—

Seeing the letters on the boy’s chest, the woman remembers her own name. The possession of a name, after all, being all they share.

“Lan,” she says. “Tên t?i là Lan.” My name is Lan.

Lan meaning Lily. Lan the name she gave herself, having been born nameless. Because her mother simply called her Seven, the order in which she came into the world after her siblings.

It was only after she ran away, at seventeen, from her arranged marriage to a man three times her age, that Lan named herself. One night, she brewed her husband a pot of tea, dropping a pinch of lotus stems to deepen his sleep, then waited till the palm-leaf walls shivered with his snoring. Through the flat black night, she made her way, feeling one low branch after another.

Hours later, she knocked on the door to her mother’s house. “Seven,” her mother said through a crack in the door, “a girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest. You know this. How can you not know?” And then the door closed, but not before a hand, gnarled as wood, pressed a pair of pearl earrings into Lan’s grip. The mother’s pale face erased by the door’s swing, the lock’s click.

The crickets were too loud as Lan stumbled toward the nearest streetlamp, then followed each dim post, one by one, until, by dawn, the city appeared, smeared with fog.

A man selling rice cakes spotted her, her soiled nightgown torn at the collar, and offered a scoop of sweet rice steaming on a banana leaf. She dropped down in the dirt and chewed, eyes fixed on the ground between her coal-shaded feet.

“Where are you from,” the man asked, “a young girl like you wandering at this hour? What is your name?”

Her mouth filled itself with that lush sound, the tone forming through the chewed rice before the vowel rose, its protracted ah, pronounced Laang. Lily, she decided, for no reason. “Lan,” she said, the rice falling, like chipped light, from her lips. “Tên t?i là Lan.”

Surrounding the boy soldier, the woman, and the girl is the land’s verdant insistence. But which land? Which border that was crossed and erased, divided and rearranged?

Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of sky stolen from a clear day.

Sometimes, at night, the girl asleep, Lan stares into the dark, thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.

* * *

—

Due to their ubiquity and punitive size, macaques are the most hunted primates in Southeast Asia.

The white-haired man raises a glass and makes a toast, grins. Five other glasses are lifted to meet his, the light falls in each shot because the law says so. The shots are held by arms that belong to men who will soon cut open the macaque’s skull with a scalpel, open it like a lid on a jar. The men will take turns consuming the brain, dipped in alcohol or swallowed with cloves of garlic from a porcelain plate, all while the monkey kicks beneath them. The fishing rod cast and cast but never hitting water. The men believe the meal will rid them of impotence, that the more the monkey rages, the stronger the cure. They are doing this for the future of their genes—for the sake of sons and daughters.

They wipe their mouths with napkins printed with sunflowers that soon grow brown, then start to tear—soaked.

After, at night, the men will come home renewed, their stomachs full, and press themselves against their wives and lovers. The scent of floral makeup—cheek to cheek.

A sound now of dribbling. A liquid warmth slides down the hem of her black trousers. The acrid smell of ammonia. Lan pisses herself in front of the two boys—and holds the girl tighter. Around her feet a circle of wet heat. The brain of the macaque monkey is the closest, of any mammal, to a human’s.

The raindrops darken as they slide down the blond soldier’s dirt-baked cheeks before collecting, like ellipses, along his jaw.

* * *

—

“Yoo Et Aye numbuh won,” she says, urine still dripping down her ankles. Then again, louder. “Yoo Et Aye numbuh won.

“No bang bang.” She raises her free hand to the sky, as if to let someone pull her right up to it. “No bang bang. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won.”

A tic in the boy’s left eye. A green leaf falling into a green pond.

He stares at the girl, her too-pink skin. The girl whose name is Hong, or Rose. Because why not another flower? Hong—a syllable the mouth must swallow whole at once. Lily and Rose, side by side on this breath-white road. A mother holding a daughter. A rose growing out of the stem of a lily.

He takes note of Rose’s hair, its errant cinnamon tint fringed blond around the temples. Seeing the soldier’s eyes on her daughter, Lan pushes the girl’s face to her chest, shielding her. The boy watches this child, the whiteness showing from her yellow body. He could be her father, he thinks, realizes. Someone he knows could be her father—his sergeant, squad leader, platoon partner, Michael, George, Thomas, Raymond, Jackson. He considers them, rifle gripped tight, his eyes on the girl with American blood before the American gun.

“No bang bang . . . Yoo Et Aye . . . ,” Lan whispers now. “Yoo Et Aye . . .”

Macaques are capable of self-doubt and introspection, traits once thought attributable only to humans. Some species have displayed behavior indicating the use of judgment, creativity, even language. They are able to recall past images and apply them to current problem solving. In other words, macaques employ memory in order to survive.

* * *

—

The men will eat until the animal is empty, the monkey slowing as they spoon, its limbs heavy and listless. When nothing’s left, when all of its memories dissolve into the men’s bloodstreams, the monkey dies. Another bottle will be opened.

Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.

Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. Hands up. Don’t shoot. Yoo Et Aye numbuh won. Hands up. No bang bang.

The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force. The first soldier steps back. The second one moves the wooden divider, waves the woman forward. The houses behind her now reduced to bonfires. As the Huey returns to the sky, the rice stalks erect themselves, only slightly disheveled. The shawl drenched indigo with sweat and rain.

In the garage, on a wall of stripped paint, spotted brick underneath, a shelf hangs as a makeshift altar. On it are framed pictures where saints, dictators, and martyrs, the dead—a mother and father—stare out, unblinking. In the glass frames, the reflection of sons leaning back in their chairs. One of them pours what’s left of the bottle over the sticky table, wipes it clean. A white cloth is placed over the macaque’s hollowed mind. The light in the garage flickers once, stays on.

The woman stands in a circle of her own piss. No, she is standing on the life-sized period of her own sentence, alive. The boy turns, walks back to his post at the checkpoint. The other boy taps his helmet and nods at her, his finger, she notices, still on the trigger. It is a beautiful country because you are still in it. Because your name is Rose, and you are my mother and the year is 1968—the Year of the Monkey.

The woman walks forward. Passing the guard, she glances one last time at the rifle. The muzzle, she notices, is not darker than her daughter’s mouth. The light flickers once, stays on.

I wake to the sound of an animal in distress. The room so dark I can’t tell if my eyes are even open. There’s a breeze through the cracked window, and with it an August night, sweet but cut with the bleach smell of lawn chemicals—the scent of manicured suburban yards—and I realize I’m not in my own house.