Embarrassingly, there was a part of Winnie that had secretly imagined herself becoming a better teacher after Dao’s departure. As if, in her absence, Winnie would automatically become the good one, and the academy would hire an inferior new demi-Winnie to occupy the space she had held before. But unfortunately, in the weeks that followed, Winnie continued to be herself.
She did start to give homework though. The same single assignment at the end of each class: “Write five sentences.” After the long question-and-answer session about American slang, her students would take turns reading aloud what they’d written at home. This took care of the remainder of the class period, sometimes with a spare five minutes to fill with rote pronunciation exercises. Winnie told them to interpret the homework however they liked. Some of the students wrote simple lists about their likes and dislikes, and others used the assignment as a sort of diary, cataloguing the various banalities in their lives that had transpired since the last class. Winnie even made occasional appearances in them on days when they were feeling less inspired. (“Teacher Winnie is American.” “My teacher wears one dress every day.” “Our American teacher does not smile a lot.”)
The only student that Winnie actively disliked was Hai, a squirrelly man in his early thirties. Every Monday and Wednesday and Friday evening, Hai arrived for class at 6:50, and then, because the rest of the group didn’t begin trickling in until quarter past seven, he would sit alone in the room for twenty-five minutes and stare gloomily at the wall while he fiddled with the wrinkled grocery bag full of pens that he always brought with him.
While his clothes were normal—unremarkable outfits of slacks and polo shirts—he wore three long strands of kumquat-sized wooden beads around his neck, one of them with a dangling carved Buddha, and when he wasn’t fidgeting with his pens he was nervously twisting the beads in his fingers and accidentally clacking them against his desk or each other. He usually had a sheen of perspiration on his neck and forehead that was unwarranted given the power of the Achievement! air-conditioning system. There was something contagious about his twitchy energy, and if Winnie watched him for too long, she would start feeling anxious and sweaty herself.
She dreaded when it was Hai’s turn to read his homework assignments out loud. While her students’ fragmented English generally lent their sentences a kind of loose jocularity, there were sometimes flecks of darkness scattered around the edges of what they wrote—allusions to illness, to husbands with bad tempers, to elderly parents and motorbike accidents and theft. Hints in wobbly English about lives in the kinds of neighborhoods that Winnie would never venture into, however far removed she might consider herself from the Cooks and their veggie-burger-yoga-expat stratum. But Hai always outperformed his peers in darkness. His work was incessantly creepy in tone, with subject matter that tended to verge on the hallucinatory.
The first session that the students had shared their homework, nearly all of them had read a variation of the same five-sentence introduction off their sheets of paper: “My name is _____. I am __ years old. I have __ children. I work at _____. I like to study English.”
But when it was his turn, Hai cleared his throat and then recited from memory: “My old boss was die. That night his mouth, open so big. I can see the red cloud. Is the red cloud the truth?” Then he looked down at the final sentence in his notebook and frowned, reassessing it upon rereading. Eventually he mumbled out a halfhearted “I like to study English,” instead of what was written on the page.
All of the other students burst into applause, but their positive reaction seemed to make him even more melancholy. He just clutched his pen and stared into space with his mouth set in a hard, cheerless line.
After the period ended, he waited for the rest of the class to clear out before he slouched up to Winnie’s desk and nervously handed her a piece of notebook paper, its margins scalloped with the translucent half prints of his sweaty thumbs. He had written a long list of Vietnamese terms that he needed assistance translating into English, and Winnie reluctantly agreed to help him, even as she quickly scanned the words and was alarmed to see that they included “exorcism,” “ghost,” and “demon possession.”
Armed with his new vocabulary, Hai’s homework only grew more disturbing and less coherent over the following weeks.
“In my old job, I find the ghost. Everything is so nice before we go to the mountains village. My old colleague have demon possess her inside. After, I do not like sleep. Sometimes, I see the red smoke in my dream.”
“My old boss with the mouth too big, he was die inside the car. At Saigon, my colleague tells for everyone, ‘He is die because he is the old man.’ It is the lie! He is die because there is the ghost. As well, maybe he is die because I cannot find the dog. So I only want to make a good tour guide now. This week I write too many sentence. I am sorry my Teacher Winnie.”
He always appeared to be deeply anguished when he read his work aloud and was often shaking perceptibly. At the end of class, if he didn’t have another list of words to give to Winnie for translation, he would shoot up out of his seat and sprint from the room with his rustling pen bag clenched in one fist.
As she approached her sixth month in Saigon, Winnie could feel herself beginning to crumble at the edges. Her eyes had little red veins in them all the time. She was accidentally walking into walls and starting to be less careful about when she stepped off sidewalks into traffic. The morning she went to renew her visa again at the Cambodian crossing point, she drank nearly a quarter of a bottle of vodka before climbing on the bus, hoping that it would let her sleep for the duration of the ride and prevent her from thinking about the trip three months ago, with Long. It worked too well—at the border, after all the other passengers disembarked, the driver had to come shake her awake in her seat, scolding her as she finally stumbled off the bus. Later, unsteady on her feet in the foreign passport line, she tripped face-first into the hiking backpack of the man ahead of her, hitting a tooth against the aggressively sleek metal water bottle clipped to its side. The backpack’s owner paused his conversation with his friends, about driving motorbikes from Phnom Penh to Battambang, turned to look at Winnie with equal parts concern and annoyance, but then he decided to ignore her. After she had her Vietnamese exit stamp, Winnie drunkenly contemplated just continuing to walk. Going on into Cambodia and starting fresh there, with only her passport and straw purse containing her phone, the remainder of the vodka, and a romance novel set primarily on a rugged Irish cliffside. She could do it, she told herself. She could leave behind all the evidence of her failed, lonely life in Saigon—leave her dirty room at the Cooks’, leave the academy and her students, who could learn how to correctly pronounce “burrito” from a better American. Leave Long too, though there was nothing between Long and herself to even leave in the first place. This time, she could become the kind of person who drove to Battambang with friends.
Winnie’s feet turned her back toward Vietnam. She didn’t think her karaoke bathroom policeman was the one who stamped her back in, but she still searched his face when he handed her passport back, to see if there was any half-buried recognition there. There wasn’t, but he could smell the alcohol on her and wrinkled his nose with distaste.
Her sleeplessness was starting to do funny things to her English. At home, sometimes the Cooks would say something to Winnie, something perfectly normal, something they always said (“Hi, Win, just wanted to ask you—Goji’s stool has been a little chalky lately. You haven’t been giving him human food by any chance, have you?” “You’ll never believe this: today we saw an actual rat run out of the kitchen at Gabe and Trinh’s restaurant. Never eating there again!” “Listen, Win, Anna made extra smoothie this morning, so help yourself to leftovers in the fridge—everyone needs a mineral boost sometimes!”), and Winnie would be unable to parse what she had heard. The words just rolled off her brain like drops of rain on a waxy lotus leaf. Other times, she would see their mouths make words (“Winnie, we think it might be a good idea for you to talk to someone about what’s going on with you.”), but her mind would replace what they had said with a Hai-homework sentence about demons and red clouds, or a line from a romance novel, or a string of her students’ mind-numbing vocabulary demands. It was as if all of Winnie’s English had been loaded carelessly in a washing machine, and now the colors were bleeding.
“My old boss with the mouth too big, he is lose his bag when the night he was die. It has contents of his papers and also of some hairs…”
Humblebrag, catfishing, bikini body, friends with benefits.
An email from her parents she already knew she was not going to respond to, accompanied by a photo of her middle brother’s pink beach ball of a four-month-old—Hi Ngoan, your dad and I hope you are having fun on your big adventure! I’m sorry things didn’t work out at Bà Cô’s house, but we’re so happy you’re making friends!
Ridin’ dirty, Brangelina, happy hour.
“…My colleague tell to us, this is secret. She is now lovers with the wife of the mountains villager man! Maybe, I am jealous a little. The mountains villager man, I believe he is die also.”
You still haven’t sent us your new phone number.
Werewolf, chicken nuggets, auto-tune, thigh gap.
A vivid dream where Winnie was two feet tall and Mrs. Cook picked her up by her tiny arms and said, “Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good girl? Is it Winnie? Are you being a good girl for Mommy and Daddy?” and Mr. Cook waved a dog treat in her face.
We’d love to hear from you more often.
Ronan could resist no longer. Lady Catherine’s auburn hair danced in the wild wind as he drew her to his sinewy chest, his manhood throbbing like the waves of the North Atlantic against the Kerry cliffs.
Attaching a sweet photo of Hien and Elliot’s new baby—you have another nephew! When you can, let us know the next time you’re planning on coming home.
Cannonball, breaststroke, doggy paddle, belly flop.
Love, Mom
One night after class, Hai came up to her desk and asked Winnie if she was all right. He then offered her one of his beaded necklaces, saying that they were for protection.
Winnie smiled, holding back tears. She thanked him for his offer but declined. Then she left the academy and hailed a cab instead of returning to the Cooks’ apartment to sit on the windowsill and get through ten sentences of The Lord of Ballyduff. The last time she had felt happy, or free, had been in the club at Dao’s farewell party. She could find that feeling again, and she didn’t need anyone else. She was going to seize it tonight. In her bones, the organ played a warning note.
Back to Bui Vien first. Two beers to start—cans of something cold from a convenience store she stopped into after exiting the cab, too easy for her to toss back in the heat—temporarily granting her a brazenness and a charm that no one would be able to tell was phony, because no one was sober here. The rattle of that inner instrument was already dampened. It was late enough and the sidewalks sufficiently full that there was no longer any distinction made between tables, so Winnie inserted herself among the ranks of the drunk backpackers. She was clinking glasses, and then she was eating skewers of chili-salt pork on a street corner while the world spun. She was taking an offered cigarette even though she did not smoke. She was squatting to pee in the forgiving shadows of a parking lot, warding off sweaty elbows in a nightclub she didn’t remember agreeing to go to, and then there were shots, and fingers fumbling at the hem of her linen sack, and then she was vomiting off the back of a motorbike, and then there was nothing, nothing.
When she opened her eyes, a man’s face was gazing curiously down at her.
Winnie gave a hoarse little shout, which resurrected the taste of the previous night’s cigarettes and liquor. “I’m sorry,” she squawked, just to be on the safe side, though she didn’t yet remember if she had done anything wrong. Or know exactly where she was. She was lying on one side. Her arm hurt. Her cheek was resting on something scratchy. She sniffed, smelled vomit, and prayed that it did not belong to her despite the damning, familiar evidence of a stomach that felt squeezed empty and a tongue that was coated with a yeasty scum. She slowly pushed herself up to a seated position and saw that she was on a sofa in a windowless room she did not recognize. It turned out that the scratchy material beneath her face had been a graphite-colored suit jacket in ultrashiny, possibly flammable polyester.
“I’m glad you’re awake. I am the Worm, you are in my nightclub, and that is my jacket.” The Worm was indeed wearing its matching shiny trousers. “A few hours ago, you asked if you could use it as a pillow and told me that you were just going to take a five-minute nap. We didn’t want to disturb you,” he continued with a wry smile, but then his expression suddenly grew sober. “Do you remember anything from last night?” he asked Winnie.
She frowned. This was when the greasy bits of the night before should have conjured themselves up, providing her with a loose outline of the evening’s events. But now she discovered, with the same, vertigo-like lurch of walking down a staircase in the dark, anticipating one more step but abruptly meeting the floor instead, that she recalled nothing. “No,” she coughed.
The Worm watched Winnie’s face carefully. “It’s likely that something was slipped into your drink,” he said.
Winnie tried once again to dip into her memories and still came up empty. She looked down at her left arm for the first time, wondering why it was so sore, and saw that there was a ring of dark, splotchy bruises on her forearm and lower biceps, like squashed grapes on her skin. A thought occurred to her. She took her right hand and arranged her fingers over one of the bruise clusters to test her theory. Each of them nearly corresponded with one of the grape marks. He had grabbed her here. She moved her hand up to the next cluster. And here. “Who was it?” she asked, wondering if she might lie back down on the coat again. It was making her dizzy, trying to piece together a story with only the clues on her skin. She felt like there were two wires she needed to connect, and if she could only get them to touch, it would all make sense, but they kept missing each other.
The Worm shrugged. “Just some asshole with quick hands,” he said. “You can buy the drugs anywhere. I— Oh no.” He had noticed Winnie starting to slump sideways again and quickly intervened, steadying her. He retrieved his suit jacket, shook out some of the wrinkles, and gave the jacket a surreptitious sniff. Then he helped Winnie rise unsteadily to her feet. “No more naps; this is a dance club, not a hostel,” he gently scolded.
With a bitter ache, Winnie realized that this was probably the longest night’s sleep she’d had in weeks.
“Listen,” said the Worm. “My boss and I reviewed the footage from the security cameras ourselves, but it wasn’t very helpful. We’re probably never going to find them.”
“Them?” Winnie’s skin crawled.
“And even if we did,” he smoothly continued over her, “what could we do? You’re fine.”
“I’m fine,” repeated Winnie softly.
“Nothing really serious happened, did it? This was a bit of a scare, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal. If you can’t even remember it anyway, then what’s the harm?” He had pulled out his wallet. “Now, if you go out, turn right, and keep walking for about ten minutes, there’s a bánh ướt cart right in front of the zoo. Best shrimp cakes in all of Saigon. Why don’t you go and get some breakfast and put all this behind you?” He pressed a crisp 500,000₫ bill into Winnie’s hand while she tilted her head back to keep her tears in. “Our treat.”
Because she did not know what else to do, Winnie went. The two bánh ướt women eyed her coldly from behind their cart as they prepared a serving of flabby rice-noodle sheets for her, served heaped up like a pile of damp Kleenex with the famous shrimp cake on top, then drenched in sweetened fish sauce. To Winnie’s shame, when they handed her the plate, both of them physically leaned away from her. Winnie knew how badly she smelled and suspected that she looked even worse. They made her pay before eating, worried that she would try to skip out on the bill. Winnie found a stool as far away from them as she could. As she ate, she overheard the noodle ladies settling the bill of a Vietnamese customer, and realized that they had overcharged her by 5,000₫.
Winnie did not think that she felt angry. It was nothing. It was the equivalent of a quarter. But she watched herself quietly take a handful of chopsticks out of the communal basket on the table, break them in half one by one, and drop them onto the ground. Crack, crack, crack. She heard the sound each one made as it snapped, but she could not feel them in her hands. Then she rose and left before they could see what she had done.
Because the zoo was there, and because the morning was still cool, Winnie bought a ticket and went in.
She was dizzy again and the shrimp cake was not sitting well with her. Her arm was throbbing, but she refused to let herself look down at the marks on it. The morning light leaching in through the branches of the dipterocarp trees lining the path was tinted bluish at its edges. She heard the little scrabble of rat feet in the bushes, and birds whose calls sounded uncomfortably like human screaming. What had her body done in those hours she could not remember? She had the troubling notion that she was going to start screaming soon too.
She passed an enclosure that appeared to house an extraordinary number of crocodiles and then turned and entered the snake house because it seemed empty. The building was designed like a nautilus, or perhaps like a coiled serpent itself—one long, spiraling hallway. The squeezers were first. Burmese python. Reticulated python. Indian rock python. Winnie read each plaque as she passed but did not spend too long studying the cages’ inhabitants. She guessed that the snakes were arranged in order of venomousness. What would be at the center? Pit vipers next. Malayan pit viper. Sumatran pit viper. Tonkin pit viper. Bornean palm pit viper. Every place, it seemed, had their own pit viper. Banded krait. Many-banded krait. Splendid krait. The body of the splendid krait was covered in blue-black markings the exact same shade as Winnie’s bruises. That made her the splendid Winnie. Chinese cobra. Monocled cobra. She was almost at the center now. Mandalay cobra. King cobra. And there, in the final vivarium at the end of the hallway, the Indochinese spitting cobra.
“Well, what’s so special about you?” she muttered to herself. Then the snake raised its second head. “Oh god!” yelled Winnie, stumbling backward.
Winnie would have described the expression on the snake’s face as offended were this not a preposterous notion. She wondered if she was only imagining it; if this was just a hallucination from the last of whatever she had been dosed with as it left her system. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You startled me.” If the snake was a hallucination, then it was permissible to speak to it. The Indochinese spitting cobra had now lifted itself nearly to her eye level, using a forked branch as a stepladder.
It was pressing itself up against the side of its tank. The slat-like ventral scales of its belly looked like Venetian blinds. Winnie approached the display again. She took a breath, held it for a moment, and as she exhaled, she reached out and placed her hand against the glass, right at the spot beneath the cleft of the two heads, where she imagined its heart was. Or hearts. She kept her eyes averted, and she was quivering, but she did not take her hand away. The snake did not move either. Winnie thought she could feel its body pulsing faintly through the pane. Or perhaps it was just her body’s woozy receptors that were giving her the sensation that solids were not as solid as they should be. She pushed harder against the tank, almost believing that the barrier would yield to her, that with a slick pop she would emerge on the other side of the glass. The two-headed snake could take her place out here instead—she wanted to be the one inside the vivarium. She would be happy in there, with just her branch and her cactus and her clear walls. She wouldn’t even mind the people who would come to gawk at her, because she was done with being invisible; invisible didn’t work. Winnie pushed against the glass with all her strength. The bone at the base of her hand hurt. Finally, she pulled herself back from it.
“Oh, Winnie. What the fuck are you doing?” she laughed to herself, and her laughter tasted like smoke and bile. She needed to go. She needed to sober up. She needed to stop talking to the imaginary snake, which had slid back down the glass again and was leaning to one side like it was cocking its heads at her.
Winnie turned and she started to run. She ran back down the hallway, past the cobras and kraits and pit vipers and pythons. Past the happy Vietnamese children, whose trip to the zoo now featured the surprise appearance of a disheveled, sprinting foreigner. She ran back toward the entrance, pausing only for a few seconds to hack up her undigested shrimp cake into a bin just outside the gates, and then she wiped her mouth on a sleeve and started to run again.
She did not slow down until the sidewalk grew too narrow and crowded, congested by banana and pineapple and sesame donut vendors and drivers who were trying to circumvent red lights by climbing up from the street onto the pavement. And then Winnie finally stopped and leaned against a crumbling concrete wall and gasped for air. When she had recovered her breath, she decided that what she needed more than anything was coffee.
She beckoned to an idle motorbike taxi. When the driver pulled up beside the curb, she asked him what district he lived in.
“Six,” he replied, handing her a spare helmet.
“Take me there, please,” said Winnie, climbing up behind him.
The elderly xe ôm man looked scandalized. “To my house?” he choked.
“Oh, no. No, no, no. Just take me to whatever your favorite coffee shop is in District 6.”
Relieved, he started his bike and they rattled off down the road.
The xe ôm man ended up selecting a coffee shop that he had clearly never set foot inside but assumed Winnie would like—the front of it was designed to look like a large, pink windmill, there was a white picket fence around the perimeter, and when Winnie looked in through the window she saw that instead of chairs, the shop’s clientele (all teenaged girls) sat on tiny tuffets of peach velour. Winnie knew that she could not possibly besmirch a tuffet by depositing her hungover carcass on it, but the xe ôm man seemed so enthusiastic about the place when they pulled up that for his sake she pretended to go inside. After he had driven out of sight, she left as fast as she could and wandered down the street to find a coffee shop that seemed grubby enough for her this morning.
No one looked twice at her when she entered Café Max. It had wooden chairs and scuffed black-and-white checkerboard floor tiles and lazy flies circling uncovered cans of condensed milk. Winnie found an empty table between a group of old men yelling at a soccer match and two uniformed middle school students frantically copying each other’s homework and glancing over in panic at a clock on the wall every few minutes. She ordered a hot coffee instead of an iced one because she wanted to watch it fall, drip by drip, through the little tin filter and into her glass. There was something soothing about the plipping sound it made. Winnie closed her eyes and pictured herself compressing everything she had experienced last night and this morning into a small, hard seed that she could bury inside herself. The dripping stopped; her coffee was finished brewing. She opened her eyes, set the filter aside, and used a dinky tin spoon to stir in the ribbon of condensed milk at the bottom of the glass. But after two sips Winnie felt vomity again; she got up too quickly, and her chair legs scraped against the floor with a noise that made her cringe.
“Bathroom?” she asked the mustachioed man unrumpling small notes at the cash register. He gestured down a back hallway. Winnie passed a storage room and a kitchen before rounding a corner and finding the toilet behind a sliding door—a little ceramic squatter with a green plastic bucket of flushing water. She leaned against the wall for five minutes while waiting to see whether or not she would throw up, and when she eventually decided that she didn’t need to, she hiked up her dress and squatted to take a piss instead. When she stood back up she discovered that her pee was a disheartening egg-yolk hue and frowned down at it. Suddenly her nostrils flared. She leaned toward the toilet and sniffed; impossible as it sounded, her urine smelled like smoke. How many cigarettes had she smoked last night? Winnie quickly tilted in some water from the green bucket to flush it away. But the fumes were still there, stronger even, even after the pee was gone. Winnie panicked briefly, imagining that the coffee shop had started to go up in flames and she would burn to death in the toilet. But when she threw open the door and stepped out into the hallway, she realized the scent was much too faint, a fragrance that was somewhere between woodsmoke and incense and tobacco. It wasn’t coming from her pee or from the front of the coffee shop but from farther down the hall. Winnie checked to make sure she was alone before starting toward what smelled like the source.
At the very end of the hallway there was a staircase that led to the second and third stories of the building, a small box altar in the alcove beneath the stairs, and across from it, a sliding glass door, half-open, leading to a walled-in patio. In the center of the patio there was a metal ash bucket leaking smoke, with little fingertips of flame just visible at its lip. Next to the bucket, reclining on a beach chair with a rusting metal frame, was a very old man smoking a cigarette.
He saw Winnie looking at him through the door before she could slink away. “Come in!” he called, crooking the index of his free hand at her. “You wouldn’t happen to be half French, would you?” he added as she tentatively stepped out onto the patio.
Winnie shook her head. “Half American. My mom is Irish and Italian, I think?”
“Ah, so we’re different mixes then,” said the old man. “A pity. I haven’t had anyone to speak French with for years. I never thought I’d miss it back when I was…Well, when I was younger. Whatever your blood, you can pull up a seat and then we’ll get started.” He gestured to a corner of the patio that held a terra-cotta planter of red and green chilies and a three-legged wooden stool.
Winnie obediently retrieved the stool and positioned it at what she hoped was a polite distance from the man. She did not know what else to do. He was barefoot and bareheaded, his nut-brown scalp bald and gleaming in the sunlight, and he wore dark dress pants that were a bit too short and exposed the skin at his ankles. He also had on a yellowing undershirt and an oversized black cardigan, despite the midmorning humidity. The clearest indicator of his Europeanness was the white beard covering most of his face, much bushier and more luxuriant than the ones she usually saw on Vietnamese men, who tended to cultivate wispy, Ho Chi Minh–esque chin whiskers. Apart from Dutch Alex’s baby and herself, this old man was the only other mix she knew in this city. They made an odd trio.
“Beg your pardon, but what are we starting?” asked Winnie nervously.
The man grinned and extended his hand. “Jean-François Auffret, fortune teller, à votre service.”
“Ngoan,” said Winnie, reaching out her own. She didn’t know why she had said it. It had flopped out of her mouth unintentionally. Maybe it was because she was afraid of lying to a fortune teller. Or maybe she just couldn’t bear to be Winnie anymore right now.
They shook hands, but instead of letting Winnie’s hand go afterward, Monsieur Auffret flipped it over so that the palm was facing up. Then he abruptly started to squish the flesh on her fingers, scrunching the hand up and kneading her phalanges. Winnie suppressed a yelp.
“This is the old-fashioned way of reading it,” he said, without releasing her hand. He prodded the meatier part of her palm, by the thumb, and pinched her wrist bone. “Not very popular anymore, but often more accurate than a birth chart. Hands can’t lie. To be honest, I prefer this method. I don’t have the head for numbers and stars anymore, now that I’m retired. Well, mostly retired. I still come back sometimes to do these little backyard readings because I have nothing else to do. It’s much less exciting than you’d think, the part that comes after. I even grew this beard because I was so bored.”
Monsieur Auffret flipped Winnie’s hand back over to study the web of lines on each of her knuckles. Then he went over her fingernails one by one, tilting them in the weak sunlight, looking closely at the white spots or ridges on some. Finally, he folded Winnie’s fingers closed over her own palm like an envelope and returned her hand to her. He reached over to tap the ash of his neglected cigarette out into his bucket. The corner of Winnie’s mouth twitched nervously as the loose sleeve of his sweater dangled right above the fire. Then she blinked and she frowned—now the sleeve was in the fire, but somehow it wasn’t burning. It was as if the flames had parted around it, repelled by a magnetic force. Winnie shook her head. Just more hungover vision tricks.
Monsieur Auffret had returned his arm to the safety of the beach chair. “It’s a confusing one,” he said. “I can’t get a whole picture for you—only half snatches. You will be moving somewhere new soon. And you will be going to the sea, but at the same time, you will never go to the sea again. I’m sorry if that seems like a riddle, but it’s all that I could decipher. Watch what you eat and drink. Be very careful about what you put into your body.”
“That advice would have been very useful about twelve hours ago,” Winnie said with a pained half smile. She saw Monsieur Auffret’s eyes take in the bruises on her arm for the first time. He did not ask her about them, and she was grateful. She did not want to know what he could read on the skin there.
“This is a stubborn hand,” he finally continued, and his voice was gentle. “But its grip is weak. That is an unlucky combination. A hand that does not heed warnings. It insists on choosing for itself, but it does not choose wisely. Tell me, do you sleep well at night?”
“No,” said Winnie.
“Ah. I thought so, but I could tell that from your face, not from your palm. Also, it is going to rain soon, but I know that from the tingling in my arthritic jaw. That will be 10,000₫ for the reading, please.”
Winnie took out her wallet and leafed through what remained of the money she had been given at the nightclub. She didn’t have any bills smaller than a fifty. “Do you have change?” she asked him.
“Let me see,” said Monsieur Auffret. He took Winnie’s stack of đồng from her, and then promptly dropped all of it into his fire. She couldn’t suppress a little squeak of surprise, and this made him laugh so hard the legs of his beach chair shook.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ve accidentally thrown away more American dollars than this in your lifetime,” he hooted. “You didn’t need any of it anyway. Now look—look at the smoke. I’m sending it up to the heavens to see if it can intercede on your behalf. That’s the best use for it.”
The flames in the bucket had gobbled up the plastic polymer notes, adding an acrid tang to the air and a murky umber hue to the smoke rising from it in intertwined coils.
Winnie wasn’t sure how she should respond. “Thank you?” she offered, after a beat. Then it began to dawn on her: “I— I don’t have enough money to pay for my coffee,” she stuttered, only realizing it fully as the words left her mouth. “That was all that I had on me.” She flashed her empty wallet at Monsieur Auffret.
“Here, give me one of those unlucky hands and help an old man out of his chair.” He extended his bony arms, and Winnie gently steadied him while he rose. He pointed to the far corner of the walled-in patio; “It’s not as high as you’d think,” he said. “It’s very climbable. And on the other side there’s an alley—turn left and it’ll take you past a meat market, and you can find your way home from there. Come on! Bring your stool.” He padded across the concrete on his bare feet, Winnie trotting behind him obediently with the stool in her arms. She set it down beside the wall and then tested one foot on the seat, frowning as its legs wobbled. She had never been very coordinated, and the events of last night had made her limbs even less reliable than usual.
“Here,” said Monsieur Auffret, bending into a half crouch and bracing himself against the wall. He laced his hands at chest level to form a makeshift rung and offered it to Winnie.
“But I’m heavy,” she protested. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
He grinned. “That’s something to be proud of! It’s the American milk you grew up drinking—you all have very dense bones! But don’t worry, you can’t hurt me.”
Winnie climbed up onto the stool. When she stood on tiptoe her hands could just cup the edge of the wall. She wiped her hands dry of sweat on her dress and put them back up in position. “Ready?”
“Ready! Now, up and over!” said Monsieur Auffret.
It felt unforgivably rude to step on him, but Winnie had no other choice. She hefted her filthy-sneakered right foot up onto his hands and balanced herself on her left leg.
“One! Two! Three!” she counted quickly, and then launched herself from the stool, switching her weight to the foot in his hands. Her triceps quivered as she heaved herself up, and she hoped that he couldn’t see her underwear from this angle. The rubber sole of her free left foot scrabbled for an instant before finding traction. One scratchy instant more, and the leg reached the top of the wall. She swung it over to the other side, intending to sit straddled there for a minute while she thanked Monsieur Auffret, but instead she lost her balance and tumbled backward, landing on alleyway concrete with a loud smack.
Her tailbone was stinging and the arm that she had stuck out to break her fall was scraped and oozing red from wrist to elbow. There was some gravel in it. It was the same arm that bore the bruises, and Winnie was almost glad that she had cut it, that there was a fresh injury supplanting the old one. Now she could tell herself that the bruise was just from the fall too. Gritting her teeth, she slowly got to her feet. It was strangely quiet in the narrow alley, and although she knew that it had to just be a trick of the light, the concrete wall seemed several feet higher from this side. It wasn’t as sunny either—the alley was lined on both sides by other tall fences and the windowless brick backs of row houses. Winnie could no longer smell the smoke and ash from the old man’s fire bucket.
“I’m okay!” she called, hoping he could hear her on the other side. She waited. “Thank you!” she yelled, louder this time. Her voice echoed off the surrounding walls, and she winced at how shrill it sounded. There was no response. Winnie couldn’t remember which way was supposed to lead to the market. The alley was deserted to either side as far as she could see before it curved out of her line of vision. She wondered why there weren’t any passing motorbikes, for this surely had to be a useful shortcut to somewhere. Eventually she decided to limp left, imagining that the distant, muffled buzz of traffic she heard was coming from that direction.
The alleyway gradually widened, and to her relief, Winnie caught sight of market stalls. After a few more steps she could smell hot blood. It was nearly ten now, most of the morning shoppers had already bought their groceries and gone, and so the idle vendors gossiped with each other or were engrossed in their cellphones. Winnie made her way down the row of stalls largely unnoticed. A whole hairy pig’s face, stretched out wide and grinning on a wooden board alongside deconstructed pink stacks of its body, greeted her first. There were several other pork stands, and women who sold only the blood—congealed and sliced into lipstick-colored cakes—or the bones, or the fat. There were chickens and ducks across a wide spectrum: unhatched inside their speckled eggshells (they would be simmered and eaten late at night on street corners, their partially developed embryos sprinkled with pepper and scraped out with little spoons); squawking in wicker baskets on the ground; newly decapitated and twitching in plucking buckets; featherless and headless and on cutting boards. Some women sold bundles of herbs along with the meats they traditionally accompanied—basil and sawtoothed quills of culantro beside the marrow and knuckle bones destined for the phở pots, purple perilla and laksa leaves and lemongrass by the chickens.
The sky had grown darker without Winnie realizing, and the first raindrops landed on her bare shoulders just as she reached the end of the market. Winnie looked around at her new surroundings: the alley had opened out onto a broader and much more inhabited lane—there were storefronts and sidewalks and houses and motorbikes again. Drivers were pulling over to the side to take plastic ponchos out from under their seats, tugging them over helmeted heads and then billowing off down the road again. It had started drizzling steadily, but Winnie kept meandering onward. She didn’t know where she was, she had no plan for getting back to the Cooks’ apartment, and the pebbly cuts on her arm stung when the rain ran down it. Her wet dress was clinging crookedly to her thighs and breasts and armpits in unflattering ways, and she was shivering, but Winnie could feel her hangover washing away, and she imagined that she hadn’t lost just her memories of last night but of everything that came before it as well. It was a full downpour now, and she was so wet that she saw no reason to stay on the sidewalk. She stepped down into the gutter and strode along, ankle deep, then midcalf deep. It was filthy; the rain had swept up all manner of blood and feathers and tiny bones from the meat market. But Winnie was filth too, wasn’t she? She let her sneakers fill with brown water, laughing at the loud sloshing she made.
Something brushed against her leg. Winnie stopped laughing and looked down. Just a bit of plastic tubing, or an old toy, she told herself. But it hadn’t felt like trash. It had felt alive. Winnie took two more difficult steps against the deluge. It touched her again, and Winnie knew that it was something long and smooth and scaled and muscly. Then she saw it ahead of her. Just a glimpse at first—a slick black body breaking the skin of the water, just like those dubiously grainy photos of the Loch Ness monster. It was weaving down the gutter. And Winnie followed it.
It never revealed its whole body to her, but she guessed that it was nearly six feet in length, based on the occasions when multiple curves of coil were visible simultaneously. Winnie did not keep track of where she was going. She just kept her eyes fixed on the rippling water in front of her. What was left of her rational inner voice insisted that this was another hallucination, that she was seeing snakes because she still had the zoo on her mind, but this did not stop her from continuing to trudge through sewage after her creature.
Because she could not look away from the gutter thing and risk losing it, Winnie did not notice that the downpour was letting up. A sudden beam of sunshine slicing through the clouds and illuminating the last gasp of raindrops caught her off guard. Winnie turned her gaze heavenward for a split second in surprise and, when she looked back down, saw the black shape wriggling down a storm drain, lost to her forever. Her last image of it was a speckled reptilian tail disappearing beneath the sidewalk.
She looked at her surroundings. The gutter guide had left her in a narrow alley. The houses here were small and old and seemed like they were a single stiff breeze away from all collapsing onto one another. Winnie pushed back several soaking strands of hair from her forehead, wiped her eyes, and squinted at a marigold-yellow house across from her that was so skinny it looked like it had been illegally built into the crevice between two other buildings. She recognized the white motorbike parked in front of it. And she recognized the man who was shaking the last of the raindrops off the two large jackets he had draped protectively over its seats and handlebars.
Winnie could not bring herself to call out to him. She wanted him to go back inside before he saw her dripping all over his alleyway.
But Long looked up. He saw her and he blinked. “Winnie?”