My brother has told me about clinging to the legs and riding on the boots of American GIs in the refugee camp in Guam where we waited a month for passage to the States in May 1975. They were impressively large, these men, and utterly fascinating to my brother, who was nine. The soldiers assisted the Red Cross workers, hauling supplies, setting up tents, handing out blankets, food rations, medicines. With rifles on their shoulders, they patroled the fenced perimeters of the camp, and my brother and the other boys he played with would watch them. Sometimes they would dare each other to run up behind and touch the soldiers—on the leg, the hand—or say one of the few English phrases they'd recently learned: “Hello, how you do?” or “You number one!” or “Goddamnit.” The soldiers would say words in return and make friendly gestures, but my brother could not understand English well. The first few times this happened he froze in shyness, then took off running again the second the soldier's conversation paused. Steadily he grew bolder, though, and lingered longer, as the other boys did.
The GIs gave them small items—packs of gum, a cigarette or two, a candy bar, magazines or comic books, a pencil, a dogtag, wallet pictures of themselves in uniform, and, occasionally, swigs of soda or beer. Some soldiers played with the boys, swinging them around, turning them upside down, hoisting them high onto their shoulders. One time, a boy, as he was being let down, wrapped himself around his soldier’s leg, and the soldier proceeded to walk with him sitting on his boot. The other boys thought this was hilarious. Soon it became a ritual game between the boys and the soldiers. Each time the boys saw a soldier walking by, they would run after him, and whoever reached him first would throw himself at the soldier’s khaki-covered leg and clamp on. The soldiers mostly humored them, plodding on without pause, or feigning confusion and effort at walking. The boys would hold on for as long as they could, usually just ten or twenty yards, from one end of a row of barracks to the other, then would fall away, rolling across the ground and dramatically acting out a death. There were one or two boys who were clingers to a more severe degree, however, and inadvertently Thien became one of these. Something in a particular soldier’s presence caught him one afternoon. He could not let go. For more than half an hour, he clung to this soldier’s leg, and the soldier took him on all his errands, to the laundry room, to the post office, to the area behind the mess hall where GIs and kitchen staff stood to smoke, to a building full of other soldiers to get some papers signed. The soldier never glanced down to acknowledge Thien, but his silence was powerful—it exuded a manner of benevolence that was extremely mellow, personal, and unusual. Thien hung on despite the discomfort of sitting so long in this position (his hands were leaving sweat marks on the soldier’s pants) and the soldier let him. When others passed and made comments or pointed, the soldier responded only in brief, semiserious tones; that he did not laugh or joke with his peers told Thien something. There was an agreement between them, he and this soldier.
The ride ended when an older American, not in uniform, passed them crossing the commons and barked some commands at Thien’s soldier who, now, at last, turned his face toward Thien. His eyes were small in his wide, smooth face, giving the impression that they looked out from somewhere hidden. His look was apologetic but conspiratorial. Thien grinned in understanding, let go, went on his way. For days afterward, though, this soldier’s expressions and mannerisms stayed with Thien. He tried to copy them, to smile with a small upturn of his lips and exude the same mysterious, accepting silence. Remembering the soldier was slightly pigeon-toed, Thien began to turn his toes in when he walked. He looked for the soldier to pass their area of the camp every day. Finally, he spotted the soldier one evening outside the mess hall, standing beside another boy, one of those whom Thien played with regularly. The soldier had his hand on the other boy’s shoulder. When Thien saw this, a bottled fury rose inside him. He rushed at the other boy, knocking them both to the ground. The two wrestled and rolled in the dirt, pulling hair and clawing at faces.
The soldier broke them apart. His expression was startled but amused. He held them apart with a hand on each boy’s chest, his arms stretched out wide.
One day a deer got caught in a fence down the road. Only three hours earlier, while he was chainsawing oak and pine trunks into big chunks of firewood, Thien had had an encounter with some other deer. It was the end of summer and a breeze was rustling through, making the tall treetops swish their branches like bellows at the sky; it surged across the long grass on the hillside like an invisible giant’s foot, pressing down upon the slope and crushing the grass for just a second, then lifting, leaving the grass to sway, dazed, upright again.
Invisible giants, lowing trees—he was growing used to being the sole witness of such entities and anomalies up in these hills where the trees and grasses were taller than any he’d seen before, and where the mountain views could set one immediately to wishing: this place with no sidewalks, no culs-de-sac, no reasonable places to ride a bicycle, no Kmart or 7-Eleven, no friends. Thien hated their new home and thought house-building a bewildering idea (why, when there were so many far nicer ones already built and available?). He missed the television programs they used to watch in their first two apartments in Sacramento, the easy glamour and humor that was, it had seemed, offering promise of what life in America should be about. He imagined it must be fun and inviting and warm behind those yellow-lit windows in the nicer Sacramento neighborhoods they used to walk through on some evenings, where the driveways were wide and garage doors open and kids rode bicycles round and round in circles in the street. In all of Thien’s earlier knowledge of America there had been nothing about chainsaws and dead trees, or the cold of these hills at night, or the discomfort of sleeping in a trailer in a tiny bunk with his nose four inches from the ceiling, or no running water or electricity, just a wheelbarrow of old plastic milk jugs to push, full and empty, up and down a gravel road. At least he was developing muscles, sometimes he thought, but this country was not much different—in terms of being easier, or at least more comfortable—than Vietnam; this was the strange, inescapable truth. At times Thien hated his mother as much as he did his new father, for what she would not take them back to—unclear as the concept of return was to him.
His ears were full of the grinding, churning buzz of the chain-saw, muffled slightly by the helmet he was wearing, when he saw out of the corner of his eye a flash of gray-brown movement, then the dogs bounding up from their resting place in the grass. His upper body jerked, too, almost dangerously, and the saw slid, the groove he was making in the log in front of him swerved, and the log rolled almost onto his feet, as he cut the chainsaw motor quickly. He pushed back his helmet, and his ears, his whole head, filled immediately with the immense rushing sound of silence, a few crackling twigs, then the sudden great rustle and crash of a heavy, swift body plunging through the pallid yellow grass and brown leaves, down the steep hillside. A family of deer (he saw them now) had passed not more than an arm’s length from where he stood, a large sleek doe followed by her two fawns, leaping effortlessly over fallen logs and brush, eyes panicked and bright yet still like stones glued into the sides of their mulish faces. The three seemed to be surrounded by a nervous, quivering rim of light, and their bodies were papery, thin-boned, thin-coated, tapering neatly at their noses, hooves, tails. They were graceful and deliberate even in their fear. The dogs pursued them with zeal; the pup’s white ears flopped comically, joyfully, while his tongue lashed about between his jaws and his barks came out in eager, unusual yelps. Jamie, the mother dog (named by Thien after the Bionic Woman), was more dutiful in her chase, barking with conviction, with a guard dog’s earnest recognition of an intrusion. Then they were gone, disappeared into the tangles of trees and grasses and viny growth that shrouded the ravine down where the hill ended. For a few seconds more Thien saw the pup’s white stump of a tail bobbing like a flag through the undergrowth, then the dogs gave up and came, noses first, out of the trees, tails wagging, tongues long, dripping, and the corners of their mouths creased into what looked like dog smiles.
Thien didn’t tell anyone else about how close the deer had passed or the slipping of the saw almost to his foot. He had felt it would be a breach of his relationship, however momentary, with the deer; and he was sure his stepfather would’ve had to make something of it, either about the boldness of the deer or his own clumsiness with the saw. Thien had learned not to talk about everything he saw, and to hide the things that might be construed as mistakes.
Now he came down the road with the wire cutters Hus had sent him back to retrieve. He saw the entangled deer, tugging and hopping frantically on three legs, its fourth leg stretched out behind it, skinny and brown and crooked like a branch, twisted in the wires of the Garrett property’s fence. It was a young deer but larger than the three young ones he’d seen earlier. Gray-faced with large black eyes and two nubs of white just beginning to protrude out of its brow. A male deer, Thien observed. Hus and Thien’s sisters were standing on the roadside a few yards from the deer.
“Don’t touch it,” Hus warned the girls, who wanted to move forward for a closer look. “If it gets the scent of humans on it, its mother and the other deer won’t go near it ever again. Smell is very important to animals.” He directed them to stand back, in the middle of the road.
Hus sent Thien forward with the wire cutters—Thien’s arms were small enough to reach through the fence—and meanwhile stood behind Thien on the bank, giving instructions. Cut there, no there, cut closer—you’re cutting his skin now, not the wire! But wire and animal leg were well entwined. Thien felt himself caught between the worry of following Hus’s instructions and the utter reality of the animal in front of him, closer even than the family that’d passed him earlier on the hill, like an omen, he thought now. The deer was panicking yet not making a sound, just pulling and pulling against the fence. The wires and his leg shook so badly that Thien could not make a clear cut. He could smell the animal, though; it smelled somewhat the same as horses, not a bad smell but also not a clean smell. Its coat was wet with sweat that made patterns like the shapes of continents on a map across its gray-brown back. Thien snipped at a piece of wire far from the leg; he was moving tentatively but wanted at least to appear to be making progress—for in truth he saw only impossibility in the redness and rawness where the wire had submerged itself in the deer’s leg, but Hus was not close enough to see that. Blood spattered on Thien’s arms and face, and he would have backed off and run were it not for his even greater fear of Hus. He knew Hus would not allow him to leave until the task was completed, and he even began to believe in the dire necessity of the task himself, with Hus’s conviction so strong and contagious behind him. It was Hus’s conviction as new father at the helm of this family that had brought them to the trailer in these scrubby-treed hills in the first place, (you are now entering gold country, said a sign along the highway at about the point where the land began to heave itself upward, like flat water stirring into waves, or like a great yellow blanket laid out and beginning, gently, to catch gusts of wind from below.) The deer lurched, stumbled, and fell away from the fence suddenly. It struggled like a creature on stilts upright onto thin legs, then bounded away, leaving half of the fourth leg still in the fence. The leg swung, then fell down into the grass with an unceremonious plop. The crosswires were bloody but still taut.
“There he goes, oh-oh, lookit that! There he goes!” Hus exclaimed. They watched as the deer cleared the far side of the fence on its three legs with no hindrance, powered now by the new strength of fear, and disappeared into the trees. “Well, I suppose a deer can survive on three legs,” remarked Hus, “I suppose he can. That is, if the coyotes don’t catch the scent of his blood first, of course.” He seemed grim but pleased—almost satisfied.
Thien didn’t say anything as he pulled his arms back out of the fence and let the wire cutters fall to his side, heavy against his legs. His sisters were standing in the road, he noticed, their hands over their eyes. They never saw anything, it occurred to him.
Years later this was not on his mind as he came out of the movie “Hearts of Darkness,” and his eyes had to adjust to the new level, albeit dim, of light in the movie theater lobby. The high flat ceilings were lined with neon tube lighting; shiny faux-sculpture mobiles listed idly in the breeze of the air-conditioning. The reflections of people moved eerily, transparently, across the large glass windows, blocking any view of the darkened parking lot outside. He paused to pry at an eyelid; his contacts itched. The dim outlines of angled walls and movie posters and people grew steadily brighter in his vision. What was on his mind at this moment was the movie, the mood it had put him in—detached, apprehensive—and the feeling of a wheel at the back of his mind, turning, trying to enlighten him about something just beyond the reach of his awareness. It was like a déjà vu of sorts. He could almost pinpoint it, could almost recognize what the mood reminded him of—but then he couldn’t. So he had walked with everyone else, not looking at anybody else, out of the artificial dark back into the artificial light.
It was a documentary of the making of a movie about the Vietnam War. Though it wasn’t his apparently relevant connection (the subject matter) that he felt strangely toward so much as it was an encompassing revelation about movies in general—the awesome but absurd confluence of the make-believe and the actual that happened on a set. The oldest of his younger sisters, who was eighteen, was currently in film school; she was the one who had recommended this movie. Though he thought he might’ve gone to see it anyway, regardless of her opinion. (She had developed a particular attitude lately, as if her education had made her privy to some secret knowledge. She laughed at points in movies now where there was nothing to laugh at, he had noticed.) He thought of the actors and their fireworks, their fake ammo, their massive, elaborate fake explosions, their drugs. He thought of Marlon Brando’s ugly squished face, remembered how funny it was to see Marlon Brando say candidly, “I swallowed a bug,” and how that funniness had opened into something else—weirder and bigger and sadder—the sensation Thien could not pinpoint. He thought people involved in making movies stood somehow at the edge of the world, enlightened and twisted, both, by the range of their power, their famous faces. The movie’s subtitle was “A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” and the filmmaker had been exceedingly emphatic about his own torment over the difficulties—financial, logistic, artistic—of shooting an American movie in a Third World country. He had compared the making of this movie to the experience of soldiers in Vietnam. “This is not a film about Vietnam,” he had insisted in one interview. “It is Vietnam.”
Thien tried to picture his sister amid people like that and felt cheated because he could believe she might get there—to an unlikely, highly coveted lifestyle—but had no similar vision for himself.
He had been enrolled in community college on and off over the years and worked in a garage as a mechanic, a skill that came to him with uncanny ease, had always. He understood them, machines. If he studied any piece of machinery long enough, he could figure out how it worked, how the parts had to come apart or go back together (the only problems he couldn’t figure out were the nonmechanical ones, those computer-run parts found in so many newer cars lately). This mechanical comprehension occurred in a strange region of his brain: he had only to turn off his thinking and set his hands in motion. It was the same with firing a gun—he enjoyed it and his aim was unfailingly accurate —another quiet exercise in simultaneously concentrating and letting go.
As he resumed walking after adjusting his contacts, he noticed a textbook inside the ticket-seller’s glass booth. She was obviously a student, young, self-preoccupied looking (she reminded him of his sister), also Asian. Her textbook was propped open on the counter before her, the book’s front cover reflecting in the window of the booth so that he saw its title backward: it took him a moment to unscramble the letters. A World of Asia, the book was called. In his mind the title coincided with the landscape of the movie, dark jungle and greenish mounds of mountains shaped like large reptiles’ backs at the edges of murky waters. He saw the words of the book’s title imprinted on top of these images, but again he reminded himself, this was always what it was like when he came out of a movie.
He thought of the term “sea legs.” He waited for his mind to reorient itself.
His companion, not exactly a date, was waiting for him by the door. Valerie was the only girl he had ever encountered who knew how, and was willing, to change the oil in her own car. But she was not very pretty, and in general he was confused by his feelings for her. The fact was, they spent more time together than he liked to admit, and the terms of their relationship had become ambiguous. But it was not her looks solely that were inadequate—he didn’t like to think of himself as that shallow; it was something about her entire demeanor, a certain oblivious candor she possessed. She had a horsey laugh; the tackiness of her clothes made him cringe; she did not mind talking loudly or intimately in public. Sometimes when she came to bed she removed her underpants before her bra, and Thien was revolted by her unabashedness, the utterly frightening gaucheness of her lust. She was also taller and heavier than he was, but then he was a small, slight-bodied man.
“Did that movie remind you of China?” she asked as they exited into the warm early October air.
“Vietnam,” he corrected her. She was always getting them mixed up. This was another thing about her he was wary of—her slight, though totally unmalicious, ignorance. She had never been farther outside of San Diego than San Bernadino, one hundred nine miles to the northeast where she’d grown up, and Florida, once, to visit Disney World. How could he blame her when he hardly desired to go much farther himself? He had moved from his aunt’s house in one suburb to his own house, a rental, in another suburb just a few months ago, though his aunt wouldn’t have minded if he’d stayed till he was forty, it seemed. As for the rift that had sent him out of his stepfather’s house in northern California nine years ago and brought him south to San Diego in the first place (he never actually referred to Hus as his stepfather, had done so only for a short period of time three years ago following his mother’s death, when he’d been trying in every way he could to claim himself independent of Hus’s influence—he was no longer so vindictive, had matured, he believed, past the point of blaming one’s parents for everything)—that rift had been largely glazed over, healed by time more than anything. Their animosity toward each other simply wore out. Thien now understood it’d become necessary, then, for both of them, to see him leave. He could remember, after an argument, entering the kitchen to find Hus’s bottle of ulcer pills in the middle of the counter, the cap screwed on crookedly, powder from the crushed pills visible on the countertop. Seeing that had always made Thien feel guiltily, tentatively triumphant. He had understood it as evidence of Hus’s vulnerability—a rare admission—and possibly the only unadulterated expression of emotion he would ever get from Hus. Now, though, when Thien and Hus talked on the phone occasionally, Hus became lucid, surprising. “I was quite miserable in those years,” he told Thien once. He never spoke like this when they spoke in person; selfdisclosure could be sanctioned only by phone, it seemed. Thien often didn’t know how to respond. He wanted Hus’s openness to continue but was also aware of the concentration it required on his own part. The wrong tone of voice or too probing a question could send Hus immediately back into one of his usual modes—sarcasm or bravado or speeches.
“That wasn’t really filmed in Vietnam,” Thien replied to Valerie’s question, as they crossed the parking lot. “It was filmed in the Philippines. The credits said so in the beginning.” He felt a little annoyed with her.
Then he realized his car was not where he had left it. They were where he had left it, but the car was not.
This is not happening, he thought immediately. This is not happening again. He had had three previous cars stolen in as many years. “Of course this would happen to me. Of course,” he said.
“Thien, maybe it was just towed.”
Thien almost wanted to laugh. He put his hand to his head, paced the perimeter of the parking space several times as if to confirm its emptiness. There were few cars in the large parking lot. The streetlamps were tall and curved at their tops, like metal swan necks, their heads wide, buzzing bulbs of glaring, yellow light.
Thien cast his gaze around, into the distance, at the headlights of cars going by on the strip, the winking intersection lights. His was a black car, a small one. It wouldn’t be easily visible, a Honda CRX with only a few adornments. It should not have been that appealing to thieves—he had resisted his usual desire to fancily adorn the rims, the fenders, as he had done with cars in the past; he had adorned them conservatively this time. As a security measure on one of his previous cars, he had removed all the knobs, inside and out, leaving only one knob that could be easily attached and detached when he himself wanted to get in and out; whenever he left the car, he would put the handle in his pocket and carry it with him like a second key. But even that car had managed to vanish. A Datsun 510. He had belonged to a Datsun 510 car-enthusiast club but had vowed not to buy another 510 after the last one had been stolen. He had then bought a vehicle that was factory issue. He sighed, hooked his fingers in his belt loops, met Valerie’s eyes.
“Another one bites the dust,” he said.
“You had insurance on this one, didn’t you?” She was equally unfazed, had been through it with him before.
He thought of something then. “My Ruger. Should I tell them? It was under the seat. It cost me a lot. I want it covered.”
“Say it was in the trunk. Say you were on your way back from the shooting range. Lie.” Then, with one of her bold, presuming smiles: “Say you had a stereo in there, too. I could use a new one.”
But it was not purely the loss of things that bothered him, was it? he thought later that night, after the police report had been filed, after Valerie had pumped herself to exhaustion atop him and then fallen asleep with arms and legs flung across more than half of the bed. It was her bed anyway, and he was indifferent to its comfort; he hoped he would leave it to her entirely soon enough, for good. Her dyed blond hair fell like a mop over her face, her brown roots showing like some grave aspect (he frankly didn’t want to know) beneath her brassy personality. He glanced at the bedside clock and recalled the scenery from the movie and the title of the book. His thoughts had been carried away with the movie, he remembered, and maybe the sight of that book had been meant to pull him back, then, into the situation at hand. Maybe it had been meant to tell him A World of Asia existed not so much on the cover or even in the contents of that textbook—or that movie—as it did in what was beyond the reflection in the glass, and notably that was the parking lot, the absence of his own car, which he could not see for all the reflections upon the windows. It was unnerving to him, the sense that one may not always be looking at what one thinks one is looking at. It was also unnerving that one could not leave one’s vehicle unguarded for even ninety minutes, without the possibility of returning to its absence and the consequences that entailed. He’d been told he was too emotional about his cars. But he couldn’t help it. It flooded him with dread to lose a car. He wanted it back. He wanted the things inside of it back, too, intact. Maybe he was “materialistic” (his college-sister’s word), but so what, he thought, so I am.
The truth was he had been driving around for months with the gun under his seat, within easy reach, just in case. Carjackings, whatever. He kept the safety on, but it was loaded and not in its case, as the law required. Some nights he had even driven with it lying on his lap, or tucked under his leg. He was uneasy enough about this to realize that he shouldn’t be doing it, that he was crossing a boundary. But he had succumbed to the security of it, a gun under the seat, as a person might succumb to candy or pornographic movies; juvenile, guilty pleasures that did not actually eradicate lust, or fear.
In the morning they ate breakfast in front of the television on Valerie’s kitchen counter. She would drive him to work, she had said.
A commercial jingle for dog food came on, and she got up to dance across the kitchen floor with the dogs, the two little brown mutts. She held them upright by pulling on their front paws, and they followed her lead with stiff, earnest focus. They had short, peppery-brown fur and pert, compact bodies, but around their muzzles the fur was long and straggly, making their faces look like those of bearded old men. She wore a pair of Thien’s boxer shorts and a tank top. Her breasts looked large and loose beneath the thin fabric. He had thought before that her body was nicer-looking than her face.
Sometimes a contentedness with her descended upon him—and he felt as abashedly guilty about this as he did about the gun under his seat. It made him angry.
“I’m going to be late,” he said.
“Is it my fault you wouldn’t get your skinny butt out of bed?” she returned, almost gaily.
“You aren’t even dressed yet.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, like a child, he thought. She twirled one of the dogs, the dog’s hind paws taking a dozen tiny, pained steps to make one tight circle over the floor.
Digging for some morsel of harmless—still, he wished to toe the line of sensitivity—malevolence, finally Thien found it: “What dumb-ass dogs.”
He worked quietly that day, taking the usual number of breaks to smoke his cigarettes, half listening to the usual songs on the radio, half thankful when every now and again the few he liked alleviated the monotonous sounds of revving engines and rolling wheels and slamming hoods, the long whining rise and sighing descent of the motorized jack. How many times a day did he reach under the hood of a car with his fingers, find its trigger and then lift, to be met by the sight of another vehicle’s gaping innards, asking for interpretation? Some days dragged more than others. He could do much of this work without thinking and so his mind wandered. It followed the good-looking businesswoman with the Miata, pacing in her tight skirt in the waiting room while talking on her cell phone; it followed her as she flipped her buoyant hair while walking to the restroom around the side of the garage and as she delicately stepped back out; it probed her clothing for chance glimpses of the skin beneath; it followed her later as she drove away with her top down, sunglasses on.
At his lunch break he made a phone call to the police department, gave his license plate number, waited. He was told: no news. “Usually they turn up in forty-eight hours or so if they turn up at all,” the officer had told him the previous night.
It had been eighteen hours. He imagined the joy-riders still whizzing about; they could’ve been to Mexico and back by now.
“Bummer about your wheels, man,” said a co-worker named Jerry, who was one of the younger boys, maybe twenty, and the only white employee at this company (the rest were Mexican or Asian). Jerry was sociable, would chat up customers, laugh loudly at dumb jokes, snap his oil rag at the others when he should’ve been working. Harmless. Still, Thien didn’t like him.
In fact, the only co-worker Thien did like enough to call a friend was Ramone, whom everyone called simply Mone. Mone claimed his heritage was a mixture of Mexican-Indian, American-Indian (or “Native American,” though he preferred the former term because of its more to-the-pointness, he said), German, and Irish; he was also a Catholic. He was twenty-nine, slightly older than Thien, lean and of medium height with skin the same glowing color and texture as burnished pale oak wood; his eyes were dark green, his long hair a unique shade of brown. Women stared at him, Thien had noticed, though sometimes almost with fear, with curious mistrust. Mone spent much of his spare time on his back underneath or bent over the gaping mouth of his own 1970 Datsun 240-Z, one of the most coveted of the Datsun Z car series, rarer and sportier and more expensive to restore than the 510. Mone kept his car locked in his mother’s garage and drove it only on rare occasions.
Mone lived with his mother, who spoke only Spanish fluently. He paid her bills, carried in her groceries, ran errands to pick up her prescriptions, took her cats to the vet, et cetera. At times Thien became annoyed by Mone’s dutifulness, these activities, their meandering and stalling effects on their friendship; he never waited for Mone to go somewhere with him, he would just leave. And Mone was always unperturbed—by Thien’s impatience as well as by the undependable clock of his own life. So the two remained friends. Often what they shared were silences: watching a sports event on the couch, with Mone’s mother moving about the kitchen in the background; working on one or the other’s car while listening to the radio; going to a movie. Mone did not date (Thien suspected it had to do with his mother) and they rarely talked about girls, or any personal facts of their lives. Maybe a thought dropped here and there—but neither was the kind to question further, or to talk willingly about such matters unless prodded.
Mone carried a hunting knife strapped to his shin, which on occasion he had unsheathed for Thien’s sake. “Could skin a baby with this edge,” he had said once, but these sounded like words he had heard someone else say and was repeating.
Mone was the one who had let Thien in on the secret—the option—of driving with a gun under the seat. And Mone had been serious, entirely sincere in his paranoia. “You never know, man, when some crazy is gonna pop up in your window. I’ll shoot through the glass if I have to, I’ll be all cut up by glass if I have to, if it means protecting my own life. Shit, yeah.”
Thien had seen the drama in this, at first, and then the inkling, the disturbing seed, of its possibility. He began to keep his gun loaded in the house, then in the car. One of his cousins was robbed at a traffic light as early as seven p.m. in a decent neighborhood, and you could blame it on the fact of his BMW, sure, but still. Sometimes when Thien thought about the world he saw a grid, an immense terrifying grid of objects—like city lights, computer chip boards—viewed from a long distance. The sight made him agoraphobic. There were too many available turns to take; too many people; it was impossible even to imagine the depths of abnormality into which one human being might sink, unnoticed. You just never could be sure.
In the break room Mone nodded to Thien. “Check this out,” he said. He was watching the television that was mounted high in one corner of the room, on the wall. “Some guy just went berserk and took a video store clerk hostage in Mira Loma. Look. The TV crew got hooked up to the video store’s security cameras somehow. This is live footage, man. They already caught him, though. Trying to run out the back door.”
“No one got shot or anything, though,” said Jimmy Liu, who was also in the break room, sitting back on the sagging car seat they used for a couch.
“What kind of gun did he use?” asked Thien.
“They didn’t say,” answered Jimmy Liu.
“A nine-millimeter Ruger P-89,” said Mone eagerly, because he knew this was exactly what Thien had lost.
“Yeah, right,” said Thien. He patted his pockets for his cigarettes, headed outside to smoke.
On the blacktop after he had finished smoking, he stubbed his cigarette under his shoe, turned, and walked toward the restroom around the side of the garage. It had never been clean here, next to the Dumpster and fence that separated the service station from the apartment complex next door—but he was used to it. The door, when he tried it, was locked. He wandered back to the corner, debating his need to wait, when he heard the door open. A man had opened the door a few inches, to peek out, it seemed. Thien caught his eye, and the man pulled the door shut again. But this glimpse of him stayed in Thien’s head: a long-faced man, light brown skin, short, frizzy black hair, apathetic expression, some scruff along his jaw and above his lips, long, thin fingers lying on the doorknob. Thien decided to walk away; he could use the restroom later. But then the man exited, striding swiftly past Thien without a glance, and climbed into a pickup truck (red, Toyota Tacoma, V-6, probably an ’88) parked among the other cars in the lot; he pulled out and drove off. Thien had an unclean, a sickly feeling, yes, but told himself it was silly and would be inappropriately discriminating not to use the restroom after this man just because of, what? The look of him, his skin color? Thien told himself: the man was tall, a little skinny; he was dressed in normal, clean clothes. He drove away in a decent vehicle.
When Thien went to pull open the door, he was surprised to find the restroom still occupied. A woman. Her appearance was ruffled, her expression surprised and apologetic. She was gathering what appeared to be Band-Aids from the floor and stuffing them hurriedly into her plastic bag—a bag that seemed to contain other plastic bags. She was not totally despondent-looking, but he assumed she was a homeless person. She wore jeans and dirty, thin-soled sneakers and several layers of big flannel shirts that didn’t match. Her blond hair was uncombed. In her thirties, he thought. She was wiping her mouth with a paper towel, and her eyes looked a little raw at the corners. Spotting Thien, she rose from the floor with the courtesy of a drunken person trying to conceal her drunkenness with an overt attempt at manners. “Oh, excuse me,” she said and, brightly, “There you go, now,” as she ducked out the door. He was holding the door open for her. He wished that if he let it go, it would swing shut fast enough to hit her—a complicated anger had risen inside him—but it was a heavy door, a slow one, on a hydraulic hinge. He noticed the crumpled paper towels on the floor. He felt helpless, foolish, his imagination racing. He used the restroom nevertheless.
Later that afternoon, when he called the police again about his car, it was this man’s face he pictured looking furtively out from behind the wheel, although he was aware this was an unfounded suspicion.
Thien had told his sisters about the deer’s leg twirling up into the sky like a baton over the fence not to scare them as much as to shield them: he’d understood (if only instinctively rather than consciously) that there was a need for embellishment in such situations, that if you sufficiently dramatized an event to a point of near impossibility, you could be saved. You could be saved from a more private and difficult processing of the event.
He had created a grotesque cartoon image of the deer’s leg spinning upward like a fire baton, except that blood instead of flames made colorful arcs in the air. He had told them how the blood had wheeled everywhere; it was like a sprinkler, like rain. He had told them this with a tone of pleasure, the kind of tone he knew his little sisters would respond to with “nuh-unh’s.” Neither could remember seeing any blood. You’re gross, they said, and Eew, and so the fact of gore had been attributed to him, and the actual incident pretty much forgotten. And Thien was fine with this. He was, in fact, relieved.
Maybe one day he would tell them more, he thought.
Hus had talked in theory about the deer. Deer were astounding jumpers, he said. This deer must’ve been sick, weak already, if unable to make that easy jump. Or he said: the fence was of a poor design. The crosswires stuck out too far from the fence line, and it was easy for animals to get caught; the Garretts should’ve known better when they built the fence. Then Hus went further. Where was the deer now? he speculated. Probably it had died, shunned by the other deer because of the human scent on it and left to fend off coyotes and mountain lions and wild strays. The accusation burned in Thien’s mind.
And Hus made other accusations (Thien had begun to notice them around this time, when he was fifteen years old) about people in general. Fallibility was a fault that couldn’t be corrected, his comments had made it seem to Thien, the tendency toward mistake or failure or sloth—it was like ugliness. Unfortunate but undeniable; probably a result of unfit genetics. Just as Hus praised certain breeds of dogs for having good temperament and looks and acumen in their ancestry (the Rottweiler, the German shepherd, the Newfoundland, the Saint Bernard, the Great Pyrenees, and Bernese mountain dogs, as well as any mixture of two or more commendable breeds, because Hus was also wont, on occasion, to praise the surprise strengths of an anomaly), so had he constructed similar theories regarding geographies—races—of people.
You could view the world as you viewed the body, Hus seemed to think, when it came down to it: nether and upper regions, hither and yonder. What went on below was cruder, base, potentially and problematically violent, irrational; what went on above was loftier, better intentioned, better planned, cerebral. Of the continental states, for instance, Hus despised Texas most of all, though he’d flown over it, and maybe stopped in it once. Nevertheless he was certain it was a wasteland of bad taste, backward manners, crass Americanism, inbreeding—he had met Texans in the U.S. Army (had shared a bunkhouse with a boy from Lubbock who was the first to expose Hus to the most unbelievably idiotic kind of music he had heard in his life, a wheedling, grating kind of music that was, it had seemed to Hus, especially aimed to promote mediocrity and praise only the virtues of ignorance and self-satisfaction. Hus had also been appalled by his roommate’s speech, how it seemed the boy spoke through a mouthful of rocks that contorted his face from the inside with each word). Hus had glimpsed the poor conditions of the South while in boot camp in Alabama (ramshackle wooden houses, haggard-looking women on sunken porches, junk in the front yards, poorly dressed kids, derelict automobiles yawning open alongside potholed roads), though he claimed one could’ve surmised it all just as well from the topography, the weather reports, the bird’s-eye view out the airplane window. Because for Hus it was mountains and seas that held the most distinction—striking, noble vistas and dramatic elevations and expanses sure to create people of respectable composure and unflinching vision. (The hush and grandeur and clear air of northern regions versus the squalor and heat and density and small-animalia of southern regions; civilized, advanced methods of warfare versus cowardly, subversive guerrilla techniques.) For Hus, it seemed a crucial, personal matter to be able to explain the world so categorically. And it put him at ease, made him amiable, actually, if Thien listened and agreed.
Still, Hus’s attitude got under Thien’s skin. It had not been lost on him that he and his mother (and April) came from that lower category, that southward one. And Hus’s criticisms were inconsistent. He had cursed idleness yet called their mother “ruthless” when she buried herself in a book or got lost in her notebooks. He poked fun at her for being sedentary and inept at housework, yet spoke negatively of more apparently domestic mothers in the neighborhood, calling them, with disdain, “domineering women.” He didn’t allow Thien’s sisters to play dress-up in certain clothes he deemed provocative, yet had bought Thien the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar each year for Christmas after his fourteenth birthday.
Thien had not always known how to regard his mother while she was alive. The way she dressed in secondhand clothes from the 1970s; her embarrassing habit of asking people questions to which they’d already given answers, and, especially, the way she looked whenever she attempted something new—she was small, determined, vulnerable but utterly unselfconscious. When she decided to take up power-walking as other women in the area were doing, Thien became aware of smirks on the faces of boys he knew passing by on their motorbikes. There was his mother in a white sweatband, her childish padded body in unseemly white sweatpants. The worst part was that Hus cringed, too, discreetly (but Thien saw it), and in public had begun to call her “Tran” in the casual way other parents called each other by their first names, although she still addressed him as “Daddy.” Sometimes Thien could find a comforting humor in the odd details he attributed to his mother (her bell-bottom pants, her taste for what seemed to Thien “old-lady” purses, her candor when she asked him to explain certain slang phrases or figures of speech), but in the next moment these things could fill him with a sudden, terrible humiliation.
When he came home with the blood of the deer on his face and forearms, his mother had looked at him curiously, blankly. Arms submerged in the tiny kitchen sink, she had listened as Hus hooted, solemnly though, and again brought up the threat of the coyotes, their hunger, their wile. When it registered with her that it was the deer’s blood and not Thien’s, she had laughed, dried her arms, and gone for the camera. The whole trailer felt it when all of them came in or moved about at once; the small thin floor gave, the walls seemed to breathe, to rattle and shrug. She loved her son and saw his blood-spattered state as something to document, another small calamity in the frail course of their lives together—a strange adventure; a story to tell later. Thien didn’t always know what to make of his mother’s quick recoveries, or her cheerfulness sometimes in the face of such events. It left him feeling shot down, as if he’d just given a wrong answer in class. He wanted his mother to look with concern at him once more, to linger. But he said nothing; and keeping silent made a knot of his heart. He felt guilty and angry and distraught altogether. He would go back to the fence eventually to look for it, whatever might remain of that deer.
He was rinsing the wire cutters with water from a plastic gallon jug when his sisters came up to him later that evening. The sun had dropped below the line of the hills and everything was a fast darkening blue. The girls made their Barbie dolls tiptoe over the rocks as they spoke to each other in some kind of code.
“Hey, Harry, I think I see a waterfall ahead.”
“Gee, George, what’s a waterfall?”
“Harry, what are you asking me for? I don’t know.”
“Duh, George, what are you asking me for? I don’t know, either.”
They were manipulating their dolls’ heads and making them pause to turn their torsos and swing their permanently bent arms. Thien was familiar with this routine, though he had no idea what the reasoning behind it was; the girls just seemed to enjoy speaking the names Harry and George out loud. Sometimes they even ran up and down the driveway, calling out to one another as Harry and George. April was usually George and Beth was Harry.
“I used to be as blond as that,” Thien said, wanting to feed them another fantasy, to hear their protests. He pointed to their Barbies. “When I was you guyses’ age back in Vietnam. Then I ate some burnt dog and got sick. I had to stay in bed for three days straight and when I woke up again, my hair was black. It’s been black ever since.”
Beth, who was five, looked quizzically at him. “Hotdog?” she said.
“No, dog. Regular dog. Woof-woof dog,” said Thien. “Where do you think hotdog comes from?”
Immediately the girls threw themselves into a frenzy of gagging sounds. Thien smiled. He stood, leaving the wire cutters to dry at the edge of a nearby pile of lumber, conscious to place them out of at least Beth’s reach; April was old enough by then to know better. He never felt spite toward his little sisters (even though the amount of work Hus made him do while they played could seem unfair), just the desire to make them laugh, to see them act silly. It was not that they didn’t act silly often enough. Hus told them made-up stories, too, and occasionally did things like swing them through the air holding on to their arms as they screamed in delight. For Thien it came as a relief to hear his sisters laugh. He could open himself up to them, in a gentle, playful way, a side of himself he didn’t dare show his peers or parents. And, he had noticed, it seemed to be somewhat the same for Hus. Whenever Thien saw (observing from a distance, bent over his homework or another task) his father playing with his sisters, a feeling of security and hope entered Thien. This Hus was charismatic and theatrical, a compelling storyteller, full of inventive ideas and hilarious facial expressions. Thien had wished the girls would go on intervening in Hus’s plans for the house and property, would keep stalling the rhythms of their work, would never grow up.
“Hey, you see that guy earlier today, that black guy? He go into our bathroom with some puta,” said Jimmy Liu, as they locked up the garage that evening. “I see them walk in the bathroom together, I no see nobody come out right away. Sick!” he added, with pleasurable disgust.
Thien didn’t admit he had witnessed this, too; he offered only a smile of agreement, a lift of his eyebrows, in reaction. For if he admitted it, he realized, he would also have to admit how close he had come in behind them, the suspect couple. And he didn’t want to let on how that had made him feel—implicated, curious—about their activity in there.
It was Valerie who had pursued Thien when they first met; she wasn’t the one he’d been watching initially. It happened at the beach, nearly two summers ago. Thien was playing volleyball with a group of friends from community college. He had come because of a girl, a pretty brunette communications major he was interested in. Her name was Tammy, and to this day he remembered she was wearing a red bikini. He also remembered the pained, surprised expression on her face when he mentioned going for coffee with her and her evasive, noncommittal reply: “Oh, my friend drove me.” Her friend, a strident blond girl named Melissa (too sassy and thin for Thien’s taste), had, it turned out, just run into another friend whom she soon brought back up the beach to the volleyball game. This was Valerie, and it was Valerie whom Thien fell most naturally into conversation with that afternoon. The other girls didn’t like her—this was made plain later, after Valerie had gone her own way again. She was too weird, too loud, and had no style, they said. Thien had felt a pang of chagrin at having been seen talking so readily to the less desirable friend. But in their conversation Valerie had mentioned changing the oil in her car and he had been impressed, had felt compelled to tell her he worked as a mechanic and was always respectful of women who knew how to take care of their own car, because so many didn’t, and they often ended up as victims as a result. A few days later she appeared at his garage, having tracked him down not through the obvious channels (she could’ve asked Melissa or Tammy) but through her own deduction (he’d mentioned certain nearby streets). And as there was no one from school present to witness him saying yes or no to her invitation to go for a drink, he had said yes.
They had a few other things in common. Valerie’s mother, too, had died—years ago, when Valerie was a child—and she was estranged from her stepfather, who still lived in San Bernardino and, she claimed, verbally and physically abused her and her sisters. She’d never known her real father. She was also the eldest of her siblings. She’d left home early before finishing high school and taken up with, first, a motorcycle gang and then various drug-dealer or drifter boyfriends or groups of friends. When she was twenty-one she finally mustered the determination to get herself together. She joined AA, got her GED, said so long to her friends. Thien was struck by her resolve, her clarity and selfknowledge. So what if she was not great-looking, she had other qualities, he would tell himself. At first he enjoyed her axioms about life (lessons from AA), but after some months, after he’d heard her drop these phrases often and indiscriminately enough, they began to annoy him, began to strike him as generic; or was it the way she adhered to them, perhaps, that was generic?
Though he believed he wanted to, he still could not stop seeing her.
He had grown too accustomed to beating himself up in her presence, to her blunt, questioning manner that drew him out of himself, forced him to speak. He despised himself for the things he told her as much as he despised her for being willing to listen.
Mostly, she was oblivious, joking, sardonic, mildly grating but easy to be around. Her understanding of him wholly inadequate. He would find himself explaining his personality to her—pedantically, meticulously, idiotically. This taught him to stand up for his own opinions, but it also reminded him of the way Hus had spoken to him when he was an adolescent (“You don’t know the first thing about the kind of person I am”). Thien would have rather emulated Mone, his stolid friend, and his self-accepting silence, his holding back; his form of celibacy. “What I like about Mone is that he’s a self-sufficient person,” Thien would attest to Valerie, painfully aware of the lame hint he was making about what he truly wanted to say to her. “He has no need at all for intimate relationships.”
But Valerie was speaking now. “He’s like a bird without a nest. A wheel without an axle.” She sat over her menu in the booth at Denny’s where Mone had joined them for dinner. They were also expecting April, who had phoned Thien from the road an hour earlier, saying she was near San Diego and needed a place to stay for the night. She had driven down to Las Vegas from San Francisco the day before; she was location-scouting for a film project in the desert, she’d said.
Thien gave Valerie an agitated glance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Val.”
“I mean you without your car.” Her eyes brightened abruptly. “No. An egg without a shell,” she said with delight.
Mone glanced over the rim of his water glass, then set the glass down on the table. Thien watched him watch Valerie and couldn’t guess what Mone might be thinking. Mone’s eyes were always a bit hazy, hazy but shrewd. Mone smoked pot. Thien usually found an excuse to leave whenever Mone offered him some. Thien had never been comfortable with people who were too obviously having a good time.
“So I’m worried about my car,” said Thien, “so what? You would be, too.”
“No, I drive a totally crummy piece of shit,” she retorted. “I drive a crummy piece of shit because I don’t give a shit what people think. I wouldn’t give a shit if it disappeared, either. I’m just like that, Thien. I’m different from you. I’m free, my mind is free, my heart is free!” She said this with a vehemence Thien found both infuriating and contradictory to the very concept of carefreeness she was proclaiming; he wished he could point this out to her but didn’t know how. So he slapped the side of his head and pretended to grimace.
“Man, Valerie, you are loud.” He laughed for a second, selfsatisfied.
Valerie brought her hands to her face and announced in a mock-sobbing voice, “Oh, I’m so sad about my car! I can’t sleep, I can’t eat! Oh, oh!” Even louder than before.
“Stop it.” Thien was genuinely irritated. He felt childish.
But Mone was the kind of friend they could bicker in front of. He made no comment and continued to read his menu.
After the waitress took their orders, Thien looked out the window for his sister’s car (1973 Saab, fixed up as a whimsical side project and given to her by Hus, who also paid for her college, Thien knew, as he never had for Thien, as Thien had never expected he would), but he saw no sign of it, its unmissable electric orange. It was a cool, odd little car with a lot of problems—a completely unpragmatic vehicle to give an eighteen-year-old girl who knew or cared nothing about automobiles. She drove it around on long trips as if it were a Chevy Sprint, and more than once it had sprung a leak or popped its ignition coil, leaving her stranded. Already she was half an hour late. She was another female he just didn’t get. Thien knew his ideas were fairly conservative; he would admit he liked women to keep themselves well groomed, to grow their hair long, to wear a little but not too much makeup, to wear skirts during the week, blue jeans on the weekend: feminine but sensible. April’s standards, however, were incomprehensible to him—she was self-righteous, morbid, almost trashy, weird with a capital W (laughingly she had even told him a guy she dated once described her using these words). He was concerned about her but also at times simply annoyed. She was smart, sure, but never practical, never thoughtful. In the years Thien had lived with his aunt, he’d heard this sentiment expressed often about his mother. “Why she do like that, I don’t know,” uncles and aunts said in regard to everything from how she cut her hair short to her lack of religion to how she’d acted (or not acted) during the conflicts between Hus and Thien that had eventually sent Thien out of the house.
When the waitress brought their food, April still had not shown. They ate unexpectantly, as if they’d not been waiting for anyone.
“Hey, where’s your sister?” Mone asked after a while, in a tone of deliberate, nonchalant surprise.
“She’s a chronically late person. She’s sort of aimless like that,” answered Thien. “She thinks she can just quit school and go hang around a movie studio and someone will give her a job. She’s a total dreamer.”
Shortly after he arrived home from dinner, as he was opening a letter from his insurance company, April appeared at his door.
“Hey! Let’s go shopping!” was how he greeted her, surprising even himself with this surge of unguarded jubilation, holding up the claim check from his insurance company. He was pleased to see her, but it was the knowledge of the money, actually, that was making the feelings of anticipation and relief rise in him at that moment.
“All right,” said April skeptically but agreeably. “Hi, Thien.”
“What took you so long?” he asked, cheerfully. They hugged quickly, lightly.
“I was farther away than I thought.”
She did not mind that he had already eaten, she said, to which he told her he had figured as much. It went without saying in their family that they would not go out of the way for each other —in mundane matters at least. They could take care of themselves.
She said, “I need to bring in my stuff.”
Thien followed her out, slipping the check securely back into its envelope first and placing it where he wouldn’t forget it, under his wallet on the hallway phone table. “How’s the car?” This was something he always asked when he saw her.
“Okay. It started overheating a few times and I had to pull over, though. I was going like thirty-five up even the smallest hills.” They laughed about this, though it was the kind of thing Thien wouldn’t have thought was funny if he’d been there when it was actually happening. But it was true there was a hilarity to it, the picture of the ancient orange car struggling. Because it was so obvious it must. They began to joke in the way they usually did about the Saab, in their deep-voice imitations of Hus:
“That German engineering!”
Hus had always spoken in defense of the Saab, despite all of its problems. BMW, Mercedes, Braun, Bang & Olufsen, Glock, Luger. In brand names as in dog breeds Hus remained loyal to his European roots. The Saab sat in Thien’s driveway, creaking with heat. Ludicrously orange, small and outmoded and urbanely European-looking. Thien noticed the inside panels of the doors were off, baring the unpainted, skeletal inner metal framework of the doors. April lifted a large black duffel bag from the backseat.
“You need to always bring along coolant,” said Thien, more seriously.
“I know, I know. I brought water.”
“You’re not putting straight water into that radiator, are you?”
She slung her backpack over her shoulder. “I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“No, never. Always fifty-fifty, water and coolant. Always.” He walked around the car, inspecting. “And what happened here?” He pointed to the doors.
“I had to take them apart. They wouldn’t open.” She put her bags down at the edge of the driveway to show him. She had wrapped a rubber band around two small pieces of a mechanism inside the door because the spring was not working properly. “It happened on this door first, then it happened on that door. I was crawling in through the passenger side all the time. And it keeps happening, so it’s just easier to keep the panels off, I decided.”
Thien laughed. He realized, though, that they were doing what Hus would do. The few times Thien had gone home for the holidays, the first thing Hus always did was show him something: the most recently cut-down tree; a repair on the house; a new retaining wall. Hus, too, walked in a circle around Thien’s car.
“I’m impressed,” said Thien now, making a show of laughing at her rubber bands. She shrugged, smiled haplessly.
Once inside, she began talking about the desert. Long flat stretches of highway, black plains of sand, white plains of sand, the silhouettes of monster windmills atop distant hills, her feeling of a vast, strange awe as she drove, the beautiful bleakness of those listless, thankless desert towns; she’d loved it out there, she said, describing it to him with the kind of fervor Thien had only heard when people talked about more unlikely topics—a chance drive in one’s dream vehicle, say, a Lamborghini or Porsche. Here they stood in his kitchen, the ridiculously largest room in the house he rented, with its gleaming, ruddy-textured, white linoleum floors and all its empty white cabinets, as she told him about the desert. She opened and closed his cabinet doors, looking for food, and found finally, to her satisfaction, an old box of instant oatmeal that she claimed was what she usually ate for dinner anyhow, and so she put a pot of water on the stove to boil. Thien watched her with fascination and bewilderment. He was not one to understand being drawn to the desert (or to any large, sparsely populated places at all, for that matter), for he was an advocate of the city, of the proximity of shopping centers and movie theaters and coffeeshops and beaches and other people. He was not one to understand the appeal of long flat stretches of anything or to marvel at such a thing as a “constantly receding horizon.” What was a horizon anyway? It was just a line of land, out there, too far from everywhere else for his comfort.
“You should drive to Las Vegas sometime. You should see it,” she was saying. “It is a totally awful place.”
“And why would I want to go to some place that’s awful, April?” retorted Thien.
April had taken several small metal film canisters, flat and circular like pizza pans, out of her black duffel bag and was now placing them in his refrigerator. He wanted to ask if she planned to eat those tins later, or make some kind of joke about it, but she had already shown him her camera, a boxy black plastic-and-metal apparatus that seemed too rectangular to record motion (had been Thien’s first thought at the sight of it—the lens was short and placed asymmetrically above two smaller lenses that looked like mini-eyes), and his sister handled it with such serious, casual dexterity that he felt wary, now, trying to mock her.
This is only the Bolex, she had said.
And what did her only imply? That there was better technology than what she was showing him and she was familiar with it already, unfazed by such special equipment? Yet she could still show up in their stepfather’s sputtering joke of a car without even the common sense to keep coolant in it. Thien, watching her, thought she had become something else lately, something worse than what he last remembered. She spoke about the camera and its specifics in some sort of specialized lingo on purpose, it seemed, as if to make a point of excluding him. Her clothes (tight-fitting black leotard shirt, paint-spattered orange cut-off sweats, cowboy boots) all had edges that had been cut or altered and were fraying. She seemed to Thien unhealthy, composed of too many disparate elements thrown together. Nothing matched, this flurrying mess under and over her skin. It was that San Francisco thing, he conjectured. Everyone up there looked malnourished, troubled, artsy. It seemed to be a matter of principle, to dress as badly as you felt.
“Irony,” she was answering his question about Las Vegas, “it’s called irony. It’s so awful it’s beautiful. Some things are just like that—beautiful and terrible.”
The water on the stove was boiling. She poured some over the dry oatmeal. She stirred with a spoon, pressing her hip into the counter.
Shortly after this the call came. Mone with an uncharacteristic tremor in his voice. “I saw your car,” he told Thien.
***
The relationship with Valerie is over now. For months. It was a back and forth ending, alternately reluctant and determined, on Thien’s part, mostly. He is sure now, though, it was for the best. She finally found a way to be angry with him, citing his wavering as cruel. She began to blame him. It became easier, then, for Thien to close his own book on her; his compassion for her finally dissolved. And now, when he thinks back to his time with her, he views it (he finds he must) as a period of self-weakness, or self-punishment, for all the years of his life up to this point of having felt: undeserving. They’d had nothing truly in common; he was selling himself short with her. He had not loved her. He had only partially respected her. (He thinks of Tammy, the brunette in the red bikini, but knows she wouldn’t have been right, either, was also of another world; weren’t they all, really?) He has come to believe that even if he’d gotten the things he wanted—the right girl, certain opportunities—he still wouldn’t have been able to accept them, would’ve found some means of sabotage. He’d been just too scared of everything then.
This is where he is now, able to see this much, without contempt; with mercy. Self-mercy. And what pushed him to move in this direction?
The night he stole back his car.
It was like slamming doors and meaning it, it was like tying a firm knot, it was like standing in the light. What that action gave him was more than his vehicle or an adventure. It secured for him the defiant fact of ownership—that he could and would take a stand. (And, now, seven or eight months after the fact is when Thien can sit in his living room and view himself as a grainy black-and-white image on his own TV screen—from a videotape sent to him by April—breaking back into his vehicle by the stark glare of a single flashlight beam. He is surprised at his own image, for he never dreamed he could appear so stylishly angular, shadowed, that a black-and-white representation could convey, so coolly and dauntingly, these facts about himself that he will from now on own with confidence: that he has good cheekbones and well-accentuated eyes; that he is lean and vigilant and good with cars.)
The body of his car had been stripped of all its adornments—silverplate rims, bumper lights, chrome-edged mudflaps, rearview mirrors, the leather car bra; it looked naked. Mone had recognized it by the pencil-thin pink tubing of light that ran the length of the car’s body; he had recognized this detail, in fact, on another car at a gas station in another part of town and had asked the driver where he got the light. The driver had said he didn’t know, it wasn’t his car. But Mone figured it was a stolen part and had followed that car into another neighborhood, where he had soon spotted Thien’s car parked in front of a body shop. A lot of tank-top clad, mostly Mexican boys were working under and around several vehicles in various stages of disassembly. Some kind of Spanish or Latin-American pop music played from a stereo atop the hood of one of the cars. Thien’s car had sat by the sidewalk, intact but stripped of most of its extras.
And later that night, Mone, Thien, and April had come back for the car.
Thien has noted some other changes in himself since the stealing and his breakup with Valerie. One, he has become interested in dating only other people of color. When he meets a woman he likes now, he is struck by an almost familial recognition—a gentle, grace-filled acknowledgment, a small door opening inside of him, giving ever so slightly. Thien realizes he was missing this before, missing out on it entirely, was walking sidewalks as if they were nothing more than sidewalks; he was unaware of the subterranean network of energies linking and testing and shooting messages among people as they pass. Now he notices the subtle nods, the movements of eyelids, the burdens of history that are transferrable in the passing sullen looks of long-haired, brown men in front of bus depots, in the wary strides of certain unkempt black men he previously regarded with suspicion. He is aware of degrees of detachment between himself and white customers dropping off their cars, and he assesses these whites according to how they do or don’t respond to the flow of the question he sends out beneath his feet at every moment now. He has come to recognize a perpetual and deep sense of—waiting. Waiting for what? An understanding perhaps? A promise?
Thien also feels in the world around him lately a sensation of reverberation. The flow of traffic, the floods of faces lined up at supermarkets, the quick dazzle and din of sound bites on the radio, billboards on the freeway—all this crazy merging and diverging at last makes sense. He is willing to watch and wait and not search every day. (He has locked up his guns.) Sometimes, driving along the seaside in a stream of traffic at sunset, he will glimpse the rooftops of houses stretching row upon row over the coastal hills, all their matching peaks turning orange in the setting light, and, with the thin clouds curling in, and the smell of salt and mist from the sea, suddenly he will be awed by the number of lives being conducted inside this panorama. An intensely euphoric feeling will grip him and turn him almost emotional as he stares at the gold sparkles on the water.
And only seldom does a reminder of Valerie creep back in, some small hint of a forgotten shame.
***
That night they waited down the street in Mone’s car. April was hunched in the space behind the two front seats, winding her camera steadily, her hands and the camera and the film all in a black vinyl bag across her lap.
The garage had been long closed. Lights flickered on and off behind curtained windows and several groups of revelers exited houses to loiter on driveways or the curb, then piled into their vehicles and drove off. The three waited. Initially, Thien had wanted to call the police but Mone had persuaded him not to. The biggest problem Thien foresaw now was with the camera, which needed light. April had brought along a very bright flashlight for this purpose. Thien had tried to dissuade her from coming at all, but she’d insisted, her argument being that you had to take chances and Thien never did. Thien had thought she was being juvenile and impetuous, until Mone had taken her side.
When the neighborhood finally fell quiet, Thien and April got out of Mone’s car and walked quietly up the dark sidewalk with their jackets zipped and their heads down, because this was how it seemed to them they should walk. Thien could hear their footsteps and the whir of the camera, could see their shadows cast long in the oblong patch of light April was shining straight at the back of his head. Thirty seconds was a long time on film, she had said, and she would film their walking for only thirty seconds; she had promised him she would use the light as little as possible. They startled once at the sight of a trash can, and giggled despite themselves. April cut the camera and they continued in silence. It occurred to Thien the filming was silly but his adrenaline was high, and soon there was no more room in his head for opinions, only motion. April had already taken what she called her establishing shots: street, exterior view of Mone’s car, interior views of their faces waiting inside Mone’s car, frivolous details such as the gearstick, the radio glow, a hand, a knee, fingers on the steering wheel. She had asked them to repeat certain actions with their hands wider apart or closer together to fit into the frame; she even asked Thien to hold his cigarette in a way he never would, to make the ash fall at a particular angle. Thien had thought this was stupid (though now, as he watches the tape she has sent, he sees what it was she was trying to get).
On screen, his fingers loom in closeup and the ash flakes off the tip of his cigarette in fine gray detail, then disappears out of the frame.
Then he is walking shakily to the car. His black-gloved hands are graceful and quick, sliding the long silver tool under the window frame. The door opens without a sound. It’s a silent film; her camera didn’t record sound, and this soundlessness lends his actions a fluid, diminishing quality even though the camera shakes and jars, and the images slip in and out of focus. The camera pans up: his profile close, the sharp shadow under his cheekbone, the dark arch of his eyebrow, the big white of his eye. He is in the driver’s seat and the inside of the car is abruptly lit with a bright white light, his head and torso blasted away for a moment, but then the light changes, dims, the picture is darker but clear once again. His hair, which was shorter then, makes a square, spiky helmet above his forehead as he bends over the steering wheel. Then comes the jumbled moment, the surprise. The picture jumps up and down and turns dizzying, moves quickly, sloppily backward, not coming clear again until a gun is already pointed.
Instinctively he had reached under the seat, groped for it, found it, stood. But when he looked at it, he saw it was not his gun. It was smaller, lighter, made of cheaper materials. And he felt then as if he were watching someone else’s hand pull it up and point it at the person coming toward him. A man not much younger than himself, and all he actually saw of this person at the time was his color. Brown. The aura of a scavenger more than a predator, and now the TV image reveals exactly how little this man was, the same size as Thien, with a wan black moustache, barefoot and shirtless and shocked-looking. Mexican or Filipino or otherwise Asian or Indian, even. Like two animals in a spotlight they stood beside the car, Thien backed into its open door. This moment—he remembers it all, of course, in very slow motion (and he is a little sickened, now, somewhere low in his gut; he will not watch this tape again)—he had felt it gratefully as an agreement between them, he and this other man, this stranger, an agreement about the manner of contact they could make with one another. They could push or relent or try to stand one another down. Thien had felt energized, sinister, strong.
This is mine — mine, you know.
All right. That’s fine. But that gun’s mine.
Where is the one that was in here?
It was sold, man, it was sold.
Somewhere in the middle of this Thien had remembered his insurance claim check, and that was when his urgency lessened (that he had enough money to buy a new gun if he wanted to slightly quenched his indignation toward the other man). More words exchanged. Here, the picture flashes, white bands cutting vertically across the frame, Thien lowering his gun as the camera stops.
He remembers the rest. He and April got in the car and drove it away and threw the gun out onto the sidewalk for the man to retrieve at the corner.
***
And there were other things: where the other pieces of his car had gone and who or what was driving around with them as decoration now; his sister following at his heels with her bright flashlight and that metal box pressed firmly to her eye (how could he warn her— open the other eye, sis— without sounding futile, naive, rote?). And: climbing over a fence into a field with some idea of a deer’s leg in mind, looking for traces of blood in the late-summer grass, what had they ever hoped, really, to recover, to rectify?