The Lotus Eaters: A Novel Page 7

"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 ass blown off? Instead he pimped another inexperienced local off the street as his assistant. Darrow's business was faces, but he hadn't recognized this one--Linh had changed so drastically. The guy had been dipped in hell.

  "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 pass. Darrow had been through it before. Just a matter of waiting it out. The accumulation 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 appetite for it. Like a starving man staring at a table of food, refusing to eat on moral grounds; appetite 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 crap? 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 bullshitted 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 godforsaken place--Angkor What?"

  "The gods 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 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 hell, Darrow assigned 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 free-for-all clusterfuck. 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 reassembled, the man assigned as his assistant 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 assistant 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 shimmying 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 glass after glass 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 competition then."

  Often Darrow stumbled across Linh in out-of-the-way corners, writing on scraps 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, hardships, 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 apsaras 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 God, lovely. Naked, she's the replica of the ancient statues here. Brought to life. As if no time had passed since this place was built."

  One hot afternoon, the 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 mea
ls.

  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 white-hot sting of his wrists instead of the deeper pain that was always there. So preoccupied by heat and pain, he did not notice Darrow passing 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 assistant 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? Hell, 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. Each stone laid in place here is laid on top of blood. Violence all around you, but you don't recognize it. It's easy for you--you don't belong here."

  "I didn't make the war. I was just a mediocre photographer, headed toward wedding shots. War made me famous."

  "What about duty?"

  "Far as I can see, you don't belong, either. Officially disappeared." Darrow stared at him. "So why not run?"

  Linh bowed his head and was silent so long Darrow thought he would not answer.

  "From what happened to me, there is no running. 'Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.' "

  Darrow was speechless at his Milton-quoting, AWOL soldier-turned-assistant. What in the world more would he find out about this man?

  On their day off, Linh woke to the usual smell of cardamom-scented coffee being brewed but then smelled something else--sweet like the French bakeries in Saigon. He found Darrow outside nursing a skillet over an open fire.

  "Pancakes," Darrow said, not turning. "My wife sent me a box of mix. It even has dried blueberries in it. And a bottle of Vermont syrup. Get a fork."

  "You're married?"

  "She thought it would make me homesick. You know how women are."

  "I'll never get over my wife's love."

  Darrow looked at him. "I'm sorry..."

  Linh waved away the apology. He didn't want to be one of those people who couldn't stand another's happiness. "She would make my favorite, banh cuon, rice cakes, each time I left."

  When breakfast was ready, Linh looked down at the golden cake on his plate, the brown puddle of syrup.

  "Dig in!" Darrow said.

  Linh took a bite and gagged. The texture and the sweetness and the flavor, all peculiar. He poked at the blue pools of fruit in the cake with the prongs of his fork and felt queasy.

  Darrow ate a stack of five cakes, along with cup after cup of coffee. "This takes me home."

  When he turned away, Linh threw the pancake into the bushes behind him. When Darrow turned around again and saw the empty plate, he smiled and plopped another on it, despite Linh's protests. "You're turning more American by the minute."

  Later in the morning, Veasna had a question about drop dates, and Darrow was nowhere to be found. After searching for an hour, they finally tracked him down to where he stood in front of the carved stone face of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion. Motioning Veasna away, Linh watched Darrow study the sculpture--blank, unseeing eyes, serene smile of the lips, the chips and cracks and lichen, shadows that changed the expression as the sun crossed it--until nightfall. Linh could work with such a man.

  At his usual late hour, Linh returned from the village and stretched out on his mat. Darrow, as always, wide-awake and reading. Glass of scotch at his side, he insisted Linh join him with a small glass. Linh wet his lips with the alcohol--he would have drunk it even if it was poison to please--then closed his eyes and felt the walls spin. When Darrow came across interesting parts in his book, he read them aloud, regardless of whether Linh, muddled with drink, had fallen asleep or not, so that Linh acquired his knowledge of Mouhot's history of the ruins in dreamlike segments. He would never be sure if the stories were real or his imagination.

  The king of Cambodia, along with an entourage that numbered into the thousands, went elephant hunting through the dense forests northeast of the great lake, Tonle Sap, in the year 1550. In some places, passage was so restricted that his slaves had to cut away vegetation and trees in order to pass through. They came upon a particularly thick, overgrown place through which they could make no progress. Finally they realized these were solid stone walls beneath the dense foliage--the outer wall of Angkor, rediscovered by the Khmers after having been forgotten since the twelfth century.

  _______

  One day when work had finished early, Darrow rounded the corner of a building and ran straight into Linh, who quickly stuffed a scrap of paper away into his pocket. "What are you writing all the time?"

  "Nothing. Scribbled poems, stories."

  "Really?"

  "I used to write plays."

  "Let me read them? You write in English, don't you?"

  Linh looked down, his skin flushed. "Sometime, yes, maybe." His hand a firm no over his pocket. When he came to his room to go sleep that night, he found a new thick spiral notebook and a package of ballpoint pens on his mat.

  Finally, the last picture taken, exposures packed away in their cans, Darrow could not prolong the inevitable any longer. Finally he would go. He would not starve himself any longer, but must gorge himself on war. On their last day, as the trucks were loaded, he walked among the workers, handing out small gifts. Veasna and Samang were nowhere to be found. Since Linh had taken the morning off, Darrow went into the village alone with only a translator. He hoped to catch a glimpse of the young woman who came nights, who fed him the soft-fleshed jackfruit and mangosteens, but knew he could not ask for her. He wanted to make the brothers a farewell gift of an old Rolleiflex that he had taught them to use. Unable to find anyone, Darrow had the translator question the villagers. Long minutes of back-and-forth, indecipherable, while Darrow sat on a rock, sweating and swatting at flies that he hadn't noticed while he was under the spell of his work. A shaking of leaves, and the young woman appeared from behind a banyan tree. She leaned against the trunk and rubbed her hand against her thigh, a smile on her lips, and Darrow felt twice as bad about going. Finally a shrug from the translator.

  "What?" Darrow said in a raised voice. His irritation, a breach of etiquette. The girl's hand dropped from her thigh, and she hurried away. Screw the camera, more than anything else he had an overpowering urge to
run after her for one last meeting.

  "Samang die of snakebite two days ago. Veasna is in mourning." The brother had been climbing the side of an overgrown wall of the ruins when a cobra lurched out and bit him in the thigh.

  Darrow slapped at the air. "Why didn't anyone tell us? We have anti-venom. A doctor is only a few hours away."

  "He die fast. Not want to bother you."

  Shaken, Darrow returned to the camp, slammed his belongings into bags, the spell of the place broken--the girl, the temples, the pancakes--all of it ridiculous and driving him crazy; he just wanted to get back to real work.

  Linh walked in and considered him.

  "You heard about Samang?" Darrow snapped.

  "It is sad."

  "Not sad! Stupid. Ignorant. It didn't need to happen. Forget this place."

  "Samang could have been working on other job when the snake found him."

  "But he wasn't. He was on my job."

  Linh picked up his bags. "I'll go check equipment on the trucks." He turned away, then turned back. "He was very lucky, doing his duty, earning to support his family. You should give the camera to Veasna. If he does well, he can earn money. That is all that matters to Samang now."

  Darrow snorted and shook his head. He shoved a heavy case out the door with a hard push of his foot. "I hope I'm not as lucky as Samang." He grabbed a towel and wiped off his face, put his glasses back on. "Damn unlucky in my book."

  "And then there is the young lady you entertained. Their sister-in-law. Widowed with two small children to feed. It would be thoughtful to give her some money so she could do something besides sell her body to foreigners."

  The Europeans, upon finding Angkor, refused to believe that the natives could have built the original temples. Briefly they entertained the thought that they had found Plato's lost city of Atlantis.

  The young woman dropping pieces of warm fruit into Darrow's mouth had given him a false sense of understanding that was lost again, that did not transport to the modern world, where a syringe and a dying man were separated more by fatalism than actual distance. He felt like that ancient king hacking through the jungle, stone walls of his own trea sure barring his way.