Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Marie and her mother, Hua-ling, stood half out in the hallway listening to her complaints. Mme. Troix wore her hair in a bun pulled back tightly from her forehead, and it was there at the borders of her scalp that the perspiration seemed to start, collecting in tiny beads that grew pendulous and then plunged down — it was damp and hot everywhere; you had to move slowly on any errand. Having made herself into a collection of nervous disorders by worrying, Mme. Troix now hoped Hua-ling would assure her that things were fine. But Marie’s mother was far too polite to contradict her. Mme. Troix exclaimed something briefly in French, in the manner of someone dealing with an uncomprehending street vendor, and raced in tears down the stairs. No detail of this was unavailable to Grandmother Marie now, nine-tenths of a century later, even down to the three dull patches of sweat in the hollow of Mme. Troix’s back, along the spine of her nylon slip.

And next, within a few more minutes, Mme. Troix was back again, ushering up the stairs two policemen in khaki. They moved too quickly for normal people — they were part of this hallucinatory city, driven beyond all limits by the Americans, who ate up the time from under everything. The policeman in the lead held a shiny Baretta pistol on the flat palm of his hand, and he shoved it repeatedly toward her mother as if trying to get her to take it.

Hua-ling raised her hands above her head. So did Marie. Mme. Troix stopped fanning herself and stood still.

The policeman spoke in Vietnamese; the mother shook her head, because she couldn’t speak it; he insisted; she grew even more frightened.

And then he said in English, “This you hesbunt gun?” When she nodded, unable to find reason to deny it, he said, “Why he kill himself? Shot himself?”

“Who did?” Hua-ling Wright said. “Who shot?”

The second policeman abruptly turned on Mme. Troix with an intention of inspiring fear, and the fear on his own face was more intimidating than any trumped-up malevolence he might have managed to show her. She dropped her fan as if it were a weapon.

The first officer put the Baretta in his belt and said to Hua-ling Wright, “You come right away. Now. We get it taking care of, baby.”

“He’s work ing,” Hua-ling said. “He’s at work.”

When Hua-ling came back from identifying her husband’s body she seemed to have acquired the tight-faced, berserk efficiency of the two starched officials. The same darkness of trouble stained her eyes.

A cremation and funeral were arranged; today, however, in her life in the room off the damp kitchen and the rocking chair in the parlor, Grandmother remembered no cremation or funeral and wasn’t sure she’d attended any kind of ceremony for her father at all. What she remembered, instead, was a vision of him standing in their cramped living room next to the air-conditioning unit with a tumbler of Scotch whiskey and ice in his hand, letting the refrigeration spray over his face, ducking his head and reaching back to lift his collar and let the cool air spill under it onto the pale English flesh of his neck, while simultaneously, not three meters across the room, Hua-ling talked to herself angrily with a swollen and terrified face, ticking off the factors that kept them from joining her brother’s family in Seattle. Clearly Marie’s father was already dead in this picture. It was his ghost standing there in the room.

“Perhaps you’re saying that a squall took him off the boat,” her grandson Anthony said. There was a cup of tea before her, as motionless as a stump or a rock. If they were on a boat, the sea was calm today.

The boy was crying as if his own cup of tea were the origin of all the world’s torment. “It was the tiller,” the boy said.

Captain Minh nodded — he’d grown so old.

How long had they been on this boat? Hang on! Everything else is nothing. Remember that, remember that.

But she wasn’t on the boat yet. She was still in Saigon. She was trying to get to America.

Because Hua-ling’s brother was an American citizen, mother and daughter not unreasonably hoped to be granted visas by that country. Hua-ling managed to reach him in Seattle by telephone, an accomplishment demanding rare energies and a tremendous will; but the sense of dishonor surrounding the world, the troubled nature of anything to do with America, the people and things that wouldn’t behave, the official machinery that was out of synch, the frayed hearts, the broken faces, the ugly rules, all of these things kept them in Saigon when they should have been able to leave for Seattle right away.

The dry season ended and the rains began, driving the grease up out of the streets and tearing up the surface of any road that wasn’t concrete, and eventually eroding great potholes over which the taxis and personal sedans slammed obliviously. The drivers of mo-peds and Hondas careened among the chasms bearing a relentless faith in their immunity, while the bicyclists shrank themselves against the margin of whatever street and forged straight ahead. The traffic ate up the precious time and the pointless distance, the rain grated and sighed over everything, and in spite of her grief, to Marie Saigon was music.

Months later Marie saw the policeman again, the one who had pushed her father’s gun on her mother, looking almost the same. He stood in the midst of police barricades around some kind of accident, pointing his finger and shouting orders to a straining crowd of citizens who lurched forward dangerously against the wooden sawhorses, unbalanced by the weight of their curiosity. In a manner intended to startle them and keep them back, the policeman stamped his foot and gestured flagrantly toward the butt of his holstered pistol. It had rained, but it was clearing now, and one of the spectators poked his umbrella out of the group at the barricade like a rifle, and some people laughed hate-filled laughter at the policeman. Behind him an ambulance waited while a stretcher was being loaded through its open rear doors.

A mo-ped in perfect condition lay on its side near the ambulance. A street boy in khaki shorts, squatting like a monkey, wrestled with one of its saddlebags until another policeman, backing off from the ambulance, noticed and shouted something that drove him away.

Marie turned to see her father, tall and pale and caressed by a white shirt. He was sipping a cocktail among onlookers in a streetside bar, all of them mildly diverted from their own troubles by this anonymous street tragedy.

“Daddy!” Remembering the moment these many decades since, she couldn’t tell it from a dream.

“Daddy!”

Perhaps it had been only a dream.

He saw her but pretended not to. Rather than drinking his drink, his drink appeared to be drinking him. Rapidly he was consumed by it until the glass hung in the air and then exploded. A woman in a blue dress sat there instead of her father.

“Daddy?” she called. The khakied policeman looked up, the man who had held her father’s gun in his hands. He searched for the one who had called to him from the crowd.

Her mother went to sleep in her face, as a Chinese expression went, at about this time. Marie was surprised and confused to find one day that Hua-ling had produced an armor of lifelessness around herself. She’d transmitted to Marie the faith that to suffer over generations was unremarkable, and now because her husband had killed himself, one man in all this panorama of endlessly masticated hope, she collapsed inward like a dry toadstool and spoke neither yes nor no. She couldn’t think of going to Hong Kong, or even England, but only to her brother in America. Marie had to learn to care for herself and her mother, bargain with merchants, avoid traps, and navigate bureaucracies, while they all invented new ways of delaying her and she passed her sixteenth birthday.