Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Stop,” Linh pleaded, and Charlotte, alarmed, pulled over on the gravelly shoulder. He tugged at the seat belt and threw open the passenger door, and she thought he was going to be sick, when he ran into the field and fell on all fours and bowed his head. Confused, she warily got out of the car, but he was oblivious to her, eyes filled with the flowers, his hands tearing at the soft orange petals within his reach.

On his first day in California, despite his exhaustion, he begged Charlotte to take him to Robert’s office in Los Angeles.

Robert stood up from his desk, smiling, came around to give him a hug, but Linh was all business, not acknowledging the view out the window, twenty stories up, the highest building in the biggest city he had ever been in.

“I need to go to Thailand,” Linh said.

Robert winced. “You look like you need a hospital.” It had been more than seven years since they’d last met, and yet Linh acted as if it had been only yesterday. Was it the effect of the war that collapsed time? Robert could not account well for the last years in Los Angeles, yet his two years in Vietnam were as deep as a full lifetime. While Robert had grown plump, Linh was thin as a wire, as if all excess had been melted off him. The intensity of his eyes made the room suddenly too small.

“Helen went to Cambodia,” Linh said in a tone like defeat. “I have to find her.”

Robert had never gotten to know him that well; he had never really gotten to know many of the Vietnamese well during his time there. The whole country had remained a cipher to him. Too, Linh was always part of Darrow and Helen, and he recognized their willfulness and determination in him. For the first time, it occurred to him that the three of them were alike and had merely found one another in Vietnam. They had shared some understanding and obsession about the war, and he had never had a chance of befriending any of them. They had merely tolerated him.

“No way I can send you. It would be criminal in your state.”

“You cared for her, too.” Linh said it as accusation, but Robert’s failure with Helen had been part of a larger failure of nerve.

“Her choice to stay on and then go to Cambodia. If that’s what she’s done.”

Robert treated him with a politeness that masked disdain, a condescending sense of him as the Other. But he was a man of honor. Linh could bargain on that. Even at the beginning, Linh hadn’t understood his letting Helen go without a fight, although the fight was clearly lost. Only a madman insisted on a fight impossible to win. Yet what kind of man used logic in matters of the heart?

“Over the years, I’ve developed contacts,” Linh said. “I’ll need your help now to use them.”

Robert said nothing. “There always was gossip.”

“People love rumors, plots. They always prefer the more complicated explanation.”

“I’ll say it again. It was her choice.”

“It’s my choice, also, to go. I need a press pass and a plane ticket. I need you to send some messages.”

Robert sighed. Suddenly he felt less good than he had in all the time since he had been back; something about Linh’s passion that was like a burning, the timbre of his voice in the room, how it changed the room physically. The thought, sacrilegious, crossed Robert’s mind that perhaps he had missed something during his years in Vietnam, that perhaps by protecting himself too well from being involved, he ended up not being involved in the world at all. But he hurried away from this line of thought because it was indeed too late; as much as he might have loved Helen, he would be loath to consider getting on a plane now. He realized with a shock of sadness that he was incapable of action. “If I sent you, you’d have to promise to stay in Thailand.”

“Do I strike you as the kind of man to take unnecessary risks?”

“For her,” Robert said, the answer too quick. “Give me a hint what’s going on.”

“Certain people will be interested in the death of a drug lord, a Mr. Bao, seven years ago.”

“Old news. Who cares?”

“Mr. Bao was a businessman. An associate transferred all his drug money to a bank in Thailand. Lots and lots of money. A fortune. Blood money. Revolutions need financing.”

“You are that associate? I could get fired,” Robert said. “The magazine could be discredited.”

“Yes, you could.” Linh sat back for a minute, grimacing at the pain in his side that had started up again. “I lied to Helen. I told her that one needed to perform triage during the war, save what could be saved. But now I know differently. Sometimes you have to try even when there is no chance.”

Robert nodded and turned away. “Find her.”

The ostensible story was that Linh was sent to cover the exodus out of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover. He grabbed it like a lifeline. But breaking back into the NVA network proved all but impossible. Mr. Bao had made certain that Linh officially didn’t exist. The NVA would never trust a contact with him.

Linh had lost his faith long ago. But now something worthy of faith occurred. For a time after the filming at Angkor, Linh had kept in touch with the boy Veasna, followed his fledging photography career with the gift of Darrow’s Rollerflex. They had become lost to each other since, but as Linh began to dig and grasp at any straw that might save Helen-a miracle. Veasna had become involved with the nationalist movement, the Khmers. Anyone on the outside would assume his anti-Americanism, but Linh understood about the gray areas of patriotism. Veasna had risen to a fairly high position. And he remembered their kindness. A camera and money when his family had nothing. Contact to the Cambodians had been achieved; he had found out that Helen and Matt were being held hostage. Money was discussed. There was never any guarantee what would actually happen. The original idea of holding the money until Helen was given up had to be abandoned. Now, bribes paid, it became an act of faith.

In Thailand, Linh went to the border and looked through his binoculars at lands now as inaccessible as the dark side of the moon, the blank part of a map. Looking for something more elusive than a tiger. The remaining Westerners in Phnom Penh, mostly diplomats and journalists, were being convoyed to the Cambodian border town of Poipet to be turned over for release. Helen and Matt were supposed to be thrown into this group and be smuggled across. Hours later, when the group crossed to freedom in small, defeated clusters, they were not among them.

Linh stayed at the border long after everyone else had left. His eyes smarted from staring down the dusty, hazy road, willing her shape to materialize on the horizon, as if his very wanting would make it so. He planned to cross into Cambodia that night under cover of darkness to find her. It was not his country; he was unfamiliar with the land and the language. Chances were he would not survive beyond a few days.

Returning to town, trying to bribe a guide, he sat in one of two restaurants on an empty street in town, ordered a beer and a meal, and as he waited for his contact, he overheard one of the Westerners from the release talking loudly as he stuffed food in his mouth. Linh heard a few French-inflected sentences and turned to stare at him, at his young face, with long brown hair and beard. As he listened the restaurant grew unbearably hot, the beer tasted bitter, and finally he set down the bottle and stood unsteadily and walked up to the man’s table.

“Did you see a woman named Helen?” Had his contacts lied to him? Taken the money and run? Had something gone wrong?

Frightened, the man looked up at him, and Linh realized he had been wrong, that despite the youth and loudness, this man cared enough to remain at the border waiting for those who had not come out. “No. No one by that name. Still some of our Cambodian people haven’t been released. I don’t think they will be. We wait. There is a rumor of another release tomorrow morning.”