My daughter Linda left us to go live on her own, which is just fine; but I think Thomas has been getting mixed up with drugs, and that frightens Peggy and me both. You can't imagine the trouble I have gone to just to keep that boy out of jail. It is a real mess."
Stan walked out of the psychologist's office a bit more relaxed than when he came in an hour and a half earlier. Surrounded by the roar of motor traffic he watched for his opportunity to cross the street. Stan climbed into the driver's seat of his old dirty white Chevrolet, and sped homeward through the hot afternoon. The prior discussion aroused in him a sense of impersonality toward other motorists and people. Even so, he liked suburban Columbus. As he drove home he became engrossed by turmoil in his family. He parked in front of his partially paid for home and became greeted eagerly by his son.
"Can I use the car for my date tonight?" Thomas asked. He was confident that his father would not stand in the way of an almost regularly scheduled Friday night date.
"Sure, Tom." Bradley found no immediate cause for denial and handed him the keys. "Put some gas in the car, and mind that front left tire. It's getting threadbare. Going out with Nancy?"
"Yeah, Nancy," Tom assured him. "I am going to the car wash, filling station, and then over to the Fairchild's at six. Got any last requests?"
"No. Just don't get any tickets. Watch the radiator temperature gauge. This heat plays hell on old winter antifreeze."
A little slowly, Stan climbed stairs to his front porch, opened the front door, and stood listlessly in the living room, looking momentarily at a worn old couch. He felt weakened and somehow drained, uninterested at the moment in anything but his own troubled irritation. He lay down, head back, trying to visualize his wife and kids as they had been while the children were infants. It was a time of innocence when the children had yet to develop a juvenile idea of what would later be coming expected from them by society. Rebellious patterns had not yet begun.
Stan pictured his son chasing pigeons in a park, with Peggy watching after him. The birds dumbly stepped aside or took to the air a precarious instant before the boy was upon them. At one point he caught one of them, grasping it momentarily, then letting it go again, more startled than the bird was over allowing itself becoming caught. Stan recalled when it had been fun to be a parent, watching offspring develop with attitudes he instilled in them. He closed his eyes and momentarily savored this happiness, while sleep stole upon him.
As he dozed, alone in the house except for Peggy, Stan dreamed of people and faces. They seemed to alternate intermittently between individuals who were very familiar to him and those who were completely foreign. He experienced the sensation of having fallen into collective consciousness with generations of men who were long since dead. A multitude of individuals came to coexist with him in his dream. They all seemed to support him emotionally, seeing in him a hardy, robust, self-reliant individual whom they could envy and whom many of them wished to imitate.
Each character seemed somehow related to his past, minor characters from a book, soldiers from ancient Rome, job acquaintances from years gone by. To one of the characters, more bizarre than the rest, he gave a wave of recognition and a friendly smile, a symbol of his love for all humanity. In these strata of wholesome humanity were patently evil individuals too, formed eternally from brimstone and pressed in vivid relief on what appeared to be dark tablets wherein the images' souls became contained. Clutching weapons, these malignant ones held forever a hateful intent toward humanity, eternal habitants of hell.
The door to the living room became left partially opened. A presence, which Stan acknowledged but felt powerless to investigate, seemed to enter the room. A certain dread overcame him, as he lay quietly still, aware of the presence being there, yet wishing to ignore it. He could sense it's being close to him. The realization to Stan, asleep at the time, was that a cloudy shadow of death had come creeping into the room, stirring about in the stillness, taunting him to arise and recognize its presence. Stan refused to respond to his own curiosity. Lying still on the sofa he turned his mind in another direction until the phantasm went on about its business. It retreated on the same path through which it entered.
Stan woke up in a nauseous delirium. He watched impotently as the room, spinning out of control, caved inward on his dream world. He staggered dizzily to his feet in a cold sweat, gasped as his heart pounded furiously, threatening to explode. He stood for a brief instant then crashed, momentarily unconscious, to the floor. He began to protect himself, from what, he did not know, as he lay helplessly still. Unable to get to his feet, he foggily remembered where he was, then propped himself up on one arm. There was a light on in the kitchen. He could see Peggy stirring about, getting something to drink.
"Are you all right, Stan?" Peggy asked anxiously, poking her head through the door and seeing him sprawled helplessly on the living room rug. She dropped her glass, then rushed to help him off the floor and back onto the sofa. Stan sat pitifully upright, but breathing easily again.
"I must have had some type of minor heart attack," he whispered to her before carrying on in a slightly more emphatic voice. "It was one of those spasmodic conditions associated with those chest pains I have been having. You can hardly imagine what it was like. I could swear I died for a moment, and woke to find out something ominously frightening I never wanted to know. The appearance was like some macabre cloud passing overhead comprised of all the fear and hatred condensed in mankind. Its influence was a strange sense, like being in the shadow of a horribly evil presence. I knew the influence had come to collect me. I could feel the impending catastrophe but refused to recognize the intuition until it passed and I could feel the sun again."
"What was it, really, Stan?" Peggy asked timidly.
"What was what," reiterated Stan as he pressed his nose to the side of her neck, feeling the reassuring warmth and smelling the sweetness of her skin?
"What was it you found out but never wanted to know?"
"That life is not eternal," Stan absently replied, sounding rather subdued. "I have been having nightmares, Peggy, about two million people who died in Cambodia and six hundred thousand Vietnamese who drowned trying to flee the country after the American military pulled out of Southeast Asia." Stan began to caress Peggy intimately and force himself upon her until she sighed and got up to turn off the kitchen light.
"Come on Stan," Peggy told him sympathetically. "I'll help you to bed."
As they walked upstairs, Stan rested his arm on Peggy's shoulders. He perceived a welcome comfort from her support. By the time they reached the bedroom he felt like himself again.
"You know I have never experienced anything like that premonition before," he told her. "It was a completely exasperating experience. It was helpful to talk to the psychologist and explain what was happening between us, how I felt about you and the kids. I want you to talk to him too. I think it mght keep me away from the bottle a little longer."
"If there is anything on your mind, Honey? Why don't the two of us just talk about it? What is it you are trying to hide? I keep thinking about those years that you were gone overseas and how they affected you. What is it, Stan, another woman? I know you never admitted it to me, but I get the feeling that there was somebody else in your life all that time we were apart."
"You know that is just not true!" Stan tried to reassure her. He answered with convincing sincerity. His reply had no inward conviction. Thoughts of Su Trang and long years during which he had been a promiscuous adulterer lingered in depths of his memory. Hideously vivid visions of dismembered bodies rotting in tropical heat, of the stinking decay of human flesh, of dying soldiers waiting for medical attention, and of cries of wounded that had become beyond help highlighted an abyss in his emotion. He covered it with a camouflage of outward sincerity whenever he talked to his wife. Stan perpetually presented a facade of emotion, like the sheath of a blister surrounding the liquidity of his contaminated memory.
CHAPTER 2 - Su Ann Tuyen
Tuyen, the girl known to Stan as Su Ann, was exquisite. Many Americans saw her as an Asian Aphrodite, those who had heard of Aphrodite. She subsisted in Vietnam as a bargirl, businesswoman of sorts, who tendered the service of pleasing men during the war. In her own world she attracted; and many men, especially Westerners, saddened by the inevitable likelihood that her kind would cease to comfort them at the end of that bitter conflict.
Born of poor parents, she grew up in the village of Ben Suc, north of the air base at Bien Hoa in the Saigon River Valley. Her village, the center of an operation for Ho Chi Minh's National Liberation Front, fell to American forces in 1967, in an attempt to rout communist forces from the dense jungle area surrounding it.
This area was an unyielding stronghold for Vietcong, and was called "The Iron Triangle" by members of the United States Army's First Infantry Division. The Triangle located only a few miles southwest of Su Trang's home. Military Region Four, containing an entire division of Vietcong operated generally in the Saigon area, having a regional headquarters in and around Su's village. Miles of tunnels dug into the jungle by determined followers of Ho Chi Minh housed men and supplies for the People's Liberation Army. That army trained and supplied by the North Vietnamese Government. Military occupancy of her village was in constant flux. One day it was the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which supported the South Vietnamese government, that occupied her village and the next day the Vietnamese communists' National Liberation Front. Americans finally dropped leaflets advising citizens of Ben Suc that their town was the objective of an invasion, and that they have free passage to a safe area. Su had a vivid memory of the artillery barrages and B52 bombing strikes that shook her childhood playgrounds.
Theosophical proselytism was a crucial influence in the daily life of the poor. Knowledge of the Four Noble Truths and the following of an Eight fold Path in finding the middle way to Nirvana, a timeless void free from all human suffering and desire, is a set of meaningful parables taught by the monks. Parables of Buddhism are scriptural narratives called sutras. Each sutra regarded by Buddhists a discourse from the life of Siddhartha Gautama, last of the living Buddhas. Each scripture centers on the life of Buddha and his followers. Noble Truths of Buddhism simply state that existence is suffering, and that suffering springs from egotistic desire; hence, elimination of suffering comes about through extinction of desire. To achieve an end of desire, a certain path of conduct emulates the Eight-Fold Path. This is a method of conduct one is to follow to enter into Nirvana. The Path stresses nsight into mastery of motives in the practice of proper attitudes, speech, and conduct in pursuit of livelihoods.
Although Su Trang and her mother lived a very frenzied life among some of the most impoverished and itinerant people in the country, Su preserved her love for elderly Missus Trang and followed her parental instructions devoutly. Su's mother had witnessed continual war throughout her entire life. The Trang's family aided Nguyen Ai Quoc (later to be named Ho Chi Minh) while he fought against the imperial might of Japan. As a young woman, Su's mother worked for several years in a French factory in Ben Suc. The factory, built shortly after World War II to process products from local rubber plantations, failed to provide the workers' small families with even a meager subsistence. Thousands of laborers died from lack of medical attention while the French continued to exploit the country.
Su's father gave up working for the French in 1949. Allied with Vietminh for years before his daughter was born, he died in a clash between President Diem's government troops and a gang of Binh Xuyen outlaws as they fought to control Saigon. At one time Missus Trang and her husband had looked upon Ho Chi Minh as a national hero.
