Inheriting the War Read online

  I was upset that Baba broke his promise and I had been looking forward to going. We got to our driveway and I got out to push open the gate so that the car could go in. I pushed the gate a bit harder than usual and Baba got mad at me for showing anger toward him. So I had to “chol houng hay” which literally means “sit in the air” also known as “the horse stance,” a kind of Chinese punishment. My back had to be straight and not leaning against anything, I had to hold my ears with my hands, and my thighs had to be parallel to the floor. I had to sit as if I was sitting on a chair, except there was no chair. Five minutes of doing this and I couldn’t stand it anymore: my thighs tightened up and I felt like the house was falling down on me. Baba put a stick across my thighs as I was sweating and sitting in the air and said if the stick dropped, then he would hit me. No one in the house could stop him; no one wanted to stop him. I was crying and Baba said that I had to stop crying or else he’d hit me. I felt like I was dying; I was shaking, sweating, crying, and my heart was broken. For two hours, Baba made me sit in the air with my back straight and a stick across my thighs. Finally, Grandma begged him to let me go. He let me go. I went to the bathroom and cried. I cried loudly, gasping for breath. Baba heard me crying and told me to stop. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop it. He said that I had to go back to being punished. So, I went back to chol houng hay. It was one of the worst days of my life.

  RED

  Baba refused to wear anything that was the color red. He said that it was a good thing that mama’s car wasn’t red; otherwise, he would’ve repainted it. He said he hated red because he said it was the color of communism.

  BABA

  When Baba was in Hoang Lien Son “Reeducation” Camp, his fellow inmates died of hunger, sickness, beatings. If someone attempted to escape and was caught, they would get one year in solitary confinement or the death penalty. Some were bludgeoned to death in front of the other prisoners. Some prisoners were hung upside down from the ceiling and beaten as they swung, and if they screamed in pain they were beaten some more. As punishment, prisoners were tied up in excruciating positions, shackled, and placed in small boxes where their tied-up legs became gangrenous and had to be chopped off. Prisoners were punished for “reactionary statements,” forced to work more hours and deprived of their small ration of food. Prisoners died during interrogation. There was a list of rules they had to memorize and follow.

  BRANDON COURTNEY is a veteran of the United States Navy, and the author of The Grief Muscles and Rooms for Rent in the Burning City, as well as of the chapbooks Inadequate Grave and Improvised Devices. Another full-length collection is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Tin House, Guernica, Memorious, The Progressive, and American Literary Review.

  PROMETHEUS

  for Neal D. Courtney, Cambodia, 1969–70

  Years before his bedridden blindness,

  my sobriety,

  there was day-tripping

  through the National Mall’s

  gazing pool—The Three Soldiers—

  an embossed flask

  clanging

  against my father’s belt buckle.

  He poured shot after shot

  of off-brand bourbon into cut glass,

  chain-smoked Chesterfields, rolled spliffs,

  offering me a swallow,

  a medicinal hit,

  from the same ashen hand

  that formed his fist

  that christened drywall,

  my mother’s lip.

  Fever wasn’t the only thing to break

  in Cambodia,

  in roadside ditches dark

  as umbilical blood.

  There was the slug fired from the angel end

  of his rifle,

  ripping through eucalyptus leaves.

  There was him,

  left in tourniquet grass

  to shepherd home our dead.

  Now when he sits

  on the steps and tells me of the world’s

  original fire,

  how black wasps carouselled

  the tongues of bloated bison,

  I believe him.

  No maggot went unfed.

  YEAR WITHOUT DUSTING

  There’s softness

  to the photograph’s

  image after a year

  without dusting:

  my father

  in his uniform,

  the picture

  hanging in the hallway,

  crooked,

  a single nail

  pulling from the drywall.

  It held the weight

  mother couldn’t.

  He told her once

  that after a month

  in Vietnam, warm

  water from the shower

  was enough

  to make

  the soldiers’ cocks hard.

  Now, spring storm,

  the sky coming apart

  in a thousand places

  has knocked the power

  from its lines; my wife

  warms water on the stove,

  tests the temperature

  against her wrist.

  She pours pot after pot

  into the tub,

  pours blood-warm

  water over me.

  ACHILLES, VETERANS’ HOSPITAL (PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA)

  Because his pain’s no longer phantom,

  he traces two fingers along the scar

  where surgeons went looking for a lion,

  opened the bone cage of his chest.

  He waits in the emergency room’s

  borrowed light for orderlies to drag

  his corpse behind the wheelchair’s shadow,

  knowing doctors will make peace

  with his parts. His greaves have been

  replaced with gauze, cuirass for paper

  gown, mitra for colostomy bag.

  He knows how an august father could perch

  on his son’s shoulders, grip the wick

  of his neck, as they both flee the burning city.

  LINH DINH was born in Saigon in 1963. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004); five books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006), Jam Alerts (2007), and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (2009); a novel about Vietnam, Love Like Hate (2010); and a nonfiction account of a declining USA, Postcards from the End of America (2017). Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry (2013). He has also published widely in Vietnamese.

  VIET CONG UNIVERSITY

  When I tell people I went to VCU, they usually ask, “Viet Cong University?”

  “No, Virginia Commonwealth.”

  Talking of Viet Cong Universities: when a squadron of Viet Cong took over the ARVN officers’ club at Tan Son Nhat Airport on April 30, 1975, they opened a fridge and saw twenty cans of coke. Noticing a tab on each can, their officer, a man whose face resembled a backhanded fist, explained: “Hand grenades. A special kind. That’s why they’re being kept in this cold box.”

  The Viet Cong took one of the grenades outside and flung it against a burnt out jeep. It clanked off the side but did not explode. A black, fizzing liquid oozed out.

  “Chemical weapon,” the officer explained, “like Agent Orange.”

  A mangy dog came by to lap up the black, fizzing liquid. He was still seen to be alive a week later.

  PRISONER WITH A DICTIONARY

  And so a young man was thrown into prison and found in his otherwise empty cell a foreign dictionary. It was always dark in there and he couldn’t even tell if it was a dictionary at first. He was not an intellectual type and had never even owned a dictionary in his life. He was far from stupid, however, but had an ironic turn of mind that could squeeze out a joke from most tragic situations. He could also be very witty around certain women. In any case, he did
not know what to do with this nearly worthless book but to use it as a stool and as a pillow. Periodically he also tore out pages from it to wipe himself. Soon, however, out of sheer boredom, he decided to look at this dictionary. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light by now and he could make out all the words with relative ease in that eternal twilight. Although he was not familiar with the foreign language, and did not even know what language it was, he suddenly felt challenged to learn it. His main virtue, and the main curse of his life, was the ability to follow through on any course of action once he had set his mind to it. This book represented the last problem, the only problem, he would ever solve. The prisoner began by picking out words at random and scrutinizing their definitions. Of course, each definition was made up of words entirely unknown to him. Undeterred, he would look up all the words in the definition, which led him to even more unfathomable words. To define “man,” for example, the prisoner had to look up not only “human” and “person” but also “opposable” and “thumb.” To define “thumb,” he had to look up not only “short” and “digit” but also “thick” and “of” and “a” and “the.” To define “the,” he had to look up “that” and “a” (again) and “person” (again) and “thing” and “group.” Being alone in his cell night and day, without any distraction, allowed the prisoner to concentrate with such vigor that soon he could retain and cross index hundreds of definitions in his head. The dictionary had well over a thousand pages but the prisoner was determined to memorize every definition on the page. He cringed at the thought that he had once torn out pages to wipe himself. These pages now represented to him gaps in his eventual knowledge. Because they were gone forever he would never be able to learn all of the words in that particular language. Still, it was with an elation bordering on madness that he woke up each morning, eager to eat up more words. Like many people, he equated the acquisition of a vast vocabulary with knowledge, even with wisdom, and so he could feel his stature growing by the day, if not by the second. Although he did not know what the words meant, what they referred to in real life, he reasoned that he understood these words because he knew their definitions. And because he was living inside this language all the time, like a fetus thriving inside a womb, there were times when he felt sure he could guess at the general implications of a word, whether it was a plant or an animal, for example, or whether it indicated something positive or negative. But his guesses were always wrong, of course. Because “bladder” sounded somehow vast and nebulous to the prisoner, he thought that it must have something to do with the outdoors, most likely the weather, a gust of wind or a torrential rain or a bolt of lightning. “Father,” with its forlorn, exasperated tone, made the prisoner think of something dead and putrid: a corpse or a heap of garbage. He guessed that “homicide” was a flower. He thought “July” meant “August.” The prisoner was also justifiably proud of his pronunciation, which was remarkably crisp and confident, the stresses more often than not falling on the right syllables. If he were to speak on the phone, the prisoner could almost be mistaken for a native speaker, albeit one of the lower class. But if the prisoner was convinced he was gaining a new language he was also surely losing one because he had, by this time, forgotten nearly all the words of his native language. By this time he could no longer name any part of the anatomy, even the most basic, hand, nose, face, mouth, etc., and so his own body was becoming vague, impersonal, unreal. Although he was surrounded by filth, he could no longer conjure up the word “filth.” The only word that came readily to his tongue, automatically, unbidden, was “prison” because that was the last thing he thought of each night, and the first thing he thought of each morning. His dreams had become entirely devoid of conversations or thoughts. Often they were just a series of images or abstract patches of colors. Sometimes they were also made up entirely of sounds, a cacophony of his own voice reciting bits of definitions. Even in his worst nightmare, he could no longer shout out “mother!” in his own language. But this loss never bothered him, he barely noticed it, because he was convinced he was remaking himself anew. As he was being squeezed out of the world, the only world he had a right to belong in, he thought he was entering a new universe. Perhaps by purging himself of his native language, the prisoner was unconsciously trying to get rid of his horrible past, because, frankly, there was not a single word of his native tongue that did not evoke, for the prisoner, some horrible experience or humiliation. Perhaps he could sense that his native tongue was the very author of his horrible life. But these are only conjectures, we do not know for sure. In any case nights and days the prisoner shouted out definitions to himself. If one were to press one’s ear against the thick iron door at midnight, one would hear, for example: “an animal with a long, thin tail that commonly infests buildings.” Or “a deep and tender feeling for an arch enemy.” Or “a shuddering fear and disgust accompanied by much self-loathing.” With so many strange words and definitions accumulating, surely some profound knowledge, some revelation, was at hand? What is a revelation, after all, but the hard-earned result of an exceptional mind working at peak capacity? The prisoner was thankful to be given a chance to concentrate unmolested for such a continuous length of time. He felt himself victorious: condemned to an empty cell, he had been robbed of the world, but through a heroic act of will, he had remade the universe. He had (nearly) everything because he had (nearly) all the words of an entire language. But the truth is the prisoner had regained nothing. He only thought that way, of course, because he had to think that way. After decades of unceasing mental exertion, the only fruit of the prisoner’s remarkable labor, the only word he ever acquired for sure, was “dictionary,” simply because it was printed on the cover of a book he knew for sure was a dictionary. For even as he ran across the definition for “prisoner,” and was memorizing it by heart, he didn’t even know that he was only reading about himself.

  DAVID ELLIS lives in New York City where he writes and teaches. He is a recipient of the Hearst Prize for Poetry and has had fiction appear in The Bridge and Sandscript Art and Literary Magazine. His father spent 1965 flying combat missions over Viet Nam in Huey gunship helicopters, an experience he’s kept locked away until recently. “Aphasia” recounts the desire from both son and father to enter the darker conversations about war and one’s inner demons, while finding more success in kindling connections through indirect means.

  APHASIA

  We were warned repeatedly not to touch the paper lunch bags hanging in the trees, warned by teachers, neighborhood parents, segments on the local news, and the ugly contents of the bags themselves. Inside: two blackened figs, shriveled to leathery Jivaro heads. I make that connection to shrunken human heads now, 35 years on, with their rough-sewn stitching across eyes and mouths, but even then, in grade school and limited knowledge of darker practices, I saw the little blackened blobs as unsettling and enticing, testicular sacks, made even more ominous and intriguing with the knowledge they were poisoned. In 1970s and early ’80s California, Big Agra of the Central Valley, and its exploitative Grapes of Wrath existence, was under mortal threat from a tiny, nearly invisible, Mediterranean fruit fly. The rotting and poisoned bait sitting in the open sacks strung up in the trees, meant for the flies, and all the warnings around it was too great of a temptation for all of us kids who made a playground of the fig orchards.

  I spent my pre-teen years as a latchkey kid. After school I walked the few short blocks of modest, cookie-cutter tract homes that edged acres of fig orchards to our house, a virtually indistinguishable brick and stucco job. Most of the diffuse edges of Fresno during that time seemed like little more than an oversized farm town. Our little corner of the city, Fig Garden, was a quiet place to grow up, seemingly tucked safely away in God’s pocket. Of a certain kind of god, or pocket, anyway. Many winter mornings were blanketed in thick, pea-soup fog; summer days were similarly blanketed in a heavy smog and haze that drifted up from L.A. It was a place easy to lose perspective, like the entirety of the world was merely a pill bott
le stuffed and muffled by a protective cotton ball. Running along the subdivisions of houses was an eerie shielding band of fig orchards. Rows upon rows of gnarled, runty fig trees—branches, roots, and bark knotted and warted—surrounded our neighborhood like stands of wizened hags set up as sentinels when fog or smog drifted through. This place suited my quiet and safe family, insulated in our own silence and separated from the dark, cultivated wood.

  I had hours to myself every day after school. My mother worked as a social worker in a neighboring county. My dad worked as a pilot for the Border Patrol, up in the sky scanning the surrounding miles and miles of farms for undocumented pickers who ran when La Migra showed up. His main job was, simply, to radio down where the migrant farmers ran to as agents on the ground attempted to round the workers up. My older brother was busy with high school, sports, and friends across town. I liked having the house to myself. I could watch whatever I wanted on TV, sneak as many Chips Ahoy as I dared, and I didn’t have to talk with anyone, except when I left the house and my friends and I headed into the orchards to play.

  Being home alone presented the usual temptations to poke around. Both my parents were quiet, but my mom—trained as a clinician—often tried to break the silence with probing questions or with stiff inquiries that seemed gleaned from a workbook. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t make those efforts. He worked long and odd hours, napped on the couch often when he was home, and was sometimes sent off on months’ long assignments as a government pilot. “Detail” is what my mom called it. He was a bit of a stranger to me, one that I tried to unstrange by snooping through his stuff.

  Secreted up on a shelf in his closet, hidden under some t-shirts, were three cardboard cigar boxes. To my eight-year-old mind, these boxes held relics of a nearly spiritual kind and had a drawing power greater than lunch sacks of poisoned fruit hung in knotted trees. As I examined them, the objects found in the cigar boxes took form as nebulous constellations, but, just as quickly, whatever inchoate image growing out of my haphazard curation disintegrated. The inability to make sense of anything only underlined that the value of the objects must be otherworldly. There were two rattlesnake tails, some arrowheads, rusty pocketknives, brightly colored and intricately patterned foreign bills, and the like. A few Army patches, insignia, and ribbon bars were interspersed with other odds and ends. There was a small movie reel that I unwound once in the harsh light of the single bulb dangling in the closet. I slipped the slim frames through my hands a few inches from my face: black and white, a woman and a man standing near a bed in what looked like a motel room, both of them dressed smartly—he, a tight suit and skinny black tie, she a pale dress with a fur cape hanging over the shoulders—then sitting on the bed talking, a cigarette is lit and passed back and forth. Part of me wondered if the man was my dad, it was hard to tell, though it clearly wasn’t my mom in the frames. I unspooled yards and yards of film, gathering around my feet in a blooming tangle, before it turned out to be a dirty picture. I was surprised and not surprised: baffled that two people, looking bored, then slouched in those stretches of unwound film, could end up so shockingly and clinically naked. The lack of discernible causation unnerved me, as if any conversation could take such a foul turn. Yet, I must have suspected. Why else peel through the reel?