New Star Page 9

  Her brown skin is so soft to touch, and I slide back in. The shoe-gazed guitars of Ride break into relentless percussive beat. My thrusting is matching it, driving us both crazy.

  The music then becomes peaceful again as the lyrics kick in: “She's effortlessly cool. But circumstances can be cruel. And sometimes you must accept.”

  A prophetic sign for sure. I keep changing my speeds and my rhythm, grabbing and squeezing Tien’s plump breasts.

  “Cum, cum,” Tien moans and tightens her pussy. I explode into the condom, and we collapse onto the sweaty bed.

  40

  The early afternoon sunlight streams across the cream bed sheets. The crisp and clear air blows in from the window. The tension and ennui I have been carrying of late has dissipated. I look around the room and see Tien putting on her blouse.

  “I’ll go look for a new room today and get my clothes,” she says.

  In the sunlight, she looks as good as she did last night. I smile and wish her well.

  “I finish work at eleven. Can I come here at twelve?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I answer. And just like that, our little love song continues. I’m smart enough to know it is not about me. Circumstances have pushed us together. I needed a distraction from all my introspection, and she needed somewhere to stay to avoid a difficult situation. Who knows what that situation really is? But who cares, our tryst has a definite end, and we will appreciate this time together and move on.

  I get out of bed and put on my boxer shorts and follow Tien down the stairs.

  We kiss, and wish each other a good day. I unlock the front door and let her out.

  I stumble back upstairs and throw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and sit down at my desk. The room smells like sex and stale marijuana smoke. We smoked and fucked till the early morning.

  I take a hit of weed and look at all the photos and postcards above my desk. In my earlier time in Hanoi, a couple years ago, I felt these images would inspire me to write. Now they act as a reminder of times past.

  I grab the cigar box from the drawer of my desk, and I tear the photos off the wall and put them into the box. The light yellow wall looks better devoid of all those images; living in the now is the only true inspiration.

  The future only happens in the now, by living in the present. The past has already happened, and the struggle to get to now ends the moment you realize that every moment is now.

  My time in Hanoi is nearing its end, and I have no regrets. Everything I have done has led me to now. Everything I didn’t do or didn’t say does not matter, nor will it ever matter. Life does not flow like a film or a book. We cannot edit scenes of our lives. We can only move forward with inherent cruelty knowing life can only be understood looking backwards.

  All my thoughts of waking up from a terrible eight-year dream and seeing my ex-fiancée’s loving face in the bed next to me will never happen. All my regrets of running away from Thu Duong and not committing to her or any other woman in my life are illusions the trickster is plying onto me. The journey to the self never ends and everything outside of ourselves is nothing but a distraction.

  Stay still, my friend, and listen to yourself. No amount of money, no amount of possessions or passion will ever last. We all will die alone. The journey of now always ends in death.

  The death of an idea, the death of a love, or the death of an emotion will always lead to rebirth. And it is up to us, how we handle these ashes and fly away to our true path.

  41

  Drew and Ross went off to Dien Bien Phu. Being in the middle of my little tryst with Tien, I decided not to go. I was there before, a year ago, landing at the old French airfield, now the airport, and walking across the tarmac, looking at the large mountains that surround the fertile green valley.

  The French command had to be out of their minds thinking they could hold up here in a surrounded valley. No amount of trenches and mini Sherman tanks could have ever stopped the barrage of mortars from those mountains.

  The one thing I have learned living in Vietnam these past two years is that you should never put anything past the Vietnamese. Their tenaciousness has no end, and they will always find a way to beat you.

  The Chinese learned that in 1983 when they stormed over the border all the way to Sapa. Then it became a turkey shoot as the Vietnamese mobilized and chased the Chinese back across the border, twice the distance the Chinese went into Vietnam. You can see why I gave up trying to haggle to get the price I want any time I go to the market — I accept the expat price and move on.

  And that’s what I’m doing, moving on. I’ve handed in my resignation at New Star. I have another week or so of classes.

  Laos looms on the horizon and Tien has hinted she wants to go with me. I’m not so sure about that. Sure the sex every night has been magical, but do I want to pay for someone else while I travel?

  That being said, I offered to pay her way if she buys a pair of sensible walking shoes. A fair deal if you ask me.

  I don’t want to dig any trenches when I’m leaving. Freedom can only be truly experienced alone, and the instant you step away from all the things binding you to place or a specific time in your life, it becomes the moment where the unknown releases itself and propels you forward. No belief is needed other than the belief in yourself.

  But soon enough that unknown becomes all too familiar, and we’ll have to start the process of digestion and incubation all over again. Unless a person becomes a true nomad with no possessions except for the clothes on his back, this process of existential angst will always be there. But then, the nomad faces the same ennui. He is on the run from it, and so will I be when I go to Laos.

  All the faces we see on a daily basis will disappear and become new faces on another journey. And these new faces will vanish once I move to another place. The only faces that are constant are the face you see in the mirror and the faces from the past that haunt you.

  Try as we may to overcome these faces, we still encounter them when we become idle with too much time for thought. So be kind to yourself and let those faces vanish as much as they can. For they are on their own journey, and you are also a disappearing face to them in their sense of being.

  Humanity has created this dichotomy that can never exist. Permanence can never be actualized unless you accept the permanence of every atom or every subquantum particle constantly changing to become something new.

  42

  With no more paint or paintbrushes to mock me, I decided to stay in a cheap hotel in the Old Quarter. I gave up the house and purged everything except for my photography camera, some books and a backpack worth of clothes. My tryst with Tien came to an end; she never bought the shoes.

  People have to want to be around you. You can never do everything or be everything for anyone. The whole kit and caboodle called humanity has bamboozled us by making us think we are living for some grand purpose. It's difficult enough being everything for yourself, so enjoy the countless rotations of the planet.

  The good thing is that I have a bit of money to last me a few months travelling. After that, I have no idea where I’ll call home, and soon I’ll be on a bus to Vientiane.

  I take out my notebook from the desk drawer and begin to write.

  Children jump into the water, bare-chested,

  catching bluegills in their bare hands.

  Couples stroll around the lake holding hands,

  and photographers take photos of the flowering trees.

  The green water offers no reflection.

  43

  The full moon radiates to the east above the rooftops and TV antennas. City workers wearing conical hats scoop up trash from the open sewers. Their shovels scrape and reverberate every time they make contact with the asphalt and cement.

  The endless stream of motorbikes rushes by, surrounding a few taxis and expensive foreign cars. People slurp noodles in the corner shop while tourists walk by wearing large backpacks. Other than it being a different day on the calendar, the sce
ne in the Old Quarter never changes. If I hadn’t lived in Hanoi for two years, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish tonight from my first night here.

  I sit with my backpack outside my hotel, waiting for the bus to Laos. Thoughts from the past swirl through my head, and I see myself a year ago at Thu Duong’s house, talking to her father.

  The smell of green tea and fried pork permeates the house. Her brother’s wedding photos and pictures of other relatives hang on the white walls, and on the living room table is an architectural model of an eight-story building her father is designing.

  It looks no different than the buildings that already exist in Hanoi, as

  the hazy film keeps projecting in my mind. We talk of my dreams and goals, and we talk about what Thu Duong’s father wants for her, a husband who takes care of her, some children and a good life for her. He doesn’t care about the ethnicity of the man. He only wants for her to be happy.

  She sits next to me, smiling and drinking tea. For some reason, she and her father view me as desirable. I take a sip of tea and look at a photo of her brother holding his newly born son.

  I can’t do it, and I know I can’t do it. No matter how hard I try to “fit in,” I will always be a misfit adrift in carnal desires chasing my dream of creativity. Teaching English is a gig that gets me to new places, which inevitably puts me in situations like this.

  I take another sip of tea, and the film dissipates.

  A second-hand Korean mini-bus, with a logo for some Korean cram school, pulls up. The driver takes my ticket and puts my backpack on the backseats with the other backpacks. I get on the bus and find a seat among the other travelers. I look out the window at all the motorbikes and people going by.

  The bus drives through the narrow streets of the Old Quarter and heads south to connect with Highway One, on our way to connect with a larger bus that will take us to Vientiane.

  All the houses along the road look the same. Two to three stories with faux columns framing the front doors. I put on my headphones and load “Anyway That You Want Me” by Evie Sands into my CD player as we pass through Thanh Trì and get onto Highway One.

  44

  The mini-bus stops in Vinh at a fancy restaurant attached to a hotel. The bus driver motions for us to get off the bus. The Aussie backpackers look perplexed. They ask the bus driver in stilted English what’s happening, while the bus driver tries to mime that we are to wait here for the other bus.

  I laugh and ask the bus driver in Vietnamese how long we will be here. He says no more than an hour, and I relay the information to the Aussies. We grab our backpacks and get off the bus. The Aussies head into the restaurant for a beer, and I rest under a tree looking through my notebook: stunted attempts of poems, thoughts about a novel and random self-portraits alternate page after page as I leaf through pages from the past several months. Maybe someday this will amount to something.

  After fifteen minutes or so, an old beat-up two-tone yellow ochre and white Russian bus sputters into the parking lot and stops. The driver and crew step down from the bus and shout, “Vientiane.”

  They motion for us to give them our backpacks, and we get on the bus full of Vietnamese going to Laos. There are no empty seats, so we head to the back of the bus, where the last two rows of seats have been removed.

  Huge burlap bags, each the size of a person, are piled up there. We readjust the bags and create spots to sit as the crew finishes tying our backpacks to the roof rack.

  The engine starts again, and we’re off into the darkness. The Aussies talk amongst themselves about mates they know from university, and I close my eyes and try to sleep.

  Some hours later, the bus stops at a closed gas station in the middle of nowhere near the Laos border. I look at my watch. It’s four in the morning and the border won’t open for a few more hours. I grab my day bag and find a clean stretch of cement to lie down on.

  The bus crew begins to open secret compartments all over the bus, transferring as many burlap bags to the compartments as they can. A middle-aged Vietnamese man appears to be supervising them and giving instructions. Obviously, we have some contraband with us on our journey.

  The Aussies have found another clean stretch of cement near the garage, where they have passed out, while the other Vietnamese remain on the bus passed out in their seats. I change the batteries in my CD player and play Spiritualized’s Pure Phase album.

  “Every day I wake up. And I take my medication. And I spend the rest of the day. Waiting for it to wear off.” The swirling phased guitars make me feel content. Ironically, this is probably the first night in the past year where I have been sober.

  No weed, no codeine and no booze. I look up to the sky and find a few constellations. All of the light is hundreds of thousands of years old. Who knows if any of these stars exist right now? Who knows if I exist right now?

  If I die, the only proof of my existence will be the people that knew me. But what will happen when they die?

  45

  The black sky fades to purple. The sun’s rising magenta fingers touch the hillsides, while its growing light washes out Venus. In the distance, roosters begin to crow awakening the other farm animals.

  Women wearing conical hats with baskets of eggs, fruit and vegetables attached to their bicycles slowly pedal by to sell their goods in the local market. The cracked orange and blue painted facade of the Petrolimex station lies at the crossroads of this small town. Somewhere in Hà Tĩnh Province, I am at a loss to guess the name of the hamlet I find myself in.

  I take out a pâté baguette sandwich from my bag and eat breakfast, watching more women pedal by amidst a small stream of motorbikes. Unlike back in Hanoi, the stream of motorbikes is rather silent. No horns beep, and I can hear the individual engines of the motorbikes.

  The bus crew awakens and continues to hatch down the secret compartments of the bus. A middle-aged woman gives them a small wad of đồng for their services. The driver starts the engine, and I follow the Aussies back onto the bus. A few of the burlap bags remain on the bus, and we adjust them again to make ourselves comfortable.

  The engine starts and we drive off, back onto the highway to the Nam Phao border crossing, passing motorbikes and trucks headed to Laos. The bright orange sun announces its presence on the horizon sending golden light into the bus. I close my eyes and let the light radiate through my eyelids. Nothing exists to me other than this bus on the way to the Vientiane. The noise from the road disappears the further I look into myself.

  46

  At the border, we get out of the bus and walk into the cream-colored concrete building. Vietnamese officers decked out in their commie olive-green uniforms question people and stamp passports. I take out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a dollar from my pocket and hold them along with my passport.

  I walk up to the officer and hand him my passport, then the cigarettes and the dollar. He quickly stamps my passport, smiles and hands it back. No questions asked, and I walk to the other side of the building to Lao border officials wearing their version of the commie olive-green uniform.

  I hand my passport to the Lao official and he stamps my passport. The Aussies follow me, and we walk outside to our bus parked on an asphalt road along an embankment. All the Lao and Vietnamese passengers except for the middle-aged woman, are on the bus waiting, while the bus crew hollers and laughs throwing rocks down the embankment to a small river below.

  With nothing else to do, I pick up a rock and join in the fun, and the Aussies follow suit. An international rock-throwing contest on the Vietnam/Lao border. We all laugh and continue to throw rocks, as back near the cream-colored building, the middle-aged woman talks to a couple of Lao officials.

  A wad of Lao kip changes hands; she runs to the bus and takes her seat. The bus crew, the Aussies and I, all follow her back onto the bus, and we take off again.

  As the bus sputters along Highway Eight, heading east, the sun continues its ascent amidst the green-craggy forested mountains, while a few cumulus c
louds hang above making it look like we are driving through an Asian painting.

  After a couple hours, we pass Lak Sao and its few concrete buildings and come to a police checkpoint. The bus stops; the middle-aged woman gets out of the bus and talks to the police.

  From the window, I can see the police giving her a hard time. It’s obvious she needs to bribe them, and they are trying to get as much kip as they can from her.

  Commerce in a communist country. She hands them a wad of kip, probably twenty-five dollars at least, and she climbs back onto the bus. The driver starts the engine and we’re off again, more than likely to repeat this process at every police checkpoint.

  47

  After stopping at a few more police checkpoints along the way, the bus comes to a stop at a checkpoint on Highway Thirteen just outside Paksan. Our driver turns off the engine, the middle-aged woman gets off the bus and follows the police into a small concrete building. The rest of us on the bus look at each other and shrug our shoulders.

  What can we do at this point? This woman has held us hostage with whatever she is smuggling into Laos.

  Along the way we have been stopped at Na Hin, Nam Dua and Pak Kading. Her wad of kip keeps getting smaller, while the rest of us, except for the bus crew, get more annoyed. They must have seen this a million times on their journeys between Vietnam and Laos.

  I go to the front of the bus to ask the crew what is happening. They tell me that all the burlap bags are filled with fan belts for cars. The woman smuggles fan belts every couple of months from Vietnam to Laos.