UP AHEAD a yellow sign burns a dull smudge into the night. I have to get off. I cup my bladder and push into the isle. Miraculously the driver puts on his blinker to indicate that he is turning into the very Shell station I am to rendezvous behind. But rather than attributing this good fortune to a scheduled pit-stop, I choose to believe in luck. It is something I feel I need this night.
The driver leaves the engine running and hops down the stairs. I am right
behind him but don't feel safe leaving the bus. Despite the protests of
the passengers behind me, I stop in the doorway and peer out over the
dash. Light from inside the station does little to illuminate the darkness.
We are on a deserted street of nondescript buildings and overgrown lots
on the edge of Kham Cot. The town itself is small and smells of dust and
petrol. Over the sound of the bus idling I can hear the whir of the gas
pump clicking the digit-disks higher; I also hear cicadas, Southeast Asia’s
call for silence.
I really do have to piss now, but I’ve always loathed Turkish-style
toilets. I hate squatting over some dirty hole or standing on those shit-stained
foot prints, splashing muck onto my shoes. I go around the side of the
building instead.
I push the board aside and step into the alley. Down the street a battered Peugeot sits in a spill of light from the street lamp. There are no trees, no breeze, just the backs of buildings and darkness, and of course, the Peugeot. If that is my contact, I think, I don’t want to go. Almost instantly I feel alone in the world, as alone as a person feels in moments of extreme anguish. All I really want is to return home and ask C. out again. I can still hear the bus engine idling by the gas station. I could go back. I could board the bus and resume passage to the capital. The only person I'd told about Laos was my editor, or had he given me the idea? There was something to our last conversation that kept nagging me. I hadn't heard from C. in weeks. My money was running out. And the last article I'd written for the paper had been shredded as so much anti-communist propaganda. Maybe journalism wasn't my gig anyway. I knew that I had two, three minutes tops, before the driver made up his mind, before he finished his cigarette and closed the door and pulled back onto that pathetic thing they called a highway. Counting seats for missing passengers was not a courtesy Vietnamese drivers cared to afford.
Just then the headlamps of the Peugeot flash twice, dimly. Had I overlooked the dark form now seated clearly behind the wheel? A minute passes before it happens again, two quick flashes, then nothing. Instinctively, I know that I should run. Things don't feel right. If only I could remember what my editor had said exactly, then maybe I wouldn't have to go. Do I really need to see Laos when every warning signal in my head is telling me to get the hell out of there? Rather than piss my pants with indecision, I do the only sensible thing. I walk down the alley and get in the Peugeot.
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HOW DO I get home, I ask.
The driver waives his hand in front of the windshield to indicate that
he is not the contact as I had thought, but someone hired to drive me
to the contact. From the hunch of his shoulders and his graying head,
I understand him to be non-threatening. But when he adjusts the rearview
mirror, the deep tiredness weighing on his lids redoubles my anxiety.
"Taxi," he says and switches on the red numerals to a meter.
From there on, that is the only light I have to go by. There are no lights
to be seen anywhere once we'd turned away from the gas station, no cars
appear on the roadside, and for a long time I keep my eyes fixed on the
path cut by their headlamps. I am too apprehensive to think of anything
other than a safe return to Hanoi. Shouldn’t he be driving with his
brights on? Or are those feeble beams the brights? It feels as if we are
heading back in the direction of Vietnam, but I can’t be sure. Going
into the night with this old Lao has to be a mistake, but then so is crossing
the border on an odd tip slipped beneath his door, like some wrinkled,
travel-weary love letter. But written by whom? Shouldn’t I stop and
ask myself that question first? This little leave I have taken, not merely
of my senses but my life—this whole Vietnam diversion—is inexplicable
to me. It is as though reality has stopped and I have gotten off to do
whatever it is I’ve been doing these past few months and now I wish
only that I am being driven along these dark roads not to meet some source
whom I don't know from Adam but to the airport where reality will be waiting
for me to climb back on board and resume doing what I used to do. Maybe
I'll track C. down after all, I think. Isn't that what I've been hoping
for all along, an excuse to go home? And is she really not coming out?
Or is that too a creation of my underslept mind? Haven't I gone to extravagant
lengths to let her know how I feel? The invitations to visit me in Utah
and now Hanoi. How on earth could a phone call from Vietnam be interpreted
as anything less than an confession of love! Could she be as dimwitted
as she appeared in these matters? Or was I the one that was confused?
I wonder how I’ve gotten this far. The rattling car, the sleepy driver,
the sinister road...it is all an unforeseen outcome of the convergence
of my evasiveness with C.'s, dissimulation to match dissimulation. Why
not just buy a plane ticket home and ask her straight out? Other than
maybe hurting the relationship with my editor, what could it hurt to leave
a little early?
It is as I am thinking these thoughts that I realize that we’ve long since left the town behind. And, as impossible as it may seem, it has gotten darker. The meter hasn’t yet reached the 50,000 mark of what I assume would be kip not dollars when the taxi driver speaks his first words to him since I’d gotten in the car. In English, which he didn’t pronounce with much assurance, he asked, "Are you a spy?"
"I’m a friend of VIR," I reply. "It’s a newspaper. In Hanoi."
"Are you a spy?"
Who is this guy, I think. This time I ignore him and continue looking out the window for a sign of something familiar along the highway. But what if we aren’t on the highway to meet the contact, but on some other road to destinations far more unpleasant? Hadn’t the traffic officer in Hue asked that exact question? What is wrong with these people? Either way I’d answer no, right? No good spy would confirm his own existence...unless under extreme duress...and no one I knew personally would be foolish enough to joke in this situation if they weren’t a spy. A Southeast Asian's paranoia rivaled only my own. Clearly this is too queer to be coincidence, and we obviously aren’t on the same road as the bus whose ticket is still in my front shirt pocket.
"Are you a spy?"
"Tell me," I reply as agreeably as I can, "where you think this question will get you, and I’ll tell you if I’m a spy."
"Are you a spy?" he repeats flatly.
"Look," I snap back, thinking, Why don’t you just say no? "what business is that of yours? Drive, please. This is the road to where again?"
"Are you a spy?"
The car is now perceptibly losing speed, the road is pitch black, and beyond that I could see nothing.
"Why are you slowing down?"
"Bad road. Bump bump."
"It’s fine. Keep going."
"Bad car. Not work."
"It was working a few minutes ago."
"Are you a spy?"
We are barely rolling now.
"Shift," I say, "shift the car down before it conks out."
Which is exactly what happens.
"What’s going on!"
The driver does not answer, but gets out of the car with a flashlight, which he begins clicking on and off.
"Answer me! Why are we stopping out here like this? Why are you doing that with the flashlight? Where are you going?"
I don’t know whether to stay in the car or to jump out of the car or whether either is going to make a difference to whatever is about to befall me. "Look," I shout, leaping after him onto the road, "did you understand me? I am a friend of VIR. I am a U.S. citizen. I work in Hanoi."
But I can’t find him. He is gone.
This is what you get for taking an editor’s advice on love! This is what you get for not listening to C. and pretending you didn’t hear her ask you to stay! This is what you get for failing to comply with a sense of reality like everyone else’s! You egotistical sheister!
"Hey!" I shout. "Hey, you! Where are you?"
When there is no reply, I open the driver’s door and feel around for the ignition: he’s left the keys. I get in and shut the door and, without hesitating, start the car, accelerating hard in neutral to prevent it from stalling. Then I pull onto the road and try to build up speed—there has to be a village here somewhere! But I haven’t driven fifty feet before the driver appears in the dim beam of the headlights waving one hand for me to stop and clutching his trousers around his knees with the other. I have to swerve wildly to avoid hitting him, and then, instead of stopping to let the man get back in and drive me the rest of the way, I gun the motor and pump the gas pedal but am unable to get the thing to pick up speed and, only seconds later, the motor spittles and goes dead.
"You should have said you had to take a shit. What was I supposed to think when you stopped the car and disappeared?"
"Sick," he says, patting his belly as he buckles up his pants.
"You should have told me that. I misunderstood."
I slide over on the seat to let him get in.
We roll along in funny sort of way. Watching him ride the clutch like this makes me wonder how we got as far as we have.
Within the first five minutes the driver checks the rearview mirror three times. Not looking at me like before, but at the road behind.
"Why are you doing that?" I ask, because I can’t see anything in such darkness, "what’s back there?"
"Are you a spy?"
"Why do you keep asking me that? If you mean CIA, then I am not a spy. If you mean that I work freelance for VIR—" But why am I even answering this old Lao with bowel problems, answering him seriously in a language he understands only barely...where the hell is my sense of reality? "Drive, please," I say. "Vientiane. Just get me to Vientiane without talking and I’ll pay whatever’s on your meter."
We haven’t gone three miles when he drives the car over to the shoulder, shuts off the engine, takes up the flashlight, and gets out. This time I sit calmly in the front seat while he finds some sheltering bamboo to take another crap in. I even begin to laugh at how I have exaggerated the menacing side of all this, when suddenly I am blinded by headlights barreling straight toward the taxi and another from behind. Each stops just inches from either bumper, although I had braced myself for the impact and may have begun to scream. Then there is noise everywhere, people shouting, a third vehicle, and a fourth, there is a burst of light whiting everything, a second burst and I am being dragged out of the car and onto the road. I don't know which language I am hearing, I can discern virtually nothing in all the incandescence, and I don’t know what to fear more, to have fallen into the violent hands of North Vietnamese boarder guards or a marauding band of Lao robbers. "English!" I shout, even as I tumble along the surface of the highway. "I speak English!"
I am up and doubled over the Peugot’s fender and then I am yanked and spun around and something knocks glancingly against the back of my skull and then I see, hovering enormously overhead, a helicopter. I hear myself shouting, "Don’t hit me, God damn it, I’m an American!" But that too is drowned out by the crackle of a radio, What do you need, over?
I couldn’t have counted all the soldiers pointing rifles at me even if I could manage to count—more soldiers certainly than had surrounded me that day in Hue, helmeted and armed now, shouting instructions that I can't hear, even if their language was one I understood, because of the noise of the helicopter. And yet through the mayhem, despite the terror, there is a moment of lucidity: this is not the first time I’ve been in this situation.
"I live in Hanoi!" I shout back to them. "The driver stopped to take a shit!"
"Speak English!" someone shouts to me. Having been kicked periodically, I involuntarily flinch.
"THIS IS ENGLISH! HE STOPPED TO MOVE HIS BOWELS!"
"Who?"
"The driver! The Lao driver!" But where is he? Am I the only one they’ve caught? "There was a driver!"
I hear the crackle of a radio pack. Bring it on, says a voice that I am just now beginning to recognize as speaking English, give him a taste of the good stuff. I can feel the helicopter dropping lower, and as it does so, as the troops pulled back, I get a glimpse of the most hideous creature I’ve ever seen, followed by a sound I will never forget.
---------------
BUT THE dream doesn't end there. Describing it even now seems nearly impossible because the order of events shift constantly in my mind. As best I can recall, the whirly-bird shat two steel canisters clanking to the road between us; a sound I will forever associate with britch-shitting terror. I hadn’t time to run before the blades of the departing chopper drove the substance into my face. Tasteless, odorless, a nightmare every bit as visceral as the bombing of the Tokyo underground. Was I really being gassed? It felt as if my eyes were literally bleeding out of my head, and since it didn’t matter whether they were open or closed, I thought it best to keep them open for whatever precious time I had left. By this point I had crumpled to the ground and had managed, somehow, to wedge my back beneath the Peugeot’s front fender. I tried desperately to cover my mouth with my one free hand which was itself covered with the snot pouring out of my nose. The trucks had fled. The lights were gone. I wanted to speak, to scream, Don’t leave me here to die!, but all I could do was gurgle on my puke and try to stay the convulsions before the world went black. But what if I wasn’t convulsing? What if I'd been dragged from the ground by my captors in their gas masks and shaken violently like one of those children you read about whose parents are now on trial for infanticide, then forced over the hood of my little taxi, because that is where I find myself when I wake up, surprised even then that I haven’t rolled to the ground during the night? Everything about my body is hot and stiff at the same time, as are my pants where I have defecated, and, I’m sure, relieved my bladder. I wake to blinding sunshine and when, finally, my eyes adjust to the light, all I can make out is the snout of a nasty pink water buffalo licking the salt from my sweat-soaked fingers. And throughout it all, the only constant I have carried with me is the memory of my editor’s plea, go to Laos, O’Brien, shake it off, heartache only lasts as long as the next lay.
Now I’m thinking that it isn’t even the water buffalo that has roused me, but a dog barking in the distance, a sound I’ve always associated with the safety of my parents’ home. But that doesn’t really matter. I am standing on stiff legs in front of the Peugeot, on a dirty road lined with bamboo. For no reason I can think of other than to prolong my suffering, I no longer wear shoes. The road twists before me like a red stain winding into the distance…