Thomas didn’t ask where the beer came from. It was American. Coors. Bud. Or the cigarettes. Where these things might have been scared him. But he did lift his head one day and say to one of the kids, “Where the hell do you get the ice?”

“Out there.”

Later he saw that they went to the river to get it. It was delivered by a brown boat with a sail the color of a tobacco leaf. The beer, too. He watched the young boys walking down with skinny legs and returning later, carrying things back, him all the time thinking where they went was unsafe, that there were sure to be mines, and thinking also, how could he trust them, even though they were the people he’d saved, but he did, he trusted them, the ones who reminded him of his own world.

“Still,” said the man, sitting, putting his straw hat beside guava fruits and flies, “it’s been a sad place and life’s been hard for us. Out there.”

Thomas lived day by day, one after the other, aware that he was missing. There were mists from the water and it was cold at night, but the daytime sun was sometimes fierce except during monsoon season when blue-black clouds and thunderstorms moved across the world, casting shadows and shafts of darkness. It was like his dreams without the sound of roaring jets and fire, just black smoke.

A guava tree was near the bridge that had been bombed and no longer crossed the river, and next to the village was a bamboo stand, a forest of them, green with light. They bent in the strong winds, but even then he heard the frogs and sometimes he saw ghosts in there, but he never mentioned them because everyone there saw ghosts. The land was peopled by them. These were silent ghosts, merely standing. One wiped his forehead as if he were tired, weary, as if a ghost could not ever lie down and die.

When the river flooded, it shone with light and he thought of home. The houses on stilts were up to their thighs in water. The river at night shone with the lights on it. If the flood was unusually high, people left their doors by rafts, some painted in beautiful colors, blues and pinks with designs on them and words written for safety. When he looked, he wished for the spray of whales. “Where I lived we had whales,” he told the man.

“How terrible. I’ve heard of them.”

He saw the river at night with all the lights on it. People passing.

The river flowed by. So did time.

It would have been impossible to name the place, if it had a name. Most places didn’t, being new settlements. Besides, all the names ran together. He’d been in too many places. The airborne dropped men here and there. The maps changed with every bomb and battle and raid. Forests were gone. Towns were lost, corpses taken away, towns were renamed and the names would stick.