Da Minh took no more than five seconds to cross the space between them. When he got there, Hien was facedown at the edge of the water. Da Minh bent down to him, turned him over. He couldn’t understand, at first, what he was seeing: the dark trail out into the water, pouring from Hien. Then he saw—Hien’s throat, face, and arms were covered with deep slashes. His blood was pouring into the ocean. He opened and closed his mouth over and over again.

Just like a fish. Just the same as a fish, drowning in the air.

He had done nothing to save Hien. There was nothing to do. By the time Da Minh recovered enough from his shock to move, Hien had stopped moving forever.

By the time Da Minh had finished telling his story, a third beer had been ordered.

“Well,” the flattened, empty voice said, “I should let you get back to work.”

“I’m not going back today. I’ll go for a swim. I’ll say I got sick.”

If the voice could have sounded surprised, maybe it would have. “You still swim?”

Da Minh wanted to push her into the street, wanted to watch her hammered to the pavement by a dozen electric motorbikes. “After a few beers, I can.”

Da Minh walked out past the end of Thuy Van Street to the wild beach, where he stepped out of everything but his underwear and swam into the warm waves. He backstroked out fifty, sixty meters. He wished the woman had not asked him about swimming, because now he felt it: the nagging fear that had always been there after that day. He could dull it with alcohol until it almost disappeared. Almost. But he was always looking for shapes in the water. A strange stone could startle him enough, sometimes, to make him swim back in.

He had not told the woman about one thing. The thing he had told no one about. He was going to tell her—she had paid for his information, after all. But then he had gotten angry at her, for reasons he could not sort out in his mind, and decided to keep it to himself.

He had been crouched in the sand, just saying Hien’s name over and over, as if somehow that would bring his friend back. And then saw it—lying there in the sand, near Hien’s bloody, torn head.

A shell, half filled with salt water and blood. On some impulse, he picked it up. Maybe just to get the blood out of it, Hien’s blood.

It had been sharpened.

Da Minh carried it with him back to the ranger station when he radioed for help. Then later he took it out to the mangroves on the other side of the island and threw it into the sea.