Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Pass on the food. Bring the check,” Darrow said.

“Anyway, we can’t leave. Linh and I are scheduled out with Olsen’s unit day after tomorrow.”

Darrow drank down half his glass in one gulp. “I need to go back to Angkor. I’ve been here… too long.”

“What you need is to eat. You’re drunk.” He was childish and petulant, and she was bewildered by the change that had come over him. She saw this as a version of her own fear, and she tried to help him with her own mantra, Fear is not an option.

“We need to get back what we had in the village,” Darrow said.

“But the village was a lie, wasn’t it?”

Tanner scanned the tables and saw the three of them, changed direction, and walked the long way to a table in the back.

“You know what your problem is?” Darrow said, hunching his back against Tanner’s presence, running his finger down the center of the table as if tracing a line of thought. “You should have been an accountant. You can take pictures, but you take them like an accountant.”

Linh stood. “I am busy tomorrow. See you early on Friday?”

Helen ignored his effort to escape. “You know what you have, Sam? The great white correspondent’s ego. When did it all get to be about you? What you did today was all about you and Tanner, not those people. Poor you.”

Across the room, Tanner’s loud bark of a laugh rang out as people joined his table. Darrow flinched as if from a sharp slap and kept glancing over his shoulder. “He makes me feel like a ghoul. Feeding off people’s suffering. I’m tired… sick to death…”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t leave. This is my chance now,” Helen said, and in spite of her pity for him, she felt strong.

“You’re lucky. I was like you once. I didn’t care for a long time.”

Helen threw bills down on the table, wanting to leave before he caused more of a scene. “Help me out, Linh.”

Darrow dropped his hands into his lap. “I made a fool of myself. I know that.”

Linh laid a hand on his shoulder, then turned to leave, wanting no part in Helen’s hardness.

One of the street children, a young girl who regularly sneaked in, ran through the restaurant waving a twenty-dollar bill. “Thief!” A waiter grabbed her, lifting her feet from the floor, and she shrieked.

“He give, he give,” she cried, pointing. In the back of the room, Tanner stood and motioned the waiter over.

“Yes, I did. Just a little present, okay? It’s hers,” he said to the dining room at large, then turned and shrugged to his companions. “Maybe I should hire a cyclo to take her home? Or better yet, drive it myself.”

They had to drag Darrow out, as he muttered expletives behind him. On the street, Helen waved down a taxi. They arrived at the mouth of the alley, the meeting place of silk and lacquered bowl streets. The depression in the road was dry, and they walked through it and on to the crooked building, Darrow’s arm around Helen’s shoulder, half protecting, half supported.

They lay under the mint green bedspread, the light of the lampshade warming the shimmering expanse of silk and the barren room beyond it.

“One mission is blending into another. It’s time for me to leave. I have nightmares.”

Helen laid her head on his chest. “Watching Tanner made me sick, too. Forget him.” She wanted to say something that would help, but he was so far away from her now.

Darrow moved up on his elbow and put his hand across her throat. “What’s there to do other than war? It’s become my life.”

Helen held his hand against her mouth, kissing each fingertip. “I’m your life.”

“I don’t know how to repair.” He had never spoken like this before, and she wondered what she would do if he said the words she had so long waited for.

“My family’s name was Koropec… Hungarian. I was fifteen when I decided I was going to be a famous American war photographer. And famous American war photographers didn’t have names like that. I made myself into Sam Darrow. Who am I if not that name? Now I have to live up to it.”

“Says who?”

He lay back in the pillows. “If only I had met you twenty years ago.”

“We met now. That’s worth something. I’m the accountant, remember?”

Dawn lit the sky outside the bedroom window. The leaves of the flamboyant fluttered, somnolent in the last of the night breeze. Helen woke to a noise and saw Darrow sitting at the window, smoking, an ashtray full of cigarettes at his feet.

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

“I left a will at Gary ’s office a few weeks ago.”

Now Helen woke up fully, scared. “Morbid conversation first thing in the morning.”

“It’s not… The reason I’m telling you is that it caused a rumor that I had some kind of death wish. It’s just that if something did happen, I don’t want to be buried. A phobia.”

“It’s bad luck to talk-”

“My scaredy-cat. It’s the reality. I’m wagering to live to be an old man.”

She rolled off the bed and pulled clothes off the chair to slip on. Since the previous night she had been formulating a kind of equation: the idea that leaving to save Darrow would allow her to leave Vietnam without guilt. A chance. “Don’t you wonder if it’s worth it?”

“Every time I go out. Wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t. No one wants to say it, but husband, father… none of that stuff is important in the war. Otherwise, why are we here?”

“We’ll take the next plane out. You said yourself you’ve been here too long.”

Darrow nodded his head and stubbed out his cigarette. “We might,” he said, then softened it. “We could. Soon.”

Journalist

On the morning Helen was to go out on patrol with Olsen, she woke and packed, ready for Linh to pick her up at three-thirty in the morning. She opened the door to a soft knock.

“I have a problem,” Linh said, standing there. “Family. Sister-in-law, her baby has croup. She is new to Saigon. I must help her find a doctor.” He had never talked of family before, and she was surprised.

“Sure. Can I help?”

“No. Can you go without me?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

Darrow struggled out of bed in the darkness behind her. “What’s wrong?”

Helen picked up her camera bags. “Linh can’t go.”

Darrow rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses. “Come with me instead to My Tho this afternoon.”

“I promised to cover this. Besides, I’ll be with my old buddies, Captain Olsen’s unit. I haven’t seen him since the Captain Tong pictures.” She felt confident that she could handle herself and also a small excitement proving she could go it alone. Now that it had been decided that they would leave soon, these final missions took on a feeling of nostalgia.

Darrow frowned and looked at Linh. “You sure you can’t go with her?”

“I’m fine.” She resented his treating her like she wasn’t competent enough to go alone and now was more determined than ever. Besides, giving him some of his own medicine might make things move faster to leaving.

After Linh left, Darrow sat in the bed and watched her pack the additional equipment she would have to carry alone. “Don’t go,” he said.

“You’re being silly.”

“For me.” He hadn’t intended it, but now it was a kind of test.

A test she wouldn’t take. “Remember asking why the people supposed to love us the most are the ones who try to stop us doing what we love?”

He had met his match and didn’t much care for it.

Problems plagued the assignment immediately. At Bien Hoa, one helicopter after another was diverted or canceled so that she didn’t make it to the small village where Captain Olsen’s unit was stationed until late afternoon.