the quote because it’s from the King James and I’m used to my Revised Standard which says, “And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.” So “administrations” is more properly translated as

“service”—it doesn’t refer to some angelic governmental ordering, get it? I wish you were here to talk to, but we didn’t talk much, did we? Every time we got together we ended up quickly “getting together.” hardly know you. But I write to you. Are you even reading this?

As a matter of fact, no. No.

Between downpours a breeze off the creek cowed the bugs and kept the study cool. He spent the evenings in the doctor’s shot-silk robe, inquiring among the doctor’s library of some eight hundred French titles, and, at first, hardly ever ventured beyond the grounds.

He busied himself recovering to the third dimension the flattened cardboard boxes. Also Hao had brought a roll of gummed paper tape, turned by this weather into a solid wheel, all stuck together, completely useless. Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.

He sent Mr. Tho to the village shop for string and told Mrs. Diu he was heading to the local priest’s for tea. Pčre Patrice’s small house lay a hundred meters off the main street, down a pathway marked by tattered boards bridging the puddles.

Pčre Patrice traveled around the district a lot, and Sands hadn’t passed much time with him. Sands hadn’t revealed himself as a Catholic. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Maybe, he thought, I’m tired of my faith. Not because it’s been tested and broken, like Kathy’s. Only because it’s gone unexercised. And the small open-air church, a tin roof on wooden poles on a concrete slab, is this where the drama of salvation plays out? Sands found the priest, a tiny man in his tiny garden. Pčre Patrice had a round, simian face. More nostril than nose. Huge reptilian eyes. Beyond exotic, he looked like a man from outer space. He brought his guest hot tea in a water glass. They sat in the garden on damp wooden benches while the recent rain dripped from the tall poinsettias. Sands tried his Vietnamese.

“Your pronunciation is good,” the young man said, and then spoke incomprehensibly for half a minute —Skip had already practiced his Vietnamese with the villa’s two servants and found it hopeless.

“Fm very sorry. I don’t understand. Can you please speak more slowly?” “I will speak more slowly. I’m sorry.” There was a silence between them. “Will you kindly repeat your statement?” ‘Tes, of course. I said I hope your work will go well here.” “I believe it’s going well, thanks.” “You are with the Canadian Ecumenical Council.” “Yes.” “It is a project of Bible translation.” “We have many projects. That is one project.” “Are you one of the translators, Mr. Benęt?” “I’m trying to improve my Vietnamese. It’s possible I’ll help later on