Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.

The only way Linh knew how to make the journey from his old life to a new one was to take one step, then the next, and then another. Now, when there was nothing left to save, he deserted. No longer caring what they did to him, he continued on the highway south, unmoored, for the first time in his twenty-five years of life utterly alone. Each day he ate one of Mai’s rice cakes, until the supply began to dwindle, and then he broke them in halves, and as the number grew smaller still, he broke the cakes into quarters and eighths, until finally he was eating only a few grains a day of Mai’s cakes, food that tasted of her and no one else, and then finally even that was gone.

During his first months in Saigon, he wandered the streets, working as a waiter in a restaurant, a shoeshine boy, a cyclo driver. No family, the things that had weighted his life buried. At night he felt so insubstantial he held his sides to make sure he himself didn’t blow away like a husk. The smells and tastes and sounds of the city entered him, but they did not become a part of him. His only thought was to earn enough for food and shelter, no more. By accident, he had lodged into an eddy of the war-to think of the future or the past was to be lost again.

In this vacuum, he grabbed for the lifeline of attending English lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon on his neighbor’s balcony. Although he was already fairly fluent from his father’s lessons, Linh went because it made him feel like a child again. Too, there was a more serious purpose: Linh’s father had been proficient in both French and English, telling his sons that in order to defeat them one must always know the language of one’s masters.

The teacher needed the small amount of piastres she earned giving lessons to support herself and her parents. She was a pretty young woman, the shape of her face reminding him of Mai. The hours he spent looking at her were like balm, and he made sure not to let his English exceed hers. Her mistakes charmed him. Instead of using “Don’t,” she said, “Give it a miss.” “Don’t go down the street” became “The street, give it a miss.” Dreaming of Mai, he wanted to give waking a miss.

In those first terrible months he listened to his sweet-faced teacher conjugate verbs: I am, you are, he is. The plan he came up with was to rejoin his unit in the army and volunteer for the most dangerous missions. Possibly managing to get killed within months if not weeks. We are peaceful, they are the enemy. We kill; they die. Honorable and efficient death. And yet although he was no longer afraid, he did not go.

On a day neither too hot nor too cold, when the sky was clear, and the sweet-faced teacher smiled at him on the stairs, Linh passed the office of an American news service and stood rooted to the spot as he recognized the name Life, handwritten on paper and taped to the window. A talisman from the day his real life disappeared. Give it a miss, his first thought, but instead he took this as a sign and walked in. He found a large American man hunched over his desk, his face shiny with sweat, staring at a stack of papers.

“You have a job?” Linh said. “I am a good friend of Mr. Darrow.”

Gary, the office manager, looked like the heat was boiling him from inside out; his potbelly pushed against his belt. He looked up at Linh and gave him a wide-toothed smile. “I didn’t know Darrow had any friends.” Always, he thought, in the nick of time, look at what the cat drags in. Within ten minutes, Linh was hired. That afternoon they were on a cargo plane bound for Cambodia.

Gary chewed away rapid-fire on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that literally poured off him with a big, soggy handkerchief. “Man, this is good. How did you find us? That office is just a temp space. This is like fate, kismet. If it wasn’t for you, it would be me lugging around his stuff.” Gary figured the young Vietnamese man’s reticence covered up something unpleasant that he would have to deal with later, like a criminal record. Too bad, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had a new assistant.

Linh said nothing. He stared out the cargo door at the jungle rushing beneath them, giving no sign that his stomach was in his feet, that this was the first time he had been in a plane.

They drove the empty, hacked roads, dust flying like a long sail of sheer red silk behind them, hanging suspended in the coppery sky.

“You’re right, absolutely. Enjoy the ride,” Gary said, agreeing with the continued silence. “People talk too much anyway.” He was a man who didn’t let his ego get in the way of the job. People didn’t question him as much if he acted like a cowboy and so he did just that. How could he operate if the staff guessed that he sweated each assignment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh’s silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole damned country was shell-shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.

By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment-cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.

Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room for the film. His brother, Veasna, tapped him on the calf with the leg of a tripod. “Complainer. But not when there is a tip.”

Linh sat in the shade, apart, and watched as Darrow painstakingly looked through his camera set on a tripod, moved away to make an adjustment, looked through the finder again, and at last pressed the cable release to snap the shutter, taking exposure after exposure of a bas-relief overhung by a cliff of rock that cast shadows on it. The joke among the workers was why so many pictures of a rock that hadn’t moved an inch in thousands of years? Linh calculated it would take more than an hour to go through a roll of film at that rate, the job potentially endless. Darrow made minute changes after each frame with infinite patience. Three men held a long piece of reflector foil, changing the angle an inch at a time.

During a break, the workers collapsed into the shade. Samang gossiped among his coworkers that the Westerners would kill them by working through the heat of the day. Darrow bellowed out a laugh and with his long strides moved to greet the new arrivals. He was even taller and thinner than Linh had remembered, as if his figure had attenuated during the months that had passed. Or had Linh’s misfortune bent him? Made him smaller in the world? He recognized the American’s large bony wrists.

Earlier at the office, Gary had drummed on his desk in joy when Linh said he had worked with Darrow. Everyone in the know avoided working with his star photographer, and Gary had been on the verge of locking up the office to go hump equipment himself when Linh turned up. He would not look this gift horse over too closely. Past assistants quit because Darrow insisted on covering the most dangerous conflicts, carried too much equipment, and worked them endless hours.

“You’re as red as a lobster!” Darrow said.

“The climate’s killing me. Look who I found!” Gary used a flourish of hands as if producing Linh out of smoke, trying to cover the sham. “Nguyen Pran Linh. Am I good or what?”