Haunted Worlds Page 10
On another street corner, a monk sat in his saffron robe, also as a beggar, his head shaven and his face horribly scarred by fire so that it looked like melted wax, his lower lip hanging grotesquely, his eye sockets flat patches of flesh. No doubt a victim of napalm, like herself, but Lan then wondered if he might have failed at self-immolation.
But this morning, in the deep blue murk before dawn, she saw the black man again. Maybe he too had taken a couple of days off from working, if he worked, or begging or scavenging or stealing. This time he was reclining on the sidewalk, propped up on his elbows watching the motorbikes and occasional truck rumble past. Had he slept in that spot last night, or was he only resting a while before he resumed his ceaseless wandering?
Lan experienced the odd impulse to pull her bike up to him and stop. But what would she say? And could he even carry on a coherent conversation? She remained frightened of him. And yet, she felt compassion for this unruly spirit.
She rode past him, continuing on her way to her job, but at that moment she had an inspiration. Because the man was obviously the child of an American, she had decided she wanted to give him a Christmas present.
*
With Christmas only a couple of days away, she couldn’t wait until her next two days off to buy the man’s gift, and she didn’t want to ask for another day off when her cousin depended on her so. She decided to keep on the lookout for some shop along her way to the market that might open early for business. Otherwise, she’d have to hope to find a shop that stayed open later than Nhu’s restaurant did. Maybe one of Saigon’s large night markets, which blazed and bustled past midnight, with their rows of food stands and diverse wares spilling out from under awnings?
Working in the cramped kitchen, soaked from steam and sweat, she wondered what she might buy the man, never having bought a Christmas present before. Although he might welcome some money in a little envelope, such as people gave out at Tet, that didn’t seem personal enough to her. Money would simply be like just another throwaway to a beggar.
She also wondered what she might say to him as she presented this gift. With her scar-tightened lips, she felt more than awkward speaking with people, and though she believed she might feel less self-conscious speaking with this particular person, that might not prove to be the case when she was actually standing before him.
And then she asked herself what exactly she hoped to achieve by giving the man a gift. Did she expect the gesture to soothe his savage heart, calm his bedeviled soul, if only briefly or fractionally? Did she even think her offering might touch him so deeply that his response would be to love her? Love this frightful woman, whom no man had ever loved?
This last fancy caused Lan to go hot in the face with embarrassment, shocked at herself and cursing her childish imagination for slipping its reins. She was only contemplating an act of kindness toward another human being, who looked as though he might benefit from kindness. Should there be any more reason than that simple human connection?
*
On the morning of the 23rd, Lan caught a glimpse of him again as she buzzed past on her Honda. His back was to her, but she recognized his defiant stride, his wooden staff. He was turning into a narrow side street, not far from the stretch of sidewalk where she had seen him those two other times.
She felt the impulse to turn her bike around and follow him, to see if he lived or worked down that way—if he really lived or worked anywhere—but she had already gathered her supplies for the day and Nhu would be waiting for her back at the restaurant, where things had to be prepped before they opened for business. So instead, Lan simply made a mental note of which side street it was.
*
That night, when Nhu had closed up the restaurant, Lan made an excuse about wanting to look for a new pair of sandals and then hurried on her motorbike to a night market, as she had earlier considered. Other night markets in the city might stay open to 2 a.m., but this one was the nearest to the restaurant and closed down at midnight.
Because the market was out in the open, she wasn’t the only woman who wore a hat and a mask over her lower face, so her general anonymity and sense of purpose fortified her as she slipped through the throng that choked the aisles, shopping or buying food and drink.
Lan considered buying something useful, like a new pair of sandals for him, but that just didn’t seem festive. Perhaps a little doll of Ông già Noel —Old Mr. Christmas—but she decided he might find it more childish than cute. Finally, she found what she thought was the perfect gift, and her lips almost stretched into a smile beneath the handkerchief.
It was a miniature plastic Christmas tree, with little colored balls and foil-wrapped presents.
Lan managed to sneak the tree into Nhu’s home, and into her tiny room with its mildew-stained walls, without Nhu or her husband and children noticing. Because how could she explain what she had bought it for? If the children saw it, they’d want it for themselves, and of course she’d give it to them and say that had been her intention.
Before she hid it away, Lan studied the tree again. She fingered the tiny gifts, trying to imagine the wonders they might contain. Gifts that a husband might give to his wife. The makeup she had never worn. The jewelry no one had decorated her with. Sexy underwear or sheer stockings, maybe.
But she knew that beneath the foil there were only cubes of Styrofoam.
*
Their tiny restaurant was packed from wall to wall on Christmas Eve. Lan worked almost feverishly in the kitchen to keep up. Coming back from delivering another order to a table, Nhu smiled with satisfaction and related to her cousin, “A girlhood friend of mine, Phuong, married an American and moved to the USA. Two years ago she came back to visit her family with her husband. She told me it’s so cold where they live, on Christmas the streets are dead—everyone stays inside and keeps to themselves. How lonely that sounds, huh? Look at all the excitement tonight. I’m sure it’s better to have Christmas in Vietnam.”
Yes, it was noisy out there on the street; Lan could hear the chaos of sound coming in through the open front of the restaurant, along with the night’s heat and the traffic exhaust. Ceaseless streams of motorbikes, horns beeping as cars and trucks struggled to press through, pedestrians shouting and laughing, throbbing disco music from nearby cafes. Right now she wished she was out there herself, looking around for the feral “con đen lai.” She was starting to get anxious.
“Do you think we’ll be closing at the regular time tonight?” Lan asked. They usually locked the folding front gate at eleven.
“We’ll see if the crowd has thinned out by then,” Nhu said. She put a hand on her cousin’s shoulder, and no doubt could feel uneven scar tissue through the thin fabric of her top. “I know you’re tired, Lan.”
Lan assured her, “I’m fine, Nhu.” If she couldn’t locate him tonight, she’d try again tomorrow after work. But by then, Christmas day would be all but over, her gift all but meaningless.
Nhu returned to the serving area, balancing four plates of food on her arms.
But as eleven approached, Nhu judged that the crush of customers had subsided enough that they should close at the regular time. “You worked so hard today, Lan. You need to go home and rest. Tomorrow will be even busier, after all.”
Lan experienced a wave of relief. There might still be time to spot the black man out there somewhere. With the streets so active, why shouldn’t he be about as well?
After they had cleaned up for the night and were about to lock the front gate, Lan said, “I think I might ride around a little bit, just to look at the lights.”
“Don’t forget this,” Nhu said, reaching behind her and passing a plastic shopping bag to Lan. It was the bag she had hidden the Christmas tree in. “Who is it for, Lan?”
For a moment Lan couldn’t answer, but at last she said in a tiny croak, “A friend.”
“Really? I’m happy you’ve made a friend. You’ll have to tell me about her. Or him.”
“I will.” Lan bow
ed her head and ducked past Nhu, straddling her Honda before her cousin could ask her more.
*
Each major thoroughfare in Ho Chi Minh City was a single mass of motorbikes, like one immense dragon crawling along, metallic scales gleaming. On the sidewalks swarmed the equivalent in pedestrians, children wearing glowing reindeer antlers or even, inexplicably, plastic Halloween devil horns. The streets with their shops and restaurants and cafes were already bright, but the imported holiday made them extra dazzling . . . gaudy and delirious. Christmas lights twinkled everywhere, each Catholic church so festooned with flashing colored lights that a Westerner might think it was a Las Vegas casino, or a mother ship from an alien world.
As Lan got away from the main avenues, though, things gradually grew more subdued. She drove down the street where she had seen the half-breed those several times, but she didn’t find him, and doubled back again for another try. Coming the other way was a motorbike with a Vietnamese man dressed as Santa Claus seated behind the driver, on his back a sack of gifts. Seeing Lan notice him, he smiled at her through his fake beard as their bikes passed each other and he called out in English, “Merry Christmas!”
At last, Lan directed her Honda toward the side street she had seen the black man entering that other morning. She found it was little more than an alley, twisting this way and that. Small cement houses crammed cheek-to-cheek, with open fronts giving a peek of their interiors, where Buddhist altars glowed with Christmas-type lights themselves. The alley boxed in the smell of food, of incense, of tropical night; the lurid and sensual air of Vietnam.
She rode along slowly, met by only half-curious looks from those walking the narrow street or seated inside the open front rooms of their homes. She didn’t spot the man she sought, within or without. She turned down more micro-streets that branched into new directions, becoming lost in an unfamiliar maze.
Turning yet another corner, she came upon a street that had strings of white Christmas lights suspended over it, row upon row, forming a kind of tunnel of light. Lan was drawn this way and passed under the arched ceiling of light, intrigued to find out where it would lead her.
The streets had phased into a somewhat wealthier type of neighborhood, some of the houses now possessing high walls and iron gates. Here, Catholic families had set up large nativity scenes, having formed caves of metal foil perhaps to simulate ice and snow. Within these foil hollows sheltered oversized replicas of the baby Chúa Giêsu Kitô , a cloned army of foreign saviors, all with their pudgy arms outstretched.
The narrow side streets became even more subdued, the noise of the city increasingly distant, fewer and fewer people out walking, more walls to hide the fronts of houses. Lan heard TVs and music playing quietly on the other side of those walls, sounds that seemed more lonely than comforting. The walls were topped with spikes or glued shards of broken glass. The alley Lan was currently in came to a dead end, where an especially large and ambitious nativity scene had been set up. But the smiling child no longer charmed Lan into forgetting her mission. As she turned away to retrace her path, she began to despair of finding the black man tonight and delivering the gift she had for him.
The lighted dioramas in this dark labyrinth, with their painted plaster figures, now seemed to Lan more like the eerie scenes of a ghost train ride, such as those she had heard existed at big amusement parks like Suố i Tiên and Đạ i Nam Văn Hiế n. Now, sure she had failed in her venture, she just wanted to find her way out again. Back to her tiny room above the restaurant. She would give the pathetic plastic tree to Nhu’s children.
She was angry with herself when she realized a tear was forming in the corner of the one eye Nhu called beautiful.
Lan backed her bike away from the dead end, turned the handlebars, and rode the Honda down the passageway and around a corner. But soon she grasped that she had taken the wrong path. She was now in an even darker, quieter alley formed from the back walls of houses, without any Christmas lights or even smiling plaster faces to offer her company.
She longed to find that tunnel of white light again, a landmark that she knew would funnel her toward more familiar surroundings.
So around another corner . . . and Lan soon found herself at another dead end, but this one composed simply of a dark wall streaked even darker with mildew. This neglected space was almost a tiny courtyard, though one formed more by chance than design.
Once again confronted with such a tight space, Lan had to stop her bike and walk it around to face the other way. This time when she had turned it around, however, she saw that a dark figure was moving in her direction slowly, gradually shuffling its way out of the shadows and into the meager light that penetrated the alley.
When the faint illumination fell upon the figure’s face, she saw it had no real face to speak of. That was how she recognized this man. He was the saffron-robed monk she had seen begging on the street corner by day, his face a thick mask of scar tissue, his eyes melted away leaving only blank flesh.
He scuffed his sandaled feet along, reaching out his arms ahead of him like the oversized Christ dolls.
Though she bore a resemblance to him, the monk’s appearance frightened her, and her instinct was to remain still and silent so he wouldn’t be able to hear her and approach her directly. Though surely he couldn’t want to hurt her. Surely, if anything, he would only want some money, which at another time of day and in another location she would have been happy to offer.
As Lan stood there astride her bike, poised like a deer paralyzed by terror, another figure detached itself from the shadows pooled along the opposite side of the alley, yet this figure was low to the ground . . . crawling on its elbows, and dragging its twisted, useless legs.
Lan drew in her breath sharply when she discerned it was the teenaged boy she had seen on two successive days, begging on another street corner, smiling with a younger child’s innocence at passing traffic. Unlike the monk, the boy could see her, and he beamed that same smile at her now. Again, though, in this place and at this time of night his huge grin only caused a shiver to go through Lan.
A third silhouette, moving weirdly into the light. This young man was missing one arm and one leg, perhaps having stepped on a forgotten landmine. He was using a single crutch to hobble along. He grinned at Lan, too.
A girl perhaps ten years old crept forward, smiling shyly, maybe self-conscious because lingering poison from the dioxin Agent Orange had caused her eyes to be spaced twice as far apart as they should have been.
Lan had felt an increasing need to flee, a growing panic, as these figures and several more who were compromised in other ways emerged from the darkness, apparently intent on closing in a half-circle around her, with only the dead end wall behind her. She thought she should gun her motor and plunge between them before that happened. But they all halted a short distance away, facing her expectantly.
As they stopped there, forming their half-circle, Lan finally realized that the “con đen lai” was amongst them, holding his staff in one fist like a proud explorer who stood at the crest of a mountain in an uncharted land. He was not smiling, as most of the others were, but neither did he look filled with fury as when she had seen him in the past. Like his companions, he merely watched her as if in anticipation.
In that moment, Lan was convinced that the man had previously taken note of her, too, after all. And that he had led her here.
She swung her leg over the back of the Honda’s seat and unhooked the plastic bag she had hung on the bike. Her silent audience seemed to lean in with greater interest as she reached into the bag. Looking up at them to observe their faces, no longer afraid of those faces, Lan drew out the plastic Christmas tree, decorated with its tiny foil-wrapped packages.
The teenage boy with the useless legs barked a single delighted laugh. The girl with the terribly far-spaced eyes smiled more broadly.
Lan saw that the black man was staring intensely at her eyes, one dead and one alive. He nodded at her. One more thing to unwr
ap.
As Lan set the tree down on its stand, on the street in front of the half-circle, with her other hand she reached up to pull her hat away. Then she removed her handkerchief as well.
Distantly, the six bells in both of the twin towers of the Notre-Dame Cathedral rang out deeply over the beautiful city of Saigon.
It was midnight.
It was Christmas.
The Green Hands
4. The Imperatives
Two imperatives overshadowed every other thought, during every waking moment: Run and Never stop . For Zetter they were really a unified concept, a single rule.
At one time the belief was that all sharks needed to keep moving constantly or they would drown. Zetter had read this was no longer deemed to be true, except for perhaps certain types of sharks . . . but it was true for him. He had to keep running, or he would die.
In the beginning he’d believed that he was only at risk at night, and so he had relaxed his guard during the day. Until he had found out, almost too late, he wasn’t safe in the daylight either.
In the beginning he’d also believed that it was only adult Caucasian males who sought to catch him, to seize him with their venomous green hands, because at first those were the only types of Green Hands he’d encountered. But he’d learned this, too, was not true.
Here’s how he had discovered both things.
2. The Mall
Zetter liked malls, because they were thronged with people. Though the Green Hands were people, too, most people weren’t Green Hands, and he was certain his pursuers didn’t want witnesses who might possibly interfere or impede. They would be wary of coming at him in plain view of others.
That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to put their hands on him surreptitiously when others were around. On one early occasion, he had been walking toward a subway train to board it along with a crush of other people, when peripherally he saw a hand reaching for his elbow. Someone a little behind him, to his right. The hand caught his eye because it was softly luminous, as if a dim bulb inside it illuminated translucent skin . . . but this pale luminosity, as always, was like that of a glow-in-the-dark toy: phosphorescent green in color. He had cried out in alarm and pushed roughly against the people in front of him. He’d knocked down a middle-aged woman. A young black man had sworn at him and tried to punch him in the mouth, but had missed and struck his shoulder instead. All that mattered was that Zetter had just managed to elude the extended hand. He never looked back to see the person who had tried to touch him; he just broke free of the line of people and went bolting off down the subway platform for the nearest steps up to the street.