—

Back in the apartment, we had no oxtail. But we did have three mood rings, one glinting on each of our fingers. You were lying facedown on a blanket spread on the floor with Lan straddled across your back, kneading the knots and stiff cords from your shoulders. The greenish TV light made us all seem underwater. Lan was mumbling another monologue from one of her lives, each sentence a remix of the last, and interrupted herself only to ask you where it hurt.

Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.

It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now—as Lan called to me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.” And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.

You groaned with relief as we worked your muscles loose, unraveling you with nothing but our own weight. You lifted your finger and, speaking into the blanket, said, “Am I happy?”

It wasn’t until I saw the mood ring that I realized you were asking me, once more, to interpret another portion of America. Before I could answer, Lan thrust her hand before my nose. “Check me too, Little Dog—am I happy?” It could be, in writing you here, I am writing to everyone—for how can there be a private space if there is no safe space, if a boy’s name can both shield him and turn him into an animal at once?

“Yes. You’re both happy,” I answered, knowing nothing. “You’re both happy, Ma. Yes,” I said again. Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?

“I’m happy!” Lan threw her arms in the air. “I’m happy on my boat. My boat, see?” She pointed to your arms, splayed out like oars, she and I on each side. I looked down and saw it, the brown, yellowish floorboards swirling into muddy currents. I saw the weak ebb thick with grease and dead grass. We weren’t rowing, but adrift. We were clinging to a mother the size of a raft until the mother beneath us grew stiff with sleep. And we soon fell silent as the raft took us all down this great brown river called America, finally happy.

It is a beautiful country depending on where you look. Depending on where you look you might see the woman waiting on the shoulder of the dirt road, an infant girl wrapped in a sky-blue shawl in her arms. She rocks her hips, cups the girl’s head. You were born, the woman thinks, because no one else was coming. Because no one else is coming, she begins to hum.

A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.

A woman, a girl, a gun. This is an old story, one anyone can tell. A trope in a movie you can walk away from if it weren’t already here, already written down.

It has started to rain; the dirt around the woman’s bare feet is flecked with red-brown quotation marks—her body a thing spoken with. Her white shirt clings against her bony shoulders as she sweats. The grass all around her is flattened, as if god had pressed his hand there, reserving a space for an eighth day. It’s a beautiful country, she’s been told, depending on who you are.

* * *

—

It’s not a god—of course not—but a helicopter, a Huey, another lord whose wind’s so heavy that, a few feet away, a lint-grey warbler thrashes in the high grass, unable to correct herself.

The girl’s eye fills with the chopper in the sky, her face a dropped peach. Her blue shawl finally made visible with black ink, like this.

Somewhere, deep inside this beautiful country, in the back of a garage lit with a row of fluorescent lights, as legend has it, five men have gathered around a table. Beneath their sandaled feet, pools of motor oil reflect nothing. On one end of the table a cluster of glass bottles. The vodka inside them shimmers in the harsh light as the men talk, their elbows shifting impatiently. They fall silent each time one of them glances toward the door. It should open anytime now. The light flickers once, stays on.

The vodka poured into shot glasses, some ringed with rust from being stored in a metal bullet case from the previous war. The heavy glasses thunk on the table, the burn swallowed into a darkness invented by thirst.

If I say the woman. If I say the woman is bearing down, her back hunched below this man-made storm, would you see her? From where you are standing, inches, which is to say years, from this page, would you see the shred of blue shawl blowing across her collarbones, the mole at the outside corner of her left eye as she squints at the men, who are now close enough for her to realize they are not men at all, but boys—eighteen, twenty at most? Can you hear the sound of the chopper, its dismemberment of air so loud it drowns the shouting beneath it? The wind coarse with smoke—and something else, a sweat-soaked char, its odd and acrid taste blowing from a hut at the edge of the field. A hut that, moments ago, was filled with human voices.

The girl, her ear pressed to the woman’s chest, listens as if eavesdropping behind a door. There is something running inside the woman, a beginning, or rather, a rearranging of syntax. Eyes closed, she searches, her tongue on the cliff of a sentence.

The veins green over his wrists, the boy raises the M-16, blond hairs sweated brown along his arms. The men are drinking and laughing, their gapped teeth like mouthfuls of dice. This boy, his lips pulled at an angle, green eyes filmed pink. This private first class. The men are ready to forget, a few still have the scent of their wives’ makeup on their fingers. His mouth opens and closes rapidly. He is asking a question, or questions, he is turning the air around his words into weather. Is there a language for falling out of language? A flash of teeth, a finger on the trigger, the boy saying, “No. No, step back.”

The olive tag stitched to the boy’s chest frames a word. Although the woman cannot read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat. She knows the first letter in the name is C. Like in Go Cong, the name of the open-air market she had visited two days ago, its neon marquee buzzing at the entrance. She was there to buy a new shawl for the girl. The cloth had cost more than what she had planned to spend, but when she saw it, day-bright among the grey and brown bolts, she peered up at the sky, even though it was already nightfall, and paid knowing there would be nothing left to eat with. Sky blue.

* * *

—

When the door opens, the men put down their glasses, some after quickly draining the dregs. A macaque monkey, the size of a dog, is led, with collar and leash, by a stooped man with combed white hair. No one speaks. All ten eyes are on the mammal as it staggers into the room, its burnt-red hair reeking of alcohol and feces, having been force-fed vodka and morphine in its cage all morning.

The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having.

A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?

The force of the soldier’s voice pushes the woman back. She wavers, one arm flailing, then steadies, pressing the girl into her.

A mother and a daughter. A me and a you. It’s an old story.

The stooped man leads the monkey under the table, guides its head through a hole cut in the center. Another bottle is opened. The twist cap clicks as the men reach for their glasses.

The monkey is tied to a beam under the table. It jostles about. With its mouth muffled behind a leather strap, its screams sound more like the reel of a fishing rod cast far across a pond.

* * *