After the last plane, after the arrival of buses, after days and sleepless nights, Ruth realized he was not coming, maybe he was never coming, that he had gone somewhere she didn’t know. All her hopes dropped to the ground and deeper, past the soil, deeper than sand and rock. She was afraid to go out on the water even though she lived on the boat and was a fishing woman. She was afraid because she was heavy and sinking and the weight would carry her down even farther than an anchor and she would drown in darkness and loneliness and cold. She would drop to the bottom of the ocean and maybe the boat, too, with its beds and pots and pans all falling, floating, dropping. She had thought this day or this night that she would hold Thomas, touch him, be held in his smooth dark arms. And his son would be there, and now Thomas would not sit with Marco and look at his face so like his own. Finally, she fell into a sleep at her mother’s house on the side of the hill. To the dismay of Hoist, Aurora covered the lovebirds’ cage so they would not wake her.

And so the man whose body was dishonest just by living woke and went into the city and found a place for himself on a turn to the right, not far from a highway, a room with an entrance through a crooked alley. It had a bed, a table, and two chairs. He thought it looked like the painting of Van Gogh’s little room because the floor was painted wood, red in color and scuffed, the bed was wooden and made a sound when he sat on it. The chairs and table were in a corner, the walls were blue. Even though it smelled like an old man, he rented it. Around the corner was a fruit and vegetable stand. He bought apples the next day. For a few days he felt free. But at night when he went to bed, if he fell asleep, they searched him out and found him, the people he’d been forced to leave. Ma. He’d always laughed at her name. Lin, their daughter, his daughter, with the body thin as rice grass, his girl. Maybe they came through the worlds and found him because they were the dead and the dead could travel easily. She could be in the spirit world with her mother. She could be exactly the same as when he left. If she was alive, Lin could be anything now. She could be an enlisted child in the communist army. He saw the old man Song with the goatee weeping at the end before he, Thomas, had been taken away, Lin crying for him, running toward him on her precious skinny legs. He looked back down at her as the helicopter flew him away and he wanted to jump. He should have, he thought.

The faces of the shot men also came to him. Lizards came, and the rubber trees he saw in the shadows that one time, trees the French had wanted. The heat descended on him like a blanket. He saw faces that emerged like ghosts from the canopy of the jungle and then disappeared back into the trees. In his closed eyes men climbed ladders into the red dream night sky as if they were spiders climbing their strands of shining silk. American men slept with limbs of trees for pillows, their guns in their arms like women, or they wrapped themselves around a tree as if it were safer, the nights cold, days hot, telling stupid jokes, fighting with each other, then stopping to fight an enemy and trying like hell to help one another live. Mikey, as he had called the blue-eyed boy whose life he tried to save; he came toward him.