The Lotus Eaters. Tatjana Soli

kill for him, but would she also stay alive for him? An hour before dawn, her equipment clean and ready to go, her insides buzzed, a cocktail of lack of sleep and nerves. She fell asleep on the floor beside the bed.

      They woke to the crumping sound of mortars on the edge of the city. She rose and was in motion, a prickling of adrenaline that she recognized when an operation was about to take place. Heating water for tea, swallowing a handful of amphetamines, she sponged herself off and packed a small carrying bag. Next to the door, she set down two battered black cases filled with film she had taken over the last week.

      The last three years no one was much interested in pictures of a destroyed Vietnam. So Linh and she did humanitarian aid stories and began covering the ensuing crisis in Cambodia for extra money. Now Cambodia was off the list with the Khmer Rouge takeover. But when the actual fall of South Vietnam came, a photo essay recording the event would be very much in demand.

      She had photographed the stacks of blackened corpses in Xuan Loc, had gone all over the city getting shots of the major players in the Saigon government, Thieu and returned Vice President Ky, who swore to stay and fight this time, while at their personal residences movers stacked valuable antiques—blue-and-white porcelain vases, peaceful gilded Buddhas, translucent coral and green jade statues carved into the shapes of fish and turtles—in the yard for shipment out of the country. And, of course, she had roll upon roll of the doomed people who had no special privilege, no ticket out. Looking at those faces, she felt a premonition like a dull toothache. Maybe inside these two cases she had finally pinned it down. Maybe these two cases would redeem her part in the war.

      She stood by the window drinking tea, looking at the overcast sky, roiling clouds in varying shades from light pewter to the muddy, brownish gray of scorched earth. The breeze had turned sharp, the smell of rain and thunder promising a strong monsoon shower. Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable—its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hovering doom.

      At the sound of a creaking bedspring, she turned and saw Linh awake.

      “What are you thinking?” he said.

      “Time to go to the airport. Our bags are here. Your papers are on top.”

      “We agreed you would go to the docks, get shots of the boat evacuation. Then the airport.”

      “Does one more shot matter?” She spoke so faintly he could hardly hear her.

      “Either they all matter or none of them did.”

      She nodded, unconvinced. “I have a bad feeling.”

      “We have plenty of time.” He was reeling her back, gently, from wherever she had been.

      Jittery, she moved over to the bed and unwrapped Linh’s dressings. Skin puffy and inflamed, hot to the touch. It puckered over the nurse’s crude stitches like yeasted dough. Helen bit down hard on her lip as she rewrapped him. A new hollowness around his eyes.

      “Another shot of antibiotic even though it’s early,” she said. “I’ll be back by noon. Leave the radio on. Listen.”

      Linh nodded but seemed distracted, and Helen feared he was getting worse. She helped him up to the bathroom and then back to bed. She would have to hire a cab or cyclo to move him. She placed a pot of tea and a cup in a chair next to the bed.

      “I should skip Newport, and we’ll just get started.”

      “Go,” Linh said. Then he began to sing: “ ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…’”

      She smiled, but her mind calculated potential problems each way. She assumed she could get out at any time but worried Linh was getting too weak. The trip would be hard on him until he reached a medical facility.

      “Hurry,” he said. “Go have your final affair with Saigon. No regrets.”

      She opened the refrigerator, the only one in the building, and filled the pockets of her smock with rolls of fresh film. At the door she pulled the neck strap of her camera over her head, then buttoned her smock.

      She opened the door but stood, still undecided. “If I’m late, have Chuong help load everything on a cyclo and go ahead. I’ll meet you at the airport. Do you hear?”

      He was silent, staring at the ceiling.

      “Linh?”

      “If you don’t return, I stay,” he said.

      “Of course I’ll return.” The halfhearted ploy failed; he would not let her off so easily. “You just be ready.”

      “You got it, Prom Queen.”

      She pretended she had not heard him, banging the door shut and running down the splintering wood stairs that smelled of cedar and the sulfur of cooking fires. She was out into the street before she registered the continued absence of Chuong in the stairwell. That was what she had come to dread most, the continual disappearance of what she most relied on.

      

      A cyclo stopped at a busy corner, and Helen jumped in before the driver could protest. After a wheedling argument, he grudgingly accepted three times the normal rate to go down to the Saigon River. People had decided to come out of hiding despite the twenty-four-hour curfew and the frequent pops of small-arms fire all around. A mile away from the port, the cyclo driver jumped off his seat and refused to go any farther. When Helen complained, he pointed a crooked finger to the solid wall of people. She got out, telling him she would pay double again his going fare if he waited an hour for her. Without a word, he calmly turned around and headed back downtown. Time more precious than money for once.

      A rumor went through the crowd that two men had fallen into the water and had been crushed between evacuation boats. The fetid air smelled of unwashed bodies and fear. As Helen stood deciding whether to risk plunging into the crowd and getting caught out for hours, she spotted Matt Tanner behind a concrete barricade with another photographer. In the false camaraderie of shared danger, she was happy to see him. He waved her over.

      “Madhouse, huh?” Tanner was tall and slope-shouldered, with a narrow, wolfish face, and when he laughed, which was seldom, he showed a forbidding mouthful of jagged teeth.

      “This is new blood, Matt Clark. We’re the two Matts.”

      “It doesn’t look good,” she said.

      “Are you staying on, too?” the new Matt asked. He was young, with white-blond hair in a ponytail and wearing a black T-shirt with astrology signs all over it. She didn’t like the vultures dropping in now and made no effort to hide it.

      “Heading out this afternoon.” Watching the crowd, Helen rubbed her hand along the rough concrete of the barricade, which was already crumbling. Cheap, South Vietnamese government-contract stuff that had been undercut for profit so much that it was already disintegrating back into sand from the constant humidity. For what USAID had paid for it, it should have been stainless steel. She looked down and saw a smear of red. The jagged edge had reopened the cut on her finger.

      Tanner pulled out a handkerchief and wound it around her finger. “No need to shed blood. This isn’t even your country.”

      “I forgot.”

      “The airport’s worse than this. ARVN shooting at the crowd. Especially Vietnamese with tickets out. Hurt feelings and all, huh?”

      “I hadn’t heard that.” A mistake to come. The embassy had told her it would be at least a week if not longer before the real squeeze began. Wishful thinking.

      “If I wanted my ass out I’d head for the embassy, di di mau, quick quick. My guess is that it’s today, and they’re not announcing to avoid a panic. The hard pull is on.”

      Helen shook her head. She disliked the way he looked at her, the smugness of his smile. The press corps knew all one another’s secrets, like an extended, dysfunctional family. Tanner used the long fingernail of his pinkie to scratch the inside of his ear.

      “I meant to ring