Even though it was still only 9:45 when Tan arrived, the club was busy and the Worm was already occupying a stool at the downstairs bar. He was drinking his usual, a tumbler of rice wine on the rocks with a lime wedge, which he liked to term “neotraditionalist.” Everyone else at the bar was drinking expensive cocktails that included at least three ingredients and was named after a place Tan had never been—singapore slings, long island iced teas, manhattans—but the Worm sipped his nasty rượu plain like an old village uncle.
There was nothing special about this club. It was a cement box without character or windows. It had flashing lights and a smoke machine and pulsing, wordless techno and a vaguely aggressive, monosyllabic English name like Lunge, or Thrust, or Jolt—Tan could never remember. This gave it a strange quality, more like a loose outline of a place than the real thing. He suspected that its utter unremarkableness was actually a deliberate choice on the part of the doctor. It did not attract attention, and so its main source of revenue—the various narcotic dealings of the Worm and his ilk—could continue unfettered.
The Worm had adopted his moniker because, growing up, he had worshipped Dennis Rodman. Those unfamiliar with basketball assumed that he had been dubbed the Worm because he happened to resemble one: tall and spindly and prematurely bald, with terrible eyesight too, just to make the comparison more inevitable. He hailed from some northern village within spitting distance of China and was adept at squiggling undetected across Vietnam’s mountainous border with Laos and even going as far afield as northern Thailand and eastern Myanmar when required.
The Worm raised his glass in greeting. “Tan! My favorite captain! Why so grim?” he shouted over the music, forgoing the subtlety that Tan had understood to be traditional in drug dealing. “You look like shit! Have a drink with me, and then you’ll get your boosters!”
Tan pushed past the beautiful young people with empty glasses who were clogging the vicinity of the bartender, half dancing, half pushing each other out of the way to get refills first. He plopped onto the stool next to the Worm with the fatigue of a shipwrecked sailor and leaned back against the bar. “Thanks,” he said, even though he had no desire to drink anything.
A little hand flick from the Worm, and a bartender appeared within seconds holding a second glass of rice wine, to the silent seething of the queuing beautiful young people still waiting for drinks. Tan swirled the liquor, trying to get the ice to melt faster, the slice of lime batted around by the whirlpool like a tiny green boat. He did not like drinking rice wine, because it reminded him of his father. Tan’s earliest childhood memory was of Duc Phan summoning him into the room where he and his friends sat, shirtless, in a circle on the floor. They were fanning themselves with folded paper—old maps and torn-up magazine pages—so this was before they had electricity in the house, and Tan must have been around five. The men had been too stingy to buy more than a bag of boiled peanuts and some green mangoes as drinking snacks, yet they all made a big show of fighting over who would pay for the next round of wine, grandly flourishing wallets and slapping crumpled bills out of each other’s hands.
“Put your fucking money away, all of you! This is my house!” Tan’s father had yelled, rising unsteadily and stepping across the middle of the circle and over the sad little bag of peanuts to stuff his own money into his son’s hand. “Get us two liters!” he half belched, and gave Tan a hard pinch on the arm that could have been affectionate. Tan had walked the whole way to the shop holding the money as far away from his body and as high as he could, his arms stretched out in front of him and above his head like he was holding a cross at the front of a Catholic procession. If there was a reason for this, other than the usual strangeness of children, he had forgotten it. When he passed the front garden where his mother sat wiping away tears, she had looked up and seen his funny walk and smiled, and to this day, this was still the most gratifying moment of his entire life. The memory ended there. Tan swirled and swirled his glass.
The Worm was always nattily dressed. Tonight his suit was dark green, perhaps in the captain’s honor, but the fabric was expensive, and the hue was not drab and ugly, like Tan’s olive outfits, but lustrous, the color of an oil slick. He paired it with a silk shirt pimpled in magenta paisley and a pair of very pointy shoes. Tan looked at the Worm—who was surveying his little kingdom of the drunk, the high, and the sweaty, and nodding along to the music—and tried to imagine him as the old man he would’ve ended up as, had the doctor and the lure of a lucrative career in the Golden Triangle not interrupted the trajectory of his life. Tan pictured him squatting in front of a low one-room house. Toothless, wearing rubber sandals and knockoff Adidas shorts, a half-plucked, sinewy chicken in one hand and one of those enormous tobacco pipes made from half a bamboo branch in the other. And then Tan realized that this could have just as easily been his own narrowly avoided future. He closed his eyes and tried to push further into the vision, to enter that low little house and conjure up the Binh of an alternate world, alive, the old woman she should have become—his recalcitrant wife, saggy and gray and mean as ever, in fish-sauce-stained pajamas and a puffy jacket. He could only hold the image for about a second and then it was lost. Tan opened his eyes and took a big gulp of his drink to sear away with cheaply distilled alcohol what he had been in dangerous proximity of feeling. The lime wedge tumbled from the glass into his mouth when he tilted it back, and instead of spitting it out he just gnashed it up with his teeth, bitter rind and all, and swallowed it.
As he looked out into the crowd, he suddenly frowned. There was someone else in the club who was not dancing. She stood rigidly while people thrashed around her. It was not Binh. It was the girl with the strange face that he had seen earlier that evening at the snail restaurant, and she was looking straight at him. In her arms she cradled a small dog. The dapples of light from the machines on the ceiling flickered off and on to the pounding bass line; in the throng the girl’s face was illuminated and then swallowed by shadow, illuminated and then swallowed, over and over again, and each time the light was on her face he could see that her eyes had not moved from him.
Tan dropped his glass. It shattered on the ground, but the sound was drowned out because the song that had been thump-thumping in the background up to that point switched without warning to something that must have been popular, because when it started the entirety of the beautiful young things in the club suddenly shrieked and began to flail with even greater conviction, and Tan lost sight of the girl and her dog in the churning mess of limbs. After the excitement had abated somewhat there was no sign of them anymore.
I am seeing things, Tan thought. I am so tired that I am beginning to hallucinate. Dogs aren’t allowed in nightclubs. And he almost believed himself. He turned to ask for his drugs, but the Worm was already pulling a small plastic bag containing four rust-colored pills the size of lentils from the inner pocket of his jacket with a knowing smile.
“I want to pay you for these,” Tan said as he closed his fist around the bag.
The Worm chuckled. “Oh, you will. You know that.” He waved a bartender over to sweep up the broken glass on the floor.
“No, no, I want to pay with money,” pleaded Tan, “not with favors anymore.”
The Worm’s mouth twisted, as if hearing the terms of their transaction said aloud made what they did even dirtier. “You picked the wrong profession then, Captain. Or at least the wrong country to do it in.”
At that moment, in his lower intestines, Tan began to feel an unwelcome, familiar bubbling. Unwelcome, familiar, and urgent bubbling, signaling a violent disagreement between the shellfish and his digestive tract. He opened his baggie and promptly swallowed two of the little red tabs, as if hoping that they were antacids in addition to being Burmese horse drugs.
“Easy there, cowboy,” said the Worm, “This isn’t your first time, right?”
“Is something supposed to be happening? I don’t feel anything!” Tan said as his belly tightened and gurgled. He tried and failed to prevent a sulfurous fart from escaping, and the Worm pursed his lips and tried not to wrinkle his nose.
“How about I go and get you a glass of water to wash that down with?” he said to Tan, rising and walking over to queue at the bar, even though he could have summoned the bartender with a nod.
Tan did not feel embarrassed, which should have warned him that the pills were kicking in too quickly. His eyes alighted upon a staircase in a distant corner of the club, peeking through the thick clouds of cigarette smoke, the steps glowing faintly blue under the blacklights. It intrigued him, and without really being aware of what he was doing, Tan bounced down from his bar stool, legs briefly crumpling underneath him before he regained them.
The Worm called out to him. “Captain, where are you going? And why are you walking like that?”
“Up” was all Tan said, without looking back. The mystical blue staircase was calling to him. He knew that up those steps was where he would find what he needed. A toilet, primarily, but there was something else awaiting him there, he felt strangely sure. He had to go. Behind him the Worm sighed and waved his hand for another rice wine.
Tan was never good at weaving through crowds, even when he was sober, but that night, despite his accordion legs, he somehow moved through the dancing creatures untouched. They were all moving too quickly, or perhaps he was moving too quickly, and he couldn’t tell the men apart from women, or the foreigners from the Vietnamese. Sometimes in the blur of faces there would be one that suddenly and sharply came into focus and he would be sure that it belonged to the girl with the dog, but then he would duck to avoid an elbow and it was lost again. His intestines gurgled to the beat of the music. It was when he attempted to actually mount the stairs themselves that the first real problem presented itself: Tan’s body suddenly couldn’t remember the appropriate way to walk up them, and he was struck by an acute case of the spins. Tan managed to continue on his quest by executing a sort of slow, upward crab scuttle while clinging to the handrail. He received many disapproving glances from the shot girls in little green dresses with trays of liquor who passed him on their way up or down.
The second level consisted of a lounge full of well-dressed people making unenthusiastic small talk while perched on uncomfortable-looking couches. Tan knew instinctively that this was not the place that the spirits were guiding him to, so he scanned the room, located the next set of stairs, and continued on. The third level was a large room of dancing people with a plexiglass ceiling through which, he would discover two minutes later, the fourth level could watch them. The fifth and final floor was all long intersecting hallways, dim pink lighting, and closed doors to private suites, attended to by security guards. One of them cracked his knuckles and strode over to Tan. “Who are you?” he grunted.
“Hello! I am the Cat!” Tan said cheerfully. He thought that he was being clever, using an alias—they wouldn’t like a policeman poking around up here. “I’m friends with the Worm.”
“Who?” frowned the meaty man.
The walls were vibrating and he could feel his blood moving too fast. There was a maelstrom in his veins. Tan was babbling. “He doesn’t use his real name. Maybe he told you a fake one, like I just did. I also used to work for the doctor. Do you know him? I caught snakes for him! One of them had two heads! They fed the Australian man to the crocodiles, but they let me live!” His credentials did not seem to be impressing the security guard, who was scowling. But then by fortuitous accident Tan discharged another, even fouler cloud of gas, and all of the guards took a step away from him in unison. “Could you tell me where the toilets are?” he asked.
The bodyguard pointed him down one of the long hallways, holding his breath, and Tan was off again.
The restroom was only moderately clean, even by nightclub standards, but it was miraculously, gloriously empty. Tan could have wept with joy. He rushed into the single stall and exploded. As he emptied himself in noisy rivulets, he thought back to his days at the police training academy when he had shared a single latrine with twenty-five other boys. Compared to that, this bathroom was fit for the king of Bhutan.
Spent after his long and harrowing shit, Tan rested for a spell on the toilet seat. Then, while he was finally tugging up his trousers, he happened to glance at the ceiling and noticed that one of the large tiles above him was slightly askew, and that the just-glimpsable darkness beyond it was the night sky. Aha! He thought. The next level! He did not dwell upon why he had been incapable of walking up a staircase normally earlier yet now he was able to scale the toilet-stall walls without any difficulty at all, push aside the loose tile, then hoist himself up and out onto the roof. He had abandoned logic several hours earlier. Every inch of him crackled. He had never felt more awake in his life.
On the rooftop Tan rose to his feet, brushed the cement dust from his knees, and inhaled the muggy March air.
There was only a sorry sliver of moon in the sky, so Tan walked over to the edge of the building and looked down instead of up. This was the front of the building, the side facing the street and the line of bars across it. It was all a mess of headlights and bodies, and even from up here Tan could smell the smoke from the cigarettes of the idling taxi drivers waiting to catch people as they exited the clubs. There was a reveler throwing up into the gutter, and past him, several more pissing in it. A shadow that Tan could identify as a policeman by the shape of his hat was leaning against a wall in the alley between two of the bars. A woman in a wheelchair sold lottery tickets on a corner. Tan would have bet that her legs were actually fine and she just borrowed the chair in order to get more business. Acrobatic rats ran across the telephone wires.
Tan turned and stalked across the long, dark expanse of concrete to the other side of the roof. It was silent here; the bright and screaming world of the front did not exist anymore. The Saigon River spread out before him, inky and still and choked with clumps of water weeds and rusting barges. The sidewalk along the embankment was quiet; the only lights came from unoccupied noodle stalls, their dinner customers gone and their late-night customers not yet arrived. Saigon was probably the ugliest city in the world, thought Tan, but it was not so bad from above, where he was untouchable. If only he could avoid returning to ground level for the rest of his life. He peered over the edge, swaying slightly, and then he heard Binh’s voice, very clearly, in his left ear. “Found you,” she whispered.
Tan leaned against a cement wall, panting. He did not know where he was, his head hurt, breathing hurt, his feet hurt too. He looked down at them; he was not wearing any shoes, and his socks were all bloody. Why did he always have to lose his shoes when he did drugs? His fingers curled into fists against the cement. Then he smelled incense—he was standing in the courtyard, leaning against the wall of his own apartment building. He had no idea how he had gotten home or where his bike was. His breath was calmer now but he felt painfully alert, like all of his nerve endings were slightly singed. He remembered the Worm, the strobe lights, the stairs, the toilet, the roof, Binh’s voice. Then nothing. Had he fallen off of the nightclub? Was he dead? Tan felt too sore to be dead. His neck was throbbing, and when he touched it, his skin was wet. He held his fingers up to his face to see if there was blood on them, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. He licked them instead—yes, blood. Step by aching step, he began making his way back inside and up to his room.
There were no lights on behind the doors of any of the apartments on the ground floor; Tan guessed that it was several hours before dawn, because he couldn’t hear the monks chanting next door. He felt his way through the dark with one hand against the wall. As he passed the second-floor landing he saw a frail light at the end of the hallway—the painter was still awake.
“Vung!” Tan tried to call out, his voice a feeble bark. He limped down the hallway toward the light, his skin stinging wherever it touched a hard surface. Without knocking, he threw open the door.
The young painter was sitting cross-legged on the floor in drawstring pants and a faded Hai Phong FC jersey. When Tan came bursting into his room he was gazing at the portrait of Binh, which was now hung up on the wall. He did not seem to be too taken aback by the sudden appearance of the captain.
“Hello, anh Tan,” he said, a little groggily. “You don’t look so well. Your neck’s bleeding. And your feet too.”
“Yes, yes, I know! Listen, Vung,” he said, “I want to buy that painting.” The Binh in half-dry oils smirked down at him from the wall.
Vung chewed his lower lip for a long moment. “I’ve never actually sold anything before,” he admitted, eventually. “I don’t know how much a painting should cost.”
“It doesn’t matter—let me see what I’ve got on me…” Tan searched his wallet and all his pockets and managed to come up with almost 600,000 đồng in bills of varying degrees of crumpledness. He walked gingerly across the tile on his smarting feet and pressed the cash into Vung’s hands. “Is this enough for her?” The painter’s eyes bulged as he counted it, which Tan took as a yes. Tenderly, triumphantly, he unhooked her from the wall. “Let’s go home,” he whispered to the canvas, and left Vung smoothing out his money against a pant leg.
Tan walked down the dark hallway with the painting held high in front of him. He could not see, but he did not stumble or bump into the walls. It was not until he was back on the staircase that he first heard the footsteps behind him. Slow steps in the entranceway of the first floor, and strange-sounding ones—a shuffling first, and then something clicking on the tile, like the tapping of small, pointy shoes or very long toenails. He imagined someone walking on all fours, bare hands extending first, sliding against the floor, and then feet creeping up to meet them—repeating again and again like an inchworm on a branch. Tan would not turn around, but he quickened his pace. The echo of his own feet on the metal steps was too noisy; he couldn’t hear if the other footsteps were quickening too. As his socks brushed the tile of the third-floor landing, he felt a new surge of energy and barreled forward down the hallway to his room, brandishing the painting before him.
His door was not locked, but he did not notice. Tan slammed it shut behind him and then knelt and pressed his ear against it, straining to hear the footsteps. And there it was—the quiet reverberation of something soft brushing against metal, trailed by the brisk little patter. It was going up the stairs now. Tan locked the door and leaned the painting against the kitchen wall while he went to turn on the lights. When he came back to pick it up again, the canvas was empty.
Binh was crouched underneath his kitchen table. She was paler than she should be, and a little cloudy around her edges, and—from what Tan could see—she was mostly wet hair. It spilled over her body, yards of it, falling on the floor in heavy tangles. He did not know what she wore beneath her hair, if anything. Where the hair ended, Tan could see that a puddle of water had formed beneath her. What took Tan aback most was the powerful odor of her—he thought her smell would be of paint, but instead it was of dampness and mildew and rotting wood. She smelled so cold.
Binh mimed combing through her hair with her fingers, and inclined her pointy little chin in the direction of Tan’s bathroom. Obediently, Tan went and fetched a brush that had been Tram-Anh’s. His hand shook as he held it out to Binh. She snatched it from him without letting their fingers touch and began to pick out her own damp knots.
As he watched her, Tan’s face suddenly lit up. “Your arm!” he said. “You can use it again! Is it…is it still…?”
In response, Binh partially drew back a sheaf of hair and extended her bare arm with a flourish, displaying both sides of it so that Tan could see the skin was now intact before returning to her brushing.
Tan sank down to the ground, fighting the dueling impulses to embrace her and to weep. He reminded himself that he was not looking at her flesh. She was not really here. This was a shadow of her that smelled like a flooded basement. He had forgotten to keep listening for the footsteps, but that did not mean that they had ceased.
The hair was now manageable, if not smooth. She smiled at Tan, nodded, and then turned to face away from him. But she was not shunning him; it was a familiar invitation.
“Just like old times, then,” said Tan softly. He released his knees and scooted over to her on the floor. The puddle of water had been spreading slowly but steadily, and Tan sucked in his breath in surprise when the seat of his trousers made contact with it and soaked through. But his fingers did not tremble when he reached out to gather the first strands of the hair.
His skin grew slippery as he began weaving the slick, wet locks into thick plaits. He wanted to see what Binh looked like beneath her hair, but as much as he grabbed, there was always more concealing her. He tried sectioning off three braids first, each one as thick as his forearm. While he worked on one, he slung the other two over his shoulders to keep them neat. As the braids lengthened he had to squelch backward to accommodate them, and when he finally came to the end of the hair he realized he had nothing to tie them with, so he just knotted them around each other. The braids, disdainful of the laws of physics, held in place.
Tan tossed all three of the finished braids over his left shoulder, letting them dangle in a long U—down the length of his back and up again, over his right shoulder with the ends resting in his lap. He was about to reach for more hair when the front-door lock unlatched on its own. His door cracked open, and a head poked inside.
“Hello,” it said in Binh’s voice. “Hello, hello, hello.” The body belonged, however, to the girl from the nightclub and snail shop. A few feet below it, the little dog’s snout also thrust through the doorway. Tan turned to the Binh whose hair he was holding, and she merely looked at him over one shoulder and silently shrugged from her puddle beneath the table.
The girl at the door chuckled, opened it an inch wider, and stepped into the room. “Aren’t you pleased to see me?” she said. “I didn’t scare you too much back at the club, did I? I was just doing my best cat impression for you—they like to play with their food before they eat it. I was giving you a head start.” Her canine companion had slipped inside the apartment too, and was barely fast enough to avoid getting its tail caught in the door when the girl shut it behind her and locked it. It trotted over to Tan’s shoe rack in the corner and then curled up with its head on its paws. The girl brusquely scanned the apartment with undisguised disdain. Until this moment, Tan had been proud of his third-floor allotment of three hundred poorly lit square feet. “Thank you for bringing us to your home,” said the girl. “I was curious to finally see where you lived. The city you love so much. It doesn’t seem much better than a shack in a pepper field to me.” She leaned back against the door and stretched her neck, rolling her head from side to side so that the cartilage crackled. Her movements were Binh’s, Tan recognized with a sweet ache; they were just being performed by this new and slightly clumsier skeleton.
“It’s confusing, I know,” said the girl, as if reading his thoughts. “I’m just borrowing her; I needed a body. And she happened to have a very useful one. But it really is me, Kitty. You know that, don’t you?”
Tan met her gaze defiantly. “This is a dream! I am still full of drugs!”
The girl licked her lips and grinned. “I know your dreams. I know them better than you do.”
Tan narrowed his eyes. “How?” he asked, despite common sense telling him that it was a bad idea to get contentious with a ghost.
“Because I’m the one who has been sending them to you. There, look at your dreams!” she made a sweeping gesture with her left hand. “Look at her!”
Tan followed her hand with his eyes to the kitchen table and then bellowed in fright like a stuck bull. The silent Binh beneath it had grown a second, full-sized head next to the first, replete with its own cascade of half-braided hair. Both necks were now elongated like a pelican’s. Her four eyes blinked at him and her two identical mouths smiled. Tan covered his eyes with his hands and whimpered.
“No, no, no,” laughed the girl. “That’s not how this works—you have to look! There’s more! Do you remember this one?”
Tan peered through the cracks in his fingers. Now the double-headed Binh was gone, and in its place were two fleshless skulls, still attached to the sheaves of hair whose ends were draped over Tan’s body. They were perched atop a heap of bones. Her beautiful, lonely bones. Her rib cage lay on its side like a rotting fish trap, and long, broken pieces of what were once Binh’s sweet, swift limbs were messily strewn divination sticks around it. Tan wiped away stray tears. When he brought his hands back down to the floor, he found that it had grown even wetter than before. Water—cold, dark water—was seeping up from the tiles.
“It’s too late for tears now; the next dream is starting!” reproached the girl. Tan’s hands were submerged. The water was already five centimeters high and rising rapidly. Ten centimeters. Twenty by the time he managed to shake himself loose from the coils of Skeleton Binh’s hair and then wobble to his feet. Tan splashed over to his table and clambered on top of it. “This is a dream, this is a dream, I am still full of drugs,” he chanted to himself. “This is a dream.” The water smelled septic and was the color of Coke and had now risen over a meter. Tan felt the legs of the table beneath him lifting off the floor, and then he was afloat, along with everything else in the apartment that was unmoored: his chairs, Binh’s bones and the long braids they were still attached to, the broken chopsticks he had thrown on the floor earlier that evening, pots and pans and knives and a few bobbing sweet potatoes, his shoes and shoe rack—which the little dog was now using as its personal raft, perched at its prow and eyeing the floating bones with keen, piratelike interest—rolls of toilet paper, washed in from the bathroom on some malignant undercurrent. Teetering on the uneven surfboard of his tabletop, Tan grabbed hold of a curtain for balance.
What the girl was doing couldn’t really be termed floating—she was crouched on top of the liquid-obsidian surface like a thread-legged water strider, her feet never breaking its skin. Tan had expected her to be delighting in the mayhem her dream was causing, but her expression was strangely somber. She met his eyes—there, that flinty look; it was her inside that body after all—and then, without smiling, lifted one hand and made a small flicking gesture. The apartment reservoir swelled suddenly and violently, knocking Tan off his table and into the black water.
It was cataclysmically cold. He spluttered and flailed, catching only half a gasp of air before going under. He tried swimming in the direction he thought was up, then second-guessed himself and started paddling the other way. His lungs couldn’t stretch his last breath much further now, and he still couldn’t locate either his floor or the water’s surface. In fact, he was starting to doubt that either of them existed anymore.
Just as he could feel unconsciousness reaching out of the darkness to enfold him in its even darker arms, Tan’s hand made contact with the end of one of Binh’s long braids. His salvation; he clasped the hair, wrapped it around his wrist and waist, and used it to tug himself forward through the water, two mighty pulls with the last of his strength. On the second pull he felt his face finally leave the water. As he drank delicious air, Tan brought the hair to his face in gratitude, but what touched his skin felt different. Bristly. He opened his eyes. The apartment was no longer underwater. He was sitting on his kitchen floor where he had started, and what he was holding to his cheek—looped, too, around his waist and his shoulders—was no longer hair but a long, woven rope.
With impossible speed that did not belong to Binh anymore—or to any human—the girl sprang across the room and in one movement had Tan pinned beneath her, the rope tugged taught around his neck and the ends in her hands.
“This is the last dream,” she said. “And this one is mine. I’ve dreamed it for two long years. Your throat and my hands around it. Now it’s finally coming true.”
A smile he recognized, on those lips he didn’t. Tan wanted to stroke her cheek, but his arms were restrained by the rope. The best he could manage was to raise his hand half an inch and touch her calf lightly with the back of his fingers. It was not skin he knew.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Because I brought you out of Ia Kare. You finally came to Saigon for me. This is how it should have been all along. Us. Together. Here. I was the one who set you free.”
“No, you were the one who defiled me. You drowned me, burned me, and then buried me. Who else can say that they had three deaths? I was sacrificed for your pride. I am the one who is setting myself free, and I am doing it now.”
The girl lowered her head and touched her lips to his wet forehead. Then she wrapped the rope ends around her hands a final time, and she wrenched hard.