—

Other times, Lan seemed ambivalent to noise. Do you remember that one night, after we had gathered around Lan to hear a story after dinner, and the gunshots started firing off across the street? Although gunshots were not uncommon in Hartford, I was never prepared for the sound—piercing yet somehow more mundane than I imagined, like little league home runs cracked one after another out of the night’s park. We all screamed—you, Aunt Mai, and I—our cheeks and noses pressed to the floor. “Someone turn off the lights,” you shouted.

After the room went black for a few seconds, Lan said, “What? It’s only three shots.” Her voice came from the exact place where she was sitting. She hadn’t even flinched. “Is it not? Are you dead or are you breathing?”

Her clothes rustled against her skin as she waved us over. “In the war, entire villages would go up before you know where your balls were.” She blew her nose. “Now turn the light back on before I forget where I left off.”

With Lan, one of my tasks was to take a pair of tweezers and pluck, one by one, the grey hairs from her head. “The snow in my hair,” she explained, “it makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog? The snow is rooting into me.” She slid a pair of tweezers between my fingers, “Make Grandma young today, okay?” she said real quiet, grinning.

For this work I was paid in stories. After positioning her head under the window’s light, I would kneel on a pillow behind her, the tweezers ready in my grip. She would start to talk, her tone dropping an octave, drifting deep into a narrative. Mostly, as was her way, she rambled, the tales cycling one after another. They spiraled out from her mind only to return the next week with the same introduction: “Now this one, Little Dog, this one will really take you out. You ready? Are you even interested in what I’m saying? Good. Because I never lie.” A familiar story would follow, punctuated with the same dramatic pauses and inflections during moments of suspense or crucial turns. I’d mouth along with the sentences, as if watching a film for the umpteenth time—a movie made by Lan’s words and animated by my imagination. In this way, we collaborated.

As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open into them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

There were personal stories too. Like the time she told of how you were born, of the white American serviceman deployed on a navy destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. How Lan met him wearing her purple áo dài, the split sides billowing behind her under the bar lights as she walked. How, by then, she had already left her first husband from an arranged marriage. How, as a young woman living in a wartime city for the first time with no family, it was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive. As she spoke, my hand slowed, then stilled. I was engrossed in the film playing across the apartment walls. I had forgotten myself into her story, had lost my way, willingly, until she reached back and swatted my thigh. “Hey, don’t you sleep on me now!” But I wasn’t asleep. I was standing next to her as her purple dress swayed in the smoky bar, the glasses clinking under the scent of motor oil and cigars, of vodka and gunsmoke from the soldiers’ uniforms.

“Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.” I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us.

* * *

—

And then there was the school bus. That morning, like all mornings, no one sat next to me. I pressed myself against the window and filled my vision with the outside, mauve with early dark: the Motel 6, the Kline’s Laundromat, not yet opened, a beige and hoodless Toyota stranded in a front yard with a tire swing half tilted in dirt. As the bus sped up, bits of the city whirled by like objects in a washing machine. All around me the boys jostled each other. I felt the wind from their quick-jerked limbs behind my neck, their swooping arms and fists displacing the air. Knowing the face I possess, its rare features in these parts, I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them. That’s when I saw a spark in the middle of a parking lot outside. It wasn’t until I heard their voices behind me that I realized the spark came from inside my head. That someone had shoved my face into the glass.

“Speak English,” said the boy with a yellow bowl cut, his jowls flushed and rippling.

The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pane and leap out the window.

“Hey.” The jowlboy leaned in, his vinegar mouth on the side of my cheek. “Don’t you ever say nothin’? Don’t you speak English?” He grabbed my shoulder and spun me to face him. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. The boys crowded around me, sensing entertainment. I could smell their fresh-laundered clothes, the lavender and lilac in the softeners.

They waited to see what would happen. When I did nothing but close my eyes, the boy slapped me.

“Say something.” He shoved his fleshy nose against my blazed cheek. “Can’t you say even one thing?”

The second slap came from above, from another boy.

Bowlcut cupped my chin and steered my head toward him. “Say my name then.” He blinked, his eyelashes, long and blond, nearly nothing, quivered. “Like your mom did last night.”

Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows. I willed myself into a severe obedience and said his name.

I let their laughter enter me.

“Again,” he said.

“Kyle.”

“Louder.”

“Kyle.” My eyes still shut.

“That’s a good little bitch.”

Then, like a break in weather, a song came on the radio. “Hey, my cousin just went to their concert!” And like that it was over. Their shadows cleared above me. I let my nose drip with snot. I stared at my feet, at the shoes you bought me, the ones with red lights that flashed on the soles when I walked.

My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.

* * *

—

That night you were sitting on the couch with a towel wrapped around your head after your shower, a Marlboro Red smoldering in your hand. I stood there, holding myself.

“Why?” You stared hard at the TV.

You stabbed the cigarette into your teacup and I immediately regretted saying anything. “Why’d you let them do that? Don’t close your eyes. You’re not sleepy.”

You put your eyes on me, blue smoke swirling between us.

“What kind of boy would let them do that?” Smoke leaked from the corners of your mouth. “You did nothing.” You shrugged. “Just let them.”

I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us.

You grabbed my shoulders, your forehead pressed fast to my own. “Stop crying. You’re always crying!” You were so close I could smell the ash and toothpaste between your teeth. “Nobody touched you yet. Stop crying—I said stop, dammit!”

The third slap that day flung my gaze to one side, the TV screen flashed before my head snapped back to face you. Your eyes darted back and forth across my face.

Then you pulled me into you, my chin pressed hard to your shoulder.

“You have to find a way, Little Dog,” you said into my hair. “You have to because I don’t have the English to help you. I can’t say nothing to stop them. You find a way. You find a way or you don’t tell me about this ever again, you hear?” You pulled back. “You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going. You have a bellyful of English.” You placed your palm on my stomach, almost whispering, “You have to use it, okay?”

“Yes, Ma.”

You brushed my hair to one side, kissed my forehead. You studied me, a bit too long, before falling back on the sofa waving your hand. “Get me another cigarette.”

When I came back with the Marlboro and a Zippo lighter, the TV was off. You just sat there staring out the blue window.

* * *

—

The next morning, in the kitchen, I watched as you poured the milk into a glass tall as my head.