I touch your shoulder with the gentleness Trevor showed me back in the river. Trevor who, wild as he was, wouldn’t eat veal, wouldn’t eat the children of cows. I think now about those children, taken from their mothers and placed in boxes the size of their lives, to be fed and fattened into soft meat. I am thinking of freedom again, how the calf is most free when the cage opens and it’s led to the truck for slaughter. All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.

For a few delirious moments in the barn, as Trevor and I fucked, the cage around me became invisible, even if I knew it was never gone. How my elation became a trap when I lost control of my inner self. How waste, shit, excess, is what binds the living, yet is always present and perennial in death. When the calves are finally butchered, surrendering their insides is often their final act, their bowels shocked from the sudden velocity of endings.

I squeeze your wrist and say your name.

I look at you and see, through the pitch dark, Trevor’s eyes—Trevor whose face has, by now, already begun to blur in my mind—how they burned under the barn lamp as we dressed, shuddering quietly from the water. I see Lan’s eyes in her last hours, like needful drops of water, how they were all she could move. Like the calf’s wide pupils as the latch is opened, and it charges from its prison toward the man with a harness ready to loop around its neck.

“Where am I, Little Dog?” You’re Rose. You’re Lan. You’re Trevor. As if a name can be more than one thing, deep and wide as a night with a truck idling at its edge, and you can step right out of your cage, where I wait for you. Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things—and call it good.

I remember the table. I remember the table made of words given to me from your mouth. I remember the room burning. The room was burning because Lan spoke of fire. I remember the fire as it was told to me in the apartment in Hartford, all of us asleep on the hardwood floor, swaddled in blankets from the Salvation Army. I remember the man from the Salvation Army handing my father a stack of coupons for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which we called Old-Man Chicken (Colonel Sanders’s face was plastered on every red bucket). I remember tearing into the crispy meat and oil like it was a gift from saints. I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted. I remember thinking you and Lan should be saints.

“Remember,” you said each morning before we stepped out in cold Connecticut air, “don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese.”

* * *

—

    It’s the first day of August and the sky’s clear over central Virginia, now thick with summer’s growth. We’re visiting Grandpa Paul to celebrate my graduating college the spring before. We’re in the garden. The first colors of evening fall upon the wooden fence and everything ambers, as if we’re in a snowglobe filled with tea. You’re in front of me, walking away, toward the far fence, your pink shirt shifting in and out of the shade. It catches, then loses the shadows under the oaks.

* * *

—

I remember my father, which is to say I am putting him back together. I am putting him together in a room because there must have been a room. There must have been a square in which a life would occur, briefly, with or without joy. I remember joy. It was the sound of coins in a brown paper bag: his wages after a day scaling fish at the Chinese market on Cortland. I remember the coins spilling onto the floor, how we ran our fingers through the cold pieces, inhaling their copper promise. How we thought we were rich. How the thought of being rich was a kind of happiness.

I remember the table. How it must have been made of wood.

* * *

—

The garden is so lush it seems to pulse in the weak light. Vegetation fills every inch of it, tomato vines robust enough to hide the chicken wire they lean on, wheatgrass and kale crowded in galvanized tubs the size of canoes. The flowers I know now by name: magnolias, asters, poppies, marigolds, baby’s breath—all of it, every shade equalized by dusk.

What are we if not what the light says we are?

Your pink shirt glows ahead of me. Crouched, your back poised as you study something on the ground between your feet. You brush your hair behind your ears, pause, study it closer. Only the seconds move between us.

A swarm of gnats, a veil suspended over no one’s face. Everything here seems to have just finished overflowing, resting, at last, spent and spilled from the summer’s frothing. I walk toward you.

* * *

—

I remember walking with you to the grocery store, my father’s wages in your hands. How, by then, he had beaten you only twice—which meant there was still hope it would be the last. I remember armfuls of Wonder Bread and jars of mayo, how you thought mayo was butter, how in Saigon, butter and white bread were only eaten inside mansions guarded by butlers and steel gates. I remember everyone smiling back at the apartment, mayonnaise sandwiches raised to cracked lips. I remember thinking we lived in a sort of mansion.

I remember thinking this was the American Dream as snow crackled against the window and night came, and we lay down to sleep, side by side, limbs tangled as the sirens wailed through the streets, our bellies full of bread and “butter.”

* * *

—

Inside the house, Paul is in the kitchen bent over a bowl of pesto: thick shiny basil leaves, machete-crushed garlic cloves, pine nuts, onions roasted till their gold edges blacken, and the bright scent of lemon zest. His glasses fog as he leans in, struggling to steady his arthritic hand as he pours the steaming pasta over the mixture. A few gentle tosses with two wooden spoons and the bow ties are bathed in a moss-green sauce.

The windows in the kitchen sweat, replacing the view of the garden with an empty movie screen. It is time to call the boy and his mother in. But Paul lingers for a while, watches the blank canvas. A man with nothing, finally, in his hands, waiting for everything to start.

I remember the table, which is to say I am putting it together. Because someone opened their mouth and built a structure with words and now I am doing the same each time I see my hands and think table, think beginnings. I remember running my fingers along the edges, studying the bolts and washers I created in my mind. I remember crawling underneath, checking for chewed gum, the names of lovers, but finding only bits of dried blood, splinters. I remember this beast with four legs hammered out of a language not yet my own.

* * *

—

A butterfly, pinked by the hour, lands on a blade of sweetgrass, then flits off. The blade twitches once, then stills. The butterfly tumbles the length of the yard, its wings resembling that corner of Toni Morrison’s Sula I dog-eared so many times the tiny ear broke off one morning in New York, fluttered down the liquid winter avenue. It was the part where Eva pours gasoline on her drug-doomed son and lights the match in an act of love and mercy I hope to both be capable of—and never know.

I squint. It’s not a monarch—just a weak white blur ready to die in the first frost. But I know the monarchs are close by, their orange-and-black wings folded, dusted, and baked by heat, ready to flee south. Strand by strand twilight stitches our edges deep red.

* * *

—

One night back in Saigon, two days after we buried Lan, I heard the sound of tinny music and the pitched voice of children through the hotel balcony. It was nearly two in the morning. You were still asleep on the mattress beside me. I got up, slipped on my sandals, and walked out. The hotel was in an alley. My eyes adjusting to the fluorescent tube lights hung along the wall, I made my way toward the music.

The night blazed up before me. People were suddenly everywhere, a kaleidoscope of colors, garments, limbs, the glint of jewelry and sequins. Vendors were selling fresh coconuts, cut mangoes, rice cakes pressed into gooey masses wrapped in banana leaves and steamed in large metal vats, sugarcane juice sold in sandwich bags cut at the corners, one of them now held by a boy who sucked from the plastic, beaming. A man, his arms nearly black from sun, squatted in the street. He worked over a cutting board no larger than his palm, halved a roasted chicken with a single deft cleaver blow, then distributed the slippery pieces to a flock of waiting kids.

Between string lights hung low from balconies on each side of the street, I glimpsed a makeshift stage. On it, a group of elaborately dressed women gyrated, their arms colorful banners in the breeze, singing karaoke. Their voices broke off and floated down the street. Nearby, a small TV, propped on a plastic white dining table, displayed the lyrics to a Vietnamese pop song from the eighties.