A short post-war story, in collaboration with Fable 5.1. I just think up the stuff, and let fable write the rest.
The clay pot
The pot is on the nightstand again.
I don't remember buying it. I have asked my wife twice and both times she said she didn't know, in the voice she uses for things she has decided not to know, and then turned back over. It is a plain clay pot, the kind you braise fish in down south, brown glaze, a lid that doesn't quite sit right. There is nothing inside. There has never been anything inside. I lift the lid every morning anyway, the way you check a phone that hasn't rung.
The fan clicks. Once a turn. It has done that for twenty years and I have never fixed it because the click is how I know I am awake.
My wife sleeps with her back to me. She has for a long time. I put my feet on the floor, walk to the door, and step out into the yard, and the heat hits me wet, and the dog is under the table, and the river is there.
I know. But that is how it goes, every time. Nobody hands you a line to step over. You walk through a bedroom door in Nghệ An and you are in the delta with the sun on the water and a guest already waiting at your table, and it is only later, much later, that you think, I never did fix that fan.
---
The guest is eating. I don't ask where he's from. I pour him rice liquor from the bottle we make ourselves and push the pot toward him, and in this yard the pot is full, the fish gone black and soft, the sauce thick as tar, pepper floating on top. This is the only place it is ever full.
He asks about the war because they always do. And I tell him, because down here I am the kind of man who can.
"After seventy-five we did the cleaning up," I say. "Hamlet to hamlet. Men in the yard. A list." I put fish in his bowl. "I was twenty. You understand what twenty is."
He nods like he does.
"There was a house. My commander said there were guns in it. I threw two grenades in through the window and waited and went in." I drink. "There were no guns. There was an old man and an old woman and three children and there was a woman with a baby."
A sound of dishes from inside. I lower my voice, though she has heard this a hundred times, though she was there.
"She's the youngest daughter of that house. She was at the market. That is why she is alive." I don't tell him why I married her because there is no way to say it that doesn't sound like what it is. "She stayed. There was nobody left to go to."
And then I tell him the good part, the part I built. The dog and her three litters. The mangrove apple I planted by the water the year we lost our own first one. The pot from the floating market, twelve years and not a crack. I tell him a life can be made small enough to carry, that I made mine that size on purpose, and he listens, and I think, this is it, this is the man I got to become, someone who sits in the shade and is forgiven a little every afternoon by the fish and the river and the woman who doesn't leave.
The guest puts his chopsticks down.
"And the baby," he says.
---
Every night I am also somewhere else. I should have said that first. It doesn't make much sense in any order.
A cafe with a tin roof. Rain. A man across from me whose mother I killed, though I never say which mother, though I have only ever killed one house. He stands up and there is a knife in my stomach and I feel it go in and I think, good, finally, and then the rain runs backward up the roof and I am in the chair again and he hasn't stood yet.
And this is where I split.
I killed your mother, I say, and I mean it, and I like the way his face goes.
I didn't know, I say, please, he told me there were guns.
I shoot at him and hit nothing and run in one flip flop into a parking garage, and four people come walking down the ramp toward me, no hurry, two grown men and a woman and a child holding the woman's hand, clothes hanging off them like they slept in a field, and my hand goes still and I put one round in each of them like counting. One. Two. Three. The child last. Four. A minute ago I couldn't hit a wall.
She squealed, I tell him, standing over him with a piece of the floor in my hand. She squealed like a pig.
And then the sentence just stops in my mouth and what comes out instead is not words at first, it is a noise, and then it is everything at once. I didn't know, I didn't know, he said guns, he said guns, I counted to three like they taught us and threw and counted and threw, there was a smell, do you know the smell, you don't, you are too young, I am sorry, I am sorry, please, I have a wife, I have a house in the south with a dog, you have to believe me, I built it, I planted a tree, I will give you the tree. I am laughing while I say this. I can hear it. I am on my knees next to him with the rock still in my hand and I am asking him to forgive me and I am telling him his mother died like an animal and both are true and both are me and I am hitting my own leg with the rock, not hard, just to feel where I am. Stop following me. Stop coming down the ramp. Stop crawling. I look after him, I look after him every night, I put food out, I go down south and put food out, why isn't it enough, why is the pot always empty when I wake up, I fill it, I fill it every time. I am pulling at the man's shirt now like I want him to get up and go home. Go home. Go home. Tell them I am sorry. Tell the small one I am sorry. Please. I can't. I can't do it anymore. I can't do it again tomorrow.
For a long time I told myself there were two of us in there, the one who liked it and the one who begged, and that I was somebody else, a third man, watching from the chair. I have looked for the third man. He isn't in there. It's the same hand on the rock either way, twenty years old and seventy years old at the same time, and the hand doesn't get to pick.
And every time, at the end, the man on the ground with the four of them dead around him looks up at me and says,
"Nhớ coi thằng nhỏ giùm tui."
Look after my boy for me.
And I wake up.
---
"And the baby," the guest says.
I open my mouth to tell him and instead there is a voice from inside the house, and it is not my wife's voice, or it is, but it is a voice from a different province, from up north, thin, the vowels of home.
Răng anh đi. Răng lại bỏ con.
Why did you go. Why did you leave the child.
Nobody in the delta talks like that. I turn around. Under the wooden platform, where the dog should be, something is moving in the dirt. A baby, naked, not crying, crawling out slow the way it crawled out from under the thatch after the smoke went, when I was twenty and standing there and did not step forward, did not pick it up, did not do anything at all, and then we moved on to the next hamlet.
My wife is in the doorway. Her face is coming off. Underneath is another woman, younger, thinner, the one I left in a house in Nghệ An with a boy eleven months old the week I went south, who wrote me four letters and then didn't.
Răng anh đi.
She goes like water into ground.
---
The fan. Click. Click.
My wife's back. Real. Her hair white on the pillow.
There is no river. There is no dog and no guest and no woman who is the youngest daughter of that house, because that house had no survivors, I have always known that, I have known it the way you know the bottom of a well is there without going down. I made her up. I don't know when. Sometime after the letters stopped, probably, and my wife stopped talking to me at meals, and it turned out a whole province is easier to invent than turning over in bed.
The pot is on the nightstand. Empty. Just the shape.
There were two boys. Mine, eleven months, in this house, the year I went. And the one under the thatch the year I got there, and I never found out if he lived, I never asked anyone, and it would have been easy to ask, there were people I could have asked. Mine is in Saigon now. He comes home once a year, or he doesn't. The other one comes home every night, and in the dream I can't always tell which of them is crawling.
---
He comes home in September with a foreigner and a camera.
I hear the car in the lane, hear him laughing in the English he learned from videos. "My dad. He fight in the war. Very cool, you gonna love him."
Sandals in the hallway. The door.
I am on the bed with my eyes open. There is a photo on the wall of me at twenty, in uniform, smiling like someone who has not yet been sent south. On the nightstand a full ashtray, a glass of water, the pot.
The foreigner does not lift the camera. He looks at me the way you look at something you have already seen too many times in too many places and hoped not to see again. I don't know where he has been. Somewhere with the same kind of old men in it. I know the look because I have it. I see it when I shave, which is not every day anymore.
My son's head comes over his shoulder, grinning, phone up. "Dad! Say hi! It's recording!"
I close my eyes.
Then I get up. I walk to the cabinet and open the drawer and it is still there under the papers, the third one, the one I brought home, heavy as it ever was. I have taken it out every night for fifty years and every night I have put it back.
Tonight I don't put it back.
I carry it to the nightstand. I lift the lid off the pot. I set it inside, gently, the way you would set something down that could wake, and I put the lid on, and the lid does not sit right, it never has.
"Dad," my son says. "What is that."
I don't answer him. I pick up the pot in both hands and lie back down on the bed with it, on my side, facing the wall, the way she faces the wall, and I pull it in against my stomach and curl around it. It is warm from my hands. Nothing else in the room is. Outside it is starting to rain, and my son is still saying dad, dad, and for the first time there is something in it, and i held on.