She was walking in the park and found, by the river, a fish trap created by the land’s first inhabitants. Not knowing what it was, she thought it was a bridge. Sinh took off her coat, put her little shopping bag down and rested. There seemed to be other plastic bags there too, abandoned, but she did not pay any attention to them, being taken so much by the idea of the bridge of boulders, and how much it gleamed, while all around it was dusty and muted in colour. She decided to go and sit on the stones in the middle of the bridge, and pretended that she was in fact overlooking a great waterfall, like the one in Đà Lạt. Then, for her own amusement she discovered that if she lay down on her back, and hung her head over the rocks, she could view the great waterfall upside down, its powerful gushing sounds drowned out all the other sounds. She proceeded like this until her long hair slipped out of its elastic tie, and fell into the murky water. Her wet hair dripped on her dark coat.
Dark and thick clouds gathered at the top of the hill, and she started to get cold, and would certainly get colder still if she didn’t begin to return home straight away. So she rushed off, up the hill, until halfway up she realised she had forgotten her little shopping bag at the bridge of rocks. She hurriedly ran down the hill. When she reached the boulders, she looked at the very spot. It was then that she took in all the other abandoned plastic shopping bags, as though they had been placed there all along to confound her. She glanced at each one, but none were hers. She looked all around in case it had been blown over. She looked behind and in front of it, and still it was not there. Behind her was the river, unmarred by any fallen bag.
She caught a glimpse of something moving just above her, positioned between herself and the top of the hill. With great dread Sinh looked up. His face was unspeakably dark and grim and his hair danced with the howling wind. His menace grew as he nonchalantly looked down at his large hands and comforted her, “I am not going to hurt you.”
Even as the scream left her throat, Sinh knew that it would never reach the top of the hill in the wind. Even as she recognised that last utterance from her throat, she could not believe that this absoluteness had arrived so unexpectedly, and she regretted the trouble and confusion that those left behind would face when they searched for her, only to find nothing except for her little plastic bag sitting peacefully at the large boulders she had visited that day.
Trung
Trung ran to Đào’s front door while Tuyết waited in the car. The wind roared through the trees, like sets of large waves. He came back with a suitcase of Đào’s clothing, and then Đào herself. They drove away in the middle of the night in the whooping-cough car. Trung watched the lights from the used-car yards near Đào’s house disappear in the distance. He gripped the steering wheel as rain and strong wind pushed his car sideways.
In the passenger seat, Đào’s breathing was uneven. She was asleep and had started to dream.
As the car moved along, Đào yelled in a high-pitched voice, “Anguli took your money. I haven’t found it, I’ve been finding all kinds of things…”
“Be quiet, Má,” Trung said softly, and turned on the radio.
Classical music cushioned the vinyl night.
“Did you tell anyone?” Trung asked the rear-view mirror.
“No,” Tuyết said.
“Not even your teacher? Or your best friend?”
“I didn’t even tell Linh goodbye.” She turned her face away.
Trung caught a glimpse of his own darkened face, amidst the white and red lights of the other cars around him.
“Good girl. Go to sleep now,” he told his child.
For the rest of the journey, he and his daughter remained silent as the car sputtered along, in the flow of traffic across the western suburbs, until it emptied into the freeway, flooded with light in the dead of night.
The motel had rooms separated from one another with a wide
carport and trimmed shrubs. Trung held Tuyết’s hand has they ran from the car to the room, then he went back to collect Đào.
In the middle of the night, Đào awoke and did not recognise where she was. She did not understand they were in a motel. Trung helped her sit up and gave her a bowl of cold rice and sardines straight from a can. That was all Trung could manage for now. The oily coating on the fish made Đào wrinkle her face.
Tuyết
Tuyết stared into the shifting vastness. Her fingers tapped tentatively on an invisible piano, a song half-learnt.
Đào
Đào’s breathing regained its regularity as she went into a deep sleep. Inside her dream, she was in her own house, with all its objects and secret hiding places. Nothing had moved at all except the meandering path of her mind. Patchy rain fell outside her windows.
Thảo’s face was hard, but she didn’t look at Đào. Thảo’s voice was choked and stilted, and she whispered, “They…want talk to you…”
“No.”
Đào sipped on her green tea, which warmed her throat. “The Society-Black?”
Thảo nodded quietly, still not looking up.
“I didn’t know that you were connected to…” Đào looked at her friend from the migrant hostel days.
“Do you understand what you have done now?”
“We all know what has befallen me,” Đào answered.
“You owe us.”
“How did they get involved?”
Thảo’s eyes lowered. “My husband, you know what he’s like. He used to be different before. Now, well…he’d sell his own grandfather…”
“I’ll get the money as soon as I can,” Đào pleaded.
“It’ll take you years to get the money together,” Thảo answered.
“Why did they take…” But before Đào could finish, her friend let out a painful sigh.
“All those years of working like animals, now once again with nothing in our hands.” Her friend suddenly reached out and picked something from Đào’s hair, a piece of red thread, which she released. Đào’s whole body felt like it was unusually light, weightless. The sliver of red thread floated through the air.
“Look at us, we’re even more lost now, older sister,” Thảo said.
It was as cold inside the room as out. Đào wanted to grip the side of the table. The nausea scuppered her and she could not hold in her fear any longer. “Please, I don’t understand why Sinh was involved in this, but I beg you, please let her go!”
Thảo looked at Đào for the first time. “Who?”
“The girl who lives out the back,” Đào said. “Sinh.”
“What does the hụi have anything to do with her?” Thảo asked.
“She’s vanished! Into this emptiness!” Đào’s chest was in a lot of pain now, and her face was hot and wet.
“Listen to me. Don’t turn your face to the wall like that. Please,” Thảo said.
Đào was crying uncontrollably, and the echoes of her sobbing seemed to bounce around the walls of the room. Outside, the choppy weather ceased.
Đào’s dream reached out towards her past and her future. She was standing in her front yard. The last truck had dispersed its horror of fumes, the night was silent and the highway empty. Her small hands took a while to locate the keyhole, but eventually she got both the security door and then the wooden door opened. She stood there in the moonlight, not wanting to go in.
She did not turn on the lights. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out the water cascading down from her bench tops; the sink was overflowing. Đào’s possessions were darker with wetness, they seemed crumpled and distorted. The bags of cotton-knitted material had filled with the rising water and were disgorging their contents – a shoulder piece, a lower leg, a torso panel. She had somehow deserved all this, and so, if this was her destiny, Đào would follow the path laid out before her to its very end.
She rummaged in her kitchen drawer for a torch, to cut through the endless darkness. There was a strange peace in her every breath. She switched the torch on, and a ball of light drifted ahead of her, reaching the different walls and surfaces of her house. Up to this moment, she had only had tentative thoughts, each one a terror of being scolded or ridiculed. Now, her thoughts were free from fear, and somehow free from herself as well. She was surprised to find this strange peace and comfort filling her lungs evenly, without effort or strain. Each cycle of breath in and out made her sink and rise, sink and rise, ever so minutely.
The moon was heavy and round in her backyard, throwing golden highlights on the concrete and the stunted pot plants. Đào opened the garage and inside, once again, she could smell rotting meat. Her torch shone slowly across the far wall, revealing the stain marks of rivulets of rain leaking through the roof, and delicate blooms of mildew. Through the tiny side-window, the moon’s light fell into the garage at a striking angle.
On the other side of Anguli Ma’s bed was one of her bowls. She stooped down to collect it from the floor. Inside the bowl were what seemed to be plump, longish fruit. She picked up one of the pieces, and discovered that it was joined to a second one, as though sewn together by a thick thread. She lifted them higher, and saw that they pulled another up, and another. It was a beautiful garland, each part of it a sinewy chunk of dried flesh. It was a necklace made of fingers, with knuckle joints and nails intact.
Đào let out a gasp as she recognised whose they were. She was tossed in the murky waves, churning, churning, churning in violence.
An idea awakened in her mind and Đào was horrified by it. Yet, she obeyed it. Lifting the gory lei high above her, she put her head through. The girl’s fingers dangled heavily around her neck. Đào felt the weight of it, the flesh and the nails of it. She stepped back to look at her own monstrous visage in the mirror. Sinh’s nails twinkled at her décolletage. Đào’s own fingers were like jewels amongst the stony, desiccated fingers; her living fingers and those of the dead intermingled.
Equipped for vengeance, the woman crouched down. She was ready to catch the offender when he eventually returned to her, with his head shaven and wearing the simple garb of a beggar. When he comes, she will be old, but ready. She will not even hear the words of an enlightened being. She will make a wreath of his fingers that will hang outside her garage door.
The Brown Man
He arranges his hands into beautiful mudras. He lowers his gaze and returns to the breath. Everything is inside everything else. The river red gums have within them sunlight and soil and rain clouds and wind. Within each thing is its other. That is the nature of Emptiness.
In the sunlight, he stares at his hands. Tension leaves the man’s body. He notices the ease flowing in his arms and legs, a softness to his gaze. He observes the dying down of his anger, and the diminishing of its light in his mental landscape.