He had been suppressing it, but he could not hold it back any longer. It sat on him, pushing his head onto his chest: the memory of a hundred nights spent with Mai’s lithe golden body pressed against him and her legs entwined around him and his lips tasting her long soft neck and her black hair falling onto his face like a gossamer veil as he kissed her and heard her whisper with delight and smelled the perfume she always wore in her hair and just below her ears. And of the morning when he returned to their little flat and felt his stomach sicken when she was not in the outer room to greet him and he realized that from upstairs he was hearing the echoing, empty sound of the shower water running, straight onto the floor like the patter of heavy rain, constant, without the interruption of a body scrubbing and rinsing underneath it. And then yelled up to her. And had known when she did not answer that she was dead.

“I love Viet Nam. I have missed Viet Nam very much.”

Dzung had labored behind him, swaying gracefully side to side. “Where we go today, Cong Ly?”

The city and its traffic had been a swirling mist and the afternoon sun had beaten down on him and the dust and fumes had risen up to greet him and the cyclo had become a time cocoon, freezing him inside forever. And it had not mattered. “I don’t know. You take me.”

“Okay,” Dzung had said, turning left toward the Sai Gon River. “I know. I know. I take you.”