We had set out that night already too drunk to drive and not knowing what we were looking for, just wanting to follow the river West until we found something to justify the journey. Regardless of what we found it would be better than Hair of the Dog had been— bad music and overpriced drinks, everyone sucking on their nitrous-oxide “happy balloons” like addicts in an opium den. I was talking to a crosseyed blonde girl named Henriette, who must have known I was a lesbian because she was saying things like “Can you see my nipples through this shirt? You can? Do you like my new piercing?” and I was hardly listening because behind her I could see my sort-of-girlfriend Amalia whispering in the ear of a guy she clearly wanted to go home with.
I felt hurt and uncomfortable, and I wanted to leave, so I was looking for a way to escape when a guy with a red balloon passed out and fell backward like a downed tree, sending his balloon zipping through the air before the back of his head struck my foot, saving him from a concussion but killing my uncovered toes, and I was about to start screaming at him when I realized he was having a seizure or something, his hands by his sides like he was doing a spastic version of the worm. I rushed over to the bar to tell the employees to call an ambulance, but with Katy Perry ringing in our ears and strobe lights flashing out the mirrors it was virtually impossible to explain to the Vietnamese bartenders what was going on, and by the time they started to understand, the guy was magically back on his feet and sucking on another balloon. I looked around at the surging dance floor, just neon flesh and neon cloth, color and madness, and I knew I had to get out of there before it sent me into a panic attack. I limped for the door, glancing briefly at Amalia who was still in another world, talking to that same guy, then I glanced at Henriette, who was staring back at me already, trying to beckon me over with her eyes. Her crooked gaze only made me walk faster, and when I pushed through the door into the warm outside air it was like I had been underwater too long and was finally back at the surface. Vinh, the bartender from Kahuna’s, was out there smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk near the bikes.
His presence had a calming effect on me, perhaps partly because he resembled my brother in a weird way, like the way my brother might look in a Vietnamese Snapchat filter. He was also the only one in Vietnam— and certainly the only one of Amalia’s circle— that I felt like I had really connected with in any way. He had no interest in sleeping with me, too butch for him probably, but he still liked to talk about anything from politics to Tarot cards, and that unconditional sociability made him a rare find. I wanted to greet him with something interesting when I saw him out there, but instead I just said the same thing I always said at a bar: how awful it was in the bar and how hungover I was going to be tomorrow. He agreed and said he was sick of all the fake conversations in there, so sick he was about to get on his motorcycle and just ride til he found something, and I said I’d do the same thing if I could— all I had was a bicycle with no air in the tires. He said, “Why don’t you join me?” like he really wanted me to join, like he might even be hurt if I didn’t, and before I could find a way to talk myself out of it he was already walking over to the white Yamaha parked on the sidewalk, backing it up toward the street and grinning.
Thirty minutes later and I was half naked in the middle of an old clock fountain by the Thu Bon River, sloshing around and passing a joint back and forth with him, fetid water and yellow moonlight up to my thighs, my bruised toes sunken in a layer of warm mud that coated the concrete. Our shoes and pants were piled up next to the motorcycle, which stood purring a few meters away and facing the river, as if it wanted to ride off without us. I wouldn’t have cared if it did. I was reveling in the unfamiliarity, the sense of adventure, half an hour from any place I’d ever seen before, totally removed from the monotonous routine I’d assumed over the last several weeks. Vinh stood puffing on his joint with one hand holding the waist of his checkered boxers, his blissful expression turned up toward the rusted goddesses in the center of the fountain, towering metal women with obliterated faces and pots in their hands. It was weird them being there in this obscure park, nothing nearby but a karaoke bar and a deserted bahn mi stand, nothing buddhist, nationalist, or even asian in their design. With the roman numerals encircling us it was clear the women symbolized time, though the architects probably hadn’t anticipated the effect time might have on their work, the thin metal eaten away as if by caterpillars and the water no longer running from the pots.
Vinh said, “What are these women do you think? Are these the four fates?”
I was surprised he had even heard of the fates— I only knew them from a YA novel I read in middle school— but I remembered there were only three fates in that novel, so I said “There were only three fates I think. Maybe they’re muses?” forgetting of course that muses would probably have flutes or harps or something instead of water jugs.
Vinh took one last rip from the end of his joint then tossed it into the water. It hissed dead, then he furrowed his brow and put his free hand to his chin, like he was doing an impression of somebody thinking. He announced, “I want to climb this one,” and without a moment’s hesitation he gripped the downturned pot and hoisted himself up onto the platform the women all stood upon, then he stepped out onto the same pot he’d just been grabbing and placed his hands on the goddess’s shoulders to balance himself. His face was inches away from what was left of hers, and for a moment it looked like he was about to kiss the corroded metal. I stood there just watching, not moving at all besides wriggling my sore toes in the muck my feet were planted in and maybe swatting at a mosquito. I remember thinking this water must be full of bacteria, and in the span of a moment I imagined Vinh cutting his hand on the metal, the cut turning green and swollen, leading to weeks of hospital trips, antibiotics, the amputation of the hand that had made all those cocktails with stupid names. On any other night I would have said something, but this night was dedicated to not caring, to letting go of everyday concerns and just living in the moment, and I felt I’d be ruining it all if I let my nervousness come to the surface. Vinh moved one hand to the crown wreath on the goddess’s head then he raised his right foot to place it further up, on her arm, but when he shifted his weight his left foot slipped off of the pot and he lurched downward for an instant before catching himself with the hand that held the wreath. He hung there cartoonishly for a long moment before he cried out in pain and loosed his grip. He fell straight down, his foot clipping the pedestal before he crashed into the water.
I’d never once been on a motorcycle before that night, always too scared to try, but Vinh was a confident driver and the fear had fled in a matter of minutes, replaced swiftly by exhilaration as we flew through the deserted streets and out of the city. Now everything was reversed or upside down and the fear was back like it never left. Vinh was driving like a madman back they way we had come, not even glancing before the intersections, only releasing the gas long enough to look at the blood streaming out of his ripped up palm. The wind was whipping my eyes, and I was holding Vinh’s waist with all my muscles tense, begging him to slow down, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. He refused to stop even when my flats fell off and I started to cry. I was holding my feet out away from the bike, too scared to risk feeling for the foot grips and hitting the wheel or scorching myself on the exhaust pipe. We were headed for a hospital we’d passed on the way out there, Vinh determined to see a doctor immediatey to prevent an infection. He was right, but with the engine screaming underneath us the risk of a crash was greater than the risk to his hand, and despite my ambition to live in the moment I wished to God he would just pull over long enough to let me off. I searched desperately for a way to make him stop without causing him to crash, but all I could think to do was bite him or pummel the back of his head in rage, which at this speed would be more dangerous than just holding on and praying.
Everything was flickering between black and the color of the moon, the streetlights, the reflections on glass, the beam of the headlight lancing the darkness out in front of us. It was like I was falling without a parachute down the barrel of a gun, the pit in my stomach now enveloping my whole body, the houses flickering past and pavement rushing underneath us fast as air.
If it had kept going then we might have missed it, slipping just behind its back bumper, and maybe that’s what Vinh was counting on. I saw silver creep into our path and knew we were going to die before I even registered it was a car, sorrow rushing into every inch of me in the two seconds it grew and took shape before us. The driver saw us coming or heard us coming and hit the brakes on impulse, stopping the silver SUV in the middle of the intersection. Vinh had no reaction at all, as if he understood like I did that the only thing left to do was end it as quickly and painlessly as possible.
It would be dishonest to say that time slowed down in this final moment before impact, but I can understand why such a cliche might be common in such experiences. I can remember so many details from the last two seconds of this life, that you would think I’d lived a whole life in just those two seconds. It’s not that time was running any slower but that my brain was running faster, the adrenaline pumping so hard that my senses were detecting everything at once, trying to give me the resources to cheat a death that was already inevitable. There was the taste in my mouth of the last beer I’d drank, a Larue, and the smell of Vinh’s neck— bitter, musky, fecal— the aroma of the fountain still clinging to him. There was the shudder and roar of the bike, like some prehistoric insect, and the short squeak of the SUV— a hyundai— coming to rest in its fatal position. There was a fire far away beyond the SUV, probably someone disposing of a pile of trash, as I had seen someone do one pleasant night in the rice fields, and there was one of those Vietnamese street altars to our right, covered in fruits and incense and splaying neon colors onto the pavement and the walls behind it. Most of all there was the feeling throughout every inch of my body— it was something more than a tension, it was the sorrow and resignation on the other side of tension, it was the empty space left by a snapped cord.
My feet touched the ground in an instinctive effort to stop the impact, the underside of my right foot disintegrating more quickly than the left. The bike hit, Vinh crumpling into the front of the bike and the side of the car and I ascending over him, headfirst until something struck the back of my neck and I felt all my weight tearing from me. Hollow sight and the smell of incense as my visual field spun like a cloud of fleas and I’m sucked backward out of my own head and shoved forward into someone else’s, seated in front of a desktop computer in a dim, yellow apartment, hand still holding a wireless mouse, the cursor still hovering over a green “YES” button, as in: Are you ready to begin the selected Stream? Yes. I buried my unfamiliar face into the unfamiliar hands that hovered out in front of me, and I started to cry for myself, for my soul, half snuffed out and half transmuted to an afterlife like this, like mine, like me. Because this is me, I thought. God damnit, this is me.
TO BE CONTINUED
Cover Photo: Image Source