A short story by Vinh Quyen
A DESOLATE EVENING ON THE FAULT LINE
Four o’ clock, and the women’s dressing room at the USC School of Medicine was as crowded as the backstage of a fashion show.
“New here?” asked a friendly woman with a stout figure and childish-looking face standing beside Mỵ.
Mỵ nodded, “Yes.”
“China?”
“No, Vietnam.”
“My father was killed in Vietnam, y’know. Today is the fortieth anniversary of his death.” The woman pointed to a small black and white photo taped to the inside of her locker. Some of the edges had been singed off, but the face of the handsome young soldier, pale and shaven, was untarnished.
“Oh, that’s really …” Mỵ didn’t know what to say.
The woman continued as she slipped a tee shirt over her head, “My mother received the news the same day I was born.”
“I suppose that makes me about ten years younger than you,” Mỵ said as she glanced in the mirror and fixed her hair. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get going.”
“Sure. I’m Catherine by the way, anesthetics. Have a nice weekend.”
“Mỵ, refresher course. Have a nice weekend.”
A solitary gust of wind whipped down the hall and out the back door. Mỵ reached down to steady her dress as she hurried to the parking lot. Her orange ‘70 Volkswagon Beetle, with its dated exterior and sputtering engine stood out from among a sea of sleek new cars. Before classes began, Mỵ had taken a few days to look for an apartment, and an old beater that would run during her nine months at school before tossing it at the junkyard. She was drawn to this car more than the others, and at four hundred fifty bucks with new paint, it was a steal.
Mỵ turned toward the suburbs to go home as usual, then spun back around in the direction of the city. The package beside her in the passenger seat reminded her of Dr. Susan Chen’s birthday party. Susan had come to the U.S. with her family a year before the British returned Hong Kong to China.
Mỵ listened to the local traffic report as she drove down the deserted roads. Listening to the radio had become a new habit of hers. She didn’t pay much attention to the actual news; rather, Mỵ was comforted by the sound of voices when she drove home through the fields, thought it wasn’t her mother tongue.
The broadcast was interrupted by a breaking news bulletin: a magnitude 5.6 earthquake was expected to soon hit the area, its epicenter originating in the town of Weitchpec, near the border of California and Oregon … Mỵ shivered for a moment, more bewildered than scared. Previously just an observer, she had followed disasters in far away parts of the world on TV, maybe squealing with fright then laying back on the couch to apply her beauty mask.
As she entered downtown, the thought of returning home was replaced by cars and pedestrians casually going about their rush - hour business; perhaps because the earthquake was based some four hundred miles from here. But when she stepped out of the car, Mỵ vaguely overheard a few partygoers chatting excitedly about it. She couldn’t understand everything they were saying since she didn’t know much about U.S. geography. Although they were all in the same boat, Mỵ still felt like she didn’t belong.
Trailing behind a group of guests, some of whom Mỵ recognized from the university, while others she had never seen, she hugged her gift tightly and proceeded to the living room. There, an eighty-year-old Chinese man buried deep within the cushions of a recliner was staring fixedly at the TV, oblivious to the strangers around him. Mỵ concluded he was Susan’s Alzheimer’s ridden father whom she had once confided to her about. She blushed when China’s CCTV9 English-language channel reported that Chinese naval vessels were patrolling the Eastern Sea, accompanied by images of Vietnam’s Paracel islands. A few people there knew Mỵ was Vietnamese and couldn’t hide their looks of concern.
Susan appeared in the nick of time, courteously welcoming everyone as she picked up the remote and changed the channel from across the room, reminding them that they needed to stay up-to-date on the earthquake.
The old man continued watching TV, as if an Eastern Sea dispute and an earthquake in California were one and the same.
Mỵ pretended to focus on the developments, but her mind still lingered on the previous story. An expert from the National Earthquake Information Center was being interviewed on TV. She explained that the earthquake was the result of periodic activity on the San Andreas fault, which stretched along the State of California from Monterey County to the Salton Sea. Mỵ suddenly realized she had seen that woman’s pretty and intelligent face before; somewhere, sometime.
After a few more guests arrived, Susan invited everyone into the backyard where the party proper would take place. Champagne glasses on tables reflected the firey red glow of the setting sun.
Susan opened each gift in good spirits, entertaining the crowd with witty quips of appreciation. Mỵ smiled along, though she couldn’t shake the anxious feeling between them. Neither Susan’s staged enthusiasm nor Mỵ’s willful denial could make the fault line disappear. Perhaps Susan sensed it too, because after she’d finished opening gifts, she came up to Mỵ and clinked glasses, enquiring after her new apartment. Actually, it was Susan who had introduced Mỵ to it in the first place, the landlord being a patient of hers.
“Everything’s fine, thanks,” Mỵ replied.
When Susan left to greet some guests that had come late, Mỵ disappeared back into the American crowd, sipping the acrid alcohol and thinking back to the day they had driven there together, and the moment she had felt her stomach sink when Susan pointed to the lonely farmhouse in the fields a mile away.
The main building was two stories tall with a total of eight rooms and only John the sixty-something-year-old landlord as its sole tenant; that is, if you didn’t count his four hounds. There was also a farmhand around, but he would come after Mỵ had already left and leave before she got home.
Susan introduced Mỵ to John, then haggled for the cheapest rent, though the two were already good acquaintances. John chewed on his pipe, smiling behind his thick salt-and-pepper beard as he observed the yellow-skinned woman chirping away, unable to get a word in edgewise himself. When Susan paused to catch her breath, John took the chance to end the one-way debate. In his deep rustic voice, he simply said, “Free.”
As it turned out, things were not fine as Mỵ had made them out to be, and she intended to find another place to live soon, though John’s generous offer was certainly hard to beat.
A middle-aged man sat down next to Mỵ and turned to her with an inviting smile. He had blond hair, a narrow face, and blue eyes. Without bothering to conceal a coveting look at her areca-sized breasts, he sparked up a conversation by asking if Vietnam also had earthquakes. His pale hand coverd with whisps of gold hair deliberately pressed against Mỵ’s when he passed her a slice of birthday cake. Mỵ remembered another hand, trembling as it reached for her in a dark movie theater; the same hand that had rustled through their divorce papers six years later.
“My name’s Elton. May I ask yours?”
“Mỵ.”
“Me?”
Mỵ covered her mouth and giggled, “Close enough.” She remembered what her girlfriend Chau had once said about her American husband, “I have no idea why I agreed to marry a man who can’t even say my name right. It’s always ‘Buffalo this,’ ‘Buffalo that’ ...”
“Like a fault line,” Mỵ thought to herself. These words led her back to the question still burning in her mind: where had she seen that woman before?
If she wasn’t working the night shift, Mỵ usually arrived at the farm around 5:30 p.m. while the warm sun still lingered in the fields. No one was waiting to greet her besides John’s four barking dogs. After more than a month of living under the same roof, they still didn’t recognize their yellow-skinned tenant. If John was around when Mỵ parked her car, he would wave. But those times were rare.
John was usually in the barn on the other side of the yard, which included a garage, woodworking shop, and storage shed of some sort. A couple of times, Mỵ had caught him watching her from a distance behind a coil of pipe smoke. With a leather cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, pipe protruding from his beard, checkered shirt, jeans, and suede leather boots, he looked exactly the same as the day they first met.
Mỵ didn’t know anything about the farm aside from her own studio and the office she and Susan had stopped in that one time. When the farm lit up in the evening, becoming one of a small number of oases sparsely scattered over the fields, Mỵ had already showered and was busy cooking dinner, her main meal of the day. She’d talk to her mother and four-year-old daughter over skype as she ate so they’d have enough time before daycare, then stretch out on the bed and catch up on her studies until she drifted off to sleep. However, her routine was thrown into chaos on evenings when John had women over at the house. And now, Mỵ believed one of them was the woman she had just seen on TV.
A single man seeking female company was normal enough, and none of her business, either. But the things that went on were disturbing. While half of Mỵ desired to be swept into it, the other half wanted only to escape altogether. John entertained women in the room next to hers. She often wondered why it had to be that room of all rooms in such a large house. There was no good reason she could think of. Mỵ just knew that that was the room whose door was always shut tight and whose lights came on only on nights when they were there; even then, it was dimly lit. The old wooden house had begun to fall apart sometime ago, and with it, the sound proofing. So whenever John’s women came over, Mỵ was overwhelmed by a barrage of strange muffled sounds. They were not the suggestive whisperings, smacking of lips, or heavy breathing of a typical intimate encounter. Rather, she heard wild screams and strangled sobs. Mỵ went from feeling uneasy to being possessed by the things on the other side of that wall. When the two lovers emerged from their den of sin, and their footsteps gradually faded down the hall, Mỵ would be curled up on her bed feeling lost and alone.
One time like this, Mỵ lost control of herself and ran out of the room in her nightgown to chase after them, to scream at the top of her lungs for them to go away and leave her in peace, to just please … But instead, she stood hidden from sight in a dark corner watching them walk side-by-side out into the yard. She couldn’t believe that those two polite, saddened faces had just come from such a sick indulgence. There was no farewell kiss like Mỵ had expected; the woman just got in her car and gazed up at John with a grateful look. The same pretty and intelligent woman Mỵ had seen on TV.
Mỵ was jolted from her daydream by a violent shaking of the earth beneath her feet. People shouted as the house swayed and cracked, its windows shattering like sheets of rice paper, and things crashed to the ground all around them. In a matter of seconds, the earthquake was over. Mỵ found herself huddled under a table clutching an empty champagne glass, which she had unknowingly poured onto her lap. The party ended in panic and disorder. Susan and a few of her colleagues were called in by the hospital on emergency duty.
Mỵ was the last person to leave the house, sometime after five. On the roads, police cars and ambulances rushed headlong against traffic and through fires. The entire city had lost power. Mỵ didn’t understand what caused her to speed back to the farm, the same place just ten minutes ago she had wanted to get as far away from as possible.
A Lexus convertible flew through the front gate, then quickly skidded to a stop, nose-to-nose with Mỵ’s Beetle.
“Catherine, anesthetics …,” Mỵ exclaimed softly.
Catherine was equally shocked to recognize the woman from the other car as Mỵ. With no time to exchange greetings, Catherine said, “I need to get John to a hospital right away. A beam fell on his shoulder.”
Mỵ ran up to the Lexus. John lay sprawled out in the backseat, his gauze bandage soaked through with blood. The look of horror on Mỵ’s face moved him, and he tried to reassure her with an ill-timed wink.
“Could you feed the dogs while I’m gone?” he asked just before the car roared off.
Instead of going straight to her room as usual, Mỵ veered cautiously toward the room beside hers, craning her neck into the open doorway. Her heart pounded in her chest, but not from a fear of more falling beams. She was about to discover the truth behind the haunted space; the place John took his women, and the place Catherine had also been when the earthquake hit.
There was no king-size bed like Mỵ had always imagined. In fact, there was almost nothing in the room besides a paint-stripped 16mm projector propped up in the back, a yellowed screen hanging opposite it from the ceiling and a few leather chairs scattered about. Two of them had been crushed under the weight of the splintered beam.
Mỵ jumped when the light of the projector turned on and the roll of film flicked through the reels. Power to the city had been restored. Bits and pieces of footage from the Vietnam War more than forty years ago randomly appeared on the screen: images of American soldiers brushing their teeth, reading letters from home, and horsing around in the camp. Mỵ recognized John from among some men in a scene, holding a microphone to a shirtless soldier and asking him questions from a reporter’s notepad; the soldier with the pale, shaven face from the photo in Catherine’s locker.
The film suddenly cut to a battlefield where G.I.’s with wide open wounds cried for help, and the bodies of Vietnamese guerrillas and villagers lay strewn about the edge of a village engulfed in flames. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the film suddenly ended and the projector came to a halt.
*
Mỵ sat cross-legged in the front yard bathed in moonlight, surrounded by quiet fields dyed a golden hue. John’s dogs contentedly licked her hands as she waited for a sign from the depths of the earth. After its awakening earlier that evening, the San Andreas fault could erupt again at any moment.
___
Translated by the author and Zac Herman.
READ ANOTHER SHORT STORY BY VINH QUYEN THE BIG RIP
