The Refugees(10)

“We raised you well,” his father said, unable to look him in the eye with his own bluish-gray ones, hazy from cataracts. “I know you won’t lose yourself in the city.”

“I won’t,” Liem promised. “You can depend on me.” He heard the driver shouting for passengers to board as his mother ran her hands up and down his arms and patted his chest, as if frisking him, before she squeezed a small wad of bills into his pocket. “Take care of yourself,” she said. Around her mouth, deep wrinkles appeared to be stitches sewing her lips together. “I won’t be able to anymore.” He hadn’t said he loved her, or his father, before he left. He’d been too distracted by his desperation to get on the bus, for without a seat he’d have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisle, or else risk his life riding on the roof all the way to Saigon.

“How could you know what was going to happen?” Marcus leaned forward. “You’re not a fortune-teller. Anyway, that’s all in the past. You can’t dwell on it. The best way to help them now is to help yourself.”

“Yeah,” he said, even though this was, to him, a very American way of thinking.

“The point is, what do you want to be?”

“To be?”

“In the future. What do you want to do with yourself?”

No one had ever asked Liem such a question, and Liem rarely asked it of himself. He was content with his job at the liquor store, especially when he compared his fate with that of his friends back home. The underage ones, like him, had become bar sweeps or houseboys for Americans, while the older, luckier ones dodged army service, becoming thieves or pimps or rich men’s servants. Unlucky ones got drafted, and very unlucky ones did not come home at all, or if they did, returned as beggars who laid their stumps on the side of the road.

Marcus was watching him expectantly. The idea of saying he wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a policeman was utterly ludicrous, but the desire to appear noble in Marcus’s eyes, and maybe his own, seized him.

“I want to be good,” he said at last.

“Well.” Marcus glanced at the bill. “Don’t we all.”

The next day at the liquor store, Liem counted seconds by sweeps of his broom and rings of the register, his shift threatening never to end when only yesterday he’d hoped the day would run on forever. After he’d grabbed the check from Marcus and paid for the dim sum, they had browsed the curio shops of Chinatown together, then driven to Treasure Island to see the Golden Gate Bridge, winding up by dusk in a Market Street theater, where they sat knee-to-knee watching One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Later, eating sushi at a Japanese restaurant on Sutter in Japantown, neither mentioned the contact—they talked instead about Jack Nicholson, whose films Liem had never seen; and Western Europe, which Liem had never visited; and the varieties of sushi, which Liem had never eaten before. In short, Marcus did most of the talking, and that was fine with Liem.

Talking with Marcus was easy, because all Liem had to do was ask questions. Marcus, however, rarely asked him anything, and during those moments when Liem ran out of inquiries, silence ensued, and the hum of the car or the chatter of the other diners became uncomfortably noticeable. Neither spoke of Parrish, not even when they returned to the Victorian and Marcus opened one of Parrish’s bottles of red wine, a Napa Valley pinot noir. Never having drunk wine before, Liem woke up the next morning feeling as if the corkscrew had been driven into his forehead. He could barely crawl out of bed and to the bathroom, where, as he brushed his teeth, he vaguely remembered Marcus helping him up the stairs and easing him into bed. Seeing no sign of him before he went to work, he concluded Marcus was sleeping in.

When he returned to the Victorian in the evening, he found Marcus watching television in the living room, clad in his bathrobe and with his hair mussed. “A letter came for you today,” Marcus said, switching off the television with the remote control. On the coffee table was a battered blue airmail marked by an unmistakable handwriting, the pen marks so forceful they almost cut through the thin envelope. Liem’s father had replied to his first note, the airmail addressed to him at Camp Pendleton and forwarded by the resettlement agency in San Diego.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Marcus said.

“No,” he muttered. “I don’t think so.” He rubbed the envelope between his fingers, unable to explain how he’d dreaded the letter’s arrival as much as he’d yearned for it. Once he opened the letter, his life would change again, and perhaps he wanted it to stay the same. Summoning all his will, he laid the airmail on the coffee table again and sat down next to Marcus on the couch, where together they stared at the blue envelope as if it were an anonymous letter slipped under an adulterer’s door.

“They think we’ve got a Western disease,” Marcus said. “Or so my father says.”

“We?” Liem said.

“Don’t think I don’t know.”

Liem kept his eyes on the letter, certain his father had written no more than what needed to be said: make money and send it home, take care and be good. The message would be underlined once and then once more, leaving him to guess at anything too dangerous to be said in his father’s bare vocabulary. But whereas his father had never sought to find new words, Liem was the opposite. He looked up at Marcus and asked the question he’d wanted to ask since yesterday.