The whiskey-Coke came down on the table just hard enough to cut him off, but not so forcefully that it couldn’t have been called an accident. Charlie’s hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and he had spilled his drink down the front of his shirt, but there was a reason why he was the alphamale. “Finish up this round and then it’s half-off vodka buckets at that place on De Tham Street. The one that used to be Comrade Something’s Lounge. How does that sound?” This last part was addressed to Barry with a smile and received a crooked brown grin in response.
Split-Mia was the only one who saw a spasm of unchecked emotion ripple across Stuck-Mia’s face, distorting her features for an instant. Then the two Mias fused together once more, and she slung back the rest of her gin and tonic.
I
T WAS JUST
past midnight. The group loitered in the Tiger Cage’s stairwell while Charlie went to the bathroom and a couple of the girls smoked. Mia leaned her back against the concrete, wondering how it could be so cool and solid when she felt so hot and throbbing and half made of liquid. She imagined sticking out a stiletto-shod foot to intercept Charlie on his way back from the bathroom. It was the sort of femme fatale-y move she would have been able to pull off in her old life, but here she would probably break his neck instead. Charlie came down the stairs, one hand on the wall to help him stay upright. “Hey,” Mia called softly.
He smiled clumsily when he realized who it was and went
to put his mouth on her neck, but she caught him by the hair before he could.
“You torment me,” he murmured, and licked her face instead.
“Let me go home.” She had meant to say, “Let’s go home,” but it hadn’t come out right.
Charlie planted himself with his hands on either side of Mia and his lips migrated farther up her face, past the cheekbone. “But it’s so early!” he whined against her temple.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Charlie frowned suddenly. “What happened to your leg?” he asked. Then he cut her off before she could reply: “Wait a minute, I have to pee again.” He fumbled back up the stairs.
Mia felt someone tugging at her elbow. “Charlie go where?” It was Barry.
“He’s in the bathroom,” said Mia frostily.
Barry looked blank. “I do not know.”
Mia tried again. “The restroom?”
“I do not know.”
“Toilet?”
“Oh! I know!” Barry nodded enthusiastically. Satisfied, she leaned against the wall next to Mia and, perhaps to pass the time, pulled out her cellphone. Mia glanced over as the screen lit up; the background was a picture of Barry with two other Vietnamese girls, all laughing, their arms thrown around one another. Barry was in the middle. The girl to her left wore thick glasses and her hair was bobbed, but the other one had hair down to her waist and looked suspiciously familiar.
Mia felt her stomach twist. “Let me see that,” she said, and grabbed the phone from Barry’s hand. It was a cheap thing—Chinese knockoff—and the picture was all grainy. Mia held it up to her face and studied the girl on the right. The image was too blurry for her to tell for sure whether or not it was Charlie’s ex-girlfriend from the ice-cream parlor, but clear enough that Mia knew she was beautiful. “Who is this?” she asked Barry, pointing to the screen.
Barry snatched her phone back and gave Mia a look of annoyance. “My friend,” she said, and walked off, the thump of her heavy sandals echoing in the stairwell.
O
UTSIDE,
M
IA WAITED WITH
the rest of the group while they hailed a cab. She helped Neil stuff the slumping Charlie into the front seat while the others played human Tetris to get everyone else into the back. Barry had come separately, on a motorbike, so Neil rode with her instead of squeezing into the taxi, too. He climbed on behind her and fastened the straps of a blue helmet. She wore a hot pink one that matched the color of the bike. When Mia saw Neil’s fingers playing along the hem of Barry’s shorts, she turned and left.
The moment she was back in the apartment she kicked her shoes down the corridor and sat down on the kitchen floor to massage the arches of her feet. Mia had sobered up considerably on the walk home, so it was strange when she found herself Splitting again, particularly because this was the first time it had happened while she was alone. Split-Mia hovered by the
kitchen window and observed Stuck-Mia because there was no one else to watch. Stuck-Mia sat on the floor and rubbed her sore feet with her gold-tipped fingers. After a while she looked up at the window, and though she couldn’t see Split-Mia, they were looking straight at each other.
At two thirty, Mia woke up when she heard Charlie in the bathroom, dropping things and cursing at the toilet and pissing noisily. Afterward he managed to get his boxers pulled up but not his jeans—he just waddled over to the bed with them in a puddle around his ankles, his belt jangling like the bell on a kitten’s collar, and then passed out facedown. Mia lay blinking in the darkness for a long time before she could fall asleep again. But when she did, she dreamed about Ms. Huong’s deformed baby. She was holding it in her lap and gently stroking its hair, over and over again.
When the alarm went off four hours later, Mia let it ring for five torturous minutes. Charlie was awake—Mia could hear how his breathing had changed—but he made no effort to move. Eventually she crawled over his inert body and switched the alarm off. She got up and went over to the dresser, wincing as she walked—the burn on her leg was throbbing this morning, though her head felt fine. Mia selected Charlie’s work outfit for the day, and unfolded the clothes on the bed next to him. After she finished she remained by the bed, surveying Charlie’s motionless mass. As if he could feel the weight of her stare, Charlie lifted his face from the pillow and scowled at her.
“Unf,” he said. He hauled himself out of bed, then shed his
pants and underwear and walked naked to the shower. Mia gathered his discarded clothes, which reeked of smoke and alcohol, deposited them in the laundry basket, and went to start the coffee and make Charlie’s sandwich. As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, she froze.
The window was open. The latch was dangling unfastened; balmy morning air permeated the apartment. Mia dashed across the room and slammed the window shut. She locked it, jiggled the latch to see if it was loose, and when it wasn’t, she finally exhaled. But a few seconds later, her breath caught in her throat once more when she saw that the windowsill was covered in long, deep scratches. In order to make marks like that, the cat must have clawed the wood relentlessly, over and over. Horrified, Mia backed away from the window just as Charlie entered the kitchen wrapped in a towel, scrubbed and rosy and battling an imperial hangover.
He made a sound that was halfway between a groan and a grunt, and reached around Mia to get a glass of water.
Mia repositioned herself so that Charlie was between her and the window. “How was the rest of the night?” she asked brightly as she began messing about with the lunch fixings, and hoped he couldn’t see her hands shaking.
Charlie shrugged and said something else in Neanderthal.
“Did you have a good time with Barry? I’m so disappointed that you’ve never introduced us before.” Mia slathered mustard viciously on a slice of bread. “We had
such
fun talking together. She’s quite the sparkling conversationalist. A real wit. An—”
“Don’t do that.” Charlie had regained his use of language. “It’s so ugly. And Barry’s a riot when you actually try and get to know her.”
But Mia couldn’t stop herself. “I’m sure I’ll learn what a riot she is in another nine months when she and little Neil Junior show up at my office. No, wait, I guess she’d have to go over to the Canadian Consulate, wouldn’t she?”
Charlie finished drinking his water and placed the glass down carefully on the counter. “I don’t know why you’re like this,” he said. His voice was so deliciously cold. Mia shivered. “You chose to live here, did you forget that? No one forced you to come work in this country. No one held a gun up to your head and told you to stay. Why are you even in Vietnam? You hate your job. You don’t have any compassion for the people here. When was the last time you actually talked to a local person who wasn’t selling you something?”
Mia threw her knife into the sink, which was still full of dirty dishwater; then, as an afterthought, threw in the slice of mustard-covered bread, too. “Make your own sandwich,” she said.
“I
never
asked you to make my fucking sandwiches for me,” spat Charlie. “Not once. I never asked you to pick out my clothes. I never wanted you to pretend to be a—to be my
wife
. God, for someone who hates Vietnamese women, you’re just like one.”
“No,” said Mia. “They fuck you because they think they’ll get a green card out of it. I do it just because I couldn’t find anyone better here.” With that she turned, left the kitchen,
and locked herself in the bathroom. Charlie left the apartment ten minutes later—Mia heard the front door click shut—but she stayed in there an extra five minutes, just in case he had forgotten something and had to come back. She searched the apartment for her phone, eventually finding it on the floor next to her discarded heels. Mia retreated to the bathroom once more, where she perched on the toilet seat and carefully dialed the numbers written at the top of the receipt she had removed from her jewelry box.
She emerged a few minutes later with the receipt still in her hand, but now scrawled across it in brown eyeliner was: “118B Nguyen Thai Binh, Tan Binh, 9:30.” Mia paused as she passed the bedroom. The shirt and tie and trousers she had picked out for Charlie were still arranged on top of the covers, untouched, but his outfit from the night before was missing from the hamper now. Mia walked over to the bed and stretched out alongside the empty clothes. It looked like she was lying next to an invisible man. She snuggled closer and rested her cheek on the breast pocket of the button-up.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed. She reached across the shirt to hold its cuff in her hand and listened for a heartbeat beneath the fabric, even though she knew there wouldn’t be one.
T
WO HOURS LATER
, Mia flagged down a taxi and showed the driver the receipt with the address Tuan had given her. The car slipped into the current of morning traffic on Dien Bien Phu, parting the motorbikes like a hand through a swarm of
gnats. Mia rested her head against the window and watched the hot sun cooking the various surfaces of the city: tin roofs, asphalt, brown skin.
Outside District 1 there were fewer trees, but tangled power lines hung low across the roads like jungle creepers. The buildings were all skinny and pale yellow, their balconies crowded with strings of drying laundry and red flowers growing in planters made from repurposed water jugs. The taxi’s air-conditioning was at full blast; for the first time in ages, Mia felt chilly. She wondered if Tuan would be like Charlie’s girls, and expect her to marry him once they had slept together.
Maybe she would, Mia thought to herself, her mind feverish. She would buy a traditional dress and marry Tuan in an incense-choked ceremony. They would rent a one-room apartment in one of these butter-colored buildings. She, too, would hang their laundry out on the balcony and grow red flowers. Her parents would come to see her in Vietnam, her father would give Tuan dirty looks the entire time, and her mother would cry when she saw the rats and the stray dogs and the children running around without pants and the toothless old men holding rooster fights in the street. Mia would have a baby and fill out the paperwork for its American citizenship herself.
The hotel at 118B Nguyen Thai Binh that the taxi pulled up in front of was named—uncreatively—“Hotel.” Underneath its sign was another sign, but in Japanese; beneath that was yet another in Korean; and beneath that, Tuan was waiting for her on the sidewalk. He was parked on the same yellow
motorbike he had been fixing the day before and which, Mia gathered, was now fully functioning. Mia had never seen him wear a shirt before. A handful of depressed-looking Asian men in suits were milling about in the lobby; the neighborhood they were in seemed to cater to foreign businessmen. Mia liked that she was among outsiders. She began counting out the bills for the driver but paused when, for the first time that morning, she noticed the state of her fingers.
The nails on her right hand were all ragged and ground down. Mia brought them closer to her face; her gold polish was almost all worn away, and her fingertips were rubbed raw. The driver coughed impatiently, so Mia paid quickly and got out of the taxi. She curled her fingers into a fist to hide them.
“My Mia,” said Tuan, rising from the motorbike. “I know you will come to me.” He held his hand out to her and she took it. Together they entered the cavernous lobby and received a key and a knowing smile from the boy behind the reception desk.
Their fourth-floor room had naked wires sticking out of the wall and heavy dark curtains. A previous guest had left two books behind on the nightstand but the spines were turned away from Mia and she couldn’t read the titles. There was no air-conditioning or fan, but for some biological reason Tuan was not sweating the way Mia was. She didn’t mind being hot now—it made the decision to take her clothes off easier. While Tuan was locking the door, his back to her, she peeled off her jeans and shirt and left them in a pile on the floor. “You have a condom, right?” she asked.
“I do not know what it is,” said Tuan, before turning from the door to her. Immediately, he looked aghast. “Mia! What is wrong with you?!” he cried.
This was not the reaction she had hoped for. Mia looked down at her body. “You don’t think I’m beautiful?” she asked, hurt. It was impossible that he didn’t. For one insane, brief moment, Mia imagined that Tuan was somehow able to see into her mind, into her heart, and that his horror had been in response to seeing all the ugliness that was there beneath the skin, gnawing a hole somewhere deep and vital inside her.
“What? No! Mia, what is wrong with this?” Tuan was gesturing at the thick layers of gauze Mia had dressed her burn with.