In Hawaii the hospital had been filled with men who had vacant eyes or worse, mean ones, or the ones with gentle smiles and silence as if they’d been through nothing. At that hospital the doctor asked Thomas questions in a room with a mirror that was a window. Thomas said to the mirror, “Why don’t you just come in and sit with us?” because there were faces behind everything. He was ignored.

“Do you remember how long you were unconscious?”

“I wasn’t unconscious that I know of,” he said, then paused. “Sir.” He hadn’t said it in a long time. Sir. It was foreign to him now, years later.

“Did you have anything to do with the communists? Did they hold you or question you or wound you in any way?”

“No, I only worked. They didn’t think I was an American. The way I look, you know, being who I am. I mean, what I am. I never talked. I kept quiet like I was mute or had been shot in the mouth or throat. I grew rice.” There had been times, too, when he had hidden in dark tunnels forgotten then by those who had tried to build them too close to the water and so they’d mostly collapsed except for the reinforced entrances. Or he’d hidden in food containers. “I just grew rice.”

“Did they try to indoctrinate you in any way?”

“Sometimes I fished, too.”

He couldn’t explain to those who thought everyone an enemy how he’d been hidden all those years, but even so he wasn’t against the communists. They were for their own people. They would have killed him, though, and strange as it was, he would have understood. Of course there had been no Khmer, not yet, and he had no idea that later it had all come to an end.

“I never even knew where I was.”

This was almost true in the man made of lies because he was a map lover. It was in the South, he thought. They’d been sent on a special ops mission. There was the tea-colored river. He thought it must flow into the Delta. They were rice-growers. They were treated well. There was a shortage in Saigon. People, even the army, were hungry. Ma, it was a Thai name, it was so unusual, packed rice in baskets and helped haul it to the road where the Others would pick the baskets up, always kind to her and leaving her with special treats—ginger, lemongrass, or cloth.

He could still hear the sound of rice flowing into baskets like strong rain. He still saw her bending, filling the baskets with grain, the lines of her neck and shoulders, the concaves of skin and veins, the line of jawbone, small and delicate.

“How long were you unconscious?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t know.” He thought he was unconscious now, on his bed.

The faces of the alive haunted him, too, Ruth and the ghost child, Marco, the son. He had loved Ruth all his life. But then, in his second life, he loved Ma and Lin. He was two men. He told himself love had no limits. For him there was divinity in both his worlds. It was made stronger by knowing he was a doomed man and sooner or later he would be killed by one army or another. That’s what he had told himself until now. He was alive, or something like it. Maybe he’d go to prison.