The night before she went missing, Long dreamed that Winnie turned into a rubber tree. The dream would have felt portentous even if Winnie hadn’t vanished the following day, as Long hardly ever remembered his dreams, and the few times he did, they were prosaic to the point of embarrassment: banal nightmares about misplacing something at the office or trying to play soccer but being unable to move his feet.

In this dream, Long woke up in his own bed. He rolled over to his right side and saw an empty expanse of mattress beside him where Winnie should have been. He got up and descended the narrow staircase to the kitchen. There he found her growing out of the slight depression in the floor tiles where, six months ago, the landlord had dug a hole and never filled it in properly. Her trifoliate leaves brushed the ceiling. While the tree did not have a human face, the trunk boasted two curved, breast-like protrusions and tapered in an approximation of a waist. Its lower half was partially bifurcated to suggest legs, complete with a vaginal bark cleft. When he leaned in closer to examine the Winnie Tree, Long saw that, most disturbing of all, it even had a tiny knot where her belly button should have been.

He immediately recognized that she was a rubber tree. He would have been able to identify the breed anywhere after a childhood spent in close proximity to plantations full of their spindly silhouettes. There was a knife in his hand now—a tapping knife, short and curled at the end like an ice skate or an unusual punctuation mark—and Long knew this meant he must make a cut. What would run out of her, latex or blood? He would find out. And what should he collect it in? Long reached for a mostly empty beer can lying on its side on the counter—even in his dream, the kitchen was a mess—and shook the last of the fusty lager droplets out into the sink. But where should he cut her? This was the hardest question. Long didn’t know whether or not the Winnie Tree could feel pain, and even though she lacked a mouth, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she might still be able to scream. He let the crimped tip of the blade rest experimentally on the soft, mottled skin between her bark-breasts. Pressed it in tentatively. Panicked and then quickly retracted it. He decided that it would be safest to stay away from her heart, and so he moved the knife down to the soft swell of her lower abdomen instead, just south of that repulsive belly button. The stomach was a safe place to make a shallow incision, wasn’t it? Like a cesarean, only without the baby? Long angled the knife carefully. He had never witnessed the tapping of a tree before but was familiar with the curved lesions it left behind. The scar provided the blueprint for the new wound. He steadied his hand, inhaled, and sliced.

Long opened his eyes. It was the morning of March the 17th, and he was no longer dreaming. He was in bed, in his small room overlooking a nondescript District 6 alley, and when he automatically rolled over onto his right side he saw Winnie lying six inches away from him, asleep and—from what bits of her were poking out from the blanket— still human. Long now had to guiltily acknowledge that there was a part of him that wished the dream hadn’t ended before he could see what happened when he cut. To apologize for being disappointed, he tenderly drew up the blanket to Winnie’s chin and tucked it snugly around her sides. While doing so, he noticed that Winnie’s hair was damp.

Long always took pains not to disturb Winnie when he got ready in the mornings. He had become an expert at opening and closing the closet doors noiselessly. When he brushed his teeth, he leaned in close to the sink and dribbled the toothpaste into the drain instead of spitting. He tiptoed down the stairs. But this morning, catastrophe struck when he reached the kitchen: unwilling to cross the dip in the tiles where the dream tree had grown, Long decided to circumnavigate it instead, and, while creeping along the edges of the room, he accidentally elbowed one of the half dozen crinkled-up beer cans on the counter, sending them all raining down onto the floor. There was a sproingy quality to the sound of the aluminum striking tile, and Long hated it. It made his teeth clench. It felt like paper cuts to the eardrum. When it was finally over, he listened for Winnie stirring upstairs but heard nothing. Noise traveled oddly in the house. The Saigon traffic a few feet from his doorstep was inaudible from every room except the upstairs toilet, where the motorbike honks and the reedy siren song crackling from the ice cream man’s speakers were always perfectly clear despite the fact that the bathroom window did not face the street. Long didn’t like having conversations in either the foyer or the spare bedroom, because the walls there had a muffling effect, and everything had to be repeated twice. But in other rooms, there was too much echo. When he was lying in bed upstairs he was able to hear the slow, intermittent drip of the leaky kitchen faucet on the ground floor, and yet not the sound of monsoon-season rain hitting the roof. Long didn’t know what the acoustics of the attic crawl space were, because he was mildly claustrophobic and never went up there.

He left the fallen beer cans on the floor, his excuse being that it would only make more noise if he collected them and put them back on the counter, no matter how carefully he did it. Truthfully, he was also hoping that Winnie would pick them up later, and that doing so might inspire her to continue cleaning the rest of the filthy kitchen too. But he knew this was unlikely. Now that she no longer had her teaching job, Winnie didn’t do much apart from sleep and eat, and she didn’t adhere to a regular schedule when performing these activities either—she was often awake for long stretches between midnight and dawn and made up for it by napping during the day. At least, this was what Long inferred from what Winnie had told him; Long slept like the dead, so he had never witnessed her insomnia firsthand. He didn’t know when she slipped in and out of bed, or how she spent the currency of her restless nocturnal hours.

Long reached his front door and gave the steel gate a polite but firm tug, hoping that it would accordion itself open without screeching today. Sometimes it behaved. But this morning it was noncompliant and gave a drawn-out, rusty groan that made heads turn on the street. Long still didn’t mind this sound as much as he did the crashing aluminum cans. He rolled his motorbike down the small ramp built into the front steps, stared at the sky to try and determine the probability of rain, donned his driving jacket, and went to work. On his drive home that evening, he purchased two takeaway dinners from a cart.

When he returned to the house at half past six, Winnie was gone. At first, he didn’t realize that the house was empty—he just assumed that all the lights were off because Winnie was upstairs napping. After wheeling his motorbike back inside the house, he felt his way to the kitchen (for months now, the landlord had been making excuses for why he hadn’t fixed the broken ceiling light in the entryway), plopped the dinner boxes onto the counter, and tripped over the fallen beer cans, which were still on the floor. With a sigh, Long began picking them up. He didn’t bother to do it quietly, because he wanted Winnie to wake up and come downstairs so he wouldn’t have to eat alone. When the rattling did not summon her, he went up to the bedroom, knocked softly on the door, then pushed it open when she did not respond.

With surprised delight, he saw that Winnie had made the bed. It was the first time since moving in that she had bothered to do it. A lonely strand of black hair was clinging to the pillowcase, and he plucked it off and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then he realized that if the bed did not contain Winnie, he did not know where Winnie was. To what would later be his first great shame, his immediate emotional response was not alarm but more delight; days would pass—weeks, even—where Winnie wouldn’t leave the house, and he was hopeful that this indicated an end to her agoraphobia.

Long returned to the kitchen, where he ate his dinner and began watching a pirated Korean horror movie that he found enjoyable despite the poor video quality and mistimed Vietnamese subtitles. He wondered if Winnie was out shopping. Could she have gone to meet someone? He didn’t think that she had any friends in Saigon. He very much doubted that she would go visit her great-aunt on a whim. The Korean movie was now beginning to get too grisly for him—there was some sort of goblin living in the family’s attic, and Long could already tell that at least one of the children was going to get eaten. It was now nearly eight and Winnie still hadn’t returned. Long shut his laptop and sent Winnie a text. He worded it carefully—he didn’t want her to think that he was worried and therefore discourage her from going out again in the future.

Ten seconds later, Long discovered a new auditory enigma of his house: from the kitchen, he could hear Winnie’s phone vibrating upstairs in the pocket of a dress that had been discarded on a chair.

He raced up the stairs, back to the bedroom. She just forgot her phone at home when she went out, he told himself, even as he frantically threw open the doors to the closet, to the bathroom, to the spare bedroom full of junk that he’d been planning to sublet for a year and a half now but still hadn’t gotten around to clearing out. Winnie was not in any of them. Long had to mentally prepare for a minute before he could bring himself to climb the steps to the attic. She was not in there—and to his relief, no goblins were either—but the air smelled rank. He returned to the bedroom and got down on all fours. Her suitcase was still under the bed, her passport zippered snugly in one of its interior pockets. Long took it out and ran a thumb over the gold embossing on the front. American eagles always looked spatchcocked to him. He opened to the photo page, where the glossy face of a long-haired Winnie he could barely recognize gazed back at him through the laminate.

Long went back downstairs and checked for her in the cupboard-like space beneath the staircase with the broken toilet and then the cabinet under the kitchen sink, just in case. Then, because he did not know what else to do, he sat in the kitchen and waited. Periodically, he rose to get himself a beer from the fridge. By midnight he had drunk five of them yet didn’t feel tipsy. Winnie still hadn’t returned. Long lined the empty cans up on his countertop, then went upstairs and got ready for bed. He told himself that if Winnie wasn’t back by morning, he would call the police. His second great shame was that he then proceeded to sleep for a full and untroubled six and a half hours. He did not lie awake sick with worry, he did not get up during the night to see if she had come home, and if he dreamed again, he did not remember it.

In the morning, Long opened his eyes and rolled over on his right side, as he did every day. He saw that the space next to him was still empty. He already knew that he was not going to call the police, and this was his third great shame. Not yet, at least. He would wait a little longer before getting them involved. He was not going to run the risk of encountering his older brother, however negligible the odds, until he had no other choice. But while he brushed his teeth (quietly, still; it would have felt rude to take advantage of Winnie’s absence by being purposefully noisy) he started preparing his answers to the questions they would ask him. How long have you known the American girl? Not quite a year. Nine months, maybe. What is your relationship with her? (Long paused to inaudibly release a foamy plop of toothpaste.) We are romantically involved. How long have you lived together? About three months. Has this residence been properly registered with the police to rent to foreigners?

Long scowled and rinsed vigorously. The answer was no. His landlord would be fined, Long would be evicted, and who knew if they would ever find Winnie.

He left for work. On the way home that evening, he stopped to buy two dinners from the same cart as before. It felt too pessimistic to just buy one. A rat ran along the edge of the tarp awning that sagged above the rice cart, and Long was so startled that he nearly fell off his motorbike and the woman bagging up his takeaway boxes looked at him strangely. At home, he drank the last two beers in the fridge to settle his nerves. Winnie still had not returned. Long turned out all the lights and wandered around the house with his ear pressed against the walls, rapping them softly with his knuckles. He was now genuinely convinced that she might be trapped inside them. The building was old; perhaps its walls were hollow, and this was why things never sounded right. No one knocked back.

The next day was a Saturday. Winnie still had not returned. Long decided that it was time to begin searching for her beyond the perimeter of his own home. He drove in widening concentric circles around the neighborhood on his motorbike, scanning sidewalks and coffeeshop windows for her face. In the afternoon, he set out for District 11, where Winnie’s great-aunt lived. The old woman did not remember who Long was, but the cousin who answered the door did and gave him an unpleasant stare. No, she had not seen Winnie since she’d moved out. The cousin closed the door so abruptly that she almost caught Long’s fingers in the frame.

Long decided he did not trust them. The great-aunt was at least eighty-five years old, and the cousins looked like they collectively weighed seventy kilos, but perhaps the three of them together could have overpowered Winnie. After pretending to drive away, he circled back to the block and then found a seat at a café with a view of the house’s front gate. A stakeout. Maybe he should have become the policeman instead of his brother. Long spent the entire afternoon there before admitting to himself that he did not really believe that they were responsible for Winnie’s disappearance.

He couldn’t bring himself to go back to District 6 yet, so he parked next to a canal and practiced his dialogue with the police again. When was the last time you saw Winnie? In the house, in bed, on Thursday morning. What did you do that day? I went to my office. I had hủ tiếu for lunch at a place around the corner and then an iced coffee next door. I left work at five-thirty, arrived back at the house just after six, and by then she was gone. Is there anybody who can vouch for your whereabouts on the seventeenth? My boss and several coworkers. And the owners of the hủ tiếu shop and the café. They know me because I spend my lunch hour the same way every day. Why didn’t you report that she was missing sooner? I don’t know! I was giving her time to come back to me! It would be embarrassing if I went to the police and then found out that she’d just gone to live with a secret boyfriend. Did you assume that Winnie left you because Binh left you too? Why are you bringing up Binh? How do you know about Binh? She has nothing to do with this.

He was hyperventilating over the canal railing. The water below was unspeakably polluted, but the sidewalks were lined with beautiful old cast-iron streetlamps, and their glass globes gave off a soft, tea-colored glow that disguised the floating garbage.

Long drove back to his small, dark, empty house. Winnie still had not returned. Should he go door-to-door, asking his neighbors if they’d seen her? He shook his head. Every single one of them would reply that they did not know her and then promptly and anonymously report him to the police after he’d left. People did not get involved in others’ business in the alley. Except for one person, it suddenly occurred to Long. He poked his head back outside and looked down the street to see if the xe ôm man was lurking at his usual corner like the neighborhood vulture. Tonight, the spot on the sidewalk where he parked his motorbike was empty. Long went back inside, slightly relieved.

Another wild idea, because wild ideas were all that he had now. Long got his tool kit from the spare room. He would pry up the wonky kitchen tiles with a chisel and dig for her. He could picture exactly how it had happened: the landlord had finally showed up to fix the broken light on Thursday morning, discovered that there was an unregistered foreigner living in his house, murdered her because he did not want to deal with the local police, buried her in the spot where he’d already been mucking about in the house’s foundation, and then tiled back over it. The dream of the Winnie Tree had been a premonition; all along, she’d been underneath it. Long should have figured it out the first night. He was a psychic as well as a detective. Someone ought to give him a TV show.

But when he opened the toolbox, he discovered something that did not belong there. Something he had not put inside, something he had never seen before. It was a clumsily coiled piece of aluminum wire. A cruel-looking thing, nearly a meter when unfurled. There was dried blood streaking the length of it. No, it was not red paint. Long knew blood like he knew rubber trees. He stared at the wire, and then silently rolled it back up and returned it to the toolbox. He pushed the toolbox back into the corner where it lived. He exited the room and shut the door. Two minutes ago, he hadn’t actually believed that he would find Winnie if he dug up the kitchen. Until now, he hadn’t seriously considered that real harm had come to her. He could imagine Winnie dead, but he could not handle being confronted by the evidence of things he thought were imaginary being true.

Long went to sleep. He woke up in the morning and rolled onto his right side. Winnie still had not returned.