Читать книгу Dukkha Reverb - Loren W. Christensen - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

“Never a dull moment with you,” Mai says, watching her side mirror as she jockeys her Volvo out into the chaos that appears to be the traffic pattern here. She does some kind of wave out the window, which is either a “thank you” or a “cram it up where the sun don’t shine” gesture. Either way, it sets off a cacophony of honking. A motorbike roars around her driver’s side, its accelerating engine deafening through the open window. A second one passes so closely that Mai nearly loses her side mirror. Another cuts around us and comes within four hairs-width of clipping her front fender.

“My God, Mai. This is nuts. Has there been a coup d’état? Is everyone fleeing the city? Is China attacking?”

She laughs, a sound that’s big, like it’s coming from a 300-pound opera singer, a trait I really like. “No, everything is fine,” she says, closing the window. “If any of those things were happening, traffic would be really—” She brakes hard when a white truck cuts into our lane, just inches from our hood. “Really bad,” she finishes. A motor scooter shoots from the right lane between the truck and our front end, swoops into the left lane, and disappears around the truck.

“Mother of Buddha!” I cry.

She laughs again. “We will be out of this airport traffic in a minute and then it will be even more crowded, but there will be some organization to it.” She looks over at me and croons. “Oooh, don’t be scared.”

“Watch the road, will you?” I relax my clenched fists and try to retrieve my machismo. “I guess I’m just not used to it—” Two motorbikes pull up along side us, one by my window and one by Mai’s, the riders are young, both wearing pale blue shirts and wrap-around sunglasses. “These guys want to get inside our car?”

Mai smiles. “Personal space, even in traffic, is different here than in Portland. After a year in your city, it took me three weeks to get used to this again. Same thing when I returned from my year in Paris. I see now how crazy our streets might seem to foreigners, but as you say in America, ‘It is what it is.’”

The motorbikes are still close enough for their drivers to tap on our respective windows.

“I can’t believe I’m here. It’s surreal.”

“I am so very happy now. I hope you will like it here.”

I make a big motion with my head as I look her up and down. “I like the scenery so far.”

She giggles and punches me in the thigh.

“Ow!” I blurt, not faking. She hit me in the nerve just above my kneecap.

“Sorry,” she says with phony concern. “Was that too hard?”

“Uh, yeah. I guess I shouldn’t undress you with my eyes, huh?”

She laughs. “I am not sure what that means but it sound very, very good.”

“Well,” I say rubbing my leg. “When someone looks at…”

The motorbike rider on Mai’s side turns toward her and for a second I can see her profile in his mirrored sunglasses. When he lifts his head ever so slightly, I see my face in them. He smiles and lifts his left hand from the handlebar, his pointing index finger and upright thumb shaped like a gun, and shoots at me.

“Hey!” I shout, and he “fires” at me again. “Mai, that guy on the motorbike—”

“What?” she looks toward me.

The motorbike driver banks hard to the left.

She jerks her head toward her side window. “Guy?”

I look out the rear side window and see him merge into a mass of traffic moving down a side street.

The one outside my window is gone too.

“The rider next to your window looked at us and then did this with his hand. You know, like he was firing a gun at me.”

“Are you sure? Oh, I’m sorry, Sam. Of course you’re sure.”

The white truck hangs a right, revealing hundreds of motorbikes, bicycles, cars, and pedicabs, randomly cutting right and left.

“Could it have been Lai Van Tan’s people?” I ask. “Were you followed, maybe?”

Listen to me. I’m a hysterical teenage girl. Get control of yourself. Try to impress the woman a little.

“I do not know, but I don’t think so.”

“Then who was the guy? Is that how you welcome newcomers here—make bang bang gestures?” So much for impressing her.

Mai looks at me, eyebrows bunched. “Sam? Are you okay?”

I take a deep breath. “I don’t know. Just tense I guess. It’s been a crazy few weeks. Meeting you, meeting my father, my school burns down—and everybody was kung-fu fighting and dealing with all the legal stuff, and then Mark coming to me telling me he knows what happened. The whole time I was at the airport in Portland, I kept waiting for the detectives to show up and put me into handcuffs. I’m finally here, and I’m exhausted and jet lagged, and the young man I flew with turns out to be a runaway who kicks cops. Now motorbike guys are pretending to shoot at me.”

She shrugs. “It could be… just a moment.” She maneuvers the car to the far left lane, slows, then tapping her horn, begins to inch across the oncoming lane. Actually, it’s more like an oncoming, thunderous tsunami wave of about a billion cars, motorbikes, scooters, and odd-shaped large and small vehicles that I’ve never seen before. They stream around the front and back of us as if they were a surging river and we were a rock, except we’re moving too. Incredibly, we make it across in one piece. The new street is a tad less congested.

“The man could have been just teasing,” Mai says.

“Teasing?”

“Not the best word? Being a… jerk?”

“You don’t think he knew us?”

“No. Maybe he does not like white people, especially a white man with a Vietnamese woman.”

My cop instinct is telling me otherwise but then what do I know? I’m a white guy in Saigon who’s been here less than two hours. “Will there be much of that? People not accepting me with you?”

“You are going to be with me?” she asks, struggling against a smile. She leans on the horn and swerves around a Toyota.

“Thinking about it,” I say, faking a lack of enthusiasm.

“I see.” Her smile begins to win the struggle.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask, then blurt, “Holy!” as half a dozen motorbikes from a side street to my right accelerate directly across our lane.

Mai leans on her horn and swerves just enough not to kill them, still wearing that faint smile. “I am taking you… here,” she says, turning onto what appears to be a dirt, potholed alley between two buildings. She guides the car a short distance and pulls into a small parking lot next to one of the structures. Scaffolding on its front extends all the way to the roof, one, two… eight floors. Tape crisscrosses some of the windows on the ground floor.

“You live here?” I ask, not having to shout this time since the buildings and trees substantially reduce the traffic roar.

“I wish. No, this is a new building, called Vinh Tower One, owned by a friend of my father and me, mostly Father’s friend. It is still a few months away from being finished. He has a… what do you call..? A business on his side?”

“A side business?”

“Yes, a side business. He is a building contractor but he enjoys buying and selling jewelry on his side. The side. My father sometimes buys from him for our stores.”

“So can I kiss you now? No one is around.”

Was that too abrupt? For a hair of a second, the intensity of Mai’s smile reminds me of the movie Christmas Vacation when Chevy Chase plugs in the cord that lights up all twenty-five thousand Christmas lights that envelop his house.

“No kissing, sorry,” she says, reaching for the door handle. “Come, I want to show you something inside.”

My face is either hot from embarrassment or from the wet blanket of heat that greets me outside of the air conditioned car. I start to say something when a lone motorbike enters the alley from the steady mass of traffic passing by the opening. It’s not a man wearing a blue shirt, dark sunglasses, and armed with a pointy finger, but a young woman, her black hair blowing behind her. She smiles at me as she passes and continues down the alley.

“Many pretty girls in Saigon,” Mai says. “They think you pretty handsome.”

“Not one of them is as pretty as you,” I say.

“Good answer, soldier.” She points with her chin toward a small door under the scaffolding. “We enter over there.” She slips a card into the door’s card lock and it clicks open. “Follow me,” she says, leading me down a hallway illuminated only by outside light coming in through a high window. “I think you might enjoy what I will show you.” We stop at what looks like a service elevator.

“An elevator! Awesome!”

“Funny. I am laughing on my insides.” She slips her card into a slot. “I think I understand what you are feeling right now. Like I said, it was hard for me to readjust to Vietnam after Paris and Portland. I think life is more intense here: so many people, the noise. I think it might be hard for you to make the transition.”

We step onto the elevator and she inserts her card into another slot. She pokes the eighth floor button and turns toward me. She drops her chin a little and looks up at me. “I will help you.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

She smiles. “Same Sam as before. Always joke.” She looks at the digital numbers on the panel. “Our friend loan me this key card so I can show you something. I hope you will like it.”

“What is it?” The elevator stops.

She makes a dramatic, sweeping gesture with both hands as the doors swoosh open. “It is… Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City.”

The open and empty floor is at least a hundred feet wide by a hundred fifty feet long, with the smell of freshly laid carpet. Beige. There are four-foot thick cement pillars here and there, and floor-to-ceiling windows on all the outer walls, creating a sense that we’re floating in the sky.

“Wow! And wow again! What a magnificent view, Mai,” I say, as we cross the floor to the windows. Large rolls of beige carpet lay off to the side. “Saigon is huge! It goes on and on in all directions.”

“Yes,” she says, her voice pleased at my reaction. “Nine million of us. That cluster of tall buildings way over there is the center of the city. That is the Ho Chi Minh River beyond that. To the right, way over there by that small river, that is –Cholon where many Chinese people live. There to the left, maybe five miles away, you can see the top part of the Reunification Palace. That used to be Presidential Palace during the war. Maybe you have seen the famous film of the North Vietnamese tanks smashing through the gates.”

“I have. In fact, the only image I’ve ever had of Vietnam is the Vietnam at war. You know that I thought my father had died here. I compulsively watched all the movies that came out, and lots and lots of documentaries, The History Channel and The Learning Channel. The only image I had was of exploding rockets, rolling tanks, and street battles. But this… this is just incredible. Magnificent.”

Mai nods. “Yes. If this building were here during that time, this would be a different view. My mother said that every night, beginning when the sun went down until it came up again, there were flashes in the distance and the rumble of artillery. Most people who live here now were born after the war. So they do not know. They do not even think about it much.”

“It’s just magnificent,” I say, scanning the panoramic view.

“The sun will be setting in a few minutes and it is even more beautiful then with all the lights. But we cannot watch it tonight because we must go to see Father. We can come another evening.” She is looking out the widow but I can tell she is watching me in her peripheral. “Maybe we will bring a bottle of wine and glasses.”

That doubled the ol’ heart rate, and I barely manage to wheeze, “That sounds fantastic.”

“Good,” she says, watching a plane descend in the far distance. “Since our friend gave me the key card I have come up here many times. I sit on those rolls of carpet or on this window ledge and just look out at the view. I like watching the sunset. It makes me feel special, but at the same time it makes me feel… humble, I think.”

“I look forward to watching it with you.”

“Yes,” she says softly, turning toward me. “I imagined you up here looking out the window with me.” She looks into my eyes and I get that wheezy feeling again. “We can kiss now, if you still want to.”

I do, for a profoundly long time.

“Hi,” she breathes, when we finally separate.

“Back at yuh,” I manage. “You got to change your no kissing and hugging rule at the airport.”

“I knoooow, right? Some things are much better in America.” We’re embracing, our lips whispering against one another’s ears. “Like sushi. USA has good sushi. Vietnam, no sushi.”

“Technically, sushi really isn’t American,” I say, nipping her earlobe, making her inhale sharply. “It’s Japanese. In Portland, most sushi is made by Hispanics. My favorite sushi place is owned by a Korean guy who hires Hispanics to make the Japanese sushi.”

Mai chuckles. “Well, I will take you to a good phở street cart that is owned by a German man.”

“Sounds delicious. Will there be sauerkraut and mmrthmm—”

Mai’s lips smother my words. Seconds pass and I no longer remember what I was babbling about. Somewhere the Star Spangled Banner plays.

“Whoops,” Mai says against my lips. “That might be Father.”

Not again, I think, turning quickly toward the elevator. He was constantly walking in on us in Portland.

“The phone, silly,” she says, launching that dragon-slaying smile at me as she pries her cell out of her pants pocket. “It is. Hello, Father. Did I pick up Sam? Sam who?” She winks at me. She laughs at something he says. “Yes, I have him. He has put on about fifty pounds. He is very fat now.” She listens, laughs, and says, “I am sure you will. You want to talk to him? Okay. We will be there in a short while. I am showing him the view from Mister Troung’s building. Yes. Okay. Good bye.” She flips her phone shut. “He will talk to you at our house. He will explain to you why he could not come.”

“Sounds good. So I have gotten fat, eh?” I say with a chuckle.

“He says not to worry. He will work it off you. He is excited about training with you and introducing you to his teacher, Sifu Shen Lang Rui.”

“I am excited to see Samuel. And a little nervous.”

She smiles. “He can make people nervous. But you are his son. You should not be.” Mai takes my hand and we sit next to each other on the window ledge, our legs touching. “Have you thought much about him?”

“Not as much as I would have liked. I had to put important parts of my life into compartments so that I could deal with the grand jury for my… shooting. I wasn’t worried about shooting the abductor… but the…”

Mai takes my hand in both of hers. “You are not at fault. The ju… judgment says that it is not your fault. I know that does not make you feel better. But I think… what is the expression? Time… in time, yes. I think in time your mind will be fine. Healed.”

I called Mai the moment the grand jury came back with a No True Bill, meaning they didn’t hold me at fault for the accidental killing. My emotions were all over the place and I didn’t know if I wanted to stand, sit, lay down, or scream from the roof. I did know that I needed to hear her voice. I was blubbering so much that she couldn’t understand me, but she was kind enough and savvy enough to let me come down from my rush before asking me questions. I tried to explain that I was happy I was spared a trial, and all the horrific emotions and public persecution that would have come down on me. At the same time, I had this immense guilt because I was feeling good about the No True Bill. I had killed, and a nine-person jury decided that it was okay.

It wasn’t though. I thought I should be punished for it, punished severely. But I was happy that I wasn’t going to be. My head was on the verge of exploding and all I could think of was that I needed to hear Mai’s voice. I knew there wasn’t anything she could say from the other side of the globe to make it all go away or make me feel better, but I just wanted to hear her say hello.

As soon as she picked up, I began blubbering like a child. When I finally came up for air—I don’t know how long I’d been wailing in her ear—I could hear her sobbing. When I asked if she was crying with me, she said, “Who else? I’m sitting in a room by myself talking with you.” That made me laugh for some reason and then she started laughing. Then we cried again.

When I finally calmed, Mai asked if I remembered the meditation sessions that Samuel taught me. I said I had been doing it every other day. She suggested an increase to two or three times a day, to sit quietly and just follow my breath, in and out, in and out. Every time a stray thought came into my mind, I was to look at it for a second, then just let it float away and go back to following my breath. She added, “And kick the shit out of the heavy bag once a day. Then meditate again after the shit kicking.”

Like an obedient child, I did what she said, and it helped, like a Band-Aid sometimes makes a cut feel better. The extra meditating helped me get some control over my thoughts, and the extra hard bag work made me too tired to think at all, at least until morning came around again.

“You okay, Sam?” Mai asks looking into my eyes.

“I am now.”

She smiles. “I am happy for you to meet my mother and I want to show you so much about my life, but I am scared that you might not like it here. You might be bored.”

“Impossible. Like I said before, you and Samuel caught me during a bad week.” A shadow passes across Mai’s face before she looks away. “Sorry,” I say caressing her arm. “Bad joke. You know, we have yet to talk about Portland State, those deaths. I wanted to many times but I wasn’t sure how to bring it up.”

“I want to talk to you about it too, but not now. Now I want to just be happy to be near you,” she says, looking at me and then out the window.

I gently turn her head toward me and kiss her.

“I wish we had more time to spend here, but we need to go to see Father. Maybe in a few days when you are rested, we can talk then.”

“Just say the word.”

Mai nods. “Okay, I will say the word.” She scoots off the ledge, steps in front of me and slips between my parted legs. She takes both of my hands in hers, squeezes them and without an ounce of shyness, moves those gorgeous eyes to my shoulders, down my arms, across my chest, and all the way down to my shoes. Then slowly, caressingly, she moves them back up to my eyes. She exhales slowly with a little shake of her head. “Come on, Sam.” She steps aside so I can scoot off the ledge. “We better go, now. Before I… we just better go.”

I’ve gotten a couple of compliments in my day, but that one, without uttering a word, ranks at the top. I can even hear the electricity crackle between us as we walk hand in hand to the elevator.

“Sam, who was the boy at the airport, the one who made such a quiet entrance into Saigon?”

Good idea. Talk about something else since there is no cold shower available. She pokes the elevator button.

“Bobby Phan, or so he said. He told me that he was coming here to meet his parents and spend time with his dying grandfather. Appears that wasn’t true since his father filed a runaway report on him in California. He also said he had a black belt in taekwondo.” The elevator doors open and we step in. We begin descending “At least the black belt story was true. Did you see his kicks? Hit two guys in the head without putting his foot down.”

“Not just guys, Sam. Policemen. They will be hunting for him now harder than before.”

“I wonder then if he will call me… wait. I didn’t tell him that I’m a policeman and I don’t remember if the magazine article he read about me mentions it. So maybe he will call. You know, for a while on the plane, I thought he might be connected with Lai Van Tan.”

She shakes her head. “Oh, I don’t think so. Just a… running away, no, runaway. Lots of people come here when they run away.”

“I was just being paranoid.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m on suspicion overdrive, I guess.”

“I understand,” she says, squeezing my hand.

“When I’m not suspecting Bobby of being a Russian secret agent, I see him as a great kid. Apparently one with some big problems. I’d like to help him. He’s got my cell number, and yours.”

Mai moves into me. “Always wanting to fix things, right, Sam?” she kisses me before I can answer.