The Lotus Eaters_ A Novel Part 5

"You got it."

Darrow took off the lens cover and carefully checked the film. Then with a barely perceptible flip of the middle finger, he opened the aperture all the way so that the film would be overexposed, ruined. For the next ten minutes, recognizing what Darrow had done and the fact that none of the others had a clue, Linh could barely breathe as he watched Darrow pose Dung all around the camp, even going so far as to have him mug over the bodies of the two corpses. "That should do you," he said, rewinding the film, snapping the cap back on, smiling at last.

"Does America train in war better than it trains in photography?" Linh said.

Darrow smiled. "A smart guy."

"I'm Linh. Tran Bau Linh."

"You, Linh, are a sly one. How about if I ask Dung over there to a.s.sign you to help me today? Keep our little secret?"

The company decided to make camp that night about half an hour from Linh's make camp that night about half an hour from Linh's village, planning to move out in the morning. They had not even gone to sleep when the first bombs went off nearby. The new advisers used their s.h.i.+ny new radios to call in for an air bombing of the surrounding area. Linh would never talk about the events of that night. The memory burrowed deep inside him and remained mute.

This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.

The only way Linh knew how to make the journey from his old life to a new one was to take one step, then the next, and then another. Now, when there was nothing left to save, he deserted. No longer caring what they did to him, he continued on the highway south, unmoored, for the first time in his twenty-five years of life utterly alone. Each day he ate one of Mai's rice cakes, until the supply began to dwindle, and then he broke them in halves, and as the number grew smaller still, he broke the cakes into quarters and eighths, until finally he was eating only a few grains a day of Mai's cakes, food that tasted of her and no one else, and then finally even that was gone.

During his first months in Saigon, he wandered the streets, working as a waiter in a restaurant, a shoes.h.i.+ne boy, a cyclo driver. No family, the things that had weighted his life buried. At night he felt so insubstantial he held his sides to make sure he himself didn't blow away like a husk. The smells and tastes and sounds of the city entered him, but they did not become a part of him. His only thought was to earn enough for food and shelter, no more. By accident, he had lodged into an eddy of the war--to think of the future or the past was to be lost again.

In this vacuum, he grabbed for the lifeline of attending English lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon on his neighbor's balcony. Although he was already fairly fluent from his father's lessons, Linh went because it made him feel like a child again. Too, there was a more serious purpose: Linh's father had been proficient in both French and English, telling his sons that in order to defeat them one must always know the language of one's masters.

The teacher needed the small amount of piastres she earned giving lessons to support herself and her parents. She was a pretty young woman, the shape of her face reminding him of Mai. The hours he spent looking at her were like balm, and he made sure not to let his English exceed hers. Her mistakes charmed him. Instead of using "Don't," she said, "Give it a miss." "Don't go down the street" became "The street, give it a miss." Dreaming of Mai, he wanted to give waking a miss.

In those first terrible months he listened to his sweet-faced teacher conjugate verbs: I am, you are, he is I am, you are, he is. The plan he came up with was to rejoin his unit in the army and volunteer for the most dangerous missions. Possibly managing to get killed within months if not weeks. We are We are peaceful peaceful , they are , they are the enemy. the enemy. We We kill; kill; they they die. Honorable die. Honorable and efficient death. And yet although he was no longer afraid, he did not go.

On a day neither too hot nor too cold, when the sky was clear, and the sweet-faced teacher smiled at him on the stairs, Linh pa.s.sed the office of an American news service and stood rooted to the spot as he recognized the name Life Life, handwritten on paper and taped to the window. A talisman from the day his real life disappeared. Give it a miss, his first thought, but instead he took this as a sign and walked in. He found a large American man hunched over his desk, his face s.h.i.+ny with sweat, staring at a stack of papers.

"You have a job?" Linh said. "I am a good friend of Mr. Darrow."

Gary, the office manager, looked like the heat was boiling him from inside out; his potbelly pushed against his belt. He looked up at Linh and gave him a wide-toothed smile. "I didn't know Darrow had any friends." Always, he thought, in the nick of time, look at what the cat drags in. Within ten minutes, Linh was hired. That afternoon they were on a cargo plane bound for Cambodia.

Gary chewed away rapid-fire on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that literally poured off him with a big, soggy handkerchief. "Man, this is good. How did you find us? That office is just a temp s.p.a.ce. This is like fate, kismet. If it wasn't for you, it would be me lugging around his stuff." Gary figured the young Vietnamese man's reticence covered up something unpleasant that he would have to deal with later, like a criminal record. Too bad, he couldn't worry about that now. He had a new a.s.sistant.

Linh said nothing. He stared out the cargo door at the jungle rus.h.i.+ng beneath them, giving no sign that his stomach was in his feet, that this was the first time he had been in a plane.

They drove the empty, hacked roads, dust flying like a long sail of sheer red silk behind them, hanging suspended in the coppery sky.

"You're right, absolutely. Enjoy the ride," Gary said, agreeing with the continued silence. "People talk too much anyway." He was a man who didn't let his ego get in the way of the job. People didn't question him as much if he acted like a cowboy and so he did just that. How could he operate if the staff guessed that he sweated each a.s.signment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh's silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole d.a.m.ned country was sh.e.l.l-shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.

By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment--cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.

Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room for the film. His brother, Veasna, tapped him on the calf with the leg of a tripod. "Complainer.

But not when there is a tip."

Linh sat in the shade, apart, and watched as Darrow painstakingly looked through his camera set on a tripod, moved away to make an adjustment, looked through the finder again, and at last pressed the cable release to snap the shutter, taking exposure after exposure of a bas-relief overhung by a cliff of rock that cast shadows on it. The joke among the workers was why so many pictures of a rock that hadn't moved an inch in thousands of years? Linh calculated it would take more than an hour to go through a roll of film at that rate, the job potentially endless. Darrow made minute changes after each frame with infinite patience. Three men held a long piece of reflector foil, changing the angle an inch at a time.

During a break, the workers collapsed into the shade. Samang gossiped among his coworkers that the Westerners would kill them by working through the heat of the day.

Darrow bellowed out a laugh and with his long strides moved to greet the new arrivals.

He was even taller and thinner than Linh had remembered, as if his figure had attenuated during the months that had pa.s.sed. Or had Linh's misfortune bent him? Made him smaller in the world? He recognized the American's large bony wrists.

Earlier at the office, Gary had drummed on his desk in joy when Linh said he had worked with Darrow. Everyone in the know avoided working with his star photographer, and Gary had been on the verge of locking up the office to go hump equipment himself when Linh turned up. He would not look this gift horse over too closely. Past a.s.sistants quit because Darrow insisted on covering the most dangerous conflicts, carried too much equipment, and worked them endless hours.

"You're as red as a lobster!" Darrow said.

"The climate's killing me. Look who I found!" Gary used a flourish of hands as if producing Linh out of smoke, trying to cover the sham. "Nguyen Pran Linh. Am I good or what?"

"Sure." Darrow smiled and offered Linh a cigarette and a piece of gum. This was a land of nuance, the outright question of where they had met before unspeakably rude.

Content to wait, Darrow dipped his bandanna in the cooler water to wipe his face. The afternoon had been long and peaceful, but with the sound of Gary's jeep he felt a black weight descend on him. He c.o.c.ked his head, moving slightly side to side, trying to place Linh. "How are you, my old friend?"

"Why don't you make foil s.h.i.+elds for each side instead of lighting only from underneath?" Linh took the cigarette and lit it quickly so the shaking of his fingers would not be noticed.

Darrow let out a big laugh. "My technical expert from Binh Duong. Of course."

Linh smiled but said nothing.

"You really do know each other?" Gary asked.

"Why would you bring someone who I didn't know?" Darrow said.

Gary looked back and forth between the two men. "You're one funny guy. That's what I love about you. He's going in with you to the delta and Cu Chi. Lots of good stuff there. Cover stuff, you know? Another Congo. How can one man be so lucky? Chop, chop."

"Got it." A mixture of feeling angry and tired, and something else--a strange, gauzy sensation that Darrow recognized as fear. Did Gary sense that he was hiding out?

Trying to forget about Henry? That he was waiting for something? A sign that things were safe again? Why didn't Gary go hump through Cu Chi and risk getting his a.s.s blown off? Instead he pimped another inexperienced local off the street as his a.s.sistant.

Darrow's business was faces, but he hadn't recognized this one--Linh had changed so drastically. The guy had been dipped in h.e.l.l.

"So how much longer, you think?" Gary asked as they walked back toward the jeep.

"Till I get the picture." He played Gary, pulled his chain, unfairly resenting the push. After all, it wasn't his fault--this crisis of nerve. Henry broke the illusion that they were charmed because they carried cameras instead of guns. It would pa.s.s. Darrow had been through it before. Just a matter of waiting it out. The acc.u.mulation of deaths and horrors and jitters that got him. The curse of curses was that he was good at war, loved the demands of the job. What was frightening was he had developed an appet.i.te for it.

Like a starving man staring at a table of food, refusing to eat on moral grounds; appet.i.te would win, and his shrewd boss counted on that.

Gary stopped in front of the jeep, and in a gesture of bravado slammed his hand down on the trunk. He barely kept himself from wincing and crying out in pain. "It's going down now, man, and you should be the one getting it. This old pile of rocks will still be here when the war's over."

Darrow wagged his head. "Did you know that the French who discovered Angkor asked the peasants who was responsible for creating it? They answered, 'It just grew here.' " More and more it seemed to him a possibility just to sit out the war where he was.

Gary wiped his face and shook his head. "That's truly crazy."

"You never know."

"How's that? Who cares about this tourist c.r.a.p? Just hurry back home, okay?"

Gary tapped the driver on the shoulder to start the motor. "And take it easy on this new guy. My hunch is that he bulls.h.i.+tted me to get the work. Let's put it this way--there's no waiting line for the job."

"Sure you don't want to spend the night? Hang out a couple of days?" The truth was he liked Gary's callousness, his will to do anything to get the picture, because that was the way Darrow used to be. And he didn't want to be alone another night, and didn't have much faith in Linh as a drinking buddy.

"Yeah, that's right. That's what I want to do, hang in this G.o.dforsaken place-Angkor What?"

"The G.o.ds will strike you for that."

"Add it to the list, baby. I don't care how good the stuff is you're smoking. Get me back to Saigon with air-conditioning and ice cubes. Headquarters is busting me about hiring women, you think you have problems?"

"I'm hurt. Thought you'd want to watch a genius in action." Darrow slapped his palm against the jeep hood.

"Don't take a week? Right?"

"Hurry, Gary. Get out of here before the sun goes down and the monsters come out."

After the jeep had left, the silence settled back down on the place like dust, but left, the silence settled back down on the place like dust, but the black weight that was the suck and pull of the war had arrived, and it pressed down on Darrow's shoulders. He should tie himself down to one of the big stones to keep himself there, to avoid Gary's siren call. He smiled into the shade where Linh was standing. Too bright; he couldn't make out Linh's expression. The day he met him had indeed been dipped in h.e.l.l, Darrow a.s.signed to cover the joint operations as American advisers walked the SVA through a basic search mission. When they were fired on, the advisers called down airpower, but it dropped short, falling on them and civilians. A freefor-all cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k. The SVA panicked and started firing on their own people, on civilians instead of the enemy, who had probably long retreated. The next day as they rea.s.sembled, the man a.s.signed as his a.s.sistant was AWOL, nowhere to be found. He had seemed an unenthusiastic soldier. Perhaps he had used the chaos as an excuse to slip away. Perfect, Darrow laughed out loud, finally the type of a.s.sistant he deserved.

For the next week, Linh lived in the jungle side by side with Darrow. They rose at dawn, ate a simple breakfast of rice, fish, vegetables, and the dark Arabic coffee Darrow had become addicted to in the Middle East, insisting on brewing it himself. They worked all through the day with a crew of a dozen men, including the two brothers who were his favorites, taking hundreds of exposures, spending hours to light a subject, sometimes to the point of sending Veasna s.h.i.+mmying up a tree to strip foliage that was blocking the sun. One day, Veasna spent five hours picking half a tree away, leaf by leaf.

He came down dehydrated, and Linh fed him gla.s.s after gla.s.s of water while Darrow hurried to get the right late afternoon light.

Darrow figured at that rate, he could spend the rest of his natural life photographing the grounds and never have to see another dead soldier. Yet at night they could hear thunder on the horizon, the war's pulse, beckoning.

The two men shared a small room like a monk's cell, crowded by a mountain of photographic equipment Darrow insisted on cleaning and moving it into the room each night so none of it would be stolen. Veasna usually stayed behind to help clean, while Samang hurried to town to chase women.

"So, Boss," Veasna said. "You get me good job?"

"I'll certainly put in a word for you in Saigon," Darrow said.

"No, Saigon. I stay number one in Cambodia."

"But there's nothing here. No war."

"Less compet.i.tion then."

Often Darrow stumbled across Linh in out-of-the-way corners, writing on Linh in out-of-the-way corners, writing on sc.r.a.ps of paper that he quickly put away when approached. He caught glimpses of words and was surprised they were in English. His little AWOL friend a never-ending mystery.

Nights in the stone city, when the workers returned to the village, seemed haunted to Linh. Darrow worked away, oblivious to his surroundings, the obsession of his work keeping him from the luring obsession of the war, but Linh felt ill at ease in this mausoleum. In the stillness, the place swarmed with gliding shadows. He, Samang, and Veasna took their meals in the village. Veasna talked about how the Cambodian traditional life was being ruined by the royal family, how they needed to return to the roots of the village, the communal life of the family. He said Samang had gotten corrupted by spending time in Phnom Penh. Linh stayed to drink tea and talk with the other Vietnamese and Cambodians on the project. Many talked of broken families, hards.h.i.+ps, and escaping across the border to avoid being conscripted into the army.

The first night Linh came back too early and saw a woman from the village leaving Darrow's room. The lamplight outlined her figure as she stood outside, as full and rounded as the carved apsara apsara s on the walls of the temples. Darrow came to the doorway s on the walls of the temples. Darrow came to the doorway and pulled on the cloth around her hips, reeling her back inside. After that, Linh made sure he did not come back till midnight.

"Where are you so late?" Darrow asked when Linh came in.

Linh did not like this man's disingenuousness.

"Found a girlfriend?"

"I'm married."

"Sorry. Of course not." Darrow nodded. "Stay for dinner sometimes. I like conversation. And I cook."

"You have friends."

Darrow smiled. "Lovely, huh? My G.o.d, lovely. Naked, she's the replica of the ancient statues here. Brought to life. As if no time had pa.s.sed since this place was built."

One hot afternoon, the air as heavy as stone, Linh sat alone on a terrace far away air as heavy as stone, Linh sat alone on a terrace far away from where they worked. They had been up since before the sun to capture the light on the buildings at dawn. Sleepy, eyelids weighted, Linh heard only the stillness, broken by the occasional shrill cries of the monkeys who scampered across the warm stones in search of offerings of fruit. The monkeys were feared. They bit and sometimes were rabid, and the workers trapped them and roasted the healthy ones for meals.

He had knotted a piece of jute rope and slipped his hands through the circle, then proceeded to twist so that the rope bit a tighter and tighter figure eight around his wrists.

At each tightening, he felt a burning and then relief, his mind filled only with the whitehot sting of his wrists instead of the deeper pain that was always there. So preoccupied by heat and pain, he did not notice Darrow pa.s.sing by.

Darrow disappeared and then returned minutes later, drenched with sweat. "How about it?" he called to Linh from across a courtyard. Pretending ignorance, he climbed the stairs in his big, loping gait, carrying two beers. Linh was so dazed he did not notice Darrow's heavy breathing, did not know that Darrow had run back to his room like a madman, torn open a cooler, grabbed two beers, then run back.

Bound, he nodded, too late to hide the fact of the rope.

Darrow leaned over with a knife and cut the twisted rope between the purpled wrists. Acting as if it all were the most normal thing in the world, he then pried the caps off the bottles and handed one over. He'd noted the freshness of the scars when Linh first arrived. Darrow knew the wreckage of war. "Let's talk."

Linh rubbed his hands against each other, felt the tug of his callused palm, blood slow like sand through his veins.

"You were Tran Bau Linh last we met. An SVA soldier."

"That man is dead. Now I'm Nguyen Pran Linh."

"Okay."

"I shouldn't have lied that I'd worked for you."

Darrow rubbed his face. "A cursed day, the day we met."

"Yes."

"Does this"--Darrow waved his hand at the rope--"have to do with that night? You disappeared."

Linh looked away. "I do good work for you?"

"Best a.s.sistant I've had."

"Is that the price to keep my job? To tell you?"

Darrow took a long sip of his beer and looked across the nearby jungle. "You don't trust me yet. That's okay."

"You're happy here?" Linh asked.

"Like getting a chance to explore the pyramids. Gary's a good guy, but he doesn't get it. I've had enough war, you know? h.e.l.l, of course you know. Just can't quite get around to quitting. So what ever your reasons for being here are, okay by me."

Linh took a slow sip of his beer. "You think you are in a peaceful paradise here.

But you're hiding in a graveyard. Their violence is simply past, ours is happening now.