TUYEN WAS WET from the rain. She mounted the stairs ahead of Carla and Oku and felt around in her bag for her keys.
“Sure you won’t have a smoke?” Carla coaxed.
“Nah, next time. Tomorrow, save me some.” Her fingers touched the camera. She felt nervous. “See you guys.”
“Are you gonna be pounding on my head again tonight?”
“No. I’m kinda stalled on that one.”
“Thank God!”
“You’re kidding! After you made us haul that fucking thing up, nearly killing ourselves!”
“Anyways! Later.” Tuyen opened her door and entered her studio, leaving them in mock shock on the threshold.
Her small darkroom used to be part of the kitchen. She drew the camera from her bag, looked at it, and seeing that she had two more frames in the roll, at a whim shot them off at her own face. Then she rewound the film and removed the cylinder from the camera. In the darkroom, the only neat space in the apartment, she approached the three trays and scissors that lay on the counter. The lights off, she pulled the film out, cutting it smoothly from the spool, then with a dexterous motion she pulled it onto the reel in the light-tight tank. She poured the developer into the tank, tapped it to dislodge any air, covered it, and breathed. Exhaled, as if for the first time since entering the room. Her mind ran to her mother in another photograph. A picture of Cam, whose name meant “orange fruit, sweet mountain sunset,” and Tuyen’s two older sisters. Her mother luminous, the two girls laughing. That was long before they left Vietnam, long before Tuyen was born. The picture was on the mantel at the house in Richmond Hill—Tuyen had asked her mother for it, but her mother refused. Then she’d tried to persuade her mother to let her borrow it to make a copy, but her mother still said no, she could not part with it even for a moment. Her father had taken the picture, and whoever developed and printed it wasn’t very good. But her mother’s face and the girls laughing was illumination itself.
Tuyen poured the developer out and poured in the stop bath. This is where that other photographer may have faltered. She, or most probably he, may have done this too quickly, leaving some of the silver on the film or perhaps it was at the next stage. Tuyen emptied the stop and poured in the fixer to clear the negative of all the silver, and then hung the negative to dry on the line strung across the small room. She ducked out of the room, shaking her hands dry. The picture had been taken before Quy was born too. He was the small rise under her mother’s red dress. Red? Why had she assumed red? The photograph was black and white. She had not asked her mother the colour. She must have assumed, she thought now, from the darkish hue and the luminous face. It could just as well have been blue, but Tuyen liked to think of it as red, bursting with life.
Wiping her hands on her skirt, Tuyen realized that she hadn’t changed, she was damp from the rainy walk down Bathurst. She hadn’t put the lights on either, and it was completely dark. “Why is this place so messy?” she heard herself say aloud, then laughed at herself. Carla must be invading her head, she thought. The white drape of the city’s longings seemed illuminated. The lubaio stood erect in the middle of the floor of the main room. She had cut arms into it and had every intention of carving symbols into the whole structure, but for the moment her clothing hung from the arms, along with a bag of onions and another of her beloved potatoes. This to keep them away from the mice. Her futon lay like a messy nest under the window. Her windows faced only the alley, unlike Carla’s windows, which faced both the alley and the street. She changed, gathering desperate pieces of clothing from the floor and the signpost. She felt cold even though it was June and warm. The rain was still falling mistily outside. She wished she had a fire.
There had been another photograph on the mantel in Richmond Hill. Identical except for her father’s presence. And identical except that their features were now tense, the two girls grim. The rise in her mother’s dress was no longer there, and the boy whom it represented was also missing. Someone had taken the photograph of them as they were leaving Chi Ma Wan Camp in Hong Kong. They were among the fortunate. After six months Tuan’s grease-handing had finally paid off and they had left. As awful as the place was, Cam was reluctant to go. She kept expecting the disappeared boy to miraculously disembark from another boat. Tuyen’s mother removed and replaced this picture every so often from the mantel. As if she could not decide whether she admitted or could bear the reality it suggested but that she occasionally had to face.
Tuyen turned the stove on under a pot of water. She poked into the bag of potatoes and gathered three in her hand, peeled and cut them in halves, and put them into the boiling water. For all her apprehension earlier in the day, she felt safe now, the negative of her brother drying in the darkroom, the potatoes boiling on the stove. Uncharacteristically, she hadn’t looked at the strips. She felt safe in that too. She had captured something, she was sure, and she had brought it to her cave. The thought of this studio being her cave amused her. Jackie called it that, and that is what it felt like now. Some early place where the inhabitants had no signs for decorum, no standards for neatness; where they observed an order that was purely utilitarian. The lubaio, the bits of wood, the photographs, the longings were what she brought to the cave to be handled, and thought about, and made into something she could use to create alternate, unexpected realities, exquisite corpses. That’s what Tuan and Cam were, exquisite corpses. Or were they her surrealists and she their composition? Their exquisite corpse? Not she, Binh.
Seeing him across the street in the rain, his arm around the man whose face was like an angel or a ghost or a child, she had made some discovery that she was yet to understand. The two seemed both real and metaphoric. She guessed that’s why she hadn’t looked at the negatives yet. She was still absorbing the images, freshly. She knew that by the time she looked at the images on the negative they would acquire other significances, and by the time she printed them they would be art, open to a thousand interpretations. There was one interpretation that she needed to catch. The one that had led her memory to her mother’s photographs disappearing and reappearing.
How many times had she rummaged through her mother’s possessions, going over the signs of their former life? There was only so much they could bring with them, of course, but her mother’s sentimentality could not have allowed her to come away with nothing. Perhaps their opposition to the new Vietnam had been so strong that they abandoned even memory. Yet from their talk she could not sense any strong political opposition, just a fear that had taken hold of them over the course of several months and propelled them to a bay one night. Her father had not been involved politically; he had, in fact, avoided the army. Her mother was the only doctor in a small clinic. They were part, to be sure, of the striving middle class who felt themselves vulnerable under the communist government—Tuan had had hopes of being on the ground floor of real-estate development in Da Nang after the American victory. But in all this they were ordinary people living an ordinary life who were suddenly caught, the way war catches anyone, without bearings; the way war dismantles all sensibility except fear. Only when they arrived in Toronto would they fully construct their departure as resistance to communism. That is the story the authorities needed in order to fill out the appropriate forms. They needed terror, and indeed Tuan and Cam had had that; they needed loss, and Tuan and Cam had had that too. And perhaps with this encouragement, this coaxing of their story into a coherent wholeness, they were at least officially comforted that the true horror was not losing their boy but the forces of communism, Vietnam itself, which they were battling. Whatever the official story, her mother’s cache of photographs told another, a parallel story, a set of possible stories, an exquisite corpse.
There were two photographs of Quy. One as a tiny baby on his back, surprised by the flash of the camera. Then another, the one that her mother sent around the world in her quest to find him. A small, intelligent-looking boy, curious. Cam had made many copies, which she sent out with her letters. When Tuyen was little, these photographs littered the house. Their subject was the source of strange outbursts and crying. Over the years the photograph was less and less in evidence until it had virtually disappeared. It was not on the mantel of the house in Richmond Hill. It lay in the recesses of her mother’s room now with the baby picture. Well beyond the time that he could possibly still look like the curious little boy in the photograph, Cam had sent it along with her letters nevertheless. Tuyen hadn’t seen the picture in years.
Tuyen was sitting in the dark; she still hadn’t turned on any light. Only the glow of the one good burner of the stove could be seen. The pot of potatoes was crackling as if the water had all evaporated. A faint tinge of burning starch could be discerned. Tuyen ran to the stove, rescuing the potatoes from parching. The handle of the pot was hot, and she let out a sound of pain but didn’t let go until she’d put the pot in the sink. She scraped the potatoes out, putting them into a bowl, poured salt and butter over them, and mashed them by the light of the refrigerator. She closed the fridge and walked to the lubaio, and leaning against it she slowly ate the potatoes. Then she turned the lights on and went to the darkroom.
Tuyen slid the negative into the enlarger, suddenly in a hurry to see what she had captured with her camera—what secret of her brother’s. Perhaps she was too suspicious; perhaps she had simply seen her brother in his life, and this was the texture of a moment that she had apprehended and shot. She worked quickly, eyeballing the paper, figuring out the range of light, then deftly, one after the other, she printed the photographs in sixteen-by-twenty. When she was done, it was way past three in the morning. She wished she had had that smoke from Oku and Carla. They were across the hall, playing music. She could hear them giggling now and then. She hoped Oku wasn’t trying to move in on Carla, given that his hopes for Jackie were fading. A momentary panic struck her, then her vanity kicked in. No—Oku did not stand a chance, she thought. He could not begin to unravel those microwaves of kinetic energy that were Carla’s.
She strung a line across from the lubaio to the window and pinned the pictures to it. It had been dawning on her ever since she had taken the first shot, the one with Binh’s face and the stranger’s back, and now it was apparent.
“Shit, shit,” she heard herself say, looking at the pictures in sequence. The figure raising its hand, then turning, something like anger on Binh’s face, then a smile. She was convinced she saw a rough wiriness there in the body. Then the face, innocent, as a ghost’s. But unmistakably the face of an intelligent-looking boy. The face her mother, Cam, had coveted and sent all over Southeast Asia and Europe. Quy. Why did that face resemble this one? And why did Binh and the man appear to be in a quarrel? She felt disoriented, drawn to the babyness of the face against the body springy as violence. All the structures and translations of her childhood swept her, all the uncomfortable moments of explaining her parents to the world; all the insomnia endured, the regret her parents had translated into efficiency, all dwelled in the face of the man so much like the boy. Quy.