Monday, August 13, 2012

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 26: What the Fuck Am I Doing Here

XXVI.


Soon the light faded beneath the square brown fence behind the house. I peeked out the window in the midst of conversation and watched the sun rays whisper slowly into the earth. As the sun fell deeper and deeper into the wooden cracks of the fence, Tuan and Wheeler sank further into the artful chaos of conversation. Tuan was becoming more difficult to understand as the PBR amplified his Vietnamese accent, yet Wheeler deciphered the anecdotes with stupefying ease. Moments of laughter and emotional silence bounced between the mustard colored walls, and I sank into the linoleum kitchen, deflated.

My mind stumbled around the day and days that had passed. I could hear Vietnamese Cait Hacket sifting through drawers and picking up heavy objects and heaving them onto different parts of the floor upstairs. What the hell was she doing up there?  I couldn't help but think of her as an imposter, as though she was at fault for sharing the name of our missing Cait. I imagined the real Cait unzipping from the inside of this Vietnamese costume. She'd probably just have a secret smile on her face as she would step out of the plump suit and regain her image as the Cait I knew. She would wonder why I worried. She would strike up a joke or commit herself to a new scheme.

I excused myself from the kitchen and walked down the narrow dark hallway to the bathroom. A dangling chain triggered a single bulb light on the ceiling, which was accompanied by a fan that sounded like an alarm that lacked urgency. I could see my reflection in the high rectangular mirror. My skin looked like paper against the deep green walls, and my hair hung in tired strings loosely around my face. It had been a few days since I'd seen myself, and I almost didn't recognize my own face. I wondered if things truly changed that fast, or if it was just the way I saw things that did.

Next to the bathroom door was a small staircase leading up towards the loud thumps and heaves of Vietnamese Cait. I walked lightly on the wooden stairs and my feet squeaked into the old boards, "rick rack, rick rack, rick rack." Cait must have heard me coming towards her. She peeked her head out into the dark hallway from inside a lit room and screamed something in Vietnamese. She turned and saw me.

"Oh. It's you," she said.

Her voice was a bit kinder now in a way that seemed to surprise both of us as it escaped her lips.

"I'm moving my furniture around." She leaned against the doorway and took a tired breath. "Want to see?"

"Sure," I said. I followed her into the room.

There was a large bed with a heavy black frame on an angle in the middle of the room, mid-move. A dresser was nearly blocking the entrance way, and piles of clothes and knickknacks lined the walls in chaotic graves.

"Wow, this is a lot of stuff," I said.
"Yeah it is. It's really heavy, too, you know. Well the bed is. And the dresser. My dad bought this bed for me a few years ago, and the dresser was my mom's."

I didn't know what to say. She seemed suddenly too comfortable.

"All of this stuff over here was my mom's, too. She was going to throw it away." She put her hands on her hips and looked down onto the piles. I nodded my head. I could see some black and white framed pictures, piles of books, and a delicate jewelry box amongst the things she signaled to be her mother's.

"Want to give me a hand quickly?" She walked towards the bed.
"If you could just pick that side up and move it over here, like this," she said, motioning towards a position on the opposite side of the room.

We moved the bed to where she wanted it, and then we moved the dresser, too.  I was beginning to fear that she'd ask me to help organize all of her things on the floor, too, so I tried to slyly slip back downstairs.

"I think I'll get another beer," I said. "Do you want one too?"
"Oh no thanks I don't drink. I'm drunk after just a sip of a cocktail," she said, smiling as though she'd expected a response.

I said nothing and quickly set for the door. Before exiting I turned once more towards her, waiting, rather fantastically, for my Cait to jump out from inside this impostor. No costume was shed though, and the Vietnamese Cait stood next to her newly arranged furniture, sweating and purveying the new surroundings.

Downstairs the conversation had become intimate. Tuan was clearly weeping, despite a large smile on his face, and Wheeler was slapping the table vigorously with his open palm shouting, "That's FUCKING right! FUCKING right!"

"I think we should go..." I announced with a tone of suggestion. Suddenly I felt an anxiety, a pressure, a claustrophobia. I felt as though we were running out of time in this place. I felt like the time and the mission were slipping away and I couldn't bear to be in this linoleum kitchen. I could no longer handle the mustard walls. Nothing about this place gave dignity or purpose to why we were in Minnesota to begin with. My heart began to speed up and I slipped out the sliding door and into the fenced in back yard. The trees beyond the fence soared above it and shifted in soft chills, shaking the leaves into a frenzy that made me truly want to fly. I knelt down and touched the palms of my hands to the tips of the soft grass. "God. What the fuck am I doing here," I said to myself.

I heard the slider open and there was Wheeler smiling psychotically. "Tuan's gonna drive us to Hacket house number 2. I filled im' in. I told him about the whole goddamn issue. He's gonna drive us there and it's cool," he said. I felt the breath escape my chest in bursts without control. "Okay," I said. We got into a small white car with Tuan and sped down the dark ugly street.

Monday, August 6, 2012

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 25- But That's Okay

XXV.

The first Hacket house was off-white and square, with a shallow roof and tall mangy grass in the yard. The block was stuffed and squeezed with cardboard looking shacks that each faded like tired dogs into the dirt. None of the buildings seemed like homes from the looks of things, and I imagined the properties were giant burdens to the owners, and shelters of strange moments and fleeting chaos. We smoked and smoked and smoked before working up the courage to approach the porch.

Wheeler knocked vigorously and someone ran to the door and it sprung open. A small Asian man in high-waisted light jeans and a loose button up shirt squinted into the sun, measuring us carefully.

"Yes? You here for facial? It ten o'clock. Facial at eleven thirty. You come back."

He began to close the door.

Wheeler interjected. "Wait, wait. Sir, we're actually here looking for our friend. You have a daughter named Caitlin? Caitlin Hacket?"

"Yes. Cait? She here. She watch TV. You come in?" He held the door open and we walked into a narrow foyer behind him. He was a short man with a mop of curly black hair that sat just below his ears. He had it slicked towards the back of his head and it bounced lightly while he moved.

"Leave shoes here," he said.

We took off our shoes and followed him around a corner into a living area. The carpet was soft and brown, and yellow patterned wall paper sprung from the level of our toes and up into the low ceiling. A coiling red interlock of waves twisted together, and the paper vines moved against the yellow walls. The oriental furniture looked rich and delicate, and a hodgepodge of couches and dining room chairs formed a semi-circle around a small boxy television. A robust Asian girl sat low in a plush orange chair.

"These your friends, Cait?" her father said.

"Um.. no?" Her voice was full and American, a generation apart from the choppy English of her father.

He stood erect and talked loudly. "You not Cait's friends? You no here for facial! Why you here?"

"Ah Sir, we're actually looking for a different 'Caitlin Hacket.' We came all the way from Chicago to find her. I'm sorry to bother you guys man, but were just looking for our friend." Wheeler's voice was harsh and smoky, and he looked British in the light of the room. 

"From Chicago? I live in Chicago once. Ya, I live there ...TEN years ago man!" He held up both hands and all fingers and smiled widely. "Where your friend? She live up here?"

"She used to. She left and we're just trying to find her," I said.

"Okay okay." A loud cell phone rang and he walked away, trailing into a foreign conversation.

"You think that's Japanese?" Wheeler whispered.

"It's Vietnamese, actually," the girl interjected.

"Oh nice," said Wheeler, enthusiastically. "So, Hacket. That's not Vietnamese, right?"

"It's my step mom's last name. She's white." She didn't look at us while she talked, but kept her eyes focused on the TV as she flicked through channels rapidly.

"Ahhh, okay okay. So do you know any other Cait Hackets around here?"

"Nope." She reached down and ate some chips from a bag in the nook of her arm.

Her dad re-entered the room and the two exchanged words in Vietnamese. The conversation became angry and the girl walked away.

"You two want beer? I have Pabst Blue Ribbon? I have Sam Adam?"

We accepted the offer, graciously, and followed the man into the kitchen. "Come, come!" he said.

There was a barber chair in the center of the kitchen floor, and mirrors were placed sporadically on the walls. He opened a can of beer for each of us and we sat down at a metal table in the corner. We introduced ourselves, and the man smiled largely. "I am Tuan," he said.

--

Tuan told us about his life. He told us about the two-week journey he took from Vietnam to America in 1971. We asked idiotic questions, ignorant and oblivious to this thread of tribulation, to a history we had no concept of.

Wheeler sat erect in his chair. Beads of condensation fell from his PBR and  trickled into a cylinder pool on the kitchen table. "That's fucking crazy, man," he said. "That's really fucking crazy. Like, two whole weeks? From fucking Vietnam? It's crazy." His leg tapped lightly on the tile floor, and his eyes scanned Tuan with an edge of fever.

Tuan had a goodness about him that I'd never quite experienced. So many of the people I'd met in my life had fallen flat to me. So many encounters with strangers and acquaintances had never resounded past the moment of formality. Tuan had this heaviness to him that wasn't accompanied by grumbling or tired complaints. He just seemed to be. He told us story after story, some a little lost in translation, some a bit sad, some without having any known point at all.

He told us he had permed his hair since the 80's. He told us his ex-wife was a model in the early 90's and his new wife was a poor cosmetologist. "She's ugly," he said. "But a nice lady." His children were "too American," he said. They didn't understand him and he didn't understand them. He was happy he came here, he said. He'd lived in California and Texas, and Idaho for a short time. He'd divorced his Vietnamese wife in Chicago and moved to Minnesota with Mrs. Hacket and their children.

His youngest daughter was bullied in school and he said that he babied her. "I tell Ginny to do homework? She say- Daddy I love you- and doesn't have to do her homework!" He laughed uproariously in between his stories. "But that's okay," he said. He said that Cait was too fat. She hadn't been that fat before but she's so American, he said. "But that's okay," he repeated.

Tuan was sitting in front of a small square window leading into a fenced in backyard. The sun cast shadows on his face and beamed in to capture dust swimming slowly in the dry air. There was a bird feeder in the yard filled with plants and rain water. The fence around the square plot was high and old looking, and I watched a squirrel balance on the wood grid and bounce playfully in the bright of the sun, disappearing fast into a neighboring lawn. The wholeness of Tuan's voice made each word hold validity that permeated the moment. Even the simplest of his details propelled me into a contemplation of much bigger proportions.

He said that he had a lot of money in Chicago. He'd lost it all in his divorce, which he accepted. "I'm rich, I was rich, I'm poor, I'm rich, I was rich, I'm poor," he said. "The moon changes, but that's okay," he said.

Wheeler asked him more questions about his trip to America.

"We had 1 bowl rice a day on the boat," he told us. "And when you had to take a shit, you leaned over the edge of the boat!" He had a gleaming smile on his face, but it wasn't slightly moronic or arrogant, it was just unburdened, and perhaps innocent.

"People fell in that way! I saw TWO people die," he said. He held up two bold fingers.

"Shit," said Wheeler.

Tuan opened more beers and lined them up on the kitchen table.

"I think about that, man. Dying," said Wheeler. He took a long drink of his PBR and slouched deeper into his chair. "Well, not dying I guess. I just have this fantasy, like, sort of just sneaking out of my skin. Just kind of tip-toeing away from my skin and my bones and my body and stuff. You know? And just floating off as a-- well a blob, or a puff of smoke or whatever. You know what I mean? God that sounds crazy, man. But do you know what I mean? Just sort of escaping. Not into nothingness though- just as me, without... this." He made a circular motion around his body.

Tuan looked thoughtfully at Wheeler for a moment and then burst into a real laugh. I thought about the idea, and I could see a certain appeal in the fantasy. I too, felt somewhat trapped inside my skin sometimes. I hated to agree, but I understood.