"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

NINETEEN. The Ocean of Milk

April 30, 1975

It was late in the war, and she was tired.

Helen had not slept long in the dead grass of the embassy compound. The night before she had grabbed only a few hours while keeping her vigil over Linh. If the Communists were going to kill her, it might as well be while she slept in her own bed.

By the time she reached Cholon, she walked like a sleepwalker-inside the crooked building through the now smashed Buddha door, up the rickety, cedar-smelling stairs that had lasted another ten years since the time she doubted they would carry her weight. The end had arrived with a sputter, and although she had prayed for an end to the evils of war, now that it had arrived she couldn’t deny being strangely brokenhearted. Like a snake swallowing its own tail, war created an appetite that could be fed only on more war.

Somehow, Linh and she had eked out a happy life here. They had come back from the hamlet married, but Linh insisted for their safety on keeping it quiet. Too, there were professional repercussions, although quite a few American men had married Vietnamese women. In fairness, they felt they had to tell Gary, in case it came out. He, ever the diplomat, broke into a huge smile that could have meant anything. “There’s a certain poetry to it, that’s for sure.” He took them out for a fancy dinner. But the person who was really joyous was Annick. The war had begun to take its toll on her. Gossip was that she took opium more frequently, and her pale skin and thin frame suggested its truth. In her store, she gave Helen a beautiful gold-and-pearl choker.

“I can’t accept this.”

“It is my wedding gift. Because finally something true has come out of this war. I predict you will be very happy.”

And they were. Even as the war moved from the front to the back pages, bumped by the antiwar protests back home, Helen played wife, decorating their apartment, taking long meals with Linh, learning the city from the inside. Their time together was rich and precious. They continued covering the war, although the assignments were fewer and fewer, which suited them for a while. In America people had seemingly forgotten that soldiers in Vietnam were still fighting and still dying. And then came the drawdowns. Dwindling American troop numbers. Even less of a call for war photos. They covered the humanitarian crises caused by the country being at war so long. The effects of the defoliants on agriculture. Food shortages and lack of schools. In 1973, as the U.S. military pulled out, they classified their service dogs as surplus equipment and had them euthanized, claiming they were too dangerous to go back home. A few soldiers got in trouble trying to smuggle their dogs back to the States. Political stories in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia began to take precedence, and they traveled with the news. Gary even talked of moving the bureau offices to Singapore, but then a flare-up in military action caused everyone to scurry back to Saigon. Helen hoped that some kind of compromise would be reached, a permanent division of the country so that they could stay. But Linh knew they all had underestimated the North.

Now the building stood hushed. Had it been abandoned on account of an American woman living there? And if so, where had the families gone in this city that was now as isolated and cut off as a quarantined ship on the high seas? These people had been their friends, had shared meals with them. Helen was godmother to five children. And yet the fear destroyed all of those bonds.

Although it was daybreak, the sky hung sullen with low clouds. Helen walked over to the red-shaded lamp and turned it off, intending sleep. Until these last few days the lamp had been invisible in its everydayness, but now she noticed the shade bleached to dull terra-cotta, like blood imperfectly washed out, the fabric so brittle she could poke her finger through it. It had simply outlasted its time. But the gloom unnerved her, and she turned the light back on.

Their belongings had been sent to Japan weeks ago, when the first news of President Thieu abandoning the Central Highlands came, the cities so familiar to Helen disappearing-Kontum, Pleiku, and Ban Me Thuot.

The rooms had the empty, threadbare feeling of that first night she had come there with Darrow. But it had long ceased to be his. Linh and Helen had shared so many memories in those rooms, they had excised the curse that she had feared was on the place. But now it was slipping away from them also. Already it felt as if the apartment, the city, the country, was in the throes of forgetting them.

Helen undressed, body stiff and aching, and she swabbed at the nail marks on her arms and the bruise at her temple. Because she had refused stitches, there would be a scar near the hairline. This worry over a small vanity would make Linh smile, but perhaps that was how one remained sane. She pulled on her new red kimono, the only piece of clothing she still had other than what she wore, but the joy she had taken in it was already gone without him to appreciate it. Now it was simply a covering, and she walked past the mirror, not wanting to confront herself in it. The rooms felt thick with ghosts, and she realized that she had hardly ever been there alone. Linh always filled them with life, banishing any spirits to the corners.

She pictured him at that moment out on the dawn-pink sea. Probably not sleeping, although he had slept only fitfully through the night. Had he forgiven her? He must know that she was coming shortly. A simple matter of days, photographing the new victors of the city, then being booted out. What was going through his mind? What would he miss the most about his home-land? Of course she knew. She was his country; she was what he would miss until they were back together.

Helen frowned and looked at the map on the wall. Linh understood. Once one took a picture like Captain Tong shooting the old man, one inevitably started down the road of taking more and more. Bloated with self-importance, with the illusion of mission. One stayed at first for glory, then excitement, then later it was pure endurance and proficiency; one couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But there was something more, hard to put her finger on-one felt a camaraderie in war, an urgency of connection impossible to duplicate in regular life. She felt more human when life was on the edge.

It had never been that way for Linh. Something kept him aloof, safe, but he understood her addiction. Allowed it but also kept her from going too far. Like she was doing now. She ran her fingers down the map-Quang Tri, Hue, Danang, Quang Ngai, Qui Nhon-each name recalling a past, each name a time of year and a military assignment, defeat, or victory. But now each name was being erased, exploration in reverse, the map becoming instead more and more empty, filled with great white expanses of loss.

Her mind, again, became a treacherous, circling thing.

A water glass full of vodka in order to sleep; she hoped she would pass out before reaching the bottom. Her mind skipped and jumped, a needle on a worn record, and she pulled down one of Darrow’s old books to calm herself, a dip in the stream of a dog-eared passage:

The temple of Angkor… making him forget all the fatigues of the journey… such as would be experienced on finding a verdant oasis in the sandy desert… as if by enchantment… transported from barbarism to civilization, from profound darkness to light.

She had never understood Darrow’s obsession with Angkor; it had seemed strangely indulgent and romantic given his character. She fell asleep with the book in her hands, her question unanswered.

Hours later, Helen woke, panicked she had missed something. She stumbled onto her feet and dressed in the clothes from the day before. At the door she hesitated, not afraid, yet the outside seemed newly forbidding. One fell in love with geography through people, and when the people were gone, the most beloved place turned cool and impersonal.

At the presidential palace, she took out her camera and framed the columns of Soviet tanks slowly grinding their way down Hong Thap Tu Street. Fencing them in the box of her viewfinder calmed her. They turned up Thong Nhut Boulevard, pulling up bits of the broken street in their tracks and slapping them back down like mah-jongg tiles.

As a tank approached the front gates, Helen’s camera stuck. She pulled back and forth on the lever, but nothing happened. Jammed. She yanked the strap off her neck as the sound of crunched metal could be heard, clamped the camera between her knees and pulled out a lens for the second body, but by the time she had it ready, the tank had rolled over the gingerbread gate with a hollow tearing of metal. Later, she found out that there had been offers to open the gates, but the NVA insisted on breaking them down. Showmen. She cursed, the camera dropping from her knees, clattering on the pavement. Kneeling on the ground, she rubbed the lens with a tissue to see if it had been scratched. She looked up just in time to see the unfurling from the balcony of the huge red flag with the gold star of the North.

Within hours, once the Saigonese realized that their city would not be bombed, that the rumored bloodbath would not occur, people came out and tentatively waved and clapped at the passing North Vietnamese soldiers. If she knew anything about the place, it was how quickly it switched allegiances, a fickle paramour, and yet in spite of herself she felt betrayed.

Walking down the street, she was surprised to see noodle shops already reopened. At one, she spotted incongruous white-blond hair and recognized the new Matt, the young reporter she had run into the day before, slurping a bowl with a group of NVA. He had a day’s-old beard and wore the same black T-shirt she’d seen him in last time. When he saw her, he motioned her over.

“I’ve got a scoop for you this time. Check these boys out, Helen. We’re having a picnic.”

A group of five young soldiers looked up at her and giggled. They were young and skinny in their loose, mustard-colored uniforms, unsophisticated compared to the jaded, sleek SVA. They reminded Helen of polite and well-mannered country children. She wished her boy soldier would reappear, blowing his bubble gum. Most had never been in a city before, and Saigon, even in its present disheveled state, was a marvel of riches. The new rulers got lost on the way to the palace and had to stop their tanks and ask a frightened civilian for directions.

“Get this. They think ceiling fans are head choppers.” Matt laughed, his mouth full of noodles, his hand making small hacking motions against the side of his neck. “Choppy, choppy those bastards, huh?” he said, elbowing a soldier.

The fear was too fresh for Helen to sit down next to these men and slurp noodles. Matt was a fool, but he had the advantage of no history. “I’ve got to get some more shots,” she said.

“Hey, wait, I think I’ve talked them into giving me a tank ride. You could take pictures of me.”

“Maybe next time,” she said, walking away.

“What next time?” he yelled.

In the next few days the Communists did not take over the city simply because they did not know how. But given they had already won an impossible victory, no one doubted they would soon learn.

The Saigonese quickly regained their confidence when they met these naive soldiers and began to ply them with the same cheap watches and fake goods they had pawned off on new G.I.’s. Secretly they wondered to themselves what they had been so afraid of. The most obvious hardship of the takeover on Tu Do was the absence of prostitutes, not allowed under Uncle Ho’s rules of clean living.

Soon jokes were traveling the city about the new bo dois, how they used a modern toilet to wash rice and were outraged when they pushed the handle and their food disappeared.

Helen went up and down the streets taking pictures of shopkeepers tearing down their American signs, crowbarring off neon and metal, and replacing them with hastily made Vietnamese ones. A Vietnamese man stood on top of a swaying ladder, pounding at a neon tube sign that read BUCK’S BAR, with a picture of a naked girl in a cowboy hat with a lasso that moved up and down her body in red and green loops. His calves were thin and ropey, his feet in their sandals calloused, the toenails thick and yellow. A life of hard work could be seen in those legs. She filled the frame with his body, the sign behind him a blur. Glass fell in small, tinkling chips like snow, and he brushed the splinters off his cheeks and shoulders and pounded harder till the whole thing fell in the street; his face drawn with pain like he was beating a favorite child. When he saw the camera, he scowled and almost lost his balance, waving Helen off.

She made her way to the wire service offices, where Gary was camped out, a skeleton crew transmitting stories throughout the morning.

“Where’ve you been? Beating up some NVA? Or joining Uncle Ho’s army? War’s over, Helen!” Tanner said.

“Thought I’d hang out with you.”

Gary walked over to her. “Your credentials were pulled a week ago. You officially don’t work here. You’re supposed to be gone with Linh.”

“Fine. I’ll go. And take my pictures with me over to AP or UPI.”

“Don’t be that way. Let’s see them.”

“Am I back in?” She held the camera bag just out of his reach, teasing.

Gary hesitated, then laughed. “Just be careful. It’s weird out there.”

“It’s Alice in Wonderland time out there,” Tanner said.

She developed her own film, and Gary sent out all the prints because they might be among the last to go out. Her byline would be on the majority of the pictures of the takeover, her name joined with the crumbling city’s last hours. At last her stamp on a part of history. Everyone was waiting for the inevitable-communications lines to be cut. That was when the victors would show their true hand.

Early evening, the machines fluttered and went dead at last. A ripple of fear traveled the office.

“That’s it, people. Vietnam is closed for business. Let’s go to dinner.”

A mixed group of nationalities among the dozen journalists dining on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel. Tanner raised his glass to Helen in a private toast. Although they had never liked each other, there was a mutual respect for time served. Waiters in white coats carried food out from the restaurant as if it were just another night. The Westerners were surprised that the place was still operating but remained quiet in front of the staff, as if bringing up the war were in bad taste. The maître d’ stopped by their table and politely informed Gary that this was the last night they would remain open. They could not put the bill on account but had to pay by check or cash. Before dessert, the waiters had disappeared. Gary and a French writer rummaged in the abandoned kitchen for ice cream. The final bill never came.

After dinner, they “liberated” cigars and drinks from the now self-serve bar. Helen was lying on a lounge chair, drinking a glass of champagne and looking up at the stars.

The young Matt came and sat next to her.

“You should’ve hung around yesterday. I scored a lid off them,” Matt said.

Helen knew he was a liar but didn’t care. At this late date, personal preferences were a nicety. Should she start thinking other wars? South America? What would Linh think?

Matt’s hair was back in a ponytail, and he wore a fresh tie-dye shirt with a peace symbol on the chest. He looked almost presentable for an antiwar protester. He lifted Helen’s wrist and looked at the Montagnard bracelet. “Where’d you get that?”

“Years ago from a Special Forces guy. Before you ever took your first picture.” She lifted her chin toward his shirt. “You actually wear that to cover combat?”

“Sure. It’s a disguise.”

“It’s working. You don’t look like a photographer.”

“I totally dig this old-guard, ballbuster stuff.” Matt chuckled and refilled her champagne glass as it dangled in her hand, but she remained reclined, looking up at the stars. “And my mentor, old Tanner, with his Graham Greene vices and his Marine crap, too funny. It’s like you all read the same book.”

“Isn’t it amazing,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“The quiet. No planes, no artillery. I never knew the city any other way.” A wave of nostalgia and history and failure overwhelmed her, and she drank down her glass.

Matt poured her another and signaled to Tanner over her head. “So did the bracelet bring you luck?”

Helen shrugged. “I’m still here. Is that luck?”

Tanner came and sat down at her feet. “Tucked your VC partner safely away and now you’re ready to play with us, huh?”

“The two Matts have a proposition for you.”

She looked at the young man more closely. A boyish face, unlined and unknowing, a long thin nose with the sunburned skin peeling. He licked his lips, which were thick and pouting and didn’t match the rest of his face, and she realized he was wired up on speed. “Proposition away.”

He grinned a smirky kind of smile as if he were letting her in on some great prank. “It’s just a matter of time now before they kick us out, right? The excitement’s finished here.”

“So?”

“So… we’ll leave before they kick us out. But our way. A little car trip through Cambodia, stop off in Phompers. The only Western journalists to get pictures of what’s going down in the countryside. All the other reporters have been herded up in the French embassy.”

“Wow. That’s pretty risky.”

“That’s why we’re inviting you along,” Tanner said. “A bit of nostalgia. Our personal swan song.”

Tanner took risks, but she supposed he was most interested in saving his hide, vulture reputation notwithstanding. Matt had covered the Rangers in Hung Loc and gotten a good story out of it. Not so bad. Not so desperate.

“Cambodia?” she said, staring at him. The oldest of seductions-falling under the spell of one clearly more innocent than oneself.

“We go out through Thailand,” Tanner said. Now that she seemed actually to be listening to them, he was straightened into considering his own proposition.

“When?”

“First thing in the morning.”

Darrow had won the Pulitzer before he got to Vietnam. But he continued on, his fame growing to legend status as he became associated with this small, problematic Southeast Asian bush war. Always he wanted to cover one more action. She told herself she was not as obsessed as Darrow. She was a professional, accessing a potential gig. Tanner was seasoned; he knew the risks; he was going. So if it was doable, was she simply too afraid to push out to the limits as Darrow had done? A total shutout of the media. A once-in-a-lifetime thing. That puritan instinct. How could she let them-the bad guys, the ones who wanted to do their dirty work in the dark-win, when it was nothing more than another car trip on her way out?

As dinner broke up, Gary took her aside. “I heard what those two clowns are up to. You’re not going with them?”

She grimaced. “Of course not. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

At noontime, they were already on Route 1, getting close to the border.

Foreign employees at the wire services who had already abandoned the country left keys with directions to their cars, and the three had been able to take their pick. Nothing military because one couldn’t be sure that isolated pockets of VC didn’t still believe the war was on. They settled on a custom-painted pink station wagon with peace signs and the graffiti YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE on the side. They would try to pass themselves off as hippies or smalltime drug smugglers-anything was better than being press if they were stopped.

All three sat in the front seat and filled the back with scavenged tires from other cars and cans of petrol. With their equipment on top of that, the car was filled to the roof and made it impossible to see out the rearview mirror. Starting at dawn, they had already stopped to repair three punctured tires. The car had no air-conditioning, so they rolled down the windows.

The hot air battered Helen’s face, her lips, turned her hair into sharp lashing wires, but it felt good being in motion and having a purpose. Her mind skated, full of dangerous curves and valleys, a grand adventure. Once she got to Thailand and flew to Linh, they would take some time off in California. There would always be other wars. All in the service of this excitement that was commensurate with the risk one took. At times she had the dispiriting notion of needing to remain constantly in flight, although after all these years, she was growing tired, never alighting in one place too long, never putting her full weight on the crust of the earth in case it gave way. Her job was to get pictures, but sometimes she forgot why.

The countryside appeared empty. When they did pass villagers, there was more a look of surprise in their faces than anything else. Helen didn’t know what she expected to see, nothing had changed-only the same barren fields and plots of banana trees and patches of scrub that had always been.

Matt sat in the middle and rolled a joint, passing it back and forth among the three of them. He wore metallic blue-tinted sunglasses that reflected Helen’s image back to her.

“When did you first come here?” he asked.

“Why’re you wearing those glasses?” she asked.

“You should have seen her. A schoolgirl practically wearing bobby socks,” Tanner said.

Matt took a deep drag on the joint and held his breath for a minute. “When?” he finally squeaked out, still holding smoke in his lungs.

“We need to stop and eat,” Tanner said.

“I’m starving. What did you bring?” she said.

“Whatever I could find. Some chips. Mangoes. C-rations,” Matt said.

“Who would bring C-rations?” Tanner yelled.

“They’ll keep,” Matt said.

“Jesus.”

“You know what-you do it next time, Mr. Gourmet.” Matt turned around with his knees in the seat and burrowed in a bag behind the seat. A can flew out the open window.

“What’re you doing?” Tanner yelled.

“You said you didn’t want C-rations.”

A bag of potato chips flew out. Helen pressed herself into the door. “I came at the end of ’sixty-five. I dropped out of college to come. I worried the war would be over by the time I graduated.” She shrugged, but Matt and Tanner were still arguing. “I wanted to find out what happened to my brother. The pilot refused to land so the crew pushed the men out from ten feet up. He broke both ankles and while he was stuck in the mud the enemy shot him. He died like an animal.” MacCrae had shielded her from the ugly details but over the years, she had found them out. The relief of feeling nothing at those words.

“Fucking pigs.” Matt took a long drag off the joint. The smoke emptied out of his mouth with a gasp.

“You’re like, drawing attention to us, throwing things out the window,” Tanner said to Matt.

“I’m hungry,” he said, flinging himself back down into the seat.

Her story, told at long last and at such cost, seemed already forgotten by both of them. Minutes passed.

“So why’d you stay so long?” Matt said.

Helen was silent. “Because it seems like you’re doing the most important work in the world. Leaving was like dying.”

They drove on in silence until they heard the soft thunk, thunk, thunk of another flat tire.

“Jesus,” Tanner said.

They pulled off near a small hut, hidden from the road by a bamboo thicket. Tanner pulled out the jack and a new tire while Matt wandered off toward the building.

“Where are you going?” Tanner yelled. “Why don’t you help me?”

“I’m taking a piss, okay?” Matt said.

“Why’s he going to the hooch? Asking for a bathroom?” Tanner shook his head. “He’s resourceful, that boy.”

A few minutes later, Matt reappeared around the corner of the hut and waved them over. Up close, Helen saw that his eyes were marbled with red veins from lack of sleep and smoke. They followed him to a small dirt yard in the middle of which lay a struggling but still alive goose.

“His wing and his leg are broken,” Matt announced in a dreamy voice.

The animal labored to get away but only made dusty circles in the dirt. Its black eye looked dull, but when Matt moved closer, the bird made a gritty, hissing noise at him.

“How can you tell?” Tanner asked.

“I grew up on a farm, man,” Matt answered. “And it’s about lunchtime.”

Tanner snorted.

Helen looked from one of them to the other. “Don’t we need to get going?”

“We need to eat,” Matt said. “Give me an hour.”

“I’m still working on that damned tire. Go ahead,” Tanner said. “Are you sure that thing’s not diseased? Doesn’t have rabies?”

“Birds don’t have rabies, man.”

Helen regretted coming with these two, couldn’t stand their squabbling any longer. Their recklessness made her afraid. She had lasted this long because she took only calculated risks. With the fall of Saigon, she’d done her bit. Covered the takeover, and should have gone home. Cambodia was a whole other thing. “I need to get out of here. I need to get to Linh.”

Both of the men turned to look at her.

Helen wiped her face. “Never mind.”

Matt’s attention went back to the goose. “Maybe he fell out of a cart or was run over. He’ll be dead in a few hours and then he’ll go to waste.”

Helen walked off and sat in the shade of the hut while Matt made quick, expert work of beheading the goose, plucking the quivering body, then chopping it up to cook over an open fire. The whole spectacle disgusted her, but after the pieces began to fry, releasing the smell of cooking meat, she felt a stab of hunger and realized she was starving. The body always betrayed one’s best intentions. Memory of the recently flopping body, the head and neck thrown a few feet away in the tall grass, vanished, and instead she remembered Sunday dinners at home when Charlotte cut slices of white meat and put them on china plates as thin as flower petals and passed them down the table.

Matt grinned and brought Helen big, dripping chunks of breast and thigh wrapped in paper. She ate it down fast, laughing with the two men over how good it was, wiping the grease off her mouth and chin, then wiping her hands against her pants but unable to get the oily residue off.

Matt sat next to her holding a drumstick and attached thigh in both hands, biting off enormous mouthfuls of steaming meat.

“So how did you end up with a Vietnamese?” he said.

She smiled and took another bite of meat. “Ask Tanner. He’s made a hobby out of analyzing my love life.”

“Not bad chow, huh?” Tanner asked, taking a long drink from a bottle of whisky.

Helen nodded. “It’s good.” Matt gave her another handful of breast meat. She took a long pull off the bottle and handed it back.

“Linh’s okay in my book,” Tanner said. “He’s a good photographer, and he keeps his nose clean. Doesn’t seem to resent the fact that he’s treated like a second-class citizen in his own country. That most of us suspect him of being a Red.”

“That’s big of you,” Helen said.

“What I’m saying is that Linh is a realist. Of course he loves you; he got the prize. Darrow thought it was all owed to him. He kidded himself he was here for a higher purpose when he was just grubbing around for a byline and an award like the rest of us. Darrow would have put you on that chopper and come out here himself.”

The truth of it stung Helen.

The sky was a high, pale blue with long wisping tails of cloud. The only sound their chewing and the rustling of paper.

“Where the hell did you learn to cook like that?” Tanner finally asked.

Matt looked at the two of them. “Truth time? My old man beat me so hard I decided I better run away if I wanted to stay alive. Went to North Dakota at fourteen years old and cooked in a greasy spoon till I was eighteen.”

“Why North Fucking Dakota?”

“I once heard my mama say nobody in their right mind would ever go to North Dakota. So I thought the odds were good they wouldn’t find me.”

“Did they?” Helen asked.

“Never even looked. Best time of my life.” Matt bowed his head. “Found an Indian woman who worked the cash register. Made love to me every day for four years until she found out I lied about my age. Kicked me out, can you believe it? She did things-”

“We don’t want to hear about your squaw,” Tanner said.

Helen’s mind was buzzing with alcohol. The sense of urgency pouring out of her. “So then what did you do?”

“Came to Vietnam,” Matt yelled and clapped his hands.

She didn’t want to know but had to ask. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.” He arched his eyebrows. “Why? Interested?”

“We need to go.”

“Best way to go to a genocide is on a full stomach,” Tanner said, and Matt and he burst out laughing. Helen smiled. Clowns. Gary was right; she was glad he didn’t know where she was. But after the pictures came in, all would be forgiven once again. It was always about pushing the envelope.

“This is the big one,” Tanner said. “I can feel it. We’re going to be famous.”

“Interviewed by Cronkite,” Matt said. “The TV guys will fight over us.”

“Fuck the TV guys.”

Helen almost envied them their glee, their lust for fame, their complete and unblushing lack of empathy.

“So, what was it like back in ’sixty-five?” Matt asked.

“You came too late.” Helen smiled. “The good old days are all over.”

Bellies full, they drove in drowsy silence until they approached the border. The guard house appeared abandoned, but they slowed the car anyway. The road ahead was littered with rocks and leaves, but otherwise empty except for a lone old man walking toward them, down the middle of it, carrying a suitcase in each hand. He stumbled as they passed him, refusing to look up, either from fear or exhaustion. They stopped the car.

“Can we help you, Father?” Helen asked.

He stood still, unsure in the bright sun, squinting behind black-rimmed eyeglasses like the old Vietnamese man’s.

“Teuk? Nuoc?” Water? she asked, making a drinking motion.

He dropped his bags, exhaustion now evident in shoulders that remained stooped, and he shuffled over. He wore a tattered, dusty white shirt and khaki pants. His feet in rubber sandals were cracked and bleeding. Tanner dropped the tailgate for him to sit on, then went into the front of the car and got his camera. Helen handed the old man a canteen of water, and he gulped it so quickly he retched.

“Whoa, take it easy, old man,” Matt said.

“Where did you come from, Father?”

“Prek Phnou, outside Phnom Penh. I am a teacher.”

“That’s far away on foot.”

“I walk week. More. I don’t know. Lose track of everything. I hide in the day in forest, but Khmer Rouge leave me alone. They think I will die on my own.”

“We are going to Phnom Penh,” Tanner said, crouching down and snapping pictures of the man as he drank.

“Te!” No! he shouted. “Te Kampuchea! Te Phnom Penh!”

“It’s okay, Father.”

“They empty the city. The hospitals. Terrible. I see things I did not wish to live to see.”

“Are you a person of Vietnam?” Helen asked.

He bowed his head and nodded. “I go back after many years.”

She knew better than to ask about his family. She went to the front of the car and got another canteen and handed it to him. “Take this. Do you have food?”

He shook his head, and she grabbed sandwiches, cookies, and C-rations.

“Here. And some bandages and ointment for your feet. The border is here,” she said, waving her hand at land without demarcation, except for the guard house in the distance. “The next village not far.” What was far to an old man on the verge of collapse?

“Don’t forget an opener,” Matt said, coming around the side of the car, for all the world like a polite schoolboy.

The old man kept sitting. “Aw kohn, aw kohn.” Thank you, he said.

Tanner came back. “Let’s hit the road.”

Helen nodded. “I’m sorry, Father. Can I take your picture?”

He stared up at her with a blank look. “Daughter, there is no one left who will care.” He stood uncertainly, looking down the road. Something passed across his face as she focused her camera, a shudder, and after the picture was taken she felt embarrassed at the intrusion. The image she wanted was her first sight of him-a small, anonymous figure in the distance with the two suitcases. She couldn’t stage it. He felt around in his pockets and pulled out a sandstone medallion no larger than a small coin with a Buddha carved in relief. He handed it to her.

“I can’t accept-” she said.

“I have one, too. It has given me hope.” He pulled out another one from his shirt pocket. “Put in your mouth, like this.” He opened his mouth, revealing a few lone teeth, and placed it on his tongue, then closed his lips. He spit it back out. “It protects you from harm. That is why I escaped, why they didn’t kill me like they killed the others.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “Vay choul.” With the back of a hoe.

Helen took the small Buddha, hand trembling, and bowed to the old man. “I hope it protects us as it has you.” As they drove away, she watched him pick up his suitcases and limp down the road. She leaned out the window and took the picture she had wanted from the back.

“I wouldn’t put that in my mouth, birdie,” Tanner said. “No telling where that little medallion’s been.”

Like a pair of hyenas, Tanner and Matt laughed as she watched the old man grow smaller and smaller in the side-view mirror until he was only a shadow that disappeared on the horizon.

They had been driving long hours, a tortured skirting of crater-size potholes made by B-52s years before, riding through dry stretches of rice paddy that were smoother than the road, making slow progress, when they came upon a roadblock.

From a distance, it seemed just clutter, but up close its message was stark-a skull, a helmet, a gun, a shoe. They had entered a land before language. A clear meaning that beyond lay only danger. Beyond be dragons. The scorching air now seemed suddenly to crackle, dry and treacherous, incendiary. Helen stuck her head out the window and looked back the way they had come. Had the old man made it to shelter? When Matt and Tanner were preoccupied with the map, she slipped the medallion in her mouth, the texture gritty like pumice, tasting of salt and dirt and iron.

“Looks like we’ve caught up with our quarry,” Matt said.

Helen turned back to the parched landscape ahead, the ground and sky a series of harsh reds and yellows, the trees stunted and full of prickling spines, the place like tinder, waiting for conflagration.

The first shape seemed to be only a pile of rags at the side of the road, but when the station wagon slowed down it turned out to be the corpse of a small boy, curled on his side as if in sleep, a tiny hand covering the gap where an ear was missing. Helen felt the courage pouring out of her, despair and fear taking its place. A quarter of a mile farther on, more bodies: a woman in her twenties with her hands spread out at her sides as if in surprise; a man with his arms folded behind him as if he were relaxing. Then the bodies began to crowd the road-families, groups of men, old people, women-struck down in rows like scythed sheaves of rice, so that Tanner had to slow the car and swerve back and forth along the road, until finally the bodies became so numerous and thick he had to stop to avoid running over them. Tanner and Matt got out while Helen sat loading film in her camera. When she was ready, a Tiger Balm-smeared handkerchief over her nose, they moved forward, cameras clicking. Tanner motioned to her, and she walked to the edge of the road and saw the sunken field piled with hundreds of bodies, many decapitated and bludgeoned, so that they knew the stories of vay choul were true, killing with hoes to save bullets.

“We are the only ones who have this on film,” Matt whispered, his jaw tight and quivering, and then he turned away and vomited.

Helen put her hand on his back. “It’s okay. It happens. Get some water.”

“Not to me.” Matt shrugged her hand off and wiped his face.

She bit her lip, annoyed at his petulance. “It’s the first time I started to like you,” Helen said.

“Then you’ve got some weird criteria,” he said.

“We have enough,” Tanner said. “Let’s go.”

The two men ran back to the car. Without thinking, Helen edged down the embankment and took more pictures of the piled bodies, framing the picture from a lower vantage point, with sky behind them, so the massiveness of the piles could be felt. If the picture was no good, it meant that you weren’t close enough. She did a close-up of a young girl’s face that was as peaceful as if she were asleep, a single flower tangled in her hair. Five minutes later, Helen climbed back up and ran to the car. Inside, she pushed down the lock on the door, then laughed at her own foolishness. “I’m going crazy. Get out a bottle of something.”

“Whiskey time,” Matt said, and burrowed in the bags again.

Tanner put the car in drive. “Forward?”

Helen took a long drink, wiped her mouth, then took another. The scale of this depravity like something out of World War II. She shook her head. This was clearly beyond them. “We’ll never make it to Phnom Penh. And if we do, what then? They’ll confiscate the film.” Helen studied the map. “Let’s go back a few miles and take this secondary road. It’s probably a cow trail, but it’ll hook up with Route 6. Route 6 goes to Thailand.”

Tanner let out a yell and banged his hand on the dashboard. “Do you two have any arguments to sharing the Pulitzer three ways?” He laughed. “We have it. How lucky can you get?”

Helen tried to hold the whiskey bottle, but her hand couldn’t grip, the shaking was so bad. She stuck it between her knees so the two men wouldn’t notice. The irony was that she could have no better company for this trip; they were insulated from the horror by their own ambitions. She didn’t have the strength at that moment to question her own motivations. Why, indeed, was she there? She could only pray their ignorance would carry the three of them to the border.

“They thought they would get away with it. Pol Pot denying the whole thing. No pictures, no proof. Won’t make us too popular around here, huh?” Helen said.

“Smoked if they catch us,” Tanner agreed. “Hand over that bottle and let’s celebrate.”

“They have to catch us first, Helen baby,” Matt said.

After spending the night out, and another day of bruising roads, they reached the Mekong River. Tanner argued with and then bribed the ferryman to carry them across. The man, named Chan, had small, pig eyes, and one cheek puffed up nearly double from an infected tooth. He kept stirring at a pot of something green over a burner, spooning a paste into a dirty poultice he held against his ear. His left hand was missing three fingers, severed below the knuckle. After Matt asked to look at his cheek, he turned away quickly. “Abscessed.”

Finally, Chan agreed to take them across for an exorbitant amount, ten times the usual, and insisted the station wagon be camouflaged under palm fronds. While Tanner and Matt covered the car, Helen walked down to the water to wet her handkerchief. A pink, checkered shirt floated in the water, and as she got closer she saw it covered a swollen torso, the fabric pulled tight, splitting the seams. Another body in black swayed at the bank, face-down, long hair twisting in the reeds.

During the crossing, the water lay still like liquid metal, the ferry suspended on its surface, unmoving. Helen stared down in the water, her image as sharp as in a mirror.

The ferryman sat at the very-most edge of the boat, poultice pressed tight against his face, and glared at them. Matt and Tanner smoked a joint. “To protect our cover.” Helen slipped the Buddha on her tongue, growing used to the iron taste till the bitterness comforted her.

“I don’t trust him,” Helen said.

Matt shrugged and stared at Chan, his dour, squatting image reflected in the blue sunglasses. “What’d you want to do? Kill him?”

“He’s going to report us,” she said.

“Too bad. We’ll be across the border in a day. But I’ll kill him if you want.”

She felt light-headed, as if there were too little oxygen in the air.

Once they got off the ferry, Tanner paid Chan again as much for a tip if he would forget their meeting. The ferryman eagerly accepted and smiled for the first time, breathing in their faces, his breath like sulfur, but his eyes remained hateful. He delayed pulling the rope gate away for the car to pass. His pidgin English suddenly improved. “Khmers bad. Americans rich, the goodest.”

“So how do we get to the Thai border? With no running into Khmer? We take-” Matt pulled out a Baggie of marijuana to show him. “No problemo?”

Chan talked and gestured as Matt wrote down his directions. Tanner again pulled out a thick stack of money and peeled off more bills for him. Chan pointed to the car and Helen, and then motioned taking a picture.

Matt nodded sagely and motioned to Helen. “Girlfriend. Wants to take pictures of Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat.” Matt grimaced and took him aside. “How far to Angkor? Otherwise no-” He made an obscene poking gesture with his hands, and the ferryman laughed. He gave another set of equally convoluted directions, taking Matt’s pen and drawing part of a picture on the paper. Tanner peeled off more bills and handed them to him.

“You go Phnom Penh. Much goodest.”

“No dangerous?” Tanner said.

“Much goodest.” The man insisted. He slapped Tanner’s stomach. “Womans.”

At last he moved to take down the rope barrier, and the three men pulled over the ramp to drive the station wagon off. “You go Phnom Penh?” he insisted like a worried mother hen.

“Yes, Phnom Penh.”

Matt wagged his head lazily and waved as they drove off. He lifted both hands off the wheel and again made the poking gesture so Chan laughed.

“Definitely avoid Phompers,” Matt said.

“So we go up and over the long way?” Tanner asked.

“Chan expects us to do that.”

“No, Chan expects us to double-cross him. Take the shorter route under.”

“So we triple-cross him and do what we said.”

They set off in high spirits, convinced they had thoroughly confused the ferryman, but the trip became a horrendous series of wrong turns and dead ends. “The little bastard lied to us,” Tanner said, pounding on the steering wheel.

“I should have offed him,” Matt said. At dusk they stopped because of the danger of being spotted by their headlights. Not wanting to be taken by surprise, they hid the car in the trees and slept in a ditch.

Helen settled down into a pile of leaves. “Listen,” she whispered.

“What?” Matt asked.

“No sound. Nothing. No birds even, or insects.”

“You’re the lady in love with silence.”

No one spoke for a few moments.

“Bizarre,” Tanner said. “Tomorrow at lunch we’ll be in the best hotel in Bangkok, popping a bottle of champagne.”

Helen stared up at the sky, but even in the pitch black of the country, not a single star appeared. A blanket of lead; even the heavens had been extinguished. “I’m ready to go home,” she said.

“What took you so long?” Matt asked.

She shrugged to the darkness. “I got lost.”

Helen closed her eyes. She thought of the rolls of film in the car, the images cradled in emulsion, areas of darkness and light like the beginnings of the universe. She herself full of latent images taken over the years, and yet what she had seen would stay inside her, hidden. Linh had covered her eyes during the mission out of Dak To, because he understood that for them the eye was the most important thing. We close our eyes to spare ourselves or those we love. To see demanded responsibility. To gain power over their enemies, armies blindfolded prisoners. In the fields, the Khmer Rouge had the people turn away so that the executioners would not see themselves in their victims’ eyes.

Tanner was probably right-the pictures were good and were taken at great risk, they had a shot at some of the prizes-and so she was catching up to Darrow. It was like chasing the tail of a comet. She had done her final job for the war and was proud of that. But even as she got closer, she understood his contempt had not been feigned, that by the time one earned such accolades, one had paid many times over what they were worth. And yet she was still there.

As she fell asleep, she wondered again where Linh was-still on a carrier or already on his way to California? She saw herself back in the embassy compound, smoke and burning paper swirling in the air. Then she was on the roof, tucking Linh into the cocoon of the helicopter, but this time she stayed on, felt the familiar weightlessness as they flew over the dark city and then over the darker water. She held Linh’s hand, free for the first time in so many years, maybe for the first time ever. Somewhere out in that darkness the future was rushing toward them. Had she tricked her fate?

She thought of her brother, not the imagined, damaged Michael of the war, but as he had been before, laughing and dancing around her. His hands up in a mock-boxing stance, his hair slicked back, white teeth shining. She had forgotten that he had a life before the war. In guilt and rivalry, she had given away the chance to have her own. But then Michael tossed his head like a horse throwing off the bit, refusing her memory of him.

Helen saw the young Cambodian girl she photographed in the mass grave earlier. Imagined tearing at the gossamer fabric of her shirt, brushing the long strands of hair like threads of silk, like the tendrils of morning glories in the spring, plunging into the hollow cave of ribs and the small dried grottoes of eyes. The dead entered the living, burrowed through the skin, floated through the blood, to come at last to rest in the heart. Stirring through the bits and pieces of the mystery of the young girl, Helen imbibed her, would leave trans-muted, brave and full of courage, knowing her fear and determined enough to ignore it, courageous enough at last to return home. Time to give up the war.

At dawn, Helen woke before the men did and felt as rested as if she’d had eight hours in her own bed. She snuck over to the car and pulled out a clean shirt from Matt’s bag. An unlikely baby-blue with a peace symbol emblazoned on it. As she tugged her old one off, she brushed the scar on her belly. Linh had traced his fingers over it, the glossy raised skin as pale and iridescent as fish scale.

“No more bikinis for me.”

“This makes me love you more,” he had said.

“Why?”

“It proves that you will be brave in the future.”

But she no longer felt brave. Since she had first arrived in Vietnam, she had been obsessed with courage. Such an ancient quality in modern life, called for only in extreme circumstances. She had admired it in others, in Linh and Darrow, but found it only sporadically within herself. A combat journalist’s life mea sured in dog years. She felt old compared to these young savages like Matt. She was softening, but she pushed that thought away, too. As she turned, pulling the T-shirt over her head, she saw Matt watching her.

“That was beautiful,” he said.

She picked up his bag and threw it at him. “Pervert.”

Trading cigarettes for directions to isolated villagers working the fields, using their smattering of Cambodian and French, they reached Route 6 by midmorning. They let out whoops of joy. “Bangkok here we come,” Tanner yelled. “I’m getting me the prettiest hooker I can afford.” Helen thought of the images rocking in their cradles of film, gestating in emulsion. She would insist on doing her own darkroom work. The road ahead was empty, leaf strewn, unused. Depending on driving conditions, Tanner figured they were a day’s drive from Thailand.

When Helen couldn’t put off emptying her bladder another minute, they stopped in the middle of the road. She made the men turn away and peed behind the car, too dangerous to go in the bushes because of mines. As she squatted, she saw a few feet away a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses like the old Cambodian man’s, crushed.

They were half an hour away from Angkor when a loud explosion created a small hurricane as the back windows were blown out by automatic rifle fire. Splinters of glass flew through the car like steel filings, most absorbed by the equipment, enough reaching them to nick arms and faces.

The back window blocked, Helen couldn’t see behind, and she peered through the side-view mirror, but the car was bouncing too hard; she caught only a glimpse of a boy, then sky, the boy, earth. Tanner floored the accelerator; the station wagon lurched forward as another round of bullets swept through the car doors. The tires blew, and the car skidded into the ditch.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Matt moaned. One blue lens of his sunglasses was shattered, and he pulled off the glasses, revealing a gash around his eye.

“Shut up. Don’t look worried,” Tanner said. “Are you fucking kidding?” Matt said.

The car was surrounded by two dozen boy soldiers. Circling the car, they pounded on it with small, violent fists. They wore tattered uniforms with red-checked kramas, scarves, wrapped around their heads or necks to signify the Khmer Rouge. AK-47s hung off their small shoulders. The leader was barefoot but wore a bowler hat and orange-tinted aviator sunglasses that matched the fiery sky, a getup so strange it made him seem less dangerous. He banged the butt of his rifle on the hood of the car, leaving long, elliptical dents, while two other soldiers flung the driver’s-side door open, motioning with their hands for the three to get out.

First Tanner, then Matt, and then Helen wiggled awkwardly out with their hands folded up behind their heads. Using rifles, the soldiers pointed up the road. Helen hoped that they would simply take the car and let them go, all she could think of was the lost pictures, but when the three had walked about twenty yards, she could hear a barking of orders, and one of the soldiers ran up behind them and used his rifle like a baseball bat to hit Matt in the back of the knees.

The soldier, no older than ten or eleven, had a narrow face and large, crowded teeth, and when he yelled, his voice was high and girlishly shrill. He motioned for the other two to kneel in the middle of the road. When they did, he smiled broadly, pleased, and patted Matt on the back.

“You’re welcome, filthy little fuck,” Matt said.

Helen closed her eyes. The whole thing unreal, make-believe. She wanted to stand up and tear the gun away from the boy and slap him. So unlikely, it felt like at any minute someone should laugh and admit it was all a game.

At the sound of a groan from Matt, she opened her eyes to see the soldier miming for them to bring their hands down and take off their shoes. The boy soldiers were so inexperienced they had not even known to frisk them for weapons, but the gun Matt carried was safely back in the car. Not that they’d have a chance of shooting their way out. All three sat in the road and worked with numbed fingers at shoelaces, exchanging looks. Helen dipped her fingers in her pocket and slipped the small Buddha into her mouth, unseen. The saving bitterness of iron. Then, barefoot, they were ordered to kneel again and put their arms behind them, elbow to elbow. Other soldiers ran over and bound their arms with a crude rope made of twisted vines. Helen cursed herself for not bandaging her chest down as two of the boy soldiers stood in front of her, giggling and pointing. The smaller boy, with a spiky shock of hair, looked furtively back to the leader preoccupied with the car, then bent down and quickly tugged at her breast.

Matt made a lunge for him, and the other soldier aimed the butt of his rifle at Matt’s temple.

“Don’t,” Helen said. “Whatever happens, you can’t stop it. I need you alive.” Her knees trembled, and she tried to cave in her chest. Thoughts came in fragments, pulling themselves out slowly and with great effort. No use to announce they were press because that would be a death sentence. The color of their skin, the fact of their car, its contents-everything was against them. Her mouth filled with saliva, and before she could think, she pulled up to her full height and spat at the soldier who had touched her.

The boy looked startled and then burst out laughing. The others joined in.

Helen looked back and watched soldiers swarming over the station wagon. Such a terrible mistake to come. So unfair that one did not get a magic wish, that one could not undo at least one mistake a lifetime. Her biggest regret in dying in this way its effect on Linh. At the car, the soldiers pulled out all the equipment and lifted each camera over their heads and dashed them one by one against the pavement. One soldier flipped open the canisters, yanked the rolls of film from their dark cradles, screaming out in long, wet ribbons, exposed, the images flown off. And seeing that, Helen felt delivered, her job done, released as if from a spell. Endless destruction. War destroying objects, land, and people indiscriminately, with its appetite the only thing that was eternal. She watched, detached, as the soldiers piled up the rest of their belongings and threw a grenade on top of the stack, laughing at the explosion and scattering debris. Jumping up and down on the bags of food even though they probably had little to eat themselves. Smashing open the cans of C-rations. Next they poured gas inside the car and set it ablaze, but it only smoldered, releasing a heavy, black, oily smoke into the sky.

Then their vicious attention turned back to the three kneeling figures.

Helen looked up the road and tried to picture reaching the Thai border. She imagined it came to a dead stop at a river, although she couldn’t remember from the map if there was a river, but in her mind’s eye it was a clear and rushing one, and she knew she would have to swim across it if she wished to be saved, and the impossible price of that swim would be to leave everything that had happened during the war behind. She heard the words Darrow had recited their first night but that she had not understood till now: Let her go home in the long ships and not be left behind. She wanted to go home; she did not want to be left behind. She pictured a flimsy bamboo gate and Linh standing at it, waiting for her. It was his waiting that had always saved her.

A gun went off at close range, but she would not turn to look. She pressed the Buddha against the roof of her mouth, clamped her teeth until she thought she felt them cracking, a salty wash of blood in her mouth mixing with the iron that had become a part of her. Her reporter’s mind registered surprise that they were using bullets, always special treatment for the foreigners. She heard a whimper-Matt’s-but still would not look, looking would make it real. No sound from Tanner; now it was just two of them. The air thick with the mineral smell of blood.

Far away a rumbling sound, but she was in a trance, searching for god or peace or grace or void, making amends for things she had or had not done. The sound grew closer, like a dream, and she wondered if it was her own heart, the sounds of her body rumbling apart.

The hard crack of another shot made her ears ring, and afterward silence, and she was alone. As alone as one could ever be in life, and bad as it was, she endured long enough to take another breath. In that moment, she mourned the loss of those two innocents more than all the other lives that had been lost because she had known better. A hot wetness at her groin as her bladder released.

She bit down on the Buddha, pain a relief, a trickle from her lips as her mouth filled with blood, when suddenly there were hands at her sides, and she was yanked by her hair roughly to her feet. Legs so weak she fell back to the ground, afraid of what they planned to do with her before she was killed.

A new voice entered her consciousness, and when she braved turning her head, she saw a dusty pickup truck had pulled up next to the smoldering station wagon, and a middle-aged man had taken command of the group. Helen closed her eyes again. Her greatest wish that death would simply come fast now.

A hard shove at her back with the length of a rifle, and she was lifted to her feet. She stumbled forward, took one step, then another. Gravel bit her feet, but she did not register it as pain but simply as life. Life, beyond good or bad. No one followed her, no one at her side: They were playing with her, forcing her to march with them and have her later, and she wished to move faster, to run, but could barely manage a slow stagger of a walk down the middle of the empty road. Her ears still rang with the distancing sound of the fired shots, her two innocents gone, and she could hear the soldiers arguing behind her, and she willed herself to move faster but was unable.

She closed her eyes and saw herself rising into the air until she was flying. Had the winged thing already come? Ahead Angkor. Everything below-the road, the soldiers, the burning car, the two prone bodies-as faraway and unreal as the tiger that had appeared below the Loach that long-ago day. Time permeable. As real as the burning road under her bare feet, Darrow standing at the entrance to one of the temples, appearing as he had when she flew down to the delta to meet him. He wore his white short-sleeved shirt, eyes hidden behind glasses, and raked his good hand through his hair, his other arm still unhealed in its sling.

Helen took a bigger step forward and tripped over a stone, losing her balance, but she would not stop or open her eyes, afraid to lose her vision of him, afraid to look behind at the boy soldiers still arguing, but if she had, she would have seen two of them separating and jogging toward her, easy and carefree as two ravenous young wolves.

She choked on the Buddha, sharp gravelly pieces in her mouth that felt like bits of teeth or clay. Dust to dust, and weren’t the teeth always the last to go? Her eyes closed so small and tight she could barely see. Afraid of death and yet not afraid, already inside it and moving through it. It would come and had already come a thousand times. She breathed relief at the thought that she was soon done with it.

She remembered the pictures of the Angkor bas-relief “The Churning of the Ocean of Milk,” which Darrow and Linh had photographed years before she had loved either of them. Devils and gods churning the waves and fighting each other to extract the elixir of immortality. Violence had poisoned them all, Linh the least.

Poisoned Darrow.

And she, become Darrow, poisoned her.

A sudden clarity that he had been poisoned before she met him. His spell on her broken. She didn’t want to join him on the temple steps; she knew what that burning brightness ahead was, death, and an invitation to join him in it. During her blindness, Linh there from the beginning, guarding her, and now she wanted only to live.

Would Linh know-she wanted him to know-that she did not go lightly, that she was not willing, that despite what it looked like, he had changed her and made her brave in all the ways she wasn’t before, and if there was one last wish granted, she wanted him to know that she did not choose this.

She struggled to a half jog, determined that she could survive from mere desire.

The sound of running footsteps behind her, the flat slap of peasant sandals made of tires. A hard swing of a metal object across her back threw her facedown on the ground, unable to move. Her cheek and forehead burned. Air filled with blood. She was lifted to her knees. A soldier from behind grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, ripping out a fist of golden strands.

And then she closed her eyes, and they could no longer touch her. She no longer embraced what they threatened. Linh was there, and when she reached for his hand, her own had become stiff and brittle, her arms become branches, and from her knees to her groin to her belly to her breasts came a covering, an armor of gnarled bark, and her hair, when she reached for it, had the aspect of leaves. She opened her eyes, alive, and she turned to look deeply and without fear into her boy soldier’s face.

She was in a state between dream and reality when she heard the chanting. They carried her back to the prone forms of Matt and Tanner, the new leader giving directions, and a miracle she couldn’t fathom, Matt no longer dead but now sitting up, pressing his bleeding arm against his side. She huddled against him as the boy soldiers approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, in some kind of victory ritual, chanting. The riddle of the dream at last-a premonition.

Then the leader came and knelt down to look at Helen, and her mouth so full of liquid she gagged, spitting out Buddha and fragments of stone. The man picked up the small medallion and stared at her in wonder.