Lotusland Read online

  Lotusland

  David Joiner

  GUERNICA

  ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 108

  TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2015

  Copyright © 2015, David Joiner and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, general editor

  Lindsay Brown, editor

  David Moratto, interior book designer

  Guernica Editions Inc.

  1569 Heritage Way, Oakville, ON L6M 2Z7

  2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

  Distributors:

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

  5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8

  Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills, High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

  First edition.

  Legal Deposit – First Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2014950171

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Joiner, David, 1970-, author

  Lotusland [electronic resource] / David Joiner. -- 1st edition.

  (Essential prose series ; 108)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55071-930-7 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55071-931-4 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-55071-932-1 (mobi)

  I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 108

  PS3610.O48L68 2015 813'.6 C2014-906206-0 C2014-906207-9

  This book is dedicated to my parents,

  who are more patient with me than I deserve

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  Nathan tossed and turned on the hard lower bunk of his sleeper-class room. He peered at his cell phone; it would take 30 more hours to reach Hanoi. He was struck by how things were always a long wait for him. Nothing was simple, and whatever seemed certain had a way of being turned on its head without warning.

  The sound of the train was low and whooshing, like the winds of a relentless rainstorm. Whenever the train pulled into a station the lull of stillness became just as loud, howling inside him, heightening his restlessness.

  Lying there, discomposed by his companions' snores, a premonition of endless night took hold of him. Unable to stand it, he left the room.

  In the passageway a young man sat on a stool with his face buried in a copy of the Army Newspaper. There was nowhere else to sit, though Nathan did see, at the end of the last train car he was in, that the door was open and led to a small platform.

  He stepped outside and sat down. The night was cool and full of starlight. With his legs dangling over the edge he watched a mosaic of moonlit fields emerge from a tangle of trees now receding on both sides of the track.

  Nathan turned around at the sound of someone approaching the platform door. He was surprised to find a young woman with a train-issued blanket draped over her head. It was an odd way to wander through a train, and coming outside alone and as late as this piqued his interest. As she stood in the doorway considering the small space that Nathan occupied, or whatever was on her mind, he gestured for her to sit with him.

  She tugged the blanket from her head and, when she slipped into a shaft of moonlight, her hair appeared as pink as a rose.

  Her age was hard to guess, though she was young, between 20 and 25. The more he looked at her hair the more its shape came to resemble that of a rosebud: it enfolded her face so that the ends nearly met beneath her chin.

  She wore loose-fitting pajamas and tatami sandals. She asked him for the time — Trới ơi, mệt quá . . . Bây giớ là mẫy giớ rồi? Her pronunciation — z's in place of y's and r's; ch's in place of tr's — was lilting and feminine, yet distinctly northern. There was something almost startling about the Vietnamese she automatically used, and it pleased him that she would.

  He pulled out his cell phone and saw it was just after two. Hai giớ rỒi.

  Hai giớ hἀ?

  The northern accent was easier for him because it distinguished more between sounds. Yet there was something cold and hard about the northern way of speaking, a wintry almost martial quality. But maybe it was only Hanoi's chill weather and thick cloud cover that bled the color from the streets, buildings, even the clothing of the people, and made him feel this. For there was something warm and inviting about this pink-haired young woman.

  "What are you doing out here?" he asked.

  "I came outside to get a phone call." She rubbed her eyes. Under the dark sky he couldn't tell if she was merely tired or had been crying. "Why are you out here?"

  He didn't feel like explaining his insomnia. "I can't sleep on trains."

  They were silent a moment watching their knees sway back and forth. He pushed himself backwards until he leaned against the wall.

  "Going to Hanoi?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Why didn't you take a plane?"

  "I must have forgotten I can't sleep on trains. Where are you going?"

  "Same as you."

  Watching her yawn into her hand, he asked if she lived there.

  She shook her head, finishing her yawn. "I live in Saigon. But I'm moving to America."

  Her plan to move to America stirred his curiosity. "Why are you going to America?"

  "To make a life for myself." She turned away as if his interest made her uncomfortable.

  It occurred to him that she had notably large eyes — like an infant's, he thought. She was as disarming as anyone he'd ever met and he found her alluring.

  "Are you married?" she said, turning back to him.

  Nathan held up his ringless hands.

  From out of nowhere the train came upon a crossing. Two streetlights stood opposite one another and bathed yellow a strip of stony dirt. An old man in a dark green uniform pulled a lever to lift the safety cross on each side of the railroad.

  "You should go back to your room," the girl said. "If your girlfriend wakes up, she'll worry you're not there."

  Her clumsy attempt to learn if he was alone amused him. "Maybe her snoring keeps me awake."

  She lifted her thin eyebrows and glanced down the corridor. "It's late. I'd better go back myself."

  "What about your phone call?" When she didn't answer he said: "In that case, why not keep me company a little longer?"<
br />
  "It's late," she said again. She bid him goodnight and disappeared through the doorway.

  The blue night suddenly telescoped, reduced to a receding square: a window onto a dream fading rapidly into nowhere. He grew colder in the chill night. For a moment he felt like he was traveling away from life itself. But in the next moment the feeling passed. He saw that the train had only entered a tunnel.

  A high metallic wailing began to echo off the tunnel walls; a moment later utter darkness curtained everything he'd just passed through.

  "I thought you couldn't sleep on trains."

  Nathan awoke to find the pink-haired girl placing a bowl of instant noodles beside him, followed by two small bananas. She'd changed clothes and wore an old knee-length skirt and t-shirt with a faded Đông Hồ painting of carps across the chest. Gold Chinese lettering cascaded down the side and sparkled in the clear morning light.

  It took him a moment to realize she'd spoken in English. Behind her, sunshine stabbed through mists that encircled the jagged mountains.

  "You brought me breakfast?" he asked.

  "You missed the delivered meal. This is better, anyway. Go ahead and eat, I'll be right back."

  Stretching to break up the stiffness he felt from sleeping all night with his back against the wall, he looked over the other side of the platform. Broken rocks lined the tracks, and between there and the near rice fields were ditches of stagnant water. It was a miracle he hadn't tumbled off in the middle of the night.

  He pulled out his cell phone to see the time, and noticed that his old friend, Anthony, had sent him a pre-dawn message. "Big week coming up. Not sure how much time I'll have for you in Hanoi."

  The message was not what Nathan wanted to hear. While his trip north was the best chance they'd had in three years for a reunion, Nathan also wanted to ask him for a job. He'd been preparing for several weeks to approach him about this.

  Over the last few months, the focus of their correspondence had been on the money he owed Anthony. In his last e-mail, however, Anthony mentioned that his wife, Huong, wanted him to forgive Nathan's debt. "Of course, you and I both know her idea is ridiculous," Anthony had written. "I guess that's just the not-yet-dead embers of a first love speaking."

  The pink-haired girl returned with tea. Steam peeled off the cup and thinly veiled her face as she set it beside the bowl.

  A Lipton bag bulged at the bottom of the cup. Swirls of orange rose from it like something being pumped. He was conscious of a pleasant tightness in his chest.

  "Thank you." He reached for his money but she stopped him.

  "It's my treat." When he hesitated, she told him to eat before his food got cold.

  She sat next to him as he ate.

  "Your English is excellent. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, considering you're going to America."

  She only smiled and raised her head to watch the passing scenery.

  The breeze buffeted her hair; it fluttered about her eyes until she tucked it behind her ears. He imagined it airy and soft in his fingers, like the fringe of a silk scarf. As he thrilled over the prospect of touching it — absurd though the fantasy was, he wondered why she colored it. The Vietnamese language had so many ways to describe the beauty of black hair, he couldn't imagine why she'd turn it pink. The more he thought about it, he wondered if perhaps it were a wig. And why a wig unless she was hiding something, like a hideous scar or disease? But it was too morbid a thought; and besides, pink hair fit her.

  "I like your hair," he said in Vietnamese. "It's like candy."

  She laughed. "Don't make fun of me."

  "I'm not."

  "You speak Vietnamese like a Vietnamese," she remarked, turning his earlier compliment back to him. "You must have a good teacher."

  "I've never had one. They cost too much."

  She looked at him skeptically. "Then you must have a từ điển tóc dài: a long-haired dictionary. People say that's the best way to learn."

  He shook his head again, not wanting her to get the wrong impression. "Vietnamese girlfriends are even more expensive."

  Again she laughed. "But you're American. You never worry about money."

  "That's a common misconception."

  "What about your girlfriend?"

  He had to think back to last night's conversation. "I said maybe I had a girlfriend."

  "Liar." She smacked his arm.

  He peeled a banana. As he ate it, she peeled the other and set it before him in its own skin.

  He followed her gaze to the passing countryside. The land here was divided into paddies: a deeper green than the rice fields in the south. Far from the tracks, farmers stood knee-deep in the muck, like thin stunted trees, fixtures in an unchanging landscape.

  When he was done with the second banana he asked her name. But she either didn't hear him or didn't feel comfortable telling him. The train's movement gently rocked her as she continued to look into the distance.

  Her abstractedness allowed him to study the sharpness of her jaw line and the high bridge of her nose. When his gaze fell to her lips, where a tremor passed as if trailing a thought, it stayed there.

  "You're from the north," he remarked, trying to draw her out. The term he used, quê hương, meant something like ‘home village.' Its connotations were stronger than the English word ‘hometown,' for Vietnamese roots ran much deeper than in America.

  She turned enough that he could see her eyes. In them was a kind of wonder. "How can you tell? From the way I speak?"

  "I didn't guess it from your clothes and hair."

  "Last night when you first saw me, you must have thought I was strange."

  Until suddenly you left, he wanted to say, I thought you were a gift. But he couldn't tell what she was after, so he tried to make a joke of it. "I thought you were a . . ." He stopped to recall the word ‘stowaway,' but all he could remember was that it involved a lot of words. ". . . A deserter," he said instead, hoping to make her laugh. He carefully pronounced the words, as with these, too, he almost never had the chance to use them.

  She smiled oddly and turned away again.

  He thought he could smell the sea from here, an airborne brackishness so delicate that at first he mistook it for something sweet. Soon the near mountains fell away and his eyes took in a wide blue sea. They were approaching Hai Van Pass.

  The sea heaved torpidly while gulls circled the shore like specks of torn-off cloud. Together they watched the swell of the sea roll toward them.

  "Have you had enough to eat?"

  "Yes."

  "Good," she said getting up. "I'll be back."

  Once the clatter of her sandals in the passageway faded, a door slid open and shut, and then it was quiet.

  He marveled at his interaction with her, whoever she was. The marvel came less from her having awakened him and brought him breakfast than from how comfortable she'd felt doing this, that it was all in the natural order of things. It gave him a sense that they'd long known each other and this was an established routine. The fact was, however, he knew nothing about her. He thought perhaps there was something the matter with him.

  For the next hour he waited for her, but she never came back.

  He felt the train slowing. Soon the view changed from nearly empty countryside to the cement homes and paved roads auguring a small town. The brakes squealed as the train pulled into a one-room station.

  The station's yellow walls and orange roof-tiles glimmered in the crisp spring air. In the shadow of the sloping roof, several stands sold cigarettes, bottled water, and items wrapped in banana leaf.

  At first the place seemed deserted, but then he spotted several vendors under a grove of pepper trees, dozing in hammocks. The bright noon sun seemed to have sapped their entrepreneurial spirit. As the train came to a halt, the vendors gathered up their goods and trudged across the platform.


  The pink-haired girl stood in the vestibule waiting to alight. He watched her step down and glide across the platform. Propelled by his attraction to her, he followed her.

  He headed for a drink-stand, keeping his eye on the vending area where the pink-haired girl was helping two elderly passengers sort through fruit. Her stillness in the presence of movement was a natural grace, he thought, like the sun shining through a midday downpour. The same could be said of her eyes, and the fresh, high color in her cheeks. It was something superior, an inborn quality he was certain she'd possess all her life.

  The stand's matron came up to him. Not knowing English she smiled and pointed hopefully at a bottle of water.

  "I'll have tea," he said in Vietnamese. "And a pack of chewing gum."

  The matron quickly brought him a glass and a small pack of Doublemint, informing several passengers already seated there that he spoke Vietnamese. But Nathan only sipped his tea, ignoring what she said. He knew that if he responded she'd ask him questions and distract him from the pink-haired girl. The matron eventually wandered off.

  The man and woman the girl was helping looked up and seemed to notice him, even seemed to start talking about him. Nathan glanced away, thinking it would do no good if they saw him staring at her. But such a beautiful girl, and with pink hair — surely it was normal for strangers to gaze at her from afar? Looking back, he saw a vendor take from the elderly couple a handful of custard apples and set them on a scale.

  The pink-haired girl was now moving between tables of dragon-fruit only a shade or two darker than her hair. A moment later she disappeared into the crowd.

  Left alone with his tea he began to think that, while there wasn't anything unusual in wanting to meet a girl, his determination to do so now was pointless. Nothing would transpire between them on a train, and he had little confidence that much would happen with both of them seeking to leave Saigon.

  These days he found his confidence in short supply. In his own case, he'd spent months looking for ways to better his life. But it was more complicated than he'd imagined. It wasn't anything material he needed to jettison, but something else, something that oppressed him from within. There was no escaping the fact that his life had hit a dead end.