Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

A gun went off at close range, but she would not turn to look. She pressed the Buddha against the roof of her mouth, clamped her teeth until she thought she felt them cracking, a salty wash of blood in her mouth mixing with the iron that had become a part of her. Her reporter’s mind registered surprise that they were using bullets, always special treatment for the foreigners. She heard a whimper-Matt’s-but still would not look, looking would make it real. No sound from Tanner; now it was just two of them. The air thick with the mineral smell of blood.

Far away a rumbling sound, but she was in a trance, searching for god or peace or grace or void, making amends for things she had or had not done. The sound grew closer, like a dream, and she wondered if it was her own heart, the sounds of her body rumbling apart.

The hard crack of another shot made her ears ring, and afterward silence, and she was alone. As alone as one could ever be in life, and bad as it was, she endured long enough to take another breath. In that moment, she mourned the loss of those two innocents more than all the other lives that had been lost because she had known better. A hot wetness at her groin as her bladder released.

She bit down on the Buddha, pain a relief, a trickle from her lips as her mouth filled with blood, when suddenly there were hands at her sides, and she was yanked by her hair roughly to her feet. Legs so weak she fell back to the ground, afraid of what they planned to do with her before she was killed.

A new voice entered her consciousness, and when she braved turning her head, she saw a dusty pickup truck had pulled up next to the smoldering station wagon, and a middle-aged man had taken command of the group. Helen closed her eyes again. Her greatest wish that death would simply come fast now.

A hard shove at her back with the length of a rifle, and she was lifted to her feet. She stumbled forward, took one step, then another. Gravel bit her feet, but she did not register it as pain but simply as life. Life, beyond good or bad. No one followed her, no one at her side: They were playing with her, forcing her to march with them and have her later, and she wished to move faster, to run, but could barely manage a slow stagger of a walk down the middle of the empty road. Her ears still rang with the distancing sound of the fired shots, her two innocents gone, and she could hear the soldiers arguing behind her, and she willed herself to move faster but was unable.

She closed her eyes and saw herself rising into the air until she was flying. Had the winged thing already come? Ahead Angkor. Everything below-the road, the soldiers, the burning car, the two prone bodies-as faraway and unreal as the tiger that had appeared below the Loach that long-ago day. Time permeable. As real as the burning road under her bare feet, Darrow standing at the entrance to one of the temples, appearing as he had when she flew down to the delta to meet him. He wore his white short-sleeved shirt, eyes hidden behind glasses, and raked his good hand through his hair, his other arm still unhealed in its sling.

Helen took a bigger step forward and tripped over a stone, losing her balance, but she would not stop or open her eyes, afraid to lose her vision of him, afraid to look behind at the boy soldiers still arguing, but if she had, she would have seen two of them separating and jogging toward her, easy and carefree as two ravenous young wolves.

She choked on the Buddha, sharp gravelly pieces in her mouth that felt like bits of teeth or clay. Dust to dust, and weren’t the teeth always the last to go? Her eyes closed so small and tight she could barely see. Afraid of death and yet not afraid, already inside it and moving through it. It would come and had already come a thousand times. She breathed relief at the thought that she was soon done with it.

She remembered the pictures of the Angkor bas-relief “The Churning of the Ocean of Milk,” which Darrow and Linh had photographed years before she had loved either of them. Devils and gods churning the waves and fighting each other to extract the elixir of immortality. Violence had poisoned them all, Linh the least.

Poisoned Darrow.

And she, become Darrow, poisoned her.

A sudden clarity that he had been poisoned before she met him. His spell on her broken. She didn’t want to join him on the temple steps; she knew what that burning brightness ahead was, death, and an invitation to join him in it. During her blindness, Linh there from the beginning, guarding her, and now she wanted only to live.

Would Linh know-she wanted him to know-that she did not go lightly, that she was not willing, that despite what it looked like, he had changed her and made her brave in all the ways she wasn’t before, and if there was one last wish granted, she wanted him to know that she did not choose this.

She struggled to a half jog, determined that she could survive from mere desire.

The sound of running footsteps behind her, the flat slap of peasant sandals made of tires. A hard swing of a metal object across her back threw her facedown on the ground, unable to move. Her cheek and forehead burned. Air filled with blood. She was lifted to her knees. A soldier from behind grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, ripping out a fist of golden strands.

And then she closed her eyes, and they could no longer touch her. She no longer embraced what they threatened. Linh was there, and when she reached for his hand, her own had become stiff and brittle, her arms become branches, and from her knees to her groin to her belly to her breasts came a covering, an armor of gnarled bark, and her hair, when she reached for it, had the aspect of leaves. She opened her eyes, alive, and she turned to look deeply and without fear into her boy soldier’s face.

She was in a state between dream and reality when she heard the chanting. They carried her back to the prone forms of Matt and Tanner, the new leader giving directions, and a miracle she couldn’t fathom, Matt no longer dead but now sitting up, pressing his bleeding arm against his side. She huddled against him as the boy soldiers approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, in some kind of victory ritual, chanting. The riddle of the dream at last-a premonition.

Then the leader came and knelt down to look at Helen, and her mouth so full of liquid she gagged, spitting out Buddha and fragments of stone. The man picked up the small medallion and stared at her in wonder.

One Heart

When Linh arrived at Camp Pendleton, he was weak in body and spirit. Helen’s mother, Charlotte, recognized him from pictures, and they hugged as if they had known each other for ages, grief providing an instant history and bond. He was her only real link left to family. She had buckled him into the passenger seat of her Buick and driven up the coast to her home.

The wideness of the freeway, the speed at which the car traveled, dizzied him, and he forgot his tiredness, he was so taken up by his new country. More than its differences, he was struck by its likenesses. Just as in Vietnam, this was a place of land, dat, and water, nuoc. Ocean on one side, the grassy, burned foothills on the other; they passed all the things that Helen had promised him they would see together-dark groves of avocado and orange, small towns of white houses with red-tiled roofs, signs with the names of towns he remembered from her lips: San Clemente, Laguna, San Juan Capistrano. And then without warning they rounded a gentle curve, and as far as the eye could see were golden poppies.

“Gary contacted me, Linh. He overheard two other reporters talking to Helen about driving through Cambodia to get out of Vietnam. All three were gone the next day. No one has heard a word since then.”