“No fighting,” Quy suddenly spoke, silencing them both. “It’s fine. Everything. I stay here. You go first. Everything is fine now.”
“Okay, big brother.” Binh smiled. “Everything is fine.”
Tuyen grunted assent and opened the door, climbing out of the Beamer. Binh followed. They walked in silence for a few steps. Tuyen began to say something, but Binh’s resolute face dissuaded her. It reminded her of when they were children. At night in the restaurant, after all the customers had left, he would sit on a table playing his Pacman, which she was not allowed to touch, his brow furrowed, his mouth pursed; she would sit on the cash register stool, both of them waiting while their sisters and Bo and Ma cleaned the restaurant around them. Then, much to his annoyance, she would burst into loud renditions of “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” her arms waving like a choir master, building the song with more and more gusto until he screamed for her to shut up. Either Ai or Lam would slap them both to quieten them down. But it didn’t, it only made them wail louder to bring Ma or Bo to their rescue.
Rescue. Were they now on some mission of rescue? Who was being rescued? she thought. Ma, Bo, her sisters, her brother, this one, or the man they’d left in the car? Quy, the eldest? She must stop annoying Binh; she must help him rescue Ma and Bo. They must, she and he, translate now the years between that man and their parents. They must stand between them to decode the secret writing of loss and hurt.
She put her arm on Binh’s to slow him. He turned to her at first brusquely, then, seeing the understanding of their mission in her face, slowed himself, as if to savour their mutual intuition. This is what they’d done all their lives, she thought. She felt comforted by their commonality, the same commonality that had made her so uneasy most of her life; it had made her long to be unexceptional. Yet, here was their specialness now carried between them to the door of the house, the recognitive gaze of an exception cherished through all this time. Wasn’t that what her art was all about in the end? She had a vision of the cloth on the wall in her apartment, the scores of scribbled longings, then she felt for the photographs of Quy still stuffed in her bag. She would make tiny copies of the image, yes, and insert them among the records of longing in her installation. She would take photographs of the people of the city too, and sprinkle them throughout. She would need a larger space for the installation, three rooms really, very high ceilings. In the middle of each room a diaphanous cylindrical curtain, hung from the ceiling, that the audience could enter. At the centre of one cylinder would be the lubaio with all the old longings of another generation. She would do something with the floor here too, perhaps rubble, perhaps sand, water. In another cylinder there would be twelve video projections, constantly changing, of images and texts of contemporary longing. This one would be celebratory, even with the horrible. Again here the floor, the path, what material? The last cylinder would be empty, the room silent. What for? She still wasn’t quite certain what she was making; she knew she would find out only once the installation was done. Then, some grain, some element she had been circling, but had been unable to pin down, would emerge.
Quy
There are times when I’ve said to myself, Who the hell are you? That’s a dangerous question. And this is a dangerous city. You could be anybody here. That is what first took me when I walked among people on the streets. Then one morning I sat on the subway train and I heard a laughter and it reminded me of when I was little, and right away I knew it would be easy to disappear here. Who would know? The man living across the street from you could have fought in the Angolan war, he could’ve killed many people, and there he is sitting in a deck chair with his wife as if nothing happened, and one day he will mention the simple fact to you with a look of triumph as he remembers it only as a youthful adventure. That woman whose ass you love when she walks down the street, she could’ve been tortured in Argentina and the last thing she wants anyone to love is her ass, her genitals were wired with electrodes, once. And the taxi driver you strike up a pleasant conversation with could’ve been her torturer or a torturer of a similar woman in Burma with similar equipment. So if this guy from Angola can sit there in his shorts and tan himself and remember killing people like a youthful prank, like a necessary job, and if the taxi driver can devote himself to sharing pleasantries and directions, thinking of the electrodes he put in a woman’s cunt as routine, just trying to get the job done, like driving a cab, well, who am I really? Who the hell am I?
So I’m sitting here thinking, Margaret Yao turns out to be the girlfriend of one Alex Turgenov, who happens to have been a sports doctor from the old Soviet Union and who is now a mechanic but more importantly runs a whorehouse; the girls turn out to be only three thousand dollars apiece. Alex is going to store them in a whorehouse called a spa, above a retail shoe place that used to be called the Elephant. One day the cops will find them and they’ll be on TV and Alex will disappear and Margaret will walk across the screen looking sour, but that’s another story. By some coincidence, if you believe that kind of thing, I come to the name of a guy, Vu Binh, in the monk’s e-mails. Young
