We’d been in-country three months without seeing any action. We went on patrol every day, a two-kilometer half-circle sweep around the base of the hill behind us, which we took to calling Mount Neverest. We cleaned our rifles and our living quarters. We ate hearty meals and worked out afterward, jogging around and around the camp (I can still recall the sequence: Quonset huts, mess, armory, heads, clinic, Quonset huts, mess, armory…), lifting dumbbells, and doing complicated and difficult variations of push-ups, girding ourselves for what was coming. We scanned the perimeter and sometimes even felt the distant rumble and rumor of mortar explosions, like an earthquake from across the sea, but still there was no action.
We talked about action a lot, all the time, really. What to expect, what it was like. The majority of us were fresh, or nearly fresh, out of training. The guys who’d seen action instantly assumed a semi-mythic status with us, similar to the way seniors in high school appear to freshmen. They’d been through it. Berlinger had seen action in Binh Dinh, but he wouldn’t talk about it.
“Come on,” I said. A group of us was sitting in the mess after dinner playing dominos.
“Come on what,” said Berlinger.
“What happened?”
“When?”
“You know when. Binh Dinh.” I didn’t know if I was saying it right, rhyming the words in an uncertain singsong.
He put down snake eyes. “I told you before, it was a clusterfuck.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means a bunch of idiots in green are shooting guns at these other idiots in green shooting guns back, and there’s smoke and fire, and you’re running, then at some point you realize whatever was happening is over, and you somehow came out the other side, whoop-de-do. You won, apparently. And if you happened to catch a little shrapnel in the eye or get your dick shot off, some guy comes by while you’re zonked on morphine in sick bay, and pins a little Purple Heart pin to your chest. You can trade it in at the VFW back home for half-price Schlitz at the monthly social. Your go, Lazar.”
Another one of the combat vets, a black heavy-lidded Texan named Pauls, had fought in the Siege of Hue, during the Tet Offensive in 1968. He’d been honorably discharged following his tour, whored around Houston and Galveston and New Orleans for a year, then gotten bored and reenlisted. We treated him like some kind of warrior monk, our sensei. I remember us sitting around his feet staring up in awe, although surely we were cooler than that in reality.
What’s it like, someone might have called out, as guys got drunk sitting around the barracks, tired of the limited entertainments we had on hand to distract us from what we were really there to do, whatever that was. Without putting down whatever jungle-moist Action Comics or Playboy he was reading, Pauls would pronounce something oracular, like “It’s what it is, nothing to compare it to” or “Like going deep inside this cave and you walk out the other side different.” It sounds like pure bullshit remembering it now, but it sounded pretty badass then.
The other thing we talked about was pussy. Pussy in its cosmic infinitude of variety. Pussy as the ultimate goal of existence. Pussy as life, pussy as death. Pussy as an almost entirely conceptual entity separated from the women it belonged to. (Once, out on a run, this jug-eared kid next to me said, “Man, my dick’s so hard I gotta do handstands to pee. I get back to America, it’s all over for pussy. Pussy’s gonna rue the day I left Vietnam. Pussy’s gonna curse my name.”) Women were an entirely different subject, far too depressingly real and scary. In the same sense, we rarely discussed the stone-cold niceties of combat. Tactical considerations, for instance, or emergency triage. Our bullshit sessions about action, in both senses, were limited to the kind of metaphysical Platonism favored by scared young dudes who’ve never had the real thing.
We didn’t look to see action anytime soon, either. Our base was located on the southeastern edge of the central highlands, a relatively uncontested area, what with Cam Ranh and its tactical support within a couple of hours. A similar position on the opposite side of the highlands, near the Ho Chi Minh Trail, would have been looking at daily firefights and the constant threat of mortar attack. Put it this way: if Vietnam was New York City, we were stationed in a toll booth on Staten Island. As far as any of us understood it, which wasn’t very far, ours was a safeguard position, making sure Charlie didn’t slink down the coast and try to curl around west toward Saigon. That’s just a guess, though. No one told us anything, least of all Lieutenant Endicott. He was a narrow-faced, tight-assed New Englander, a descendant of Boston Brahmins with a military pedigree going back to the Battle of Hastings. He had the stink of noblesse oblige about him—there was no other good reason for anyone who could have avoided service to have served. I mean, he certainly wasn’t stupid enough to have thought Vietnam was a good idea.
I will say that the area was beautiful. Sometimes, in the purple light of dusk, I would sneak behind the huts and look up at Mount Neverest. With its dark green vegetation interspersed with craggy bluff face, it reminded me of nothing so much as the few areas of California and the West that I’d seen. The surrounding forest was thick, but not overlush, and it was not hard to imagine homesteading there, getting yourself a little local mistress who knew the woods and language, and building a log cabin back in the woods. I’d imagined Vietnam as a fetid jungle, and I knew part of it was, but where we were it was soft-lit and peaceful green, if still hot as hell’s half acre.
This backdrop of placid, rugged beauty was the unlikely theater on which we staged our fantasies of action. We imagined scarring the hillsides with zappers, M-32 rounds, calling in air strikes to shear off the rock face. Vast firefights, an Independence Day of tracers and mortar shells, taking it to an invisible enemy that had massed somewhere out there. We imagined leading a charge, using our bayonets. We imagined acts of valor and acts of cowardice in equal measure. Though we were young, most of us were not dumb or naïve enough to pretend we knew how we’d respond in a real battle. That was why we imagined it and talked about it at such great length—we were trying on the clothes of a soldier the way a child tries on his father’s suit. We hoped we were up for it and feared we weren’t.
I remember in mess, once, Hawkins started talking about what he was going to do when he bagged his first zip, as he put it. “Gonna aim for the stomach, so he goes down but don’t die,” he said, mouth glistening with fruit syrup.
“Shut up, Lester,” someone said.
“No, wait,” he said. “Then I’m going to walk up and fucking execute him.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I’ve got a little speech worked out and everything.” He grinned, pulling out a piece of paper from his ID wallet.
Berlinger said, “You know they don’t speak Dumbfuck, right?”
I don’t know where he got his hands on a translation book, but Hawkins looked down and started reading in a halting, cornpone Vietnamese: “Toi muon ban nhin thay khuon mat cua nguoi dan ong da giet chet ban. Doi voi tat ca coi doi doi, linh hon cua ban se thuoc ve toi.” He folded the paper back into his wallet with an air of finality, something settled.
“Well,” someone said at last, “what’s it mean?”
He said, “It means ‘I want you to see the face of the man who killed you. For all eternity, your soul will belong to me.’ ”
“Jesus Christ, Hawkins.”
Hawkins may have been a fucking nutcase, but I gave him credit for at least being up for some action. The longer we were there, talking about action and seeing none, the more I was convinced I wasn’t. I just couldn’t fathom the notion that there were men somewhere out in the jungle, a whole nation of men, who hated America and wanted to use their guns and knives and mines to do away with me. Me! Let alone the idea that I should do the same to them. I got through my doubts by lying. I teetered around on my bravado like a pair of stilts. I lied all day, to myself and others, but at night, in my cot, surrounded by the innocent snoring of my fellow soldiers, the truth squatted on me like a school-yard bully, pinned me to the bed and forced me to look it in its bright eyes. The truth, it said, is you can’t do it. Oh, you can fire a rifle and do fifty push-ups and ten pull-ups. You ran your survival course in respectable time, finished Basic. You can put on your greens and helmet and field pack, and look exactly like a soldier. But you are not one.
It wasn’t from any conscientious objection. I was nineteen—I wasn’t conscientious about anything besides jerking off twice a day. And I had no conscience to speak of. It was simple fear, yet I knew most of the men sleeping around me were scared, as well. I knew I was likely surrounded by a jungle dreamworld full of bloody ambushes, green malarial death, incompetence, and paralytic impotence in the face of the enemy. And I also knew none of them felt what I felt, which was a leaden certainty that I was not going to do this thing everyone, including me, said I was going to do. What quality separated my fear from theirs? Was there simply more of it? Maybe so. It flowed like liquid metal through my veins, made my arms and legs dull and useless. I only reached sleep each night through the thin comfort of knowing that in the morning I could keep lying and defer the truth one more day.
When I did dream, I sometimes dreamed about the little strip of woods behind our quarters, figures weaving their way silently between the trees. In one memorable nightmare, I was enormous, towering over the base, looking at myself as I slept. I grabbed the trees by the tops of their branches, and yanked, and the whole piece of land came up like a ripped-off Band-Aid. Underneath, thousands of tiny Viet Cong writhed in the light, like maggots under a rotten log suddenly exposed to air. I pounded them over and over with my fist, and woke up flailing at the mosquito netting over my cot.
Then, too, there were good dreams—disembarking a Boeing 707, expecting to step out into the choking Indochinese air—only to feel a cool breeze on my face, look at the smiling stewardess at my elbow, and somehow know that I was back in America. But then again, these were also the worst dreams, as terrible as they made waking up, dripping with sweat, under the same mosquito netting, bivouacked in a tin hut somewhere in Vietnam.
The one thing that did happen during this stretch didn’t happen to me. Berlinger and Tony Carbone had been sent out on morning patrol, probably as punishment by our staff sergeant, Davis Martin, for having to listen to them go back and forth all the time. Berlinger baited Carbone like it was his job. Anything cornily Italian—Dean Martin, Marciano, spaghetti and meatballs, et cetera—was fair game, and Carbone somehow always took the bait.
I was in the yard after exercises, writing a letter back home I knew I wouldn’t send, when I heard yelling. Me and two other guys ran to the entrance—Berlinger had Carbone under the arms and was hauling him like one of the giant flour sacks that got dropped off by supply trucks twice a month. He was shouting for help and we ran down the path to where he was, rifles out. Carbone’s foot was gone and the meat of the leg was sheared away to the shin, like a chicken leg gnawed to the bone. It trailed in the bloody dirt, left a little divot. The guy to my left, whose name is lost to me, got on his knees and retched. Me and the other guy grabbed his legs, what was left of them, and carried him into base, to sick bay. I remember looking down at the bone sticking out and thinking how odd it was, that it looked in real life the way you would imagine it. That there was no special magic holding our bodies together and no sacred energy unleashed when they were torn apart. Just blood and bone.
That night, sitting sedated, but still ashen and sweating, with his back against the hut’s tin wall, Berlinger told me what had happened. Predictably, they’d been going back and forth, and he’d started in about how Sinatra was a fairy and “My Way” was about taking it up the wazoo. Carbone came at him and of course Berlinger, with a foot and eighty pounds advantage, easily fended him off. Too easily—he accidentally pushed Carbone back into a nearby bush, and when Carbone got up, he was covered in shit; apparently some monkey or lemur had eaten a bad oyster and squatted there. Carbone stalked off, furious, momentarily leaving the trail, which, over the last year, had been swept and patrolled into a safe, smooth ring. He disappeared into the woods, and a second later Berlinger’s ears compressed and there was smoke and then screaming. Berlinger found him on the outside of a black ring of underbrush, singed and flattened by the mine he’d stepped on.
Carbone was sewed up and shipped home. We saw him off in the back of the green supply truck, got him situated against a couple of those big bags of flour. The morphine he was on dropped his eyes before we could wish him well, and then the truck was pulling out and gone. In the days that followed, recon found no further mines in the area and the consensus was that it was random, possibly a remnant of the French occupation. Just bad luck, shrugged Davis Martin at chow a few days later.
“Bad luck,” said Berlinger, looking up from his turkey Alfredo, his tin of stewed apples.
“What else?”
“Stupidity?”
“Yeah, that too.”
Other than that, though, we waited. No action, besides the action in our heads. And my growing certainty I wouldn’t be able to do it, whatever it was. At a certain point, I even began fantasizing that we would never see action, that my military life would wind up being the same as my civilian life, just a bunch of jerking off and bullshitting, albeit in hundred-degree heat. Then on May 22, 1971, the order finally came down to move out.
Vance put the book down and, for the hundredth time in the last thirty minutes, scanned his surroundings for the girl. He sat on a bench beside a small playground at the apex of San Ysidro Park—in the daylight it was not a magic garden, just a city park where people walked their dogs, took their children to play, or, like him, sat reading in patches of sunlight. Below him was a sloping expanse of green, bordered on each side by rows of trees and to the south by a row of interlocking Spanish colonial apartments in pastel colors that reminded him of Easter candy. In the distance, the buildings of downtown pressed up against the horizon; an expanse of gray rainclouds issued from over the skyline. They had a quilted, overstuffed look and provided a sense of three-dimensional depth that prevented the vista from looking like a mediocre landscape painting.
He’d come here today, as he had yesterday, with the dim idea that he might see the girl again—as though, through some primitive magic of repetition, she might be summoned. Now, as yesterday, he felt how silly this was, yet still he’d come. Partly this was owing to a simple need to get out of the hotel in which Stan, who remained seemingly unconvinced of the necessity of this arrangement, had punitively booked him: a place in Oakland called the Jack London Inn—an actual roach motel; every morning, a new one paraded across the stained carpet as though, like mints on the pillow or ballpoint pens, it was compliments of the hotel. He’d hurried out into the bright chill, anxious to escape the room, and his own presence in it—after two days, the hotel room had been contaminated, practically irradiated, by his anxious, futile longing.
Mainly, though, he just wanted to see her again. He pulled out his phone and brought up the number, saved under Girl. Four one five eight seven seven three two one nine. He’d brought it up a hundred times before and not called. What would he say? He wasn’t looking for a good time; he didn’t like to party. Calling her would make something official, transactional, between them, and he didn’t want that. But he wanted to see her, he craved the girl. Something inside him he hadn’t even known was there before needed her. You ever think that maybe you’re someone in need? Richard had said. Well, yes, he did think that. He needed lots of things. He needed the girl and needed her to need him; and if he could provide her the help she so clearly needed, she would need him, help him back. On a certain level, he found this energetic little tautology suspect—in fact, suspected himself of substituting “help” for another four-letter word. Call me if you change your mind, she’d said, the taste of her mouth still fresh in his.
He’d writhed for two days with the memory of that kiss. It wasn’t his first kiss—there had been a peck from a mortified blonde, dared by her giggling friends in eighth-grade gym class, and another kiss two years later from one of his brother’s girlfriends, who’d gotten drunk one night at their house and laid one on him as he’d lain on the sofa reading Of Mice and Men—but it was his first real kiss. Why, at nineteen, was it his first real kiss? The feelings the girl had sparked in him included an uncontrollable, punishing bout of self-analysis, played out in his head and in the hotel room over the last thirty-six hours. The girl had known he was a virgin—it was obvious. This morning, as he’d brushed his teeth and gotten dressed, he’d avoided looking at himself in the mirror, though he knew what was there. A bunch of long bones loosely slung together, a dusting of acne on the back and stooped shoulders, his mother’s small eyes peering out over his father’s mouth—which could generously be described as “rabbity”—and a schoolboy’s cap of flyaway brown hair perched atop it all like a nervous bird waiting to take flight. He was ugly, ungainly, unsure of himself. But then, both of his friends in high school had been ugly, too, and they had still gotten laid somehow. “Somehow” was, he knew, that they went to parties he wouldn’t go to and grimly stood against the wall nursing their Steel Reserves. The difference was, then, that they wanted it.
He had wanted it, too, but not with the callow girls in his high school, and not any of the girls he’d met his lone month in college either. He had wanted Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre and Cathy and even poor, stupid Tess. Since he was a child—since his father left and then his mother started bringing home strange men who condescended to him or who chucked him under the chin or who told him to stop being weird and get the fuck out of the living room or, worst of all, men who simply ignored him entirely—he’d built a fortress around himself made out of books. The thing about books was that they were better than real life. Much better. By the time he was fifteen, he’d fallen in love and had his heart broken countless times, sitting on the couch, watching over the pages as his poor mother went through the real thing. Friday night, she would stand in front of a mirror by the front door of their apartment, clutching her purse in one hand, applying hopeful lipstick with the other and smacking her lips, telling him there was dinner in the oven for him and John, that she might be late. The next day he would find her watching the living room TV in a fog of penitent self-hatred, her face screwed up and her eyes like black pennies. Vance would make them lunch—a can of chicken noodle soup and a peanut butter sandwich, both split in two—and eat his meal at the kitchen table, watching the back of her head across the room while he read, the edge of the plate holding down the pages.
He had gotten taller since then, and read more books, but he hadn’t changed. He hadn’t wanted to, had never wanted to join that great rush of feeling and calamitous need. And now, he did. The night before, he’d dreamed he was lowering his tiny vessel into an enormous river. The water was black, and the current was horribly strong, but from bank to bank it was choked with other boats of all types and sizes: canoes like his, also yachts, catamarans, speedboats, houseboats, even a regal steamboat with figures in formal dress waltzing on its yellow-lit ballroom deck. Why, he wondered, thinking for the hundredth time about the car hitting her and her small, crumpled body rising as though lifted by invisible wires; the glint in her bright eyes as she’d looked at him; the funny sweet smell or taste, he wasn’t sure which, that emanated from her as they’d kissed. Why now, why her? This line of questioning always ended with a shrug, a tug, and a shudder, another damp tissue thrown in the plastic trash under the sink. For better or worse, he thought—and probably for worse—you are joining the human race.
The breeze picked up, gently rustling a nearby palm grove and bringing Vance back to himself. A small child on the roundabout behind him shrieked in a language he couldn’t understand. He thought how he’d be picking Richard up in the morning, how he wouldn’t see her again, and before he had time to talk himself out of it, he was calling her. He got up and paced, protectively holding the phone away from his ear. It rang and rang, and each ring lasted forever—not an eternity but, say, a year or so. Finally, the voicemail picked up, a monotone male voice saying, You know what to do. Vance hung up, embarrassed at himself—the amount of time and energy he’d spent obsessing over a wrong number, probably given as a joke.
The long, complex interlude of recrimination and self-hatred that followed was interrupted by the ringing phone. He dropped it in surprise, and it skittered, vibrating, under the bench. He retrieved it and answered on his knees. “Who is this?” said the girl. Her voice sounded blurry, distracted, like he’d woken her up from sleep, even though she was the one calling him.
“Vance.”
“Who’s Vance.”
“We met the other day. I gave you money, you gave me this number.”
There was a pause, as she processed this information. “Oh, yeah.”
“The voicemail was a guy, that’s why I didn’t leave a message.”
“Okay, what’s up?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want something?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughed. “Okay. Where are you, man?”
He tried to describe where he was—the bus route and streets he’d taken, the park and houses opposite. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “San Ysidro. I’m pretty close to there.”
Ten minutes later, she was in the field below him, unmistakable with her incendiary hair. She wore a black sweater and dirty jeans tucked into black combat boots, and she seemed to be unsteadily looking around, her motion roughly describing an off-balance circle. She gently spiraled in the direction of the westward tree line. Vance walked down the hill and approached her from the side. “Hi,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said again, looking up at him with unfocused eyes, as though she’d already forgotten who she was meeting, which maybe she had. He didn’t know much about drugs, but he knew she was on them. And she was filthy. Not just her clothes—her hair was half matted and sprouting incipient dreadlocks, her arms were smudged with dirt, her fingernails were long and comprehensively grouted with black grime. The welt on the side of her face had scabbed over, but it was red and swollen, with wispy red streaks that reached out toward her ear, her cheek. It was infected—he knew this because his mother had had a similar livid wound on her leg once, which hadn’t gotten clean, since she wasn’t taking showers at that point.
“That needs disinfecting,” he said.
“What?”
“Come on.” He held her arm and guided her toward the path, and though she made a face, she followed, oddly compliant. Winding silently with her through the trees, he indulged himself in a third-person perspective of the two of them, a homely little narrative in which the hero finds and saves the girl. He was not unaware of the problems with this point of view, of its triteness and simplicity, but somehow his awareness did nothing to dispel the pleasure of it.
They walked under the iron trellis, braided with ivy, and out of the park. As they crossed the street, a homeless man screaming into a phone booth vaporized the romantic mise-en-scène. The girl began pulling away from him like a bored, petulant child, but after only a minute of further walking, a CVS materialized. Vance told her to wait outside, went in, and grabbed gauze and peroxide and Neosporin and bandages and was standing in the check-out line before realizing he should have brought her in with him, that when he emerged she would almost certainly be gone. But she was still there, seemingly entranced by a white sectional sofa in the neighboring storefront window, or perhaps it was her own image. Like a dog looking into water, wondering at the strange aqua-dog staring up at it, a flicker of recognition passed over her face, then was gone. He led her to a bench and cleaned her wound with the peroxide. The clean place was a full shade lighter than the surrounding dirty skin. He smeared the Neosporin on it, then covered the whole area with gauze and several bandages. She was looking at him with the light in her eyes that he’d seen before.
“You need to keep it clean.”
“My hero,” she said. He knew it was sarcastic, but his dumb heart swelled regardless.
He put the supplies in the bag, and she took it from him, with a smile of vacant gratitude. She pushed up from the bench and walked unsteadily away, but she looked back twice to see if he would follow. He followed. Her small form was childish at a glance, but her hips swayed along an adult fulcrum. They walked two blocks single file in this manner until she reached an unbused sidewalk café table and sat. He sat down across from her. An older couple sat at the other outside table, talking over their eggs and toast with the luxuriant boredom of the long married. The girl picked up and bit into a half-eaten chocolate scone on the table and poured leftover coffee from a carafe into dirty white cups.
She said, “What’s your name again, man?”
“Vance.”
“Hi, Vance.”
“Hi.” He took a sip from the lip-stained cup, despite not liking coffee and being something of a germophobe. She was including him in something conspiratorial and precious. “Where are you from,” he said.
“Visalia,” she said, and didn’t seem to be joking.
“Where’s that?”
“Like, halfway between here and LA. Nowhere.”
She continued tearing into the remaining food on the table, and Vance realized she was starving, then realized he was starving, too. He hadn’t eaten since returning to Oakland yesterday evening, where he’d bought a dinner of jerky and chips from the gas station next to the Jack London Inn. He took a piece of scone from the plate and ate it, then took another. She cleaned the plates, then they drank their cold coffee in silence, as if copying the couple next to them. A waitress wearing a white button-up and black bow tie came out to clear their table; they could see her reenter the café and talk to the vague figure of a tall, bald man who glowered at them through the window. The girl quickly got up and, again, Vance followed, with the sense he was being tested somehow. A block later she cut left onto Vista. Here, she entered a movie theater called the Star Star Cinema. If someone was meant to be taking tickets, they were nowhere to be seen. The lobby was dirty and empty, with peeling wallpaper and handbills strewn everywhere. They pushed into the small, darkened theater and stood in the back.
The room they were in smelled damp and comprehensively bleached. Rustling and shifting sounds close by alerted Vance to the presence of other, unseen people. He felt the back of a seat in front of him, the itchy tweed of theater upholstery. Overhead, the projector whumped on and, to the tune of Also Sprach Zarathustra, a man’s glistering penis pushed up from the bottom of the screen in ultra slow motion. It kept moving up and up, slowly widening at the base as the shaft grew longer and longer. It reminded Vance of Star Wars when the camera pans along the Imperial cruiser for a seeming eternity. He could feel the girl gauging his reaction, and for that reason he stood where he was, watching the screen. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t seen these things before online, and as his eyes adjusted, he wondered if the handful of men gazing up at the screen, rapt, had ever heard of the Internet. But the few times he’d watched porn before, he’d been depressed by it. Because it was depressing—he didn’t see how everyone didn’t find it so. Or maybe like his high school buddies going to parties, drinking bad beer, and getting jostled by people dancing to lousy music, they did find it depressing but worth it, nonetheless.
The girl put her hands on the sides of his face and kissed him again, her front teeth scraping against his. As before, it was an act of aggression; as before, it worked regardless. Over her shoulder, the tumid prick still filled the screen, and for an odd moment Vance felt as though there was a camera trained on his own member. She disengaged, and he followed her outside, where it was beginning to rain. A bearded boy sat damp and stubborn, strumming his guitar with an intensity at odds with his ability to correctly finger the chords he stabbed at. In a mangy, wobbling tenor, he sang-spoke in their direction: Got a wife in Chino, babe, and one in Cherokee, first one said she’s got my child, but it don’t look like me.
“All right, man,” she said. “Listen, thanks for the money, and thanks for this.” She held up the CVS bag. “But tell me what you want, or I’m going to find a cop and tell him you’re harassing me.”
“I don’t know,” he said, adjusting himself. He knew describing what he actually wanted—to take her away from the city, clean her up, give her a chance to be the good person he knew she was or had been before and yet could be, perhaps get married in a quiet ceremony at the courthouse of some rustic hamlet where he would build a house for them, board by board—would be met, justifiably, with laughter. “Do you want me to take you home?”
“Home?”
“Visalia, you said.”
“Yeah.”
“I can drive you.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“No, God.” Her face screwed up as she looked away. She couldn’t handle kindness—you can get used to so much as long as you aren’t ever reminded that alternatives exist. His dank basement, for instance, the moldering press of books, the close light and air in the house, his mother dissipating upstairs in a steady column of cigarette smoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” They walked slowly down the street, side by side. Heavy drops of cold rain hit the ground around them, one by one. “I don’t know, I just don’t think I can go back, not after everything that happened. I don’t know if they’d take me back.”
“I bet they would.”
“I don’t know. Even if they did, I don’t know if it would be a good thing.”
“You don’t have to go there, but you need to get out of here.”
“And you’ll take me.”
“Yes.”
She huddled in close to him as the wind picked up. Frowning at the sky, she said, “It’s about to pour. We’re right by where I stay; we can wait it out there.”
“I don’t know,” said Vance.
“I want to talk more about it.”
As he had in the park, he again saw the two of them from some distance—the girl close to him, a yellow awning covered with faded Chinese symbols overhead, rain pattering on the roofs of cars—and he experienced a wave of amazed gratification. This was really happening: they could ride out of San Francisco, to who knew where. Visalia. Visalia sounded like a pretend town on a postcard—a pastel storybook land with WELCOME TO arching over it like a rainbow. With a little pang, he thought of Richard in the hospital.
“Come on,” she said, taking his arm now. They moved in what he now knew was the direction of downtown and the water. They walked past bodegas, taquerias, and flower stores. A dirty fruit stand filled up with plums. The temperature had fallen ten degrees in the last hour, and a rough wind was picking up again. For a moment, he was struck with the insane idea that it was the same wind as the other day, when they’d met—that that wind had gone into hiding in some obscure corner of the city, only to come barreling out again, madder than ever.
She pulled him down a small street and then down an even smaller one. It was as though they were spiraling at right angles, through the labyrinth and into a secret chamber in the heart of the city. She unlocked a door, and they were walking down a ruined hallway, then into a room that was not unlike the one he’d imagined numerous times over the last few days. As in his fantasies, it was small and dark, with the gray light from a single window illuminating a quilted mattress on a box spring. As in his fantasies, there was even a candle burning on a side table, a book whose cover he couldn’t make out on the windowsill, and she turned to him with that fierce light still in her eyes. In his fantasies, however, someone did not barge out of the adjacent room and punch him in the side of the head.
The floor came up to meet his face. A foot introduced itself to his side. Pain spread through his abdomen like scalding bathwater, and he went under it. A second or minute or hour later, he opened his eyes. A man stood over him, waiting. No, not a man, a boy, probably younger than he was—underfed skinny, with some sort of neck tattoo or maybe it was a cluster of scabs. He shook Vance’s wallet over his face. “Nothing. Piece of shit.”
“No.”
“So how’d you plan on paying? Think it’s free?”
“I wasn’t going to do anything.”
The boy laughed. Like the girl, his eyes, too, were brightly animate and filled with light. It was the light of atavistic need, Vance now realized, and all it recognized was opportunity, a sucker. He was freshly amazed, as ever, by his own despicable innocence, at how gladly he could get everything wrong if it suited some fleeting fantasy. The boy said, “You got an ATM card in here, man, let’s go get some cash.” He picked Vance up by the back of his shirt and pushed him through the door. A last-second glance revealed an empty room, no maiden in the tower. The girl was gone, as though she’d never been there, which, in a way, she hadn’t.
Outside, it was coming down in gray sheets billowing back and forth like laundry on a line. The water stung his face, reviving him a little. He felt the boy behind him, marching him down the street, right at the corner.
The boy said, “That’s my girl back there. My wife basically.”
“I wasn’t going to do anything,” he said again, wondering if it was true.
“I love her.”
“Okay.”
“I love her, man. She loves me,” the boy said.
“I believe you.”
The rain fell harder, they stepped out into the road, and Vance was running, flying across the liquid, his feet making a slapping sound, hearing footsteps behind him and a frustrated yell, zaggling across another street to the klaxon of an approaching car, down a larger avenue, his stomach sparking pain with every step, the rain even harder now, other people running too inside now as the sky completely opened up. The horizon was a mottled red with tendrils reaching out to either side, like the wound on the girl’s jaw; he ran toward it for something to run toward, but it disappeared, a trick of angle or perspective. He ran and ran, and when he dared to look back, there was nothing, just the underwater city. The boy had disappeared—or, Vance thought, he himself had. He doubled over in the portico of a dilapidated colonial building, vomiting. The rain obligingly diluted the puke and washed the froth away into the street.
He waited for the storm to break, but it didn’t. Finally, a bus pulled up at the corner, and he got on it before remembering his wallet was gone. The bus driver, a large, older blonde woman so thoroughly wedged into her seat that it appeared as if the bus had been assembled around her person, looked at him standing there dripping, gaping, wordless with his own misfortune. She sighed and jerked her thumb toward the back of the bus, a gesture of brusque compassion that was at that moment almost unbelievable. He sat alone on the plastic bench in the back. Reports of pain issued from all over his body. Eventually he would find out where he was going and make his way back across the water to the hotel, but for now he closed his eyes and allowed himself to be ferried through the flood.