The Refugees

  “I’d remember to take care of your soul.”

  “When would you hold the wake? When would the cele­bration of my death anniversary be? What would you say?”

  “Write it down for me,” I said. “What I’m supposed to say.”

  “Your brother would have known what to do,” she said. “That’s what sons are for.”

  To this I had no reply.

  When he had still not appeared by eleven, my mother went to sleep. I descended to my basement once more and tried to write. Writing was entering into fog, feeling my way for a route from this world to the unearthly world of words, a route easier to find on some days than others. Lurking on my shoulder as I stumbled through the grayness was the parrot of a question, asking me how I lived and he died. I was younger and weaker, yet it was my brother we buried, letting him slip into the ocean without a shroud or a word from me. The wailing of my mother and the sobbing of my father rose in my memory, but neither drowned out my own silence. Now it was right to say a few words, to call him back as he must have wanted, but I could not find them. Just when I thought another night would pass without his return, I heard the knock at the top of the stairs. I believe, I reminded myself. I believe that he would never harm me.

  “Don’t knock,” I said when I opened the door. “It’s your home, too.”

  He merely stared at me, and we lapsed into an awkward silence. Then he said, “Thank you.” His voice was stronger now, almost as high-pitched as I remembered, and this time he did not look away. He still wore my T-shirt and shorts, but when I showed him the clothes that my mother had bought, he said, “I don’t need those.”

  “You’re wearing what I gave you.”

  His silence went on for so long I thought he might not have heard me.

  “We wear them for the living,” he said at last. “Not for us.”

  I led him to the couch. “You mean ghosts?”

  He sat down next to me, considering my question before answering.

  “We always knew ghosts existed,” he said.

  “I had my doubts.” I held his hand. “Why have you come back?”

  His gaze was discomforting. He had not blinked once.

  “I haven’t come back,” he said. “I’ve come here.”

  “You haven’t left this world yet?”

  He nodded.

  “Why not?”

  Again he was silent. Finally he said, “Why do you think?”

  I looked away. “I’ve tried to forget.”

  “But you haven’t.”

  “I can’t.”

  I had not forgotten our nameless blue boat and it had not forgotten me, the red eyes painted on either side of its prow having never ceased to stare me down. After four uneventful days on a calm sea under blue skies and clear nights, islands at last came into view, black stitching on the faraway horizon. It was then that another ship appeared in the distance, aiming for us. It was swift and we were slow, burdened with more than a hundred people in a fishing boat meant to hold only a fishing boat’s crew and a fishing boat’s load of cold mackerel. My brother took me into the cramped engine room with its wheezing motor and used his pocketknife to slash my long hair into the short, jagged boy’s cut I still wore. “Don’t speak,” he said. He was fifteen and I was thirteen. “You still sound like a girl. Now take off your shirt.”

  I always did as he told me, in this case shyly, even though he hardly glanced at me as he ripped my shirt into strips. He bound my barely noticeable breasts with the fabric, then took off his own shirt and buttoned me into it, leaving himself with just his ragged T-shirt. Then he smeared engine oil on my face and we huddled in the dark until the pirates came for us. These fishermen resembled our fathers and brothers, sinewy and brown, except that they wielded machetes and machine guns. We turned over our gold, watches, earrings, wedding bands, and jade. Then they seized the teenage girls and young women, a dozen of them, shooting a father and a husband who had protested. Everyone fell silent except those being dragged away, screaming and crying. I didn’t know any of them, girls from other villages, and this made it easier for me to pray I would not be one of them as I pressed against my brother’s arm. Only when the last of the girls had been thrown onto the deck of the pirate ship, the pirates climbing back on board after them, did I breathe again.

  The last man to leave glanced at me in passing. He was my father’s age, his nose a sunburned pig’s foot, his odor a mix of sweat and the viscera of fish. This little man, who spoke some of our language, stepped close and lifted my chin. “You’re a handsome boy,” he said. After my brother stabbed him with his pocketknife, the three of us stood there in astonishment, our gaze on the blade, tipped by blood, a silent moment broken when the little man howled in pain, drew back his machine gun, and swung its stock hard against my brother’s head. The crack—I could hear it still. He fell with the force of dead weight, blood streaming from his brow, jaw and temple hitting the wooden deck with an awful thud still resonant in my memory.

  I touched the bruise. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not any more. Does it still hurt for you?”

  Once more I pretended to think about a question whose answer I already knew. “Yes,” I said at last. When the little man threw me to the deck, the fall bruised the back of my head. When he ripped my shirt off, he drew blood with his sharp fingernails. When I turned my face away and saw my mother and father screaming, my eardrums seemed to have burst, for I could hear nothing. Even when I screamed I could not hear myself, even though I felt my mouth opening and closing. The world was muzzled, the way it would be ever afterward with my mother and father and myself, none of us uttering another sound on this matter. Their silence and my own would cut me again and again. But what pained me the most was not any of these things, nor the weight of the men on me. It was the light shining into my dark eyes as I looked to the sky and saw the smoldering tip of God’s cigarette, poised in the heavens the moment before it was pressed against my skin.

  Since then I avoid day and sun. Even he noticed, holding up his forearm against mine to show me I was whiter than he was. We had done the same in the bunker, splaying our hands in front of our faces to see if they were visible in the dark. We wanted to know we were still all there, coated in the dust that sifted onto us after each impact, the memory of the American jets screaming overhead making me tremble. The first time we heard them, he whispered in my ear not to worry. They were only Phantoms.

  “Do you know what I liked the most about those times?” He shook his head. We sat on the sofa of my basement office, warmer than the living room in November. “We would come outside after the bombing, you holding my hand while we stood blinking in the sun. What I loved was how after the darkness of hiding there came the light. And after all that thunder, silence.”

  He nodded, unblinking, curled up on the sofa like me, our knees touching. The parrot crouched on my shoulder, roosting there ever since we let my brother go into the sea, and it came to me that letting it speak was the only way to get rid of it.

  “Tell me something,” it said. “Why did I live and you die?”

  He regarded me with eyes that would not dry out no matter how long they stayed open. Mother was wrong. He had changed, the proof being those eyes, preserved in brine for so long they would remain forever open.

  “You died too,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”

  I remembered a conversation with Victor. A question struck me one night at eleven, so urgent that I telephoned him, knowing he’d be awake. “Yes, I believe in ghosts,” he said, not surprised to hear from me. I could see him curled up on his chair, head aflame on his candle-wax body, as if he were lit up by the memory of the airplane crash that had taken the lives of his family. When I asked him if he had ever seen any ghosts, he said, “All the time. When I close my eyes, my wife and children appear just like when they were alive. With my eyes open, I’ll see them in my p
eripheral vision. They move fast and disappear before I can focus on them. But I smell them too, my wife’s perfume when she walks by, the shampoo in my daughter’s hair, the sweat in my son’s jerseys. And I can feel them, my son brushing his hand on mine, my wife breathing on my neck the way she used to do in bed, my daughter clinging to my knees. And last of all, you hear ghosts. My wife tells me to check for my keys before I leave the house. My daughter reminds me not to burn the toast. My son asks me to rake the leaves so he can jump in them. They all sing happy birthday to me.”

  Victor’s birthday had been two weeks ago, and what it was that I imagined—him sitting in the dark, eyes closed, listening for echoes of birthdays past—became the opening of his memoir.

  “Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?” I asked.

  Over the line, in the silence, the static hissed.

  “You aren’t afraid of the things you believe in,” he said.

  This, too, I wrote in his memoir, even though I had not understood what he meant.

  Now I did. My body clenched as I sobbed without shame and without fear. My brother watched me curiously as I wept for him and for me, for all the years we could have had together but didn’t, for all the words never spoken between my mother, my father, and me. Most of all, I cried for those other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself.

  When it was published a few months later, Victor’s memoir sold well. The critics had kind things to say. My name was nowhere to be found in it, but my small reputation grew a little larger among those who worked in the shadows of publishing. My agent called to offer me another memoir on even more lucrative terms, the story of a soldier who lost his arms and legs trying to defuse a bomb. I declined. I was writing a book of my own.

  “Ghost stories?” Her tone was approving. “I can sell that. People love being frightened.”

  I did not tell her that I had no desire to terrify the living. Not all ghosts were bent on vengeance and mayhem. My ghosts were the quiet and shy ones like my brother, as well as the mournful revenants in my mother’s stories. It was my mother, the expert on ghosts, who told me my brother was not going to return. He had disappeared when I turned my back on him, reaching for a box of tissues. There was only a depression in the sofa where he had sat, cold to the touch. I went upstairs to wake her, and after putting the teakettle on the stove, she sat down with me at the kitchen table to hear of her son’s visit. Having cried over him for years, she did not cry now.

  “You know he’s gone for good, don’t you? He came and said all he wanted to say.”

  The teakettle began rattling and blowing steam through its one nostril.

  “Ma,” I said. “I haven’t said all I wanted to say.”

  And my mother, who had not looked away from me on the deck of the boat, looked away now. For all the ghost stories she possessed, there was one story she did not want to tell, one type of company she did not want to keep. They were there in the kitchen with us, the ghosts of the refugees and the ghosts of the pirates, the ghost of the boat watching us with those eyes that never closed, even the ghost of the girl I once was, the only ghosts my mother feared.

  “Tell me a story, Ma,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  She found one easily, as I knew she would. “There was once a woman,” she said, “deeply in love with her husband, a soldier who disappears on a mission behind enemy lines. He is reported dead; she refuses to believe it. The war ends and she flees to this new country, eventually marrying again decades later. She is happy until the day her first husband returns from the dead, released from the camp where he has suffered as a secret prisoner for nearly thirty years.” As proof, my mother showed me a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the woman and her first husband, reunited at the airport some years ago. Their gazes do not meet. They look shy, uncomfortable, forlorn, surrounded by friends and reporters who cannot see the two ghosts also present at this melancholic meeting, the smudged shadows of their former selves.

  “These kinds of stories happen all the time,” my mother said, pouring me a cup of green tea. This evening séance would be our new nightly ritual, my mother an old lady, ­myself an aging one. “Why write down what I’m telling you?”

  “Someone has to,” I said, notepad on my lap, pen at attention.

  “Writers.” She shook her head, but I think she was pleased. “At least you won’t just be making things up like you usually do.”

  Sometimes this is how stories come to me, through her. “Let me tell you a story,” she would say, once, twice, or perhaps three times. More often, though, I go hunting for the ghosts, something I can do without ever leaving home. As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs. They are pallid creatures, more frightened of us than we are of them. That is why we see these shades so rarely, and why we must seek them out. The talismans on my desk, a tattered pair of shorts and a ragged T-shirt, clean and dry, neatly pressed, remind me that my mother was right. Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

  iem’s plan was to walk calmly past the waiting crowd after he disembarked, but instead he found himself hesitating at the gate, anxiously scanning the strange faces. In one hand he held his duffel bag, and in the other he clutched the form given to him by Mrs. Lindemulder, the woman with the horn-rimmed glasses from the refugee service. When she had seen him off at the San Diego airport, she’d told him his sponsor, Parrish Coyne, would be waiting in San Francisco. The flight was only his second trip by air, and he’d passed it crumpling and uncrumpling an empty pretzel bag, until his seatmate asked him if he would please stop. American etiquette confused him, for Americans could sometimes be very polite, and at other times rather rude, jostling by him as they did now in their rush to disembark. The lingering pressure in his ears bewildered him further, making it hard for him to understand the PA system’s distorted English. He was wondering if he was missing something important when he spotted the man who must be Parrish Coyne, standing near the back of the crowd and holding up a hand-lettered placard with mr. liem printed neatly on it in red. The sight nearly overwhelmed Liem with relief and gratitude, for no one had ever called him “mister” before.

  Parrish Coyne was middle-aged and, except for his gray ponytail, distinguished-looking, his deep-set green eyes resting above a thin, straight nose. He wore a brown fedora and a black leather jacket, unbuttoned over a generous belly. After Liem shyly approached him, but before Liem could say a word, he said Liem’s name twice. “Li-am, I presume?” Parrish spoke with an English accent as he clasped Liem’s hand and mispronounced his name, using two syllables instead of one. “Li-am, is it?”

  “Yes,” Liem said, guessing that his foreignness was evident to all. “That is me.” He meant to correct Parrish’s pronunciation, but before he could do so, Parrish unexpectedly hugged him, leaving him to pat the man’s shoulder awkwardly, aware of other people watching them and wondering, no doubt, about their relationship. Then Parrish stepped back and gripped his shoulders, staring at him with an intensity that made Liem self-conscious, unused as he was to being the object of such scrutiny.

  “To be honest,” Parrish announced at last, “I didn’t expect you to be so pretty.”

  “Really?” Liem kept smiling and said no more. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right, but he’d learned to bide his time in situations like this, sticking to monosyllables until the course of a conversation clarified matters.

  “Stop it,” the young man next to Parrish said, also with an English accent. “You’re embarrassing him.” Just then the pressure in Liem’s eardrums popped, and the muffled sounds of the terminal swelled to a normal volume and clarity.

  “This is Marcus Chan,” Parrish said, “my good friend.”

  Marcus appeared to be in his mid-twenties, only a few years older than Liem, who’d turned eighteen over the summer. If Marcus’s smile se
emed a little disdainful as he offered his hand, Liem could hardly blame him, for compared with Marcus, he was sorely lacking in just about every regard. Even the yellowness of his teeth was more evident next to the whiteness of Marcus’s. With body erect and head tilted back, Marcus had the posture of someone expecting an inheritance, while Liem’s sense of debt caused him to walk with eyes downcast, as if searching for pennies. Since he was shorter than both Marcus and Parrish, he was forced to look up as he said, “I am very happy to meet you.” Out of sheer nervousness, Marcus’s hand still gripped in his, he added, “San Francisco number one.”