Saigon, 1970.
The Continental Palace Hotel stood at the crossroad of two shadowy streets where things in daylight only partly imagined at night were made ominously clear. The hotel, dimmed dun from decades of pollution, was built in 1880 by a French man, Pierre Cazeau. Or so claimed Jean Benoit, the French hotel manager, a grenade-shaped man over thirty who wore a black silk tunic to cover his advancing stomach, and a black felt cap to cover his retreating hair.
Mr. Benoit referred to the street in front of the hotel as “rue Catinat,” as though the news that the French lost their war sixteen years ago, in 1954, was the beam from a distant star that had yet to arrive and enlighten him. The nasal, lilting twang of Mr. Benoit’s French-Vietnamese-American accent sounded like a man vocally sanding grapefruit.
Their room was on the second floor and overlooked the street. Two sober double beds, with yellow bamboo headboards braided straight and lacquered strong. The beds flanked a low, rickety table that wobbled irresponsibly between them no matter how many matchbook covers Conor shoved underneath the loose-jointed legs with an air of exasperated impatience never fully warranted by the task. Optimistically entrusted to this tipsy table, and no doubt contributing to its off-kilter existence, were heavy stacks of books, two glass pitchers of potable water, several empty cups of unweakened coffee, Alodia’s 35mm Minolta, four miniature, glass bottles of perfume, maps, pens, cigarettes, a brass incense burner in the shape of a dragon, with four clawed feet in lime green and a fierce, removable, tangerine head, and a pile of savaged matchbook covers.
In one corner of the room, a metal cabinet the color of Conor’s M-16, so narrow and tall it might be mistaken for the clothing locker of an American basketball player, reached all the way up to the high, white ceiling and touched it at the top. A big, overstuffed chair, toad skin green, with an oily pattern of crimson-bloated leaves, took up comfortably the rest of the space in the corner. The bathroom, tiled white, accessible through a door with a handle so low it looked as though it had been built for children, hid behind the chair: enamel tub, low sink, and two toilets, one weird.
Two shuttered windows, no screens. Day and night, beetles, flies, and moths, of every size and color, lent consistently to the warm air the sound of flicking, whirring, clicking, and fizzing, a factory of insects churning out exuberant life. At various times throughout the day, a gecko appeared on one of the windows to wash its feet in the rain if it rained, or to hang upside down on the glass and stare at them in a mysteriously obscure but somewhat humorous way if it didn’t. Outside on the narrow ledge of dirty, pitted cement that ran the length of the building, several gold pigeons with rust-colored feet fluttered optimistically awake at first light. Like well-funded, Saigon politicians, and their American patrons, they engaged in a noisy, communal, puffed up stroll along the slender ledge before flying expediently off somewhere safely out of sight to spend the rest of the day feathering their nests.
After breakfast earlier that morning in the hotel restaurant, Alodia had fallen onto the bed and into sleep as into paralysis. Now she lay motionless on her back with her arms thrown wide, like a criminal held down by invisible assailants. Because she had yet to adjust to the twelve-hour time change, she was unhappily awake at midnight and peacefully asleep at noon. Added to this, Alodia found it impossible to sleep without the air conditioner, and because the power in the overcrowded city shut down every few hours, more often than not it was off.
But, for now, at least, the electricity seemed to be co-operating with that eccentric, American desire to maintain a normal body temperature, the air conditioner pumping out enough Freon to keep the room cool and almost dry. On the window, like an ecstatic Druid, the gecko was splashing maniacally about in rare puddles of sunshine. Overhead, the rhythmic, metallic click, click, click of a well-oiled typewriter could be heard. Vultures circling a corpse, reporters were.
Yesterday, before Conor knew why he was being airlifted down to Tan Son, he tossed into his duffle the civilian clothes he brought with him four months ago and never wore. Pair of Levi’s. Two black t-shirts. Half dozen jockey shorts. Because he had lost twenty pounds in four months, the Levi’s dropped several inches off his hips, like a girl’s skirt, and the t-shirts fluttered like capes with arm holes when he walked. He took off his clothes and flung them into a pile on the floor, pleased to demonstrate to himself that the Army hadn’t turned him into a compulsive, neat freak yet. When he lay down on the bed the sheets felt like cool water.
In another part of the hotel, Frank Sinatra was asking someone to take all of him as Conor lay there with his eyes open and imagined making love to Alodia in all the capitals of the world. Did he even know all the capitals of the world? Dublin . . . Paris . . . Rome . . .. She said there were a hundred and forty-two. A, Accra. Z . . . no Z. The last capital was W, Wellington. Capital of New Zealand. A to Z. Alpha Omega. Conor knew nothing whatsoever about the money that was to pay for this magical, mystery tour. He knew that Alodia had inherited money on her eighteenth birthday, three months ago, because he got that news in a letter. She never wrote how much, and he never asked, because it never mattered. But now he saw that it did matter, because without that money Alodia never would have come to Saigon.
A moth as big as the gecko, with green, iridescent wings, flew in a lazy, zigzag pattern past Conor’s face. Lightly touching down on a stack of books, methodically, the moth began to check its landing gear, drawing one at a time each delicate leg up over its head, holding it there for a moment, then slowly and oh-so-carefully, as if it were made of glass, setting the leg back down again. After a few moments, reassured that everything was in good working order, it flew away, leaving Conor with nothing to look at but Alodia’s stack of books.
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Popular. Two guys in his platoon were reading that. The Teachings Of Don Juan. Freaky. Soul On Ice. Good one. Read it in high school. The Magic Mountain. Thick one. Was it about mushrooms? The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. No clue. Sounded weird. Siddhartha. Psychedelic. The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. Old one. On his summer reading list in ’66. Silent Spring. Death of the planet from chemicals. The army was helping out with that one. Summerhill. Sounded nice. No idea. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Not true. Alodia was beautyful. Alongside these towering stacks of heavy air freight, a small, amber bowl of etched glass held Conor’s dog tags, which Alodia had asked him to remove. Before leaving home, Conor bought a gold peace sign on a long, gold chain, which cost him all of the money he made the previous summer playing in a band, and gave it to Alodia. Now, the silver dog tags and the gold peace sign lay tangled together in an obscene, metallic embrace. He looked at them with sadness and wondered which one would win.
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“You got my heart, you got my soul,
You got the silver, you got the gold,
You got the diamonds, from the mine
Well, that’s all right. It’ll buy some time . . ..”
Overhead, a second typewriter was tap dancing to the first typewriter’s fierce rhythm. The heavy, American, military vehicles, as they passed below the windows, shook the walls of the hotel. Conor closed his eyes and listened for that one pure note at the center of the noise around which all the other notes gathered and fell, like wheat against a scythe. From the city streets came the deathless, Siren call of the American God of Music: “Purple haze all in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same, acting funny and I don’t know why . . ..” Inside the room, a cricket was keeping time to Hendrix’s Fender telecaster. One cricket. No, two crickets. Through the wall he heard the soothing cadence of a woman’s soft voice: “chay,” or “chay-ah,” or “choi.” Sound without sense. Music without meaning.
Alodia had fallen asleep in her white dress, like Cinderella back from the ball, too exhausted to get undressed. Her hair on the pillow, a wreath of burnished gold, was a radiant crown she’d never have to wait for any dumb prince to bring. He watched as the sunlight sent its long, slender fingers through the slatted blinds to find her where she lay asleep beside him, touching the dark amber flints in her hair and setting them ablaze. Softly, with his fingertip, Conor traced the constellation of freckles on the horizon of her cheek, and kissed her collarbone where the blue light pooled and hollowed out. She was the first girl he loved, and she taught him everything he knew about love, not because she knew anything about it herself, but because of how he felt when they were together.
“You’re my first love, and you’re my last love,” he would tell her as they lay on the grass looking up at the stars. “First and last. Alpha Omega.”
That always made her laugh. They were only thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old.
Alodia had a curfew then. She had to be home before dark. Home when the streetlights came on. When Conor told her that American civilians in Saigon had a ten o’clock curfew she laughed and said that after traveling ten thousand miles, across twelve time zones, how had she managed to add just sixty minutes to her curfew?
Yesterday, Alodia told him a story about the two Vietnamese room girls, Dáo and Lê, or, in English, Peach and Pear. She was so exhausted from her flight that after she checked into the hotel Alodia slept sixteen hours straight. Dáo and Lê were helpful and kind. Girl stuff, she said shyly. They gave Alodia Coca-Cola syrup over crushed ice, and told her to sip it slowly, and after that she felt better. The Coca-Cola syrup surprised Conor. He thought they would have offered Alodia some foul-smelling concoction of roots and berries from a secret, V.C. recipe for heat exhaustion.
He rolled over and lit the saffron cone of incense inside the brass dragon’s head. As he watched the smoke spiral listlessly to the high, white ceiling, he remembered that Peach and Pear, in addition to the Coca-Cola syrup, gave five cones of sandalwood incense to Alodia. Not to carry prayers for the dead, as it did in Buddhist temples, they told her, but to keep away mosquitoes. Nevertheless, last night Alodia held the little brass dragon up to her mouth, and, gently blowing smoke around the room, said that she was sending a few prayers up to heaven, too, and Conor didn’t have the heart to tell her that God had abandoned that place, and, therefore, her prayers were useless.
“All the evil in the world is here,” he whispered to himself because he knew she couldn’t hear him. “God most needed where God most absent.”
