The A’atsika people hear speaking coming from the house. They avoid the place. Maybe it is haunted, the place where Thomas lives. The house talks at night and there are no lights. It remains empty, they think, so why did he build a fence? But in daylight it is silent. Dead silent. The seals love the shade of the fence. They sleep there. He wants them to leave, but they are there like guardians, his relatives who watch over Thomas. Thomas who is a container of history, pain, convictions, beliefs, memory, sins, and courage.

So when he was found, so many years later, Thomas was the lone survivor according to the historical record, if there was a living record. Otherwise, Thomas was dead because he threw his dog tags down on the ground. Yeah, he thinks, I am alive and I am dead. He is history the way Dwight is civilization. But in war your life is at its height, watching for danger, wondering if you can make it to the next place, believing you can’t. Sometimes not giving a shit. Sometimes too afraid. The mind wasn’t built for this. Nor was the spirit. And always you know someone is watching you and they are thinking the same as you: Someone is out there. Something is there, and there is a boundary between self and self that is crossed only in a world like this. These are shadow-covered realms. A person watches himself when he is not himself.

Strangely, the thing he’d done that was dishonorable was the only, the most honorable thing he’d done the whole time.

He says, “I have a daughter there. I didn’t want to leave her.”

Now he is thinking about Lin and her mother, Ma. About when Lin was a baby. He sees Ma bending over her, her hair falling down over her face.

He is thinking about Lin when she is out there somewhere thinking about him.

LIGHT-YEARS

Years pass. Lin thinks she is maybe twenty-two now, or older. No one alive knows Lin’s age, but her hands are still the hands of a girl, her face bright and delicate.

She pushes her black hair behind one ear. Where she sits it is quiet, a park where old people sit in daylight. From only a street away, she hears activity and noise, buying and selling, motorbikes and hawkers. A world is going on, lives being lived. She watches bats cross the body of the distant moon, and thinks she is as far away from her own blood as the moon is from earth. The bench where she sits is rock, old enough to be green in color, as in the cemetery. It was not destroyed by the war. There is a sweet smell. The road that is near her, behind the ginko trees planted by the Chinese, is the one that brought her from far away. It is larger now and traveled by automobiles, bikes, and without a sign of the people who once marched, ran, or died there. It is as if she’d traveled light-years and arrived now at a place where time and space intertwine. And in the dank scent of evening, the rich odors of old earth, they do. Her memory lives with the present as if it is all one, her village, the old ones, and this place, Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon.