Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Much of Hua-ling’s correspondence and many of her transactions regarding their visas, it turned out, had been only imagined or dreamed. While Marie came to appreciate how bad off her mother had been immediately following the suicide, Hua-ling got even worse. She starved herself, took too many pills, passed out, swelled up — kidney problems were evidently killing her, and she could hardly drag her fattened legs beneath herself from one room in the apartment to another. Something happened to her sweat glands and she ceased perspiring, even on the muggiest days when the air conditioner was worthless. The hot weather drove her temperature up to nearly fatal levels, from which she shouted down at imaginary goblins in a fever-world, sometimes finding the crazed strength to move things around the living room, barricading the door or building herself small shelters from private, terrible eventualities. She couldn’t be left alone for more than a few minutes, and even so, one day Marie came back from shopping to find her mother stretched out and looking dead on the sidewalk in front of their building. She was alive, but from that day forward her English, formerly perfect, was so elementary she hardly ever spoke it. All day she smoked Peace, a Japanese brand of cigaret, and coughed with a tearing sound and beslimed hundreds of Kleenex tissues with the congestion from her nameless disease, scattering them like white blossoms over the tabletops. Often she had to take her breaths from a yellow compressed-air tank labeled “O 2.”

As the people of Saigon came to appreciate, against all belief, that they’d be abandoned by the Americans and eaten by the Communists, the city’s atmosphere grew much more crazed and scary. Marie dragged herself among government offices where the Vietnamese employees, some made rabid, others lobotomized by betrayal, failed to help her in the matter of visas. Everything that happened around the American Embassy was taken as a sign of hope or of disaster — a change in gate personnel, the early or late arrival of the gardener — and everyone had a theory or a rumor, but there was never any official news except what everyone knew just couldn’t be true: that nothing of significance had been decided; that things would go on as they had.

But the machines moved paper to the extent that such movement was possible, and on a day when the news was official, and Danang was falling and Saigon would certainly fall, and sources said there were no spaces on the flights, no flights, no way to get to the airport, no airport, no pilots left in the country, no planes, the papers arrived for Hua-ling and Marie. Marie raced back down Tu Do Street with the manila envelope soaking sweat under her blouse, restraining herself to a pace befitting business rather than panic, more terrified to have these precious papers, even, than she had been of the chance of never getting them.

She crossed Tu Do in the hope of skirting a group of six or seven ARVN officers who moved along the sidewalk with a shopping cart full of what seemed to be gold bullion. When they came to the broken curb of a cross street, four of them had to take hold of the heavy cart and ease it down, and then up over the next curb. The group stopped in front of a closed goldsmith’s, and one of the officers, who carried his sidearm unholstered, banged on the door with his free hand.

Marie turned left and got off Tu Do. The side street she entered was empty. Dressed in the anachronistic white suit of the tropic colonial, a man who made no sound of footsteps strolled toward her from its far end. Her father.

The heat of their surroundings smelled of fear, a humming, ozone fragrance. She stopped still and waited, stroked by its sickly fingers until she felt weak. He kept walking but got no closer.

When she moved back onto the larger street, the ARVN officers were out of sight inside the shop, and except for a patrol of their subordinates passing in a jeep, white-faced, weeping boys manning a high-caliber machine gun and draped with belts of its ammunition on the day of their defeat, the traffic seemed suddenly usual.

Mme. Troix bid Marie and her mother goodbye. She’d been on the phone, and was crying and dancing jerkily through the hallways in fear. “The big helicopter have seen leaving the roof of the U.S. Embassy. You see everything is finish! I have predicted it! I have predicted it!”

There were barricades up, she said, along all the roads between the city proper and Tonsonhut Airport. People from the countryside were crowding into Saigon. The American Embassy was being mobbed. She herself had made secret arrangements for Hong Kong. The black mascara streaked down her face as she cried and kissed them goodbye, because they’d all grown very close in Hua-ling’s illness, and Mme. Troix had been nursemaid, friend, and, finally, hysterically loyal family member, refusing to take herself out of the doomed city until she knew that Hua-ling’s and Marie’s papers had gone through.

Wiping her neighbor’s tears from her neck, Hua-ling seemed to grasp the situation for a moment. She wished Mme. Troix a passage without hazard, and gave her a black lace shawl for a gift of parting. But a stealthy satisfaction firmed the lines of her mouth, as if the end of things in Saigon was something she’d arranged single-handedly, to get back at everyone.

Were they on the boat yet? Where was Captain Minh? Grandmother went to take a sip of her tea, and it smelled amazingly like curry. Stuff was floating in it. it had turned into soup. A thin white hand set down a cup of rice next to it. Now arrives the metal spoon with the wooden handle. Now you’re going to put a napkin under my chin. “Let me put the napkin, Grandmother,” her grandson’s wife said. It had been like this for as long as Marie could remember.

But what had she been remembering? She couldn’t remember. The boat, the helicopter, the airport, the apartment — her mother, Hua-ling, standing next to her yellow oxygen tank with a cigaret lighter, threatening to blow up the world. “Where are you taking me?” she said in Chinese. She hardly ever spoke English anymore.

“America. A mer ica. Look — see? The apartment is empty. We don’t live here anymore,” Marie told her.

When she appreciated that they were leaving the city, Hua-ling dropped her cigaret lighter and found strength to gather up a nylon robe and put it on, moving with pale force, swimming through fuzz. She took from the black walnut table by the door a cigaret she’d been dealing with and abandoning for half an hour, while Marie hefted a suitcase holding a few essential items. “Do you have a match?” Hua-ling said. The power went off at that instant and the air conditioner ceased humming. Hua-ling looked around herself curiously, as if just getting there.

When they got outside, they found their neighborhood completely changed. The afternoon had surrendered any pretense of control. Marie choked on the smell of sweat, exhaust, and smoldering rubber — they were burning piles of garbage on Tu Do Street. In the movements of the people all up and down the thoroughfare — khaki or black or white movements, everyone seemed to wear khaki or black or white — everything was being done for the last time: people who for years had been the walking dead were now awake; eyes that had been filmed and cynical were glittering and blind with adrenaline.

Hua-ling, wearing a nylon robe the color of cream and spattered with coffee and whiskey, appeared alert and walked slowly on her own power. Marie wore her most businesslike dress and carried only one small suitcase, which she held in her lap in the crumbling taxi, sitting next to her mother in the back seat.

The taxi’s driver was afraid of the airport. When Marie told him to go there, he looked out his side window for other passengers, his nostrils widening and his wooden lips clamping shut. She offered him a wad of piasters without counting it, but he refused, talking in Vietnamese to this Eurasian girl, as everyone did.