Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

The crew chief gave her a thumbs-up and passed her a flask, and she took a long drink of whiskey, drank it down like water, only the good burning sensation down her throat registering. They flew high above the jungle canopy, out of reach of danger, and Helen wished the flight would never end, that they would never have to come down and touch earth again.

When she got out of the helicopter, Robert was waiting for her in a taxi. “Tell me everything. Olsen already radioed the incident in. I’m writing the story while the photos are developed. The package needs to be couriered to Hong Kong ASAP. The censors will never transmit it out.”

She stood in the darkroom, the size of a closet, bumping her head on shelves filled with plastic chemical bottles, watching Arnie, the wire’s office manager, develop the film. He said it was too important to let her or the assistants do it. Arnie was potbellied and married, his wife and kids back home in London. The office’s assortment of freelancers were his misfit orphans. He had spent a lot of time explaining composition technique to Helen.

“You’re catching on, damn it!”

The pictures were properly framed and shot, a whole sequence from alive to dead villager, and then a muzzle below the outraged face of Captain Tong, the end of the gun pointed straight at the camera and the person behind it.

Looking at the pictures, Helen broke out in shivers again, seeing what had been invisible before, a devouring shade as if a cloud had passed before the sun-the mystery she was chasing, the one she’d glimpsed at MacCrae’s funeral. Now she understood what he’d said to her that night: that the mystery came in its own language to each person, and you had to decipher it on your own. She had been so scared at the moment she might as well have been blind.

“Too bad,” Arnie said. “This kind of work under pressure. Incredible. So good they’re probably going to throw you out of the country, and I’ll lose another promising photographer.”

“They’re good?” The tension in her body unspooling fast now.

“I wouldn’t have believed it without seeing them. But I talked to the office in New York, who said if they were half as good as they sounded, they’d think over offering you a full-time job with the wire service.”

“Are they half as good?” Part of the dread those last few months had been the fear that she was incapable of doing what she had come for, that she would be found lacking. As a freelancer, she could stay out as long as it took to get a shot. Captain Tong had just happened, her actions unpremeditated. Now would she feel the pressure to take such risks again and again?

“Two hundred percent as good. I might even have to give you a raise to thirty per shot. Don’t get greedy.”

She frowned. “They can’t throw me out now, can they?”

“They can. They’ve done it to others.”

“Okay.” That was enough for now.

“I agreed to share the pics with Life. If that’s okay by you. They can print the whole series in next week’s issue. That philistine, Gary, pays a bit more than we do. You can actually survive on what they pay.”

Helen nodded, unhearing, and left the darkroom for the office’s tepid air-conditioning and lumpy couch. She stretched out and plunged into a dreamless sleep.

That night Helen met Robert in the bar of the hotel. He was a little bit amazed and a little bit delighted but mostly afraid for her.

The tables were crowded, spilling out along the sidewalk. The city’s electricity had gone out, and the room was lit by oil lamps, opening out onto the dark street. After her night out in the rain, the city felt luxurious even in the dark in a way no city had ever felt before. Waiters floated between the tables with small flashlights. Everything seemed uniquely fine. She felt at ease, perfectly in the moment. The danger of the incident with Tong faded into the background, and all that was left was her shining invincibility.

A bottle of champagne appeared, and the old Vietnamese bartender in his white coat opened it with great ceremony, nestling it in a bucket on the corner of the bar. Robert and she toasted, and at her insistence, the bartender joined them for a glass. Ed and some of the other journalists came by and stopped to congratulate her.

Matt Tanner came and stood behind her. He was a recent ex-Marine who had re-upped so many times the joke was that the Marines had finally thrown him out. The rumor was that he simply loved war too much and brought his bloodlust along with him to journalism. He was always competitive when another reporter did well, as if they were stealing his chance at glory. When he was jealous and drunk, which he was at present, his face thinned to an even more wolflike aspect.

“Nice little publicity stunt this morning. Who’d you pay to snap the pics, huh?”

“Get lost, Tanner,” Robert said, standing up.

“G.I. Jane, eh? Nice angle.”

“Maybe you should take a break from trampling over other people’s backs to get the story first,” Helen said.

“Nice talking to you,” Robert said to him. “Sorry you have to go.”

Tanner squinted at Robert, deciding if he was in the mood for a brawl. “All I’d like to know is who she had to screw this time.”

“Why?” Helen said. “Do you want his number?”

“That’s enough,” Robert said.

“We all know you’re not getting it from Bobby here,” Tanner said, and stalked out of the bar.

Robert sat back down on the bar stool, emptied his glass, and poured another.

“I wish the Marines would take him back,” Helen said.

“I’m your friend. It’s none of my business about you and Darrow. But you have to be careful. Tanner is a competitor. Not like me, too scared to leave Saigon and the official junkets. There’s going to be sore feelings if you don’t sweeten up.”

“You’re smart enough not to need the attention.”

Robert stiffened. “You don’t have to throw me a bone.”

Helen drank down her glass and looked into the bottom as if she might find answers down there. “If I was a guy, you wouldn’t tell me to worry about sore feelings.”

“If you were a guy, I’d tell you to punch him out. But I’ll tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t have bought this bottle of champagne, either.”

Helen laughed. This charade of light flirtation was necessary for both of them. “Can I admit something? Just between us? This feels good.”

“Enjoy it. You earned it. But be prepared.”

“What for?”

“For what comes next.”

In the morning her pictures and story headlined across a dozen front pages worldwide. Life magazine bought the series of photos and planned to use one as the cover for the following week; the contributor’s notes touted her as their first woman combat photographer for the Vietnam war.

She stared at her name in print with a feeling of relief that now she could stay on, no longer a joke. Six months before, no one would have believed her capable of this. Her only background a high school photography class and some work on the college newspaper taking pictures of football games. In a way, she had not believed it herself, but now she felt a sense of belonging to a fraternity, even if it was one that wasn’t sure it wanted her. As time went on, she would find herself welcomed and ignored in equal mea sure.

The nerve that she had hit was not the atrocity of the killing of the old man, which was a routine horror, nor the evidence that the SVA had run amok and was alienating the civilian population. Not even the angle that America was supporting dubious allies. Her plea sure started to chip away as she realized they were using Captain Tong threatening a woman photographer, an American civilian, to sensationalize the story. Her being a woman was the story.