This is not the only life ...

 

Chapter One

 

Nobody knows Shakespeare has reincarnated and is hiding in Brooklyn.

 

For the last five hundred years the English reading world has worshiped Shakespeare as a literary genius; and for centuries, he had been watching the reverence from the vantage point of the bardo. Shakespeare did not go to hell, and did not go to heaven either. What he did was hovering in the no-man's region between heaven and hell, waiting for an opportunity to come back to earth. And forty five years ago, he had his chance: he reincarnated as a human. But in this life, Shakespeare is a nobody. People do not recognize him on the streets because he does not resemble his old body as the great playwright of five hundred years ago. He does not look any bit like the black and white sketches of himself in the textbooks that people are familiar with: a distinguished Caucasian gentleman with a pensive gaze, a goatee, and a funny looking shirt collar. Instead, in this life he has black eyes, black hairs and yellow skin. He remembers in details his past life in medieval England, and he also remembers all the plays he wrote back then. Despite the immortal fame, he does not mind being unknown in this life: he is the type of man who keeps a low profile while knowing his own worth. He still possesses the literary prowess of the old Shakespeare, but does not produce anything worth publishing. He understands the taste of people today is different from that of people five hundred years ago; and if he, the legendary Shakespeare, wrote again in the same manner he did back then, they would laugh him out of existence. But the style of those old plays is the only thing he is good at, the stanzas, the ancient English, the thee's and the thou's, the kind of incomprehensible crap that bores today's high school students to death. So what he writes now he keeps to himself.

 

It is the last day of the year and Shakespeare has taken a day off from his job at a Manhattan hospital. It is cold in his room this afternoon and steam is coming out of his nose. The slumlord does not provide enough heat for the basement studio he lives in. But Shakespeare does not care about the cold, he is too absorbed in thoughts. He thinks about the tragedies he has written that made such a lasting impact on the consciousness of the English reading people. He thinks about the most famous of his plays The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet--and he is bothered. The story of these two young lovers should not have ended in deaths, he now thinks. They are too young to die. Such a waste of life. Does not make sense. The story should have had a happy ending. Suppose the young lovers say fuck the adults fuck the families to hell with the hate and just take each other's hands and run off into the sunset and live happily ever after, producing 12 children. Would that be much better and more humane? Shakespeare thinks so.

 

Now he likes the idea of lovers living happily together forever. Shakespeare decides that the story must be retold and he must give it a happy ending. This time the setting would not be in medieval Italy but it will take place in modern times, his times, in two countries called Viet Nam and the United States. The lovers would have different names, and their names would be English, not Italian. He will call it The Story of Adam and Eve.

 

So, composing himself, Shakespeare sits, concentrates, and lets fly his imagination:

 

Adam wanted to get the story straight, so he reviewed what he thought he knew about what had happened. He recalled that in 1980 he left Viet Nam on a sea voyage after four years living the life of a drifter. Before hitting the water, he and Eve had not seen each other for about a year. They were in love with each other. After reaching Hong Kong, Adam wrote home to tell his family that he had landed safely. He stayed in Hong Kong for six months, then moved on to the United States, quite a distance from the land he had left behind. And he thought, on arriving in the new country, that this was his final stop. He wrote home again to let his family know where he had ended up and told them not to worry about him.

 

One day, a few months after he had settled in, he received a letter from Viet Nam, it was Eve's. In the letter she said she missed him terribly, and promised that because the earth was round they would see each other again and wished that one day she could join him in America--and ended the letter by telling him not to drink late at night. Adam was moved by what Eve wrote, he thought about her, and remembered what had happened between them: they fell madly in love when they were seventeen. It was puppy love, pure as falling snow, and beautiful like a fairy tale. They were so innocent they did not even dare touch each other's hands. The love was all in the heart and the mind. It was angelic. But life was difficult and it torn them apart.

 

After reading the unexpected letter, Adam, desperate, wrote back, telling Eve that she must abandon all hope because there was such a wide and deep ocean between them, that his departure might be a one way trip, that he had no hope of seeing her and the homeland again, all because of the political situation there, that his ties to home might have been severed forever, and that she had better forget him and move on with her life. When Adam was writing these sad words, he sincerely believed that he could never go home again. Then the letters between them stopped and they lost touch.

 

For five or six years Adam dived into and stayed under the water and became mute--as far as his family was concerned. He contacted no one back home and never heard anything from anyone. He moved around constantly and never had a permanent address. He was sucked into the life in America. For all concerned parties, he had vanished without a trace. The turbulence of life slowly erased memories of home from his mind. Then one day he woke up, perhaps after a drunken night, and said shit I have totally forgotten about my family and all I left behind, where have I been, what has happened to me? I am a bad son, I had better write and let them know I am still alive and ok, otherwise they will continue to worry as they--for sure--have been worried all these years while I was off the radar screen. Thus correspondence with the family was reestablished. During those lost years, sometimes he thought about Eve but the thoughts would not stay on his mind for long. He believed she was now burdened with a family of her own, just like he was busy with his own life.

 

In 1992, the political situation in Viet Nam suddenly changed, and the government allowed visitors back in again. So Adam went home for a visit. One of the thoughts he had while on the trip back was that he would see Eve, the love of his life, again, and he felt anxious at the prospect. As the airplane landed in Ho Chi Minh City, he said I am home, and cried: it felt so good to come back. And he had though he could never see his homeland again.

 

Besides visiting the family, he planned to look for Eve but later found out from a relative that she had gone and was now living in America too--and she was married with two children. Someone even showed him her wedding pictures and Adam thought she looked strange in the pictures. Disappointed, he walked around the city and every corner reminded him of Eve. He remembered her pretty face and pearly eyes, her round ass and small tits and long black hair. He remembered their secret meetings at various street corners at dusk, the nervousness and the ecstasy when they sat next to one another, the intense joy of loving, the delirious pain in his heart when she was away and he went looking for her, the hallucination of her face when he missed her, how he ejaculated when he held her hand for the first time (after much courage)--things like that. All the memories rushed back, and it made him sad.

 

After the visit, he returned to America and went on with his life while thoughts about Eve lingered on his mind. Then one day just a month after the visit he received a letter from Eve, totally unexpected--someone back home must have leaked his address to her. The letter confirmed that she had been in the America for years. She wrote that she had gone to sea two years after him. And after two years living in camps in Thailand, she came to settle in the America. She added that she had waited for him for years to no avail, and she had to get married because circumstances forced her to, that she was indebted, pressured and obligated to the man who was now her husband. Besides, as far as Eve was concerned, Adam had disappeared and she had no hope of finding him.

 

He wrote back to her, respectfully but with a hint of regret, saying that he was glad she was ok and wished her happiness. But Adam was somewhat doubtful about the sincerity of what Eve wrote. Waited? Probably. Looked for? Perhaps never. From what Adam had learned, Eve came to America with a relationship with another man she had met while in Thailand; and the affair continued after she arrived in America and it resulted in marriage. Eve probably had waited for Adam for some times. But she had never looked for him even after she was in the America, despite knowing that she was now sharing the same sky with him. However, Adam thought he could not blame her, because he too had put her out of his mind during all these years. She had her life to live and he had his. But in her letter, Eve hinted that it was Adam who had abandoned her, that it was his fault that they did not become husband and wife even though fate had meant for them to cross each other's path and perhaps be together. After two or three letters--Eve also sent him pictures of her husband and children--Adam let the matter stand where it was. But it did cause a brief disturbance in the life he was living. He even talked to her once on the phone. And she sounded so different. She did not even speak with the Hue accent that he remembered she had back then. Then they stopped the communication.

 

And years passed, Adam thought no more about it, but after picking up clues and innuendos here and there, he was convinced that something tragic had happened to Eve while she was on the sea voyage in the Gulf of Thailand. He believed that her boat had been attacked by the pirates and she was raped, perhaps repeatedly during the thirteen days drifting on the sea--the same fate that befell at least half of the people who dared sail across the Gulf during that time. When he imagined the horror, the physical pain, the indignity, the humiliation she had to endured through the rapes, and the trauma it had left her with for the rest of her life, he felt as if a thousand knives were stabbing his heart: guilt and sadness. She was a virgin.

 

After that brief contact in 1992, years again passed in oblivion. Then in the summer of 2004, Adam suddenly received an email--from Eve. He was surprised, it was like the emergence of a memory that he thought had been buried in a forgotten corner of his mind. And wondered if he should answer her. Perhaps he should leave things alone. She had long ceased to be a factor in his life even though the love was still there. She was not a free woman, he knew, and re-contacting would only disturb the water for no good purpose. Adam wanted to continue to forget. One week passed, and he got another message from Eve, asking him why he did not reply, and if he still considered her his friend. This time, without thinking twice, Adam wrote back, and the ball rolled: they now communicated almost daily by emails. They had found each other again. Eve wrote that her sea voyage was one unfortunate trip and the terrible thing that had happened to her during the days on the sea was one of the reasons why she felt she should not try to look for him after she landed in Thailand and even after arriving in America. Eve said that she stayed in Thailand for two years, all alone; but near the end of her stay there she met a man who took care of her when she fell gravely sick, a man who later said that he loved her. Eve said she was grateful for the man's help during the time she was ill. As Adam understood now, she and the man migrated to America together, or perhaps she went first and he joined her later. But in any case, once settled in the new country, they got married. All this was happening perhaps during the five or six years that Adam was under the water incommunicado.

 

They kept exchanging emails, and the more they wrote, the more Adam became enthralled. The feelings of those lost teen days came back and intensified with each day and with each email. But at the same time, Adam saw the hopelessness of the situation. Now, when he reviewed the events, he accepted that people who meet each other at the crossroads of life do not necessarily travel together for the rest of their life however much they want to, because things do not always work out as people desire, and because there are forces at work that are beyond anybody’s control. That was the case with him and Eve. Now she was well-situated with a good husband (according to her) and two children, the older was now in 11th grade. She had big obligations and debts to pay. She was getting old, middle-aged already. And he was getting old too. It had been 27 years since they last saw each other--and Adam asked himself, would there be a chance he might see Eve again in this lifetime? Just one more time? Or are they going to wither away like autumn leaves, get sick, and die without ever seeing each other's face again? As he pondered the question, Adam felt heavy in his heart. There must be a better way to settle old scores.

 

At this, Shakespeare sighs and feels like jelly. The story he is beginning to form has already saddened him. The two lovers live separate lives thousands of mile apart and each has external difficulties they cannot overcome. But there must be a happy ending, Shakespeare thinks, I want a happy ending, I must bring them together, reunite them, make them happy together in the end, I want them to walk hand in hand into the sunset, because they still love each other despite the long years apart. But how am I going to pull that off? Shakespeare is baffled and says to himself I need time to think, or maybe a bottle of Vodka will help because alcohol has the power to free the imagination and knock down writer's block! Alcohol is God's spiritual gift to men--men like him.

Shakespeare puts his hat on and goes out heading to the liquor store. He knows that this character Adam desires to see Eve, his old lover, again. But right now the man is trapped in a fantasy forest, having nothing but happy memories of love to cling to.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

Shakespeare buys a bottle of vodka. 750ml. He will get drunk this evening. He knows creativity calls for help from the booze god, and that is a more important reason to get drunk than just being bored and sick of life and wanting a pick-me-up, at least during these moments when he is obsessed with the story and wants to break down the writer's block. Shakespeare is a poor man. What he makes he spends mostly on rent, food and transportation; then what is left he uses for relief of the mind, like alcohol and marijuana. He does not believe in a sober life. A life sober all the times is not worth living. Alcohol is no vice, because the holy liquid opens up the mind and frees a man from the mental constraints of the mundane. And Shakespeare despises the normal and the mundane. Even the Buddha frequently travels in the land of the bliss by means of meditation. But Shakespeare is a normal and ignorant man and does not have the power to do things like the Buddha, so he has to resort to chemicals.

 

After leaving the liquor store, Shakespeare walks into a park nearby and sits on a bench. The pigeons peck at his feet, looking for bits of bread that don't seem to be there. The wind is blowing hard and the tree branches sway violently as if wanting to break. And the cold is biting into the bones. It is almost dark, and there is no one in the park except for the keeper who is emptying the garbage cans. Shakespeare opens the bottle and takes a drink, a small drink, as a warm-up, and he darts his eyes around to see if there is a cop in sight. He has to be careful because he might get a ticket for "carrying an opened container," a misdemeanor punishable by a $200 fine or community services or even jail time. But Shakespeare does not think anyone ever goes to jail for drinking on the streets. At most, they pay a fine, or if they have no money, they will be required to do a few days of community services. Once Shakespeare was caught with a beer in his hand in a park and he explained to the cop that he had just come out of work and felt depressed and just wanted a little drink to feel better before going home and he had to drink in a park because there was no bar nearby and the cop said he would let him off this time but he had better not do that again. So whenever situation demands that he drinks in public, he always does that discreetly by transferring the booze into an empty water bottle that would make it looks like he's drinking water not Vodka, or if he's drinking a beer, he will take a long swallow then quickly put the can (in paper bag) behind his back to keep it out of the view of others. Nobody knows how many undercover cops are around these days especially after that attack on New York. And cops make commission on the number of tickets they write.

 

After the first drink, Shakespeare feels warm and the cold becomes bearable. Then he takes another drink, again straight from the bottle. He feels even warmer, with a burning sensation in the throat, then a warm feeling in the stomach, and his head starts to lighten. The angels of happiness have entered and opened the doors of his mind. It's time to enjoy the wonderful liberating effects of alcohol. Whenever the spirit hits, it sends Shakespeare's imagination flying high, thoughts take on dimensions not normally possible, including funny and meaningful thoughts that in sobriety can never materialize in the mind.

 

And thoughts about the Adam and Eve, his modern time Romeo and Juliet, come back to Shakespeare. He has said that he wants a happy conclusion to the story, but how is he going to do that successfully--like a smooth operator? It is not easy at all, even impossible, perhaps. He cannot just make the lovers leave their families and run off together into the sunset. That would be cruel and offensive to society’s standard of morality. People don’t impulsively leave children and spouses in the dirt just to answer the calls of the heart, even though for some it has happened, but then they have to live in a world of regret when the love wanes and reality hits. Circumstances control most people and would not let them free, no matter how much they want to, no matter how much they desire, no matter how much lovers' hearts cry out for union. No, they have to fulfill duties to their families, before all else, as they are required to. It is the case with Eve: she has two old parents, a husband, two children, and a mortgage. But how sad it is to ignore the calls of the heart that both characters are hearing now that they are writing to each other everyday. The hearts cry out for the lovers to be reunited, to hold hands again, and to tremble in nervousness in each other's presence again. Could they just fuck it all and run away together and forget about everything else? Is it possible? Shakespeare takes another drink. He can not bear any longer the impasse of the situation.

 

Suddenly out of the corner of his eyes he sees a dark figure approaching him. The figure comes near and he recognizes a woman perhaps in her early forties. She dresses in a long black coat but is wearing no hat despite the bitter cold, and steam is coming out of her nose. Under the weak yellow light of the lamp, he sees a beautiful but sorrowful face. Her eyes are cast downward, and she projects an air of deep sadness. He wonders what is going on in her heart and mind. She looks like the Eve of his story, a woman torn between longing for the fulfillment of the love of her life and the demand of responsibilities toward her family. He can see conflict in her face. The woman walks slowly pass him, and seems unaware that there is another person in the park--Shakespeare. She appears to be lost in her inner world, and is barely conscious of her surrounding. Shakespeare follows her with his eyes as she strolls pass him, and he imagines that the woman is probably going through the same dilemma as that of Eve, the desire to reunite with her lover but forbidden to do so. And suddenly a thought hits him: there is no way Eve can forsake her family to answer the call of her heart, to run to Adam. She simply does not have the courage. She has been trapped in a marriage for 20 years and the chains around her ankles are made of steel--she can’t shake them off. She will continue to stay in the chains and she will die, taking the love unfulfilled with her into the grave. Will she? At the thought, Shakespeare feels as if a thousand knives are stabbing his heart. No, I don't want to conclude the story that way, it's so cruel and inhumane. There must be another way. I must think harder and find a happy ending for the two characters. I want them to be happy. No way I will let them die without a satisfactory outcome. I have cheated the world for the last five hundred years, as far as the outcome of Romeo and Juliet is concerned, I should have let the lovers not only live but live happily together forever, because a love like theirs is so precious, so pure, so innocent, so angelic, so beautiful, so idealistic to deserve a fate like that. Like what? Death for no good reason. Death because of the bullshit hate and feud between the two families and the lovers' own stupidity. No, Adam and Eve are not going to be Romeo and Juliet.

 

Shakespeare takes another drink and half the bottle is gone. He feels hungry. He has not eaten anything except a cold bagel this morning. But he has no appetite; and furthermore, he knows that if he eats, the effect of the alcohol will be lessened, while he wants to get as drunk and liberated as possible.

 

The woman in the black coat has turned the corner and disappeared. She would probably continue walking into the night, delirious, and would return home after midnight with her heart chopped and bloody, still without a solution to her problems, and she would crash on the sofa and fall asleep out of exhaustion, then the husband would come out and ask her to join him in bed but she would say please I want to be left alone, and the husband would be perplexed as to what has happened to his wife, she has not been herself for the last two months and would not disclose to him what has turned into her a walking dead. She is Eve.

 

Feeling cold, Shakespeare gets up and walks out of the park. It is now completely dark, and the streets are almost deserted. He sees lighted windows on both sides of the street and thinks it must be warm behind those windows. There may be loving and sexing going on, why do I not find a warm place to sit too, this cold air if exposed to too long may make me sick with pneumonia, Shakespeare thinks. So he walks to the nearest corner where there is a coffee shop. The shop has a back room hidden from view where people can sit, have coffee, and smoke, too. So he comes into the shop, buys a tea, walks to the back room and sits down. There are two other people in the room and they are looking at the tv in the corner. Shakespeare feels good, almost elated. He has no fear and anxiety now, and feels like talking but with whom is he going to talk and about what? What a ridiculous idea, he cannot just approach a stranger and start a conversation. However, if a friend happens to be with him right now, Shakespeare will pour his heart out since he feels such an overwhelming need to tell someone the sufferings he is going through. He feels terrible when he thinks it is so difficult to permanently reunite Adam and Eve. It is only creative pain, the pain and frustration a writer feels when he confronts an impasse. But it is pain, nonetheless.

 

It is warm in the coffee shop. Shakespeare removes his coat, taking care not to make noises with the vodka bottle that he has in the coat's inside pocket when he hangs the coat on the back of the chair. He takes a sip of the hot tea then slides his slim frame slowly forward until his head rests on the top of the back of the chair and his eyes see the ceiling. He feels relaxed and well. Thoughts of Adam and Eve come back into his head. Images of their life in Viet Nam when they first met begin to form in Shakespeare's mind. What was their life like? And how did they meet and fall in love, and under what circumstances? I , Shakespeare thinks, have to begin with that, the first steps in the project of rewriting “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," only this time it will not be Romeo and Juliet, but Adam and Eve, and should I call it a "tragedy" again? Hmm, Why should it is still called a "tragedy" while I don’t want it to be one? But at this point, I still don't know how this new version of the story will turn out. Of course I want a happy conclusion for both characters, but is it possible? Sometimes events happen beyond one's control, even a writer has to listen to the dictates of the characters and their circumstances. So let's just leave the word "tragedy" alone for now, and see how the story turns out first. Having thought so, Shakespeare fixes his eyes at the ceiling and lets loose his imagination:

 

Da Nang. The year Adam met and fell in love with Eve was 1977 when they were seventeen. Adam had been living like a bum for two years. Bum, because he had no job, was not in school, and spent his days getting drunk and getting high.

 

Two years before, the country had just concluded a terrible long war after one faction defeated all others and united the land under one rule. At fifteen years old, when the victorious faction took over the government of the country, Adam was still too stupid to fully understand what was going on. One beautiful spring morning in March 1975 he woke up and saw columns of soldiers marching outside his house and people lined the road and waved to them. That was the beginning of the end of his life as a student.

 

Growing up, Adam was vaguely aware that a war had been going on. He had been a child, a school boy, safe under the protective wings of his parents. There were signs that serious things were going on like city wide curfew every night after ten pm and talks between his father and friends about people dying that he overheard. His uncles sometimes dropped by to stay for a few days and boasted about their war activities. There were also sights of American soldiers being chased by the military police from the whorehouse in the neighborhood. Some of them had to climb over the fences and run. The siren also went off every now and then during the night when rockets were fired into the city and the next morning Adam saw a few houses destroyed. But to him all these happenings were so routine and normal. War and savagery and killings and destructions mostly happened far away in the countryside where he had never had a chance to be. But the irony was--the so-called countryside was just on the edge of the city, but to Adam, it might as well be another world.

 

That morning in March 1975 when the liberation army's tanks rolled into Da Nang after a long week of chaos and looting by the Saigon troops, Adam was sitting by the window on the second floor of his house. He saw communist soldiers marching down the street, passing his house. Curious people gathered on the sidewalks and waved to them. The soldiers were so thin, pale, and young, and their bodies bent forward under their heavy backpacks. They marched in formation, orderly and silently. Adam was at the window taking it all in and suddenly tears rushed to his eyes. He didn't know why he cried. He didn't know exactly how he felt at that moment, but the strange feeling was powerful. He sensed that a tremendous change had finally taken place, and that his and everyone’s life would never be the same again. History was here and now, carried to him on the bony shoulders of those young soldiers. Adam distinctively felt that the moment was big, so big, and he was there as a small witness.

 

That year, he had been in the tenth grade, and he loved school, the friends, the lessons, and even got fascinated now and then with girls. Like all of his classmates who were growing up, girls caused curiosity in them, and the curiosity remained just that: curiosity.

 

School reopened a month after liberation, after things quieted down, and Adam went back to classes but he did not feel the same anymore. There was a sense of disintegration and disconnection, of being suddenly taken out of a familiar place and put in a strange situation. The lessons were different. The teachers now taught a different version of history. And students did not wear uniforms anymore. Depression was the general atmosphere in school, at least that was how Adam felt.

 

The same depressed atmosphere pervaded every aspect of people's life. Everyone was affected by the abrupt change of government, by the unfolding of another chapter of the country's history. People learned to adapt to the new rulers who repeatedly issued decrees that were hard to make sense of. Everyone had to be in some kind of political organization according to their ages. The children belonged to the Youth Organization; whoever is between 15 and 35 must join the Communist League; older people were members of organizations that addressed their own generation’s concern; and no one was allowed to float. All must attend weekly political education meetings held in each district's police precinct. Overnight visitors to anyone's home must register with the local authority. People were issued new ID cards, and travels between provinces required permits by the police. The police often harassed people for trivia reasons, like when they saw a boy with hairs that covered his ears and necks, they would stop him and take him to a barber shop to have his hair cropped like a soldier; or if they saw him with an wide open shirt collar that exposed his chest, they would stopped him and scolded him and ordered him to button up. Shit like that. The victors acted the role, and they were running a dictatorship.

 

There were also political groups in school and students must go to meetings where lessons in Communist ideology was taught. Life had become regimented and structured, the new leadership controlled every aspect of people's life. But the biggest impact was that most people no longer had the means to make a living like they had used to. Worse if they had worked for the old regime now that is was gone. In the city, private business was discouraged and curtailed by the government. In the countryside, peasants were organized into collectives where everyone worked in teams and shared the crops and no one owned anything, not even a spade. Some small private businesses were still allowed, such as sidewalk coffee stands and petty commerce, but rice and other essentials of daily life were rationed, like fish sauce and even cooking oil. Food became scared. The bottom had fallen out of the country's economic life, and everyone scrambled for their daily meals. Hunger was the new reality. The Communist party was trying to implement new economic policies but most were not popular. Families who had used to depend on the old regime for a living--civil servants and soldiers--and now had no means to make a living were forced to leave their homes in the cities and move to the wild undeveloped outer areas to become farmers, making their living from the land, something they had never done before but now had to learn. Those areas were called the New Economic Zones.

 

And Adam did not like what was going on around him. He had a rebellious nature and did not take structure and discipline very well. In fact, he hated it. He ignored notices from the police that requested him to join the district's Communist League. He did not go to weekly political meetings. And eventually sick of it all, he dropped out of school at the beginning of the eleventh grade. Adam's parents did not know that he had stopped going to school because every morning he would still get up and go out with books under his arms like he was going to school, and so his parents had no suspicions. But instead of heading to school, he went and sat in the coffee shops and read and talked with his friends who were dropouts like him. They were a bunch of drifters. Then at the usual hour in the middle of the afternoon, he would go back home. This affair went on for months until he did not bother to get out of bed in the morning anymore. And that was when his parents asked him what was happening to him and he told them that he had stopped going to school because he did not like it anymore. His parents were dismayed and asked him what he was going to do now. He said he did not know and asked them to leave him alone. Now that he did not have to pretend to go to school any morning any more, he slept late and stayed up late. When he was awake, he would go to the coffee shops and sit with a book and a cup of black coffee and he would sit for hours and hours.

 

Adam remembered that the whole nation at that time was in a deep economic crisis. Now thinking back, however, he did not blame the Communists entirely for the people's suffering, even though their eventually wrong economic policies had prolonged the pain--unnecessarily. Lao Tzu said that famine always follows a great war. After 80 years of oppression and exploitation by the French colonists, the country had gone through twenty five years of brutal war, millions died, and the land was devastated by years of American bombing. And even after the killing had stopped and peasants returned to the rice field, they continued to be blown up by the forgotten land mines and ordinances.

 

Facing hunger, many had to take to the railroad to buy and sell whatever of values, and the police cracked down hard on these commercial activities because they, as Communists, did not condone private enterprise, and they did not care that people were only trying to make living. Adam hopped the train too, but not to buy and sell anything. He was riding the train because he was restless and had nothing to do. He was seventeen years old, still growing, his mind was still young, he was inexperienced, and was sensitive like any adolescents.

 

His first wet dream happened when he was perhaps fifteen. He dreamed he was naked in bed with a black woman--even though he had never seen a black woman--and it felt real good and he ejaculated. He woke up to find his underwear wet with a sticky substance, and it had a weird smell. He did not know how the hell that happened but it felt pretty good. But he never masturbated. He did not know he could massage his own penis to give himself orgasm. He learned that only later and in a very special environment: prison. That was how stupid he was. But he did notice that his penis sometimes raised itself and got hard when it made contact with the coarse fabrics of his shorts. That happened often when he walked; and when that happened, his face turned red for shame and he had to walk slowly and cover the area between his legs with his books so people would not see the erection. Or he would stop and turn his back to the street and hold his breath until the erection went away.

 

When not riding the trains, Adam would sit in the coffee shops all days and nights to read and discuss philosophy with his friends. He devoured the literature of the existential writers like Sartre and Camus and Nietzsche. He was especially impressed with the novels of Dostoievski. He also read the poetry of Bui Giang whose stanzas he encountered for the first time and was fascinated by the language this mad genius used: it was strange, beautiful and liberating--this poet was a word-magician. Adam also read Pham Cong Thien's books and what he found so attractive about this author was his passionate criticism of modern literature. He loved Thien’s essays on Henry Miller, Hemingway, Rimbaud, Appolinaire and Beaudelaire. These books were banned by the new regime because of their "decadent" content, of not being in line with the revolutionary spirit of the time. But Adam some how got hold of these books, mostly from the flea market, and he read them with a passion, then passed them on to his friends. He internalized all he read and lived as the philosophy dictates. What philosophy? That life was a terminal sickness and had no meaning and the mission of man on earth was to get drunk and high as much and as often as he could so he could escape from reality, no matter how short-lived the escapes were; that insanity was an appropriate response to life; and that suicide was the ultimate and justified revolt against life. So whenever Adam managed to find money, he would buy rice wine and drink with his friends until they were all drunk like pigs and did crazy things.

 

One afternoon he and a friend shared a big bottle of rice wine--and he was drunk. But he was not having a blackout. He was conscious and knew what was going on around him, but had no control over what he was doing. What he thought of doing when he was drunk, he did it. There was no thinking twice. That afternoon after finishing the bottle, he and the friend walked along the river bank, feeling great, elated, floating, supercharged, as if on top of the world. Then all of a sudden they saw a cop abusing a man. They approached the cop and asked him to leave the poor man alone. The cop was not armed even though he was in uniform. He judged the situation quickly and realized that he was no match for Adam and his friend. He was one and they were two, and he was unarmed, so immediately he let the man go and beat it. As the cop walked away, glancing back at the drunken boys with sinister looks, Adam felt that he had done a good deed and felt good about it. After the cop disappeared, he and the friend continued to walk then sat down on the sidewalk to rest and continued to feel invincible. They sat there looking at the green trees and the blue sky and it was wonderful to be drunk. Then out of nowhere three guys came running toward them, all carrying AK 47s. They surrounded Adam and his friend and Adam recognized the cop whom just minutes before they had humiliated. The offended cop jumped on them and hit them with a rifle butt, perhaps two or three times each. Adam did not see what happened to his friend but blood was coming out of his own mouth. By then the elation was gone. Then the cops took the two friends to the precinct and tied them up and locked them in separate rooms. They asked Adam where he lived, then left him alone. Hours later when it was way past dinner time, his father appeared and took him home.

 

Adam drank whenever he had money, and he get money by selling what he had and what the family had. After selling all the clothes and the books he owned, he took things from the house and sold them too. Things like LP records, cassette tapes, his father's books, and they were sold by the kilos. Eventually he was left with only a pair of pants and a shirt which he wore during the day and washed at night. His parents now considered him a lost boy, beyond redemption, and they looked at him hopelessly, not knowing what to do to save him from the crisis he was in. Every morning, while Adam was still sleeping his father put a few coins and a couple cigarettes on the night table for him. That was how desperate his father was about him: he was afraid that if the rotten son had no money for coffee and cigarettes, he would take things from the house and sell them. Adam was like a mad person--and only seventeen.

 

One day a friend introduced Adam to marijuana. Unlike Adam this friend was still in school but they saw each other almost everyday. There was a guy in a house near the market who sold the stuff. For five dongs, the guy would sell a small paper packet with dried grass in it--a nickel bag--and it could be rolled into two big joints. That Saturday morning Adam and the friend sat in Adam's living room and there was only his brother downstairs in the entire big house. It was a bright morning. Then they smoked the weed. Adam coughed. Moments later his senses started to alter and reality began to vibrate. The colors became intense and vibrant. He looked at the wall in front of him and saw scenes of Paris out of the green moss that was growing on it. It was fascinating. They talked and their voices became amplified and the words they spoke suddenly carried strange and special meanings. He looked at his legs and suddenly the legs became elongated. He reached out to touch his friend's shoulder but felt that the friend was so far away and his hand just kept stretching out and never reached the friend. Even the cigarette he was smoking seemed never to burn out, and the white fume danced slowly in elaborated patterns. Then the friend said: "Close your eyes and relax," and Adam closed his eyes and the friend started to sing. What a voice! And how sweet the lyrics were. It was a song by Vu Thanh An…A stream of white smoke takes you into oblivion…The lovers reverently gave up their bodies to one another one afternoon…Those were the words that he remembered his friend was singing. And as he closed his eyes and listened, Adam saw in his mind a desert at night with a sky full of stars and the voice flied in and filled up not only the desert but the whole universe and the voice was the only thing alive. Adam didn't know how much time had passed. Then they came out for a walk, and Adam felt that the distance he had to walk to get to the door seemed like infinity, and when he felt that he would never reached the door, he panicked. But eventually he came out of the house, and noises on the streets suddenly became distant and the houses and the people looked dreamy and far away. From that day on, Adam added marijuana to his daily chemical intakes.

 

Adam had another friend who was a heroin addict. And one thing led to another, because soon, Adam was shooting heroin too. This kind of heroin was not the white powder stuff but were little chunks of black-colored and hardened jelly which had to be cooked in water until melted then shot into the veins. Adam knew the city had an army of addicts to this kind of drug. One guy described the sensation while under the influence of the drug with an improvised song: When the needle goes into the veins, I feel like I am flying in a pink sky; when the needle goes into the veins, I feel like I am flying in a blue sky. This friend and Adam sometimes shot the shit together on the roof top of his house, or in the public bathrooms in the bus station. But Adam did not like the feeling this drug gave him. After the black liquid went into his veins and he lied down, Adam felt as if the whole weight of the earth was going down on him. It made him sluggish and stupid. So Adam never bought the stuff, and he did not become addicted to it. He preferred marijuana, which altered his sense perceptions and transported him into another reality, he liked the hallucinations that he found interesting and artful, and he especially loved to listen to music when he was high on marijuana.

 

Writing was another of Adam's passions. He wrote like a maniac. Notebook after notebook. He wrote about the pain of becoming an adult. He stayed up all night to write. Then he threw them all out to start over again. One night he threw all of his notebooks into the river and had no regret.

 

For a time, Adam walked every night through the streets of the city wanting to commit suicide. And he actually did it. He was insane. He was crazy. One night, he took a dose of mercury on the advise of a friend then went to bed and waited for death. He waited and waited then fell asleep and the next morning when the sun hit him in the face he opened his eyes to find that he was still alive. He was disappointed and wondered what had gone wrong. One beautiful morning a few months later, he tried to hang himself. But as his neck went into the loop and as he tightened the noose, it was painful, so he stopped. Then he went out and drank until he became a raving lunatic. And he was seventeen years old.

 

Alcohol was easily available and he drank all the booze there was to drink. But still he couldn't get rid of the pain of being alive. His parents were concerned about him. His father once suggested that he be committed to a mental hospital. But he objected, terrified at the idea of being seen as mentally ill. His father later dropped the idea.

 

Adam remembered that the country lied at the foot of a range called "Long Mountains," and the mountains extended into the sea. The country was in the tropical region, the climate was hot all year round; and in the central part of the country where Da Nang was, it rained in October and November and sometimes it got cold. But Adam loved the dry season because he liked hot weather. During the summers, every night he went to bed and the next morning he woke up sweating. Sometimes he had coma sleep if he slept during the day. When the coma took over him, Adam felt like the weight of the whole earth was coming down on him and he screamed in terror but made no sound and he used all his strength to shake himself out of the nightmare but couldn’t move a muscle. He thought he was going to die. Then all of a sudden he woke up, stunned, and dared not sleep again.

 

The region's climate was not monotonous because even when the weather was the most dry, the rain would fall after a long drought and things would become alive again. In the rainy seasons, the sky was always dark and the rain was relentless. The noise that the rain made on the tin roofs was thunderous. The river that ran through the city swelled and big waves bounced up and down, crashing against the banks. During those times Adam would put on his raincoat and walk to the river and sit on the bench and watch the dark and violent river. It was like the end of the world…given the dark mood he was in at that time. On occasions he would walk to the sea and look out into the distance and at the powerful walls of water that slammed furiously onto the shore. This image often appeared in his dreams after he settled in America. Sometimes he dreamed whole towns and villages being washed away by these giant waves.

 

Adam often disappeared from home for days at a time. When restlessness hit, he would get up early to get ready for the trip. He might have done all the preparation the night before: his backpack was packed, nice and ready. But then, he could not sleep very well. He closed his eyes and drifted in and out of dreams. When dawn finally arrived, he got up and washed himself, put his clothes on and sat waiting for the sky to brighten up. All the while, his heart was beating hard, full of expectation of what he might encounter on the road. Then he walked to the bus station on the edge of the city, bought his ticket, and sat in a small café and had a black coffee and waited for the time to depart. Life looked very interesting during those moments. For Adam, it was a time of adventures, of aimless wandering to strange corners of the land, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. And while he was running away, Adam's father and mother sat home and worried about him. On one of those wanderings he was arrested together with a friend by the police while they were walking on the road late at night. He had no travel permit--a serious violation of law. The whole of Viet Nam, just after liberation, then was in a state of siege and everyone was paranoia, especially the police who saw enemies everywhere they looked. That night Adam was thrown in jail. He was kept in a container for two days without food in a village before being transferred to a nearby town's prison.

 

It was while in prison for the first time that he knew what masturbation was. Guys sleeping near him would wake up in the middle of the night and jerk off and he watched them out of the corners of his eyes and understood what they were doing. They moaned with pleasure while they were doing that.

 

One month after being thrown in jail his father found out where he was and got him out after bribing the jailers. He was glad to be home again, feeling kind of special when his mother and father treated him with more care and attention than before and pleaded to him not to run away again. "Your mother prayed everyday for your safe return, son," his father said, "and I had to run all over from town to town looking for you." That was Adam in his late teen years. And when he was not traveling, he would lock himself in his room and read all the philosophies and fictions and poetry he could find. And he wrote his journals, all of which were now food for the fish in the river.

 

Adam remembered those miserable long train rides that he made frequently back then. At that time the country was in a deep economic pit. Everyone was dirt poor. There were no jobs. So people took to the railroad to buy and sell whatever that might make a profit. Adam was along for the ride but his situation was different: he was running away from home, trying to escape the desperation of his spirit, the hopelessness he felt, the dead end of his life. He was a teenager in crisis, in growing pain. So often he was on one of those trains where human miseries concentrated. The train was always packed to the max with people and merchandise. Some people could sit, if they were lucky to find a seat, but most had to stand and everyone was on top of one another. The stench was powerful, mixed with the screaming and yelling every time the train pulled into a station and people tried to get on and get off. All took place in the heat of the summer or in the drenching rain of the monsoon. He usually rode on the roof of the train with hundreds of other people. It felt better up there. And except for the danger of being shaken and thrown off by the violent movements of the train and of being smashed against the overhead steel bars of a bridge, riding on the roof was very enjoyable because he had the winds, the sky and the spectacular scenery in full view.

 

One night on one of those runaways he was lying on the roof of the train next to a strange girl. As it got colder late in the night Adam used his raincoat to cover himself--and the girl. It was dark and he could not see clearly the girl's face but it did not matter because it was the first time he was body to body with a girl in a horizontal position and he was excited. They never said a word. And under the cover of the raincoat and darkness, he explored her body. And she let him…or rather she had no reactions. Adam’s hands nervously went up and down over her breasts, her belly, her thighs but he was too afraid to touch her between the legs, all in silence and in the steady rhythm of the train. Then he fell asleep. When the morning came he looked at the girl and she was pretty and had dark skin and looked like a peasant girl. Adam did not feel embarrassed. The girl glanced at him once or twice then sat looking into the distance but never said a word. He did not say anything either.

 

One evening a friend asked if he had ever fucked. He said no. The friend said he himself had never fucked either but dared not and asked Adam if he dare to fuck, and if he dared, the friend would pay for the fuck if Adam would just let him watch. Adam agreed, and they went looking for a prostitute. He was greatly excited, and his heart beat faster and faster as they approached the corner where they knew streetwalkers liked to hang out. And under a street lamp that was too weak to dispel the darkness, they saw a female figure walking slowly in front of them, and every minute or so the figure turned her head and looked quickly at them. They knew they had spotted a prostitute. She was tall, slim, her hairs flew down her shoulders and she wore a pair of blue silk pajama. After letting them trail her for about five minutes, she suddenly stopped under a tree where it was dark, then she turned around to face him and his friend. He came close to her and asked how much, his voice trembled, and his heart beat even harder. She had a beautiful but sad face, and the sadness was distinctively clear in her eyes. The woman said her price, and also said the place to fuck would be a room she rented for things like this not far from here, near the river.

 

Then the three of them walked. He strolled close to the woman and the scent of her perfume fascinated him. It was almost midnight and the streets were deserted. Before reaching the riverbank, they turned into a small street, more like a lane than a street; and at the middle of the lane, the woman stopped in front of a two-story building that looked like a warehouse and in a small voice called out someone's name. She called three or four times, and moments later, the door silently opened by someone behind and the three of them walked quietly in. Adam was going to see a naked female body, and he was really going to fuck for real, not masturbate. The person who opened the door for them was a young man, not much older than him, who disappeared after closing the door after them. It was dark and hot inside the house, and the air stood still. The woman led the way, walking up a wooden staircase that cracked and groaned under their steps. Then she entered a room and he followed her in. She closed the door, but not completely, because Adam had told her that his friend would be allowed to watch. She took off her pajama, and totally naked, lied down on the bed and asked him to do the same. He stripped and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked intensely at body of the prostitute that was spreading silently under his eyes. The room was dark but the window was open and light from the street lamp came through and allowed him to see an ivory white form of a female body: it was proportionate, with long legs, a flat belly, and her chest was pulsing with every breath. She still did not say a word, but he had started to touch her, first on her belly then up the torso then to the breasts, and the sudden contact with the coolness of her skin sent a delightful shudder down his spine. So that was how the female body was supposed to feel like, cool like marble and smooth like silk. The sensation excited and dazzled him. Then the woman asked him to hurry up, and without waiting, took his aching penis and guided it into her. It was a painful penetration and Adam could see the woman's face contorted every time he pushed. He knew he was supposed to push when his penis was inside her. It felt strangely good when his penis caressed against the wall of her tight vagina, a sensation he had never felt before. But there was very little lubrication. Then suddenly he ejaculated, and with the release, his breath as well as the woman's immediately slowed down as if a heavy burden had suddenly been lifted. Then his penis slowly returned to its normal size and was ejected from her closing vagina. He rolled over and tried to catch his breaths. So, that was what fucking was all about, he thought. She asked him if this was his first time and he said yes and she did not say anything more. Adam paid her then put his clothes on and walked out.

 

His friend was outside the door. "Why so fast?" The friend asked. "How do I know?" Adam said. It must have been past midnight. The next morning he did not get up until noon.

 

One afternoon about a month later, he saw the woman again. She was walking alone on an empty street, her hair was a mess, her pajama all wrinkled and dirty, and she had the look of a wounded animal. He even thought she looked like a mad woman. Adam knew it was the woman who had taken his virginity. He had no doubt it was her, and he wondered what had happened. Some months later he saw her again, this time on the ferry crossing the river, she was singing for handouts, the way street musicians/beggars did, and with her was a small girl no more than ten years old. And they were both in rags.

 

Eventually the authority had enough with Adam's non-conforming ways. He had never attended a political meeting, refused to join any organizations, and evaded mandatory labor services that all young people were required to do once in a while, things like clearing jungles or digging irrigation canals. All he did was getting high and drunk. Adam was a bad citizen and the cops now decided to bring him into line.

 

One afternoon they sent him a notice to report to the district police station to discuss "important matters." He knew that this day would come. He thought the matter overnight and decided to not to run. Just give up, he said to himself. In the morning, he walked to the police station, showed the notice to the cop at the front desk who looked at him, smiled and told him to wait, then disappeared into the back. Minutes later the cop came out with another cop and they asked him to follow them to the back then shoved him into a cell and locked the door. For Adam, this was not too unexpected. The authority had allowed him to avoid structure and regimentation for too long; and the time for it to end had finally arrived. He sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, unsure of what was going to happen next. The cops had not asked him any questions. An hour later, the cell door was opened and another guy was pushed in--another bad citizen. The guy looked his age, and Adam did not know him even though they must live in the same district. The afternoon came and went, then in the evening his mother came and brought him food. The other guy's sister came and brought him food too. That night the two inmates slept on the cold floor. The next morning a cop marched both of them to the central prison, a high-walled, razor-fenced complex near the city's main market. It was only a fifteen-minute walk but it felt long because on the way people looked at them curiously: they were escorted by an armed guard and their hands were cuffed like criminals.

 

That day he was put in a room with at least forty other people. The central prison was crowded as he had remembered, he had been in it once before--for something he had not done: he was accused of being an accomplice in a bicycle theft.

 

The following morning he and some others in the room were called out and ordered to board an army truck that parked in the prison's yard. There were three trucks and when they were filled with people, they rolled out. Outside the gate, families of the prisoners were waiting and they started a commotion when they saw the trucks. People surrounded the vehicles and frantically called out the names of their sons, brothers, fathers to give them food and cigarettes and provisions. His mother was in the crowd too and passed him a backpack that later he found contained some dried potatoes and packets of salt and pepper and a few changes of clothes. The trucks took to the big road leading out of the city, traveled for an hour, then turned into a bumpy dirt road and crawled for another three hours. The prisoners were not told where they were being taken to. The dirt road finally ended at the foot of the mountains and all were ordered to walk, continuing the journey. It was noon when they started to go up the mountains. They traversed slowly though dense jungles and crossed the streams under the supervision of five armed guards, one leading the way and the rest covered the column.

 

The prisoners arrived at the camp site in a jungle clearing in the late afternoon. The camp was a series of thatched bamboo barracks surrounded by a bamboo fence and there was also a watch tower. The site was empty when the prisoners arrived and Adam estimated the number of the new inmates to be about a hundred. The commander of the camp, a respectable-looking old man with silver hair, addressed the prisoners, telling them that they were undesirable elements of society and they were going to be kept here to do labor for an indefinite period of time until it was determined that they had been rehabilitated. Adam recognized many heroin addicts in the crowd. Then they were organized into teams and assigned sleeping spaces and each was issued a hatchet, a pair of anti-leeches stocking, a mosquito nest, a blanket, a steel rice bow, a pair of chopsticks, and a tin spoon. The prisoners would sleep in two rows in each barracks on two opposite long wooden boards that extended from one end of the barrack to the other. Within the compound there were also outhouses and a mess hall.

 

The next morning the guards marched the prisoners into the jungle and put them to work. They cut down shrubs, trees, grasses, tangles, vines, all, to create field for farming. They were now a chain gang, taken under the gun to the work site every morning, labored all day, then returned to the camp in the late afternoon. It was back breaking labor under the scorching sun. And there wasn't enough to eat. Everyone was hungry all the times. Most prisoners were young men, the oldest was no more than thirty, and the food ration they received three times a day was barely enough to make them felt they had eaten anything at all. Each meal consisted of two small bowls of rice, fish sauce, and a cup of vegetable soup. So at every opportunity, the prisoners would look out for things edible in the jungle to supplement their diet. Sometimes they would find a wild small animal run by and they would all throw their hatchets at it and with luck they would kill the animal and bring it back to the camp and in the evening they would roast the animal and share the meat among them themselves. And they were all hungry for sweet and fat. But the most valuable items in the camp were candies and tobacco, which were brought to the camps for some prisoners by their relatives perhaps once a month, but not all had relatives who would do that for them on a regular basis.

 

Once on the occasion of independence day, there was a celebration and the prisoners were treated to a good meal. The food ration for that day was increased, and the for the midday meal, there were boiled bacon. Everyone ate their fills and were happy. One day someone smuggled in a bottle of rice wine and let Adam have a cup. It felt wonderful to taste alcohol again, and it felt like heaven when the effects of the wine went to the head and made him happy.

 

Two months after arriving in the camp, Adam broke his glasses while working and was excused from labor. He sat in the barracks for days afterward waiting for another pair of glasses that were being sent up by his family. The team leader said Adam had deliberately broken his glasses in order to avoid duties. And for those idle days, his food ration was reduced because he was not working. During the time in the camp he was also hit with malaria. It was a terrible illness. He felt cold and despite covering himself with three blankets he still shook. As if the cold was coming from inside his bone marrow. During those cold spells and if it was night, Adam would hug his bedfellow tightly for some body heat, and the guy hugged him back too because he knew Adam was sick of malaria and needed warmth. After the cold came the hot and it made him sweat profusely and he had to take off all his clothes. The cold and hot alternated every ten or fifteen minutes. His father sent medicine when he heard Adam was sick with malaria. The illness lasted for two weeks and he felt as if he was in a dream world--because of the high fever. He returned to work after feeling well again.

 

Every night all prisoners had to attend political meetings and listen to lectures on the virtues of socialism. There were criticism and self-criticism sections; and the nightly meetings would always end with everyone singing a patriotic song together then all would go to bed at the same time. Adam was honored once for being a model prisoner and an "advanced" laborer. Many prisoners tried to escape, but most were recaptured and brought back. For punishment, they were beaten by the guards, often while the whole camp watched, as if the guards were making an example of the victim. One guy did not learn his lesson, he tried to escape twice, and after the second failed attempt, he was shot in the one of his feet, again, in plain view of all. During the monsoon, one prisoner escaped but two days later his body was found in a stream not too far from the camp. People assumed he was killed after loosing his footing and smashing his head against a rock while trying to cross the raging stream.

 

Beside the constant hunger and the hard labor, what Adam dreaded most was the leeches that were everywhere in the jungle. They were creatures tiny like match sticks and invisible under the leaves and inside the bushes and when they sensed body heat they would spring out and attach themselves silently to the prisoners' legs or any exposed part of the skin and they would suck the blood until they became fat like a thump. Often at the end of a work day, the prisoners would go back and take off their pants or shorts and discovered a dozen or so fat leeches on their legs. They then used the hatchets to scrap the leeches of their legs and killed them, and the legs then looked all bloody. The leeches nuisance was especially bad when the jungle was wet with rain.

 

Six months into the internment, Adam was set up to make his escape. A guard came back from leave and told him in such and such a night and at such and such a time he must be ready to sneak out during the guard's watch. The guard told Adam that while in the city during leave he was contacted by Adam's father who requested that he helped Adam escape. And he agreed--for a fee. The guard told Adam that he would be accompanied by another prisoner who knew the way back to Da Nang and who was also arranged to escape that night. This prisoner had made one escape attempt before but was recaptured. He was a member of Adam's work team and they knew but rarely talked to each other. However, after receiving instructions from the guard they started to glance in each other's direction.

 

On the night of the planned escape, Adam lied wide awake waiting for the signal from the guard. Past midnight, someone touched his foot, but he lied for a few more minutes then got up and walked gently through the rows of sleeping prisoners. He sensed that another person was tiptoeing behind him, and he knew it was his co-escapee. They walked out of the gate. There were no unusual sounds except for the rhythmic buzz of insects and of howling of the night jungles. They walked for an hour on the usual path that they walked everyday to the work sites then turned into a smaller trail. Adam’s companion was familiar with the way because he had been on it before. There was some light from the moon as it was covered only by a thin layer of clouds and they could see the ground they were walking on. They did not say a word for at least three hours, and just walked. Then fearful of what might be awaiting them in the darkness of the jungles and after finding a trail of footprints that they determined as tigers', Adam and his companion decided to stop. They believed that their disappearance would not be discovered until the morning and if the guards decided to pursue, Adam and his friend would have been at least seven hours ahead of them. The pursuers would be traveling on foot like him, and they did not have instant communication to warn their people in the low land about the escape. That night Adam and his companion huddled in the bushes and toward the morning there was a light rain. He was not sure if he had any sleep. But the night did pass and as the sun came up, they resumed their trek down the mountains and through the jungles.

 

They walked for another day and in the evening arrived at a small village by the bank of a river called Giao Thuy, meaning "mixed currents." The reason behind this name was that at certain times of the day there were two distinct flows of water continuously cutting into each other, one was greenish clear and the other was muddy and red. In the dark Adam and his friend knocked on the door of the first house they found and an old man answered the door, looked at them, then invited them in. They explained to the man that they were workers on leave from a collective up mountains and they only happened to pass by as the night descended and would like to ask for a roof to spend the night then they would travel again in the morning. They told the man their families in Da Nang were expecting them--and that was the only truthful part of the story. Without asking too many questions, the man fed them with some rice and let them sleep in a bed in the back room. At midnight the village's police stopped by and complained to the man that somebody had reported that he had killed a pig and sold the meats without permission. That was what Adam heard but he did not remember how the old man answered the police. As Adam had hoped, all during the exchange between the cop and the old man, there was no mention of two escaping prisoners. They got some sleep that night.

 

The next morning they thanked the old man and his wife then caught the boat to Vinh Dien, a five-hour trip which would bring them closer to the city and freedom. Adam had a feeling that the man knew that the real deal was about him and his friend but just kept silent and acted as if they were what they said they were. However, Adam was tense when walking out of the village to board the boat because he and his friend were strangers in this area. And if anyone suspected something, they might alert the village's authority and that would surely be the end for them. They sat on the boat with a dozen other people and tried to talk as little as they could for fear that others would overhear and discover that they were fugitives.

 

They arrived in Vinh Dien late in the afternoon, went into the local market near the river and ate the best meal they had had in months, then boarded a bus for Da Nang. It was a smooth ride, really smooth, literally, because they and the bus were rolling on paved road, not trekking on rocky bumpy mountain paths like they had done during the time they were at the camp. It was a wonderful feeling, like paradise, to sit in the bus, have the wind blow into the faces and know that they were on the last stretch to freedom, and Adam was immensely happy. Once back in the city, they sat in a coffee shop facing the street and looked at the bicycles rolling by; and again, how smooth the bicycles seemed when they slowly rolled on the street. It was as if they were floating just over the surface of the road. That was the first, most distinct, and almost surreal impression Adam had coming back to the city after six months in the mountains.

 

They waited until dark then each went his own way. They did not dare go home in the daylight because the neighbors--who by now must have known they were prisoners--might see them and ask questions and a nasty one of them might even come to the cop to talk about their sudden return and that would be big troubles. Under the cover of night Adam slipped quietly into the house and saw his brother sitting in front. Saying nothing, he walked straight to the back and up to his parents' room. His father had expected his return. Adam stayed in the house for about an hour then his father drove him to his uncle's house in another part of the city and there he would stay in a small room and not come out for at least a month.

 

While Adam was hiding, his father was trying to find ways for him to escape from the country, to "cross the border" into another territory, seeking refuge. Adam's father was determined that he finds a life somewhere else and that was what many people who had the means were doing at the time: get out of the country to look for food and freedom.

 

Adam stayed in a small room at the back of his uncle's house and never came out. His brothers once in a while visited him and brought him news of the family and told him that his father was looking for a snakehead to smuggle him out of the country. Being a fugitive, it was not safe for him to stay in the country anymore. Days went by, Adam was restless and agitated, but tried to keep quiet. No neighbors of his uncle should know that there was a stranger in the house, unregistered. The uncle was taking a big risk by hiding him, but his father was a great persuader, he would talk people into doing things his way. The uncle might be doing Adam a favor by hiding him out of his own goodness, or he was paid by his father to do so, Adam wasn’t sure. A month later, his father informed him that he had found a boat owner willing to take him--and another brother of his--on a freedom voyage, for a fee. His father had placed a deposit for both of them, the rest of the money would be paid to the owner's relatives once there was news that Adam and his brother had arrived safely on the other shore. He asked Adam to be patient.

 

Then one night Adam's father came and told him to get ready to go. He got up, said goodbye to his uncle, then with head down and heart thumping, he walked along the main street, met his brother in front of a movie theatre, and they walked together to the river while his father was following them on a bicycle in a distance. At the river, the two of them boarded a small boat, and once on the other side, they were met and escorted by a man to a house near the river bank. In the house, there were already people hiding under the beds, behind the altar, in the kitchen, waiting for the time to sneak out and begin the journey--into the unknown. At midnight, hearing a signal, he and his brother got up from behind the altar, then with their backs bent forward and their heads down, they walked slowly and quietly to the riverbank and climbed into a boat and lied flat down. It was a moonless night in January. More people got on the boat, all lying down, and soon the engine started, and off they went. The boat was carrying 20 people, men, women and children, including the boat owner. They sailed out of the river mouth and to the ocean without incident: they were not detected. Had the border guards been bribed into looking the other way? There was no way to know. At day break, the boat was way out in the ocean and heading northeast. There was no more fear of being pursued; the only thing to worry about now was how to survive the trip. The year was 1981.

 

The boat owner was at the helm and had a compass to guide him. All young men took turn to throw water out of the belly of the boat. Women and children stayed down. It was his first trip to the sea and in the small fragile boat, the ocean looked and felt mightily intimidating because of the big waves. The boat would be lift up and then sunk down on the rhythm of the waves. The sky was blue and the wind was gentle, like a breeze. And they had enough food and water and fuel. During the day, it was ok as long as the boat was sailing smoothly, but it was particularly fearful at night when all round them was nothing but black and it felt as if they were swimming in a sea of thick and dark liquid. There was no moon and the stars were too few and far between.

 

After two days, they arrived in Hainan island, in Chinese territory. Adam remembered it was a beautiful afternoon, there was not a strand of cloud in the sky, and the water around the island was crystal clear and of a greenish color. The authority there sent some people out and with hand gestures, made the boatpeople understand that they were not allowed to come ashore, but they must sail on. So on they sailed. They were happy to see land, but disappointed after not allowed to come ashore. They continued the journey but now they sailed close to the shoreline. The boat's small engine was holding out fine. And the next morning, seeing signs of human on the far off beach, they headed toward land, and this time, the local authority let them step on shore. After three days being tossed around on the sea, it felt good to plant the feet again on firm ground. In this fishing village, people came out and looked at them curiously, and with hand signals, asked them if they had gold or watches to sell. And some people did exchange things. After resting for a few hours, they sailed on, and the next day arrived in another fishing village. It was new year's day, the year of the Pig. But there was little celebration in this village; the people here was so poor, they scrapped their living from the sea and the infertile land they lived on. There was an empty thatched hut on the beach and the village elders allowed the group to stay there. And they stayed for two days, until the traditional three-day new year celebration was over. During those two days, Adam and some of the young men wandered into the village to look around, and whenever they approached a house, people would immediately stop what they were doing and gather up whatever they had in the front yard and run into the house and close the door behind them. He wondered what they were afraid of. On the last day of their stay there, he went into the village with three others to look for fuel and fresh water. The village's elders understood what they needed and gave them water and fuel but would not accept payment. And they continued the journey.

 

On the sixth day, still going northeast, and in a blue and bright afternoon they suddenly saw empty Coke cans floating on the sea. Everyone was excited. The end of the journey might be near. And in fact, two hours after seeing the floating Coke cans, symbols of prosperity and capitalism, they sailed straight into the port of Macao, a Portuguese colony on the coast of China. The port city's coast guards sailed out to meet them and directed them into the harbor, and then without much fanfare and without much questioning, took them to a barrack right in the seaport. Everyone climbed off the boat elated. They saw signs of prosperity everywhere, they saw tall and colorful buildings in the distance, the flashing red and yellow and blue neon signs, the cleanliness, even the air felt fresher and freer. Everyone believed that they had reached their destination. That night they stayed in the barracks and took warm showers and had clean white towels and were even fed with fried chicken and rice that were delivered to them in white Styrofoam boxes; and that night they slept on nice firm wooden bed…with soft pillows. In the morning the officials told them that they had to sail on to Hong Kong, another port city not far away, where they would be accepted for temporary settlement. The guards inspected the boat for its seaworthiness then escorted them out of the harbor for about half an hour then signaled to them to sail in the direction of Hong Kong and one guard even shouted "Have a good trip!" as their patrol boat turned around to head back to Macao. After an hour, two Hong Kong police boats intercepted them and took them to a floating platform anchored in the middle of the harbor. From the platform, Adam could see the famed city’s skyline and he was fascinated. He had never seen a modern city; and in his mind, Hong Kong was what the rest of the world probably looked like. It was nothing like Da Nang, the city he had left. All the tall buildings of this city were skyscrapers of different heights and colors, and big colorful advertising signs decorated the top of the buildings. Officers then came onto the platform and asked each person about his identity and where they came from and entered the information into their notebooks. After staying on the platform for two days and being questioned repeatedly, they were taken to a big black warehouse on dry land, and there, people in uniforms asked them more questions and each person was photographed and issued an ID card. On the walls of the interrogation rooms, there were signs that read, "We want facts and only facts." But generally, the officials were nice and polite. They knew who these people were and the reasons they came, because Hong Kong had been dealing with escapees from Viet Nam for the last three or four years. Adam and the others were given clothes, their hairs were washed clean of lice, and the food was good. People laughed when the boat owner wondered what had happened to his boat.

 

The registration and interrogation took a week, and when it was completed, they were transferred to another shelter, a large camp inside the city where they would begin life as refugees, under the care of the United Nations. Now all was well, he and his brother wrote home to let the family know they were safe. He also wrote a letter to Eve, telling her that he missed her. The letter contained 25 words and he was drunk when he wrote it.

 

After settling down, Adam and the others walked the streets of the city to look for work, and there was no shortage of it. After a few months Adam even managed to open a bank account to keep money he earned from work. His brother also worked even though he was under-aged, and he stayed in the factory and only went to the camp on weekends to visit. Life in camp was all fun and fun. All camp residents were allowed to go out and work and required to pay a fee each month for garbage collection, water and electricity, and mail privilege. There was a UN Office in the camp whose function was to resettle the refugees in a third country, because life in Hong Kong was only temporary, and everyone must eventually go somewhere else to settle down once and for all. Anyone who had relatives in another country could apply for resettlement in that country. If not, an international charitable organization would settle them. Most ended up in America.

 

Adam had a friend already living in the US and he contacted that friend and six months later he and his brother were on their way there, under the sponsorship of the friend. They arrived in Houston one night, and while riding to his friend’s house from the airport, he looked out the window of the car and said to himself why was there so much darkness? He saw no houses and no people, only trees and bushes, and cars speeding like crazy on the wide highways. It was his first night in America--the long journey was over. But the future was a big question. He was twenty one years old, still too wild and too stupid.

 

Adam wrote to his family again to tell them that he had arrived in the US and all was well and his family should not worry about him and his brother. Then he plunged head first into the life in the new land.

 

After four months in Houston, Adam and his brother took a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, and there he found new friends. The same shit happened: the substance abuse began again, only this time the alcohol and the drugs were plentiful and cheap. He found work in a factory, and every weekend he blew it all on drinks and marijuana after food and rent. He shared a one bed-room apartment with five other guys, all his age or younger and all were wild and horny and potheads and drunkards.

 

The apartment Adam and his brother lived in was in south Philadelphia. It looked out over rows of roofs under which lived all sort of welfare mothers and working class heroes: Italians, Latinos, Blacks, Asians...and others. The apartment had windows that provided views of the city skyline, which composed mostly of the center city's tall office buildings. Adam and his friends often traded racial insults with the young neighborhood Italians and got into fights with them. The fights were mostly fought with bottles throwing at each other from distances. He was once ambushed by two Italian guys but escaped unharmed. The Latinos dealed drugs. The Italians got drunk behind their doors; and being longtime residents they looked down on the newcomers whom they assumed didn’t know what this country was all about; and they decorated their windows and doors with all sorts of red-white-and-blue things during holidays to set themselves apart from the "aliens."

 

Adam and the guys he shared the apartment with were young and directionless. Five or six guys in their late teens or early twenties cramped in a small apartment and they slept on the bed, the couch, and the floor. They worked or went to school during weekdays, and partied all weekends. The Italian girls came to their places on weekends to participate in the booze and pot parties. Some of the girls were attractive, a few were barrels of fat and meat. And all got fucked.

 

One time a guy brought home a sexy Latino girl who couldn't talk. She could only utter a few words. Like when she was asked where she lived she pointed a finger in some direction and said, "Over there." Adam thought she was retarded. And the time she was there, and it was days, she just lied in bed with her legs spread, inviting any erected penis. Adam and his friends were all young and horny and they all had a good time fucking. The girl meanwhile wanted nothing in return. Not even beer or weed. Only food. Then she left, disappeared for a month then showed up again and started all over the whole fucking thing. This affair went on for almost a year. Then one day she left and never returned. A guy later reported that he found her dancing in a strip joint in North Philadelphia. Another guy said he saw her pushing a baby carriage on the street with a child that looked half Asian. Another thing Adam remembered about this girl was that she had a front tooth missing that made her smile funny.

 

For Adam and his friends, the weekend parties started promptly on Friday evenings at six when liquor would flow like a river and marijuana would burn like forest fire. Neighbors smelled the scent from the apartment and heard the music of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and the merry atmosphere and they came in to share the booze and the smoke and the fun, and those neighbors included horny white, Latino, Italian and black girls. It was a non-stop orgy every weekend and everyone was high and drunk and all fucked to their heart's content from Friday night to Sunday night. And while romp was raging inside the apartment, the winter grabbed the city with relentless cold and snow.

 

Adam did not think much about Eve in those days. He had too much distraction. But one day while intoxicated he received a letter from Eve. She wrote she missed him like crazy and wished one day they would meet again and she was sure about that--because the earth was round. Frantically, he wrote back telling her that that was it between them, that this parting was forever because he had no hope of ever seeing her and the homeland again, because the regime would never allow people like him to return. He told her to find a husband and settle down and forget about him. He believed in what he wrote, he thought he could never go home again, and therefore could never see her again.

 

He continued the wild life. Then his brother got into a fight and seriously wounded a guy and they had to run for fear of the police and of revenge. Adam went to Georgia and his brother went to Kansas where they knew people from the days they were in Hong Kong. Adam felt guilty for the separation because his brother was only seventeen at the time. But he knew his brother could take care of himself, and he had proved that while in Hong Kong. And for Adam, life was the same everywhere: work and get high.

 

One day a friend back in Philadelphia called and told Adam that there was a letter from Eve. He asked the friend to open the letter and read it to him. Eve again talked about how much she missed him and wanted to be with him, and asked him to send her a picture of his so she could see how he looked after the two years they separated. She wrote that if Adam had the means, he should help her escape by sending her money for the trip; if he did not, then waited for her because she would find her own way. She said that her father daily scolded and even beat her because she refused to get married. She only wanted to be his wife, she wrote. Adam again wrote back and told her to forget about him. He still loved her, could never forget her, his first love, still thought about her almost everyday. But he was also convinced that that was it, he could never go home again, and Eve was now a hopeless affair, despite what she said.

 

Shakespeare wakes up from his late day dream. Late because it is now dark, and looking around he sees the shop almost deserted. How long has he been dreaming the story? He does not know for sure but it must have been a while, two hours perhaps. The tea is cold. He feels reality is not very real anymore and there seems to be a thin and transparent wall that separates him and the things around him. He knows he is intoxicated--and he has almost half a bottle left. He also knows that before the night is over, the bottle will be finished and the story he has been struggling with will be formed completely in his mind, whatever state his mind is in then, most likely very wet with booze, if not blacked out.

 

The shopkeeper announces it is time to close. Shakespeare gets up and walks out, a little unsteady. Outside, he looks up and finds snow flakes falling. Suddenly he remembers that it is the last day of the year, and that means he does not have to go to work in the morning, and that also means he can stay up late tonight. He walks, taking little sips from the bottle, and has no fear of the cops now: the booze has worked its trick, it gives him overblown confidence. He walks in the direction where the taverns are and suddenly feels very hungry. The snow is coming down harder now, and there is already a thin layer of the white stuff on the ground. It is perhaps nine o'clock. There is no one in the streets. Once in a while a car zooms by but the noise is swallowed up quickly in the thick silence. People are inside, preparing to welcome the new year. A lot of alcohol will be flowing tonight. And there will be violence. Some will get hurt. People will use the occasion to get drunk and rowdy and into troubles. But that is not the case with Shakespeare, because he is a loner. He lives alone, eats alone, and drinks alone. And once in a while he gets horny, then he will either jerk off or if he has some money he will patronizes the neighborhood whorehouse where he will chicken-fuck a whore just for the sake of having skin-to-skin contact with another human which he finds comforting and reassuring. Except for the people at work whom he has no social life with, he knows no one in the city. Even when he drinks too much and blacks out, he does not get into trouble because there is no one around to get into trouble with. In a city of millions, he feels as if he was living in a desert, and he knows there are a lot of people like him in the city, people who cannot and will not form relationship with another human for reasons unknown to them, or they just don't feel the need to. That is why for Shakespeare the world of literature is so valuable because in that world he creates characters and has intimate contacts with them; and for him, that world is perhaps more real than the physical world that he wakes up to every morning because that world makes him happy. Even the people he brushes shoulders with in the subway everyday don’t seem concrete to him, they look like phantoms or illusions, images projected on a screen, utterly unrelated to him. Even when he steps on someone‘s foot and says I am sorry he does not feel sorry at all because what is there to feel sorry for? He only steps on a thing that is not there. This feeling is confirmed by the attitude of the person for whom the sorry is intended: he will just look at the sorrier with a blank look as if he sees and hears nothing. Shakespeare does not exist for him, and vice versa. Shakespeare sometimes feels that he is living in a phantom universe. And he himself is a ghost. So there is no serious conflict, people can go on living without acknowledging the existence of each other. And for Shakespeare, that is ok.

 

Taverns are places lonely people come in to nurture their loneliness on nights like this: a cold new years' eve. Nine pm. Even the shops are closed early. Shakespeare is hungry and wants some food. The snow is now coming down heavy and steady and the wind is picking up. A winter storm is raging. The liquor is keeping Shakespeare warm and as he struggles against the wind, he continues to drink from the bottle. He walks into the first bar he saw, called "Empty Pockets," a place where one night not so long ago he was stripped bare by two pickpockets who pretended to be buddy-buddy with him then took advantage of his drunkenness and cleaned him out of his money. That night Shakespeare lost not only his money but also all his ID's and it took him a lot of trouble to replace them. Since then, whenever he goes into a bar, he would just sit and drink and mind his own business and watch himself and not get into conversation with anyone, and if he was talked to, he would give brief answers then look away, showing no interests in continuing the conversation.

 

Inside the bar, Shakespeare sees two people at the counter and one at the tables along the wall. The light is low and the juke box is playing Sade's “Smooth Operator.” He approaches the counter and says to the bartender, a white hair middle-aged woman, that he wants a pitcher of Bud. He pays her then walks to one of the table and sits down. It is warm in here, he says to himself. Then he remembers he is hungry. He returns to the counter and asks the woman if she has anything to eat and she says only peanuts and he says no hot food and she says no and he says ok and the woman gives him a packet and he says he wants more and she gives him two more and he says how much and she says it is free and he says thanks and comes back to the table. He pours the beer into a tall glass and drinks it all down. Then he eats the peanuts. Shakespeare knows the danger of mixing beer and liquor: he would get very drunk and even have a blackout. But he says to himself, no matter, I am gonna get very drunk tonight, I am on a roll and I cannot stop now because I am at the point of no return, the spirit has gone to my head and I am now under the total influence of the god of drinks and I don't mind. And if blackout happens so be it and I will deal with the aftermath tomorrow when I wake up.

 

Shakespeare knows he cannot drink his own liquor in the bar because the bartender will have a problem with that because after all, the place sells liquor. So, he decides to settle the matter. He goes into the bathroom, locks the door, and pours whatever is left in the bottle down his throat then throws it into the trash can. Because he drinks in a hurry and the fiery liquid goes down fast, he immediately feels an intense burning sensation in the throat and in the stomach. The transparent wall between him and his surroundings becomes thicker. The walls begin to dance and lines that separate objects become blurred. Shakespeare staggers out of the bathroom and back to the table and stuffs more peanuts into his mouth.

 

The bar is now silent, the juke box has stopped playing, no one is talking and all he hears is the howling of the wind outside. The bartender puts her chin in her hands and stares at the flying snow that is smashing against the window. No one in the bar is sitting with anyone. Lonely people. Shakespeare pours another glass of beer. Then he walks to the jukebox, inserts a bill and plays Elvis's "Don’t be cruel." He likes old rock-and-roll the way a person loves antique. In fact, although he is not too old--he is 45--Shakespeare has a soul as ancient as the earth. He is attracted to things rustic, mossy, and rusty. He likes to look at old brick walls, walls that are beaten by the weather and ravaged by time. He also likes to study the timeline on old people's faces and he likes to read fairy tales. He likes to follow old trails that lead to the primeval forests and he imagines a times before languages: How do people think without words? Do they think visually? He feels moved when he listens to "Don't Be Cruel," the booze has put him in a properly loose mood. "Don't be cruel to the heart that's true," Elvis wails and hits Shakespeare directly in the heart: he can relate the song's lyrics with the story of Adam and Eve. Elvis's voice breaks down the transparent wall between him and things and rudely hurts his heart. Shakespeare thinks a true heart deserves to be treated with care, to be handled with great care, a true heart is a fragile heart that is easily hurt, a rare and precious thing. For example, the young and innocent hearts of Romeo and Juliet. The lovers were naïve and stupid and were badly hurt by the love they had for each other--and the circumstances around them. They killed themselves because they thought only in death could they be left in peace to love one another. At this thought, Shakespeare feels so angry at himself that he brings his fist down on the table--then he realizes what he has just done. The other patrons steal glances at him. I have done a disservice to these lovers and to humanity, I almost feel guilty of murder, Shakespeare thinks. But things are going to be different this time. The story of my two new lovers, Adam and Eve, will end happily, I am determined to see to that. I am still forming the story in my head and before the night is over I will have it all written out in my brain. In any case, Romeo and Juliet were dead, the whole world knows that, and it was a done deal, there is nothing I can do about it. Shakespeare believes he was reborn just to rewrite the story of Romeo and Juliet. Now heavily drunk, he says to himself what will happen next, I have laid out the personal history of Adam but what about Eve? What kind of a girl is she? What are her circumstances when she crosses path with Adam. What happens when they lay eyes on one another for the first time? Shakespeare says I have to figure this shit out before I get all tangled up and lose my way in the jungle of my alcohol-induced imagination.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

Shakespeare has Adam's story laid out up to the time he came to America, now what about Eve? He has a problem. Adam is a man, and Shakespeare is also a man, they understand one another, one can even say each is a copy of the other, and so creating one another's character is not so difficult. Not the case with Eve. Because not only she is a woman, but neither Adam nor Shakespeare is familiar with her life before she appears on the scene. They don’t know much about her family, where she comes from. But lack of facts does not deter Shakespeare.

 

Eve was born into a family with many brothers and sisters. The family's main income was her father's meager monthly salary as a civil servant. So they were poor. With many mouths to feed, her mother had to supplement the family's income by selling spicy beef noodle soup: each morning the front porch of the house was turned into a noodle stand serving people in the neighborhood, and it was closed when breakfast hours ended. And the parents managed to put all their children in school. Eve was a cute little girl who went to the neighborhood grammar school every day in her colorful short skirt and a white shirt and she had her hair tied into two bundles on both sides of her head. Like any child, she just grew up, crying one moment and smiling the next, and most of the time she was happy despite the circumstances. She was considered the prettiest girl in the family. With all the sisters and brothers, she was particularly fond of the sister who was only one year older than she. They played together and went to school together and slept together and they often asked if they loved one another and the answer was always yes. This sister later played a role in Eve's life as a girl in love. Eve grew up a happy child.

 

At thirteen Eve had her first period. The first time she bled, she panicked and went crying to her mother in the middle of the night and the mother smiled and told her not to worry, there was nothing to be afraid of, that it happened to all the girls and from now on it would happened to her every month and for many years to come. She took her daughter to the kitchen where the water was and asked her to take off her panties and washed off the blood which was now running down her legs. Eve asked her mother why does it happen to girls, does it happen to boys too? Her mother said no it does not happen to boys it only happens to girls. Eve then went back to bed but what her mother had said did not reassure her. She still felt confused. But there was no pain despite the bleeding, and soon she fell back to sleep. The next morning she went to school and told one of her closest friends about the bleeding and the friend was surprised and Eve said that it would happen to you too and the friend said really? The second time it happened Eve felt very uncomfortable all three days of bleeding and it interrupted her study and play. Her mother gave her sanitary napkins to wear during the bleeding days and said Eve would now keep a supply of the napkins for herself just for days like these. This thing happened to women every month, her mother told her, and further explained that without it she would not be able to make babies. And Eve asked her mother does it happen to you too and she said yes it has happened to me too and it is still happening.

 

And so it went until one morning in March, 1975. That spring morning Eve was in bed when she suddenly heard commotions outside her house and she came out and saw children ran excitedly through the maze of the neighborhood toward the main road. They shouted that the communists were coming and let's go look at them. Eve ran after them, but her father yelled at her to stop. Her father was a civil servant working for the old regime and he was apprehensive about how the new rulers would treat people like him. Some friends of the family had come to the house the days before and discussed with her father about evacuation. But her father refused to go, saying that with a large family like his and with so little money, getting away was impractical. Eve watched what was going on without understanding much. School had been closed for a month to make room for the refugees and she had been spending her days hanging out with friends in the neighborhood. She was 15 years old.

 

The day after the communist takeover a man in an olive uniform came to the house and told her father to report to the local police station and register for reeducation. Her father did so, and three days later he was taken away. He disappeared for two weeks and when he returned he said he was kept along with hundreds of others in a camp outside the city and was treated well but had to listen to endless lectures about the crimes of the American aggressors and the old Sai Gon regime. He also learned about the virtues of socialism and about the new regime: it was the true representative of the peasants, the workers, and all the people whom for many years had been suffering at the hands of the Americans and their puppets. But her father added that officers of the defeated army were still kept in the camp and they were going to be transferred to other camps for a longer education.

 

Without a job, her father stayed home and did nothing and he started to sell valuables for money to buy rice. Her mother continued to sell beef noodle soup out of the house. There was very little money left. And with so many children, her parents were talking about marrying off the girls, the oldest was twenty.

 

Eve, 15 years old, went back to school a month after things quieted down and continued the ninth grade. Now the students did not have to wear uniforms anymore. Girls could go to school in pajamas and boy could wear pants and shirts in whatever color they wanted, whereas before girls must wear white ao-dai and boys wore blue trousers and white shirts. And she started to learn about Socialism, Communism, Karl Marx, Uncle Ho, revolutions, class struggles--and she took it all in without questions. At nights, when she did homework and her father looked over her shoulders, he was annoyed by what they were teaching her. Her brothers and sisters also went back to school but some of them dropped out after just a few months. The ones who dropped out followed the mother into the market to buy and sell things. Her father took his bicycle to the hamlet's bus station and transported goods for a fee. Like everyone else, the family felt the extreme hardship of peace, the bottom had fallen out and people must scramble to find their daily meals. Eve and two other younger siblings were spared from the struggle, they were still too young. She continued to go to school but she noticed the worries on the faces of her parents when they sat down in the evening for dinners--now a greatly reduced affair. There wasn't enough rice for the whole family, and some nights Eve went to bed feeling empty in her stomach.

 

Then one day the sister she loved got married. It was the one closest to her, the one who was one year older than her. This sister married a 20-year-old son of well-to-do family that had two houses on the city's main street. So one girl left the family; and only a few months later, the oldest girl also left to marry someone in Sai Gon. Except for the brothers, Eve now only had one sister near her.

 

One day Eve said to her mother she wanted to quit school and go with her to the market. Her mother said no, and her father also said no. But Eve stopped going to school anyway, and insisted that she be taken along to the market. Her mother eventually gave in. She gave Eve some money and told her to go buy things from people at the train stations then resell them in the market. Eve did so, and was happy to bring home a little money every evening and give it to her mother. She was then 16 years old. Eve thought if she had been older, her parents would have found her a husband and she would leave the family, relieving her parents of a burden.

 

While still in school, Eve had been followed by many boys and even received secret letters from them. She did not pay attention to anyone of them, but a few of her friends were having boyfriends. She looked at the boys curiously but because they were so different she did not want to have anything to do with them. And besides, she was very shy. She grew up with the teaching that boys and girls should always be separated until marriage. And she did not know that there might be such a feeling called love between a boy and a girl.

 

But Eve was haunted since she was 12 years old by an image of a strange boy and she did not understand why. Sometimes while she was day dreaming the face of that boy appeared before her eyes, he had dark skin and thick lips and he looked at her with curiously inquiring eyes. Eve had never seen a boy like that in school or anywhere, but whenever his face appeared, even when her eyes were open, she felt a vague longing, an unexplained desire to see him physically, to be with him, to be his friend. The image followed her through the years and showed itself to her whenever she let her mind drift. But she never told anyone about this because it was too strange to understand, let alone put into words. It was her secret.

 

Meanwhile, two of her brothers continued to go to school, but the oldest one had joined the army and was sent to the western border to defend the country from periodic sneak attacks from the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.

 

One evening her father came home from a weekly neighborhood meeting and said to his wife and children that the authority had ordered them to vacate the city and go to the "New Economic Zones," a new economic policy intended to relieve the cities of unproductive people, people who had no real means of making a living. They would be moved to the undeveloped areas of the country, mostly in the highland and the coastal regions, and organized into collectives to farm the land. The house that Eve’s family left behind would be possessed by the local government, and they would be given a small money compensation. So a week later the family packed up to leave.

 

It was a long journey, from one end of the country to another. They carried whatever they could, and sold in the flea markets whatever they had but could not bring with them-- furniture, for instance. Eve and her parents, her little sister, and two brothers, arrived at a farming collective on the edge of Ca Mau province, near the sea, after a three-day journey by train and buses. The officials assigned them a piece of land and they started to build for themselves a hut with materials provided by the officials and help by the people who had come before them. The first night the family had to scatter and sleep in the neighbors' huts. It took them two days to finish their hut. Then they settled into the routine of the collective: all worked together in the field and ate together in the common kitchen. Eve was excited about her new life; she felt that it was much better than the life in the city she left behind where it was difficult to find food. At least over here, as long as one worked, food was guaranteed each day. Eve and her sister belonged to the "young pioneers" group who did light work and were allowed to stay home to tend the family's vegetable gardens. She did not miss her previous life in Da Nang at all, even though she still had a sister there, the one she loved, the one who married a guy from a rich family that had two houses on the city's main street.

 

One year into the new life, the sister in Da Nang wrote and asked the parents to allow Eve to come back to the city to live with her. And Eve agreed to go. The first time she set foot in the house of her sister's husband she felt as if she had come into a familiar place even though she had never seen the house before. Eve was happy to see her sister again but somehow felt that the love that they had had for each other when they were younger was no longer strong. The sister gave her some money and she went to the train station to buy things from the people there and resell them in the market, like she had done before leaving for the new economic zones. In the evening, she would go back to the sister and her husband and baby-sit their little boy while they were out having fun. Eve was sad that sometimes her sister was severe with her for some very trivia infractions--things like inviting a girlfriend home.

 

One morning Eve was sitting and reading a book in the bedroom of her sister when suddenly someone came into the house and walked up the stairs outside the window of the room. Hearing the footsteps, she looked up and saw a boy. The boy stopped also and looked at Eve full of surprised because he had never seen this stranger in the house before--his house. Then after a fraction of a second, not saying a word, he walked on. Eve suddenly felt shaken almost to the point of panic, but as the shock subsided, a strange feeling took over her and made her overwhelmingly happy but she could not understand why. She had never felt like this before, and the feeling was wonderful. The boy looked so familiar. She realized that it was the boy whose image she had carried in her mind all these years, the boy of her daydreams since she was twelve. And she became immediately convinced that they had known each other for a very long time but exactly when it was she could not be sure; and on seeing him, she felt as if she had found something she had lost. Her heart beat fast and she was breathless. After immobilized for a while, Eve stood up and walked out, glancing back to see if there was anyone looking at her. She walked to the river and sat on a bench and looked at the blue water and saw the boy's face again. That dark skin and thick lips and intense eyes. That was the boy. That was him. And the happiness stayed with her all morning. At noon, she returned to the house and wished that the boy was not there because the shyness she would feel on seeing him might be too much to bear. She cautiously asked her sister about the boy and her sister said that it was Adam, the younger brother of her husband who had just returned from one of his runaways. Adam. How old is he? He's your age, Eve. Then they dropped the subject and Eve became silent with a vacant look in her eyes. That boy had taken her soul. That year she was seventeen.

 

Shakespeare feels ok that he has another part of the story written out in his mind, the part about the Eve, even though it is not too detailed. He then slowly emerges from the dream and looks around him. A man, the only other patron in the tavern, was sitting at the bar and talking at the bartender who says nothing back. The man is apparently drunk and the drunkenness shows in his slurred voice and in the fragmented way he talks. The bartender nods her head now and then while the man continues to spill his guts and she keeps pouring drinks into his glass and takes money from the stack he has in front of him. The wind is howling and the cold is creeping into the bar. Shakespeare feels cold in his bones. He looks out the windows. The street is completely deserted and the snow is blowing in all directions. He looks at the silent TV that is showing a big crowd in Times Square: people are waiting for the new year and for the ball to drop. Snow is falling on their heads and the wind is cutting into their faces but still they are blowing the horns and shouting and their faces show wild excitement. That is a tourist special. Natives stay home on New Years Eve, depressed, suicidal, and do all they can to ease their living pain and fill their existential emptiness. They take legal and illegal drugs, and drink themselves stupid. Shakespeare had been at the Times Square New Years celebration once many many years ago when he first came to New York. That night he and a friend took the train from Brooklyn to Times Square and lost themselves in the thousands of screaming and drunken people. He and the friend found and wooed two Japanese girls and walked with them to their hotel but were turned away at the doors of their room. The friend said they had lost one opportunity to fuck. The two then went back to the celebration which at that time was at its peak and the people packed the streets and they were all drunk and looked funny in their dune caps and they all screamed happy new year and blew their horns and made all kinds of noise. Shakespeare was drunk too and he too joined in the screaming and suddenly someone punched him the face. The blow appeared to come from nowhere and stunned him. But it was a light hit and Shakespeare felt a little dizzy, then he forgot about it and continued the celebration which meant more and more booze. And that was the only time he was celebrating a new year at Times Square. Now this New Year's eve, like many in the past, he is sitting alone in a bar. The clock is ticking closer to midnight; and for no apparent reasons, he thinks about the failures of his life. It was one failure after another. Who would have thought at this age he was still does not have a dime in the bank and is living from paycheck to paycheck and alone and depressed most of the time. Even though Shakespeare is happy to be reborn as a human, sometimes he remembers his past life in medieval England and he compares it with his life now and he decides that he prefers the other life. Why? Everything was much simpler then and he was not as lonely as he is in this life.

 

The bartender looks at Shakespeare and asks if he wants anything else. He says he wants more beer and peanuts. The woman brings another pitcher and two packets of peanuts. He is really drunk now and feels an urge to talk, but something in his mind tells him to sit still, to keep to himself, because if he talks, it means he interacts with people and god knows what might happen. So despite the urge to connect with another human being, Shakespeare keeps his mouth shut. But his mind is in overdrive. The images of Adam and Eve reappeared in his mind immediately after he takes another long swallow of the beer. His head starts to spin again. What had happened that brought them together when they were young only to cruelly tear them apart for life? This may be an old-as-the-earth story about boy meet girl but it always fascinates Shakespeare because it tells about a human emotion called love, an emotion that is instinctive, primitive, but yet, eternal. And in this particular case, love between the sexes, an unconscious animalistic drive that brings the male and the female together--so the species can be preserved. It is basically sexual. But in order for the sex to happen, first there must be attraction, and that attraction is called love which later will turn into lust and when the male and female connect at the hips, nature's intention is fulfilled. There is nothing a normal person can do about it, they love and make love under the mysterious and compelling direction of nature. This force is so powerful even Catholic priests who has taken vows of celibacy could not resist, some of them would rather commit sin than disobey nature. And Shakespeare thinks Adam and Eve are two very normal persons. He returns to the story:

 

Adam had just come back from one of his long wanderings. It was two years after authority changed hands and Adam had been living the life of a lost boy. That morning coming home from the train station he saw a strange girl in his brother's room. He stopped on the staircase and looked at her quickly and went up to his room and fell asleep. He slept past noon and when he woke up he went downstairs and saw his sister in law and asked her who that girl was and she said it was her younger sister who had just come from the new economic zone. Adam saw the resemblance between the two. Then Adam thought no more about it and went out to see a friend of his. He and the friend sat together in a coffee shop and listened to the music and smoked, like they did everyday.

 

In the late afternoon Adam returned home and as he walked in, he saw that girl again but this time she was sitting at the kitchen table on the first floor and talking to her sister. Adam walked past them and caught the girl's glance and suddenly his heart beat faster and he felt very shy. He said hi and went up to his room and as he walked up the stairs he felt that the girl was following him out of corners of her eyes. In his room, he sat down at the table and took out a book, but could not concentrate. His mind was captured by that strange girl; no, she was not really a stranger, she was the sister of his sister-in-law so in some way there was a connection. He thought the girl was pretty, and the look she gave him was odd. There was something unusual in her the way she looked at him, something that pulls, attracts. And a weird feeling slowly sneaked into his heart. He did not know what that feeling was, but it must have something to do with that girl. He looked at the words on the pages but only saw the girl's face and her faint smile. He wondered what she was doing in here in the house. Where did she live? Was she staying with her sister in this house or somewhere else? He heard footsteps downstairs--and then silence. He walked to the window and looked down and saw the girl walking out of the house. Where could she be going? Her long black hair was flying in the gentle breeze and the steps she took were short, relaxed, and even dignified. He followed her with his eyes until she turned the corner and was out of sight. He went downstairs into the kitchen to look for something to eat and he found some cold rice and vegetable soup. Then his brother came home from the factory and his wife prepared dinner and Adam sat in his room and overheard the conversation between his brother and his sister-in-law. The sister said that "Eve" from now on would stay at her grandfather's house on PCT Street because Adam was back. He thought he understood who the sister was referring to. Eve--that must be the girl's name, and she had been living here in the house when he was away. Had she slept in his room? Adam did not see any sign of that. That night he went to bed and the last thing he saw on his mind before falling asleep was the face of that girl.

 

It was June and it was insanely hot. Adam had gone to sleep inside the mosquito net with only his underwear and he woke up the next morning sweating and the first thing he thought about was that girl. And he could not shake thoughts about her out of his mind no matter how much he wanted to. He walked to the coffee shop and sat with his friends but thoughts about that girl had completely taken over his mind and he felt a strange longing to see her again. In the afternoon he went back home and stayed in his room and was alert for signs that might tell him that the girl was in the house again. But he did not see her again that day, and the desire to see her became stronger and stronger and it made him feel very uncomfortable and agitated.

 

Two days later Adam saw her again. She was sitting in the room of his sister-in-law and as soon as he saw her he felt so shy and clumsy but very happy and he could see that the girl was shy too and she was smiling at him. He felt that they were pulled toward each other like magnets. But he did not have the courage to open his mouth to say anything to her, not even a greeting, and she wasn't saying anything either, but they were painfully and ecstatically aware of each other's presence. She was sitting in the room with her sister's baby. She was wearing a blue pajama and her eyes were large and pearly and as he stole another look he was fascinated by the delicate contours of her small face.

 

That evening he stayed in his room and felt sick. All afternoon he had dared not go downstairs even though he wanted so much to see her. He felt a powerful attraction to the girl and he realized that thoughts about her had now taken over every cell of his brain. He could not think about anything else. The feeling crept in like a thief at night and invaded his entire being. In the evening his sister in law found him in bed curl up in a fetal position and she came near and asked him mockingly if he was sick. He knew she was making fun of him, she knew what was happening to him. "You are sick, for sure." She said and giggled. He couldn't open his mouth to say anything back. He was having a fever. Lovesick.

 

Two nights later Adam was sitting in his room and the girl--Eve--quietly came in and handed him a roasted ear of corn. He looked at her and took the gift as if he was expecting it, but they did not say anything and she quickly left the room. He looked at her swaying ass and long flowing hair as she walked away. And suddenly he felt overwhelmingly happy, satisfied and fulfilled. That was it, the love was declared. The roasted ear of corn, that was her way of saying how she felt about him, he had no doubt. His heart screamed with joy. That night he did not sleep at all and the next morning in the coffee shop he told a friend about Eve and about his feeling for her but the friend did not seem to understand what he was talking about. As far as the friend was concerned, Adam looked and talked delirious.

 

A few days later his sister-in-law said to him that if he wanted to see Eve he must go to the park by the river at seven in the evening. When he got there he saw a small figure sitting on a bench under a flower tree. It must be her—Eve. It was dark in the park and there were only a few children running around whose laughter and screams now and then punctured the silence. The river was just a short distance away. He approached and carefully sat down next to her. It was so quiet he could hear his own breaths and even the beating of his heart. He looked into her face, and she looked into his then cast her eyes downward. His heart beat fast and he felt intensely happy and he knew she was happy too. It was their first secret meeting as lovers. Eve had the look of someone whose prayer had been answered.

 

"Eve," he said.

 

She glanced at him, smiled, then looked down again.

 

"Where are you living?" He said.

 

"At my grandfather's." How small and thin her voice was.

 

And that was all that was said between them. They sat, feeling each other's overwhelming presence. The smell from her body captivated him, a smell he had never known before, it was the smell of young virgin flesh. And even though they were sitting next to one another, their body did not touch. The intense joy of being together this physically close and knowing that they loved one another were so satisfying it rendered them speechless. The night was clear and there were sparkling stars but there was no moon. Hours passed in blissful silence. The children had gone home. It was so quiet he heard only the crying of the insects. Then suddenly she said, "It's late. I have to go" in a voice that sounded almost panicky, as if she was rudely shaken awake from a beautiful dream.

 

"Don't go." He said, not knowing how long he had been sitting with her. Perhaps it was only three minutes, or perhaps it was three hours. But like her, he felt panic at the thought that the meeting must end.

 

"Grandfather will be mad if I come back so late." She answered.

 

"Don't go," he said as if pleading.

 

"But I must go!"

 

"I don't want you to."

 

"I will come and see you at your house."

 

"When?"

 

"I don't know yet."

 

"People will see us."

 

"My sister knows already."

 

And they left the park. It must be past eleven o'clock. They walked slowly toward the center of the city where her grandfather's house was. The street was empty and silent and he felt an urge to hold her hand but was too afraid. They walked with a small distance between them. Her place was at a street corner where there was a big tree and when they approached the house it was all dark in the house and he stopped and looked when she stood at the door cautiously calling out someone's name. After a minute, the door opened and she disappeared inside. That night Adam went to bed the happiest person in the world.

 

After that first meeting they saw each other whenever situation allowed. Many summer evenings they sat together on the concrete roof of his house and from there they could see the black mass of the mountains in the distance and the stars in the clear night sky above them. They sat for a long time until it was quiet in the street below. They still did not have much to say to each other, and their hands had not touched. It seemed that seeing and being near each other were enough, perhaps more than enough, and therefore neither felt a need to say anything. And sometimes when they heard footsteps, Eve would get up and quickly walk away. It was almost always Adam's brother come up to lock the door before going to bed and as he saw Eve he said to her what are you doing up here but Eve did not answer--she just kept going. And then he saw Adam in a dark corner and he understood what was going on.

 

Eve was buying and selling things in the market as she did with her mother before the family moved to the new economic zone. She was making a little money everyday on the small capital lent her by her sister. And that was how she made her living. As for Adam, all he did everyday was waiting for the time to see Eve, mostly in the evening, either on the roof of his house or at street corners around the city. They still did not touch one another, not even on the shoulders or on the hands. And so the summer went.

 

One evening Eve said to him that she was going to Sai Gon to stay with another sister and go to school to learn dressmaking and Adam asked her when she was coming back and she said she did not know. Then she was gone. And it took Adam a few days to acknowledge that Eve was no longer around.

 

A week after Eve's departure, Adam felt as if he was dying. He became desperate. He missed her terribly, and became sad. The sadness intensified as the days went by. He had not received any letter from her. Everyday when he walked home, he imagined that as soon as he stepped inside the house he would see Eve there. And he was disappointed when his wish did not materialize: she was not there. He walked to the park by the river and saw Eve sitting there waiting for him but he was aware that it was only his overheated imagination that made him see her--a ghost. And the hallucinations gave him even more pain. He sat on the roof at the spot where they had used to sit and lost himself in thoughts. He wanted to, he needed to, he must see Eve again.

 

So one day he asked his sister-in-law for Eve's address in Sai Gon. He had decided to go find her. And he asked his father for money for the trip. He could not walk there because it was such a big distance, he must take the bus and the trip would take a day and a night. His father asked him why would he want to go to Sai Gon, but he did not answer the question, he only said that he needed to go and needed money for the trip. His father refused, receiving no good reason from him. But Adam would not give up. He asked again and again, day after day. At last the father relented but said that they would both go together. Adam did not care if his father was going along. All he needed was to see Eve and his father had the means to help him do that. So two weeks after she was gone, Adam took the bus to Sai Gon with his father who still did not know his son's true intention. The father must have thought that Adam was on one of those bouts of adolescent madness and was suffering from wanderlust.

 

Adam and his father took the trip together. The bus arrived in Sai Gon early in the evening after a torturous two day journey. All through the trip, Adam could think of nothing but how he was going to find Eve. The mountains, the ocean, the green rice fields, and the scenery along the highway did not take his mind off her. He had her address, and once there he would ask his way to where she lived and would see her. His father said they would stay in his uncle's house on NDC Street while in the city, and they would stay for three days. The father was hoping that the trip would ease whatever it was that was bothering Adam even though he never asked Adam again about the purpose of the trip. And Adam did not volunteer any information either. He kept his mouth shut most of the times during the journey, and only opened his mouth when talked to. That evening, soon after arriving at the uncle's house, Adam asked one of his cousins for direction to Eve’s address and was told that it was not far away. The cousin even lent him a bike. He took the bike and set out just as darkness descended on the city. He rode along NDC Street. Sai Gon was a really big town and there was a lot of traffic and people and shops and lights of all colors and it was noisy. He made a right turn on LTT Avenue as instructed by the cousin then headed toward a big traffic circle where seven big streets met and began to watch out for the house number.

 

It was now completely dark but colorful lights from the endless store fronts on both sides of the avenue made him feel like he was in a festival. Then he found the house he was looking for, right at a corner facing the traffic circle. He stopped in front of the house and observed, it was a two-story building; and on the ground floor it looked as if it was a mechanic shop because the half-closed door and the sidewalk in front were black with dirt and grease. Except for pedestrians who were walking back and forth in front of the house, he did not see anyone who might be inhabitants of the house. He hesitated, then decided to approach the house and look inside through the half-closed doors and if he saw someone he would ask for Eve. He was sure he had found the right address. As he was thinking, suddenly from nowhere a small hand grabbed the handles of the bike and he looked up and there she was. An avalanche of joy took over his heart. Ecstasy. "Eve," he whispered then muted. The small girl with jet black hair and pearly eyes and ivory skin did not seem real; but it was her, his Eve.

 

"I had the feeling that you would look for me, I've been waiting," Eve said and her voice sounded so far-off like it was in a dream. In fact, everything around Adam had turned surreal, even the traffic noises became faint and faraway and the people suddenly floated like ghosts. The earth had disappeared and what was left was just heaven. Adam saw only one thing: Eve; and he felt only one thing: Rapture. Their spirits rose upward then melt into each other in an ocean of bliss, of indescribable happiness, of boundless ecstasy. And in that private heaven of theirs, he saw Eve radiate like an angel, and they were the only people that existed. How beautiful she was! He looked at her and his soul was sucked into her eyes. Lost. Forever.

 

The next day Adam waited for Eve at the corner where her school was. It was the monsoon season. When she came out in the late afternoon, they walked together to the house of Adam's uncle. The rain poured down in short bursts. But they did not try to avoid the rain, they just walked. At the house, Adam took Eve to the room where he was staying and while walking up the stairs his cousin looked at them curiously. They sat down at the table near a big window and outside darkness was approaching and the rain had stopped and the children had come out to play again. The street lights were also on. Eve and Adam sat facing each other and were engulfed in a quiet but intense happiness and they could almost hear each other's heartbeats. They did not feel the need to say anything. They just sat and looked at one another and felt the love; and during those moments, the two persons had actually became one. Hours passed. The room became dark but Adam did not bother to turn on the light. Then he walked her home.

 

They saw one another one more time and on the third day Adam had to go back to Da Nang. At daybreak in the morning he must go back home, his father was already sitting with him on the bus waiting for the time to depart. But Adam got off the bus and ran to Eve's house which was not far from the station. He must see her face one more time. He saw Eve on the other side of the door; she had been waiting to for him to show up to say goodbye because he had told her the night before he would have to return to Da Nang that morning. Trapped inside, Eve looked at Adam through a narrow opening between the locked double doors. She did not have the key to open them. Adam looked at her and felt excruciating pain in his heart. "I must go. I will be late for the bus," he said breathlessly, then yanked himself away from the doors and ran back to the bus. And as the bus started to roll out of the station, he broke down and cried, but he did not let his father see the tears in his eyes and he swallowed his sobbing. Sensing something was not right, his father asked him what the matter was but Adam did not answer. It was his private pain and only he could understand.

 

Back home, Adam was satisfied that he had seen Eve again, and he felt less agitated. But he still thought about her every minute of the days. He continued to hallucinate, to see her face in the space in front of his eyes; and every time he walked home, he convinced himself that as he stepped into the house, he would see her there. But she was not there. Ten days after the trip, Adam received a letter from Eve. He opened the letter, trembling, and on the page, she had written only two words, "My love," and she wrote it over and over to fill the whole page then signed her name. Just "My love"-- and nothing else. Adam was deeply moved. He could see written on the page Eve's loving-madness. They were both seventeen that year.

 

Days went by, months went by. And while Adam continued to indulge in his idle and drunken way, the longing for Eve became less intense. Then one day she returned to the city, probably because school was over. Again, she stayed at her grandfather's house and this time she worked as a dressmaker at a shop in the market. In the evening, they would see one another on the roof of Adam's house or in the park by the river like they had done before. The love was still all heart and mind, there was no physical contact; and even though sometimes Adam felt an urge to touch her face or hands, he restrained himself, bashful. One afternoon Adam came home and saw Eve sleeping. He sat down next to her and his movements woke her up. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and he lied down, but she sat up with a fearful look in her eyes and retreated to a corner of the bed.

 

"You can't do that!" She said.

 

Adam's intention was to touch Eve. Seeing her reaction, he sat back up then walked away, the smell of her body trailing him.

 

Summer. Another afternoon. The house was deserted. Five o'clock. Adam was sitting in his room, and he heard footsteps--Eve was coming up the stairs. Then their eyes met, and together they walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. Adam felt tense and his heart beat fast. They both knew something was going to happen and they were determined that it would happen, it must happen--here and now. A long and agonizing silence ensued, anxiety built and built, then suddenly the words came out of Adam's mouth, "Give me your hand," and Eve reached for his left hand with her right hand and both hands immediately grabbed and squeezed each other tight as if they had been waiting a lifetime for this moment. Time and space suddenly vanished. How soft and cool and electrifying the touch was! Adam was breathless and he felt his penis harden. And it ached. It was his first skin-to-skin contact with Eve, and as the hands continued to hold tight and the fingers caressed, it felt like a silent and sustained explosion. Adam was overwhelmed by an incredibly good feeling that he had never felt before. Virgin skin on virgin skin. His penis got harder and harder. Adam was out of breath, and suddenly he ejaculated, and for a few short moments, it felt as if he had ceased to exist. Ecstasy took over him quickly and completely. Then as the orgasm faded and the breath regained its steady rhythm, he slowly turned his head and looked at Eve and saw her resting her head on the back of the couch with her eyes closed and her hand was still grabbing his tightly as if she was falling and needed to hold on to something. He saw the anguished satisfaction on her face. No words. Then as the erection subsided, Adam slowly let go of Eve's hand and stood up and walked to the window. It was now dark outside but things in the living room were still visible because of the street lights. An hour must have passed. Still stunned, Adam looked into the distance outside the window, while desperately savoring the residual feeling of his first sexual experience. He felt wet and sticky in his pants. The clock ticked. Then he became aware of Eve's presence behind him. She took his hand again and whispered his name with her small trembling voice. Her body was so near it almost brushed against his and he smelled the odor of her skin, the kind of sexual odor that female animals in the mating season exert to attract the males. As Adam now thought back, those moments had been lost forever, those moments when sex was a thing godly, holy, sacred, to be worshipped with the utmost reverence. No, Adam thought, feeling the tension again as Eve came closer to him, it is too much, it cannot go on. If they continued the adventure, he would have to make love with her and he knew she would give it to him--with all the love, with all the willingness and happiness, with all the sincerity, without a second thought. Because she was standing on the edge of the abyss and ready to fall at the slightest touch of his fingers--but that was not what she really wanted because she would lose her virginity and she was not a married woman and that was not good for her. And besides, fear: his brother and sister-in-law might come home at any moment. So Adam, trying not to look at her, said "Please go" even though his heart yelled out don't. After some hesitation, Eve tore herself from him. The sound of her footsteps faded away, then silence returned to the darkness.

 

One night Adam did not come home until 2. The next morning when he woke up and saw the sunlight streaming through the window he said to himself he wished he were dead. The pain was splitting his head. And when he came into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, he saw a face disfigured by desperation and hopelessness, and as the breaths hit the mirror and bounced back into his face he smelled liquor, all the liquor in the world that he had drunk last night, and he felt his stomach churning as if wanting to vomit. He felt sick in every fiber of his being, a sickness that was both physical and spiritual. He thought, again, that death was preferable to life, this life, the life he was living. He thought about the day in front of him and was terrified of having to live through it--again. But there wasn't only today, there was also tomorrow, another day and another day and another day and another day. If there was a bottom to spiritual desperation, he was standing on it. He walked back into his room and sat at the table, holding his head in his hands. It was a Sunday morning. It was the day of the week that all of his friends would put on their best clothes and sit in the smoked filled café to listen to music and talk--and half of them would be high on marijuana and heroin. A few of his friends would probably drop by later to pick him up, but at this moment, Adam was in no mood for company, he just wanted to go back to bed and close his eyes and never wake up again. Then suddenly Eve came into the room and sat facing him and she was shocked to see the look in his eyes. But she was unable to say a word. She just fixed her worried eyes on him, waiting for him to say something perhaps, something to assure her that he acknowledged her presence--and his own. But this morning, seeing his lover, Adam did not feel any joy anymore, she had suddenly become something extra, something he could do without, even a nuisance, an object among all the other objects in the environment and in the life that made him sick. He stared through her as if she was not there, then he shifted his death gaze outside the window to the bright and almost blinding sunlight. He saw a piece of blue sky and a thin strand of white cloud and heard the birds singing. At last, unable to bear the unusual silence any longer, Eve said "What's happening to you?" Her words carried with them a profound sadness--she had the feeling that she had lost him, that he had become another person, not the Adam she knew anymore, all because of the unexplained pain that he was experiencing--she could feel it. She took his hands and wrapped them with her bony fingers and caressed them as if trying to suck the sadness out of him and bring him back to her. But he was mute, immobilized, had no reaction--gone. Minutes passed, and Adam finally opened his mouth after gathering all of his strength, "Go. Leave me alone." And Eve looked at him as if she did not believe what she was hearing and her eyes were asking him why why why. She too became frozen. Then he said again, "Why don't you leave me alone? I am sick of it all. I am sick of you, too." Eve wanted to deny she was hearing what she though she was hearing, but the words repeated themselves in her ears and they cut her like a thousand knives. Then all of a sudden she broke down and cried, her long black hair covered her face. She felt that something had suddenly collapsed between them when he finished saying those words, he had rejected her and the love--and she could not understand why. But he had said the words, and she had heard the words. She sobbed, and her small shoulders shook, but she tried not to lose herself. It was a controlled outpouring of grief, which perhaps made it even more painful. Adam stood up, leave her at the table, and walked into the living room. He lied on the couch--for a long time--and then heard Eve stepping out of his room and down the stairs. She was gone.

 

The days after that morning he heard from his sister-in-law that Eve had gone back to the new economic zone in Ca Mau province, thousands of kilometers from Da Nang. But he thought she would return after the pain subsided and they would make up and be loving to each other again--and how wrong he was. That tearful morning was the last time they saw each other. He never saw her again. He was taken away a couple months after that and put in a labor camp for six months then he escaped and took to the sea and became an exile.

 

Now, 2004--when Adam remembered all of this, the separation had been twenty seven years--and counting. And they had lost their youth.

 

 

 

Chapter Four

 

Shakespeare looks at the clock. It is near midnight, just a few minutes before the hands hit 12, and on the silent TV screen people's faces show wilder and wilder excitement as the ball slowly drops. Shakespeare feels he is losing control of his consciousness. The blackout seems imminent. But there is no stopping now. He takes another drink from the pitcher and throws more peanuts into his mouth. The other patron stands up and staggers toward the door, slowly and clumsily opens it, then steps out. He looks very drunk. Only Shakespeare and the bartender remain in the tavern. He looks at the bartender and says what time do you close and she says two.

 

In his drunken mind up Shakespeare has laid out the story to the point when Adam left Viet Nam. Adam left behind all he had, he left his past which included Eve. He had put her in a far corner of his mind and was going into an unknown future--and he was excited. Things that awaited him in the world outside the country were more alluring, and he had to live it. Shakespeare feels that Adam was only doing what circumstances were compelling him to do and thus did not think much about what he was doing, he only knew that he must escape from the country because he was a fugitive. So off he went, thinking about Eve a little bit, but thoughts about her quickly slid from his young and restless mind. But at this point, the more Shakespeare thinks about the story and how it is going to develop, the more desperate he becomes. He is suddenly bothered by the thought that there may not be a happy ending to the story of these two lovers. And if he cannot bring the lovers together and make them happy in the end, their fate would be no different from Romeo and Juliet and that would be the end of Shakespeare the playwright, so to speak. He would rather die a thousand deaths than see such thing happens to Adam and Eve, and not just these two, but all lovers. Shakespeare wants his mission on earth this time to succeed, but he now sees more and more clearly the difficulties his characters were facing: adverse circumstances and inner obstacles, problems that were even as formidable as those that has killed Romeo and Juliet.

 

At the beginning of the mission (to rewrite the story), Shakespeare felt that he might have some difficulties giving it a happy ending. But as the evening progresses and as he thinks deeper about the events surrounding Adam and Eve, Shakespeare realizes that he is confronting an impossibility. He very much wants the two lovers to reunite after twenty seven years of separation and live together happily like a fairy tale. But life is not a fairy tale. Shakespeare is using materials and people from real life for the story, and life is much pain and suffering, and very little happiness--if there is happiness at all. Fairy tales are stuffs of the suffering imagination, of wishful thinking, of a desire to transform the mundane, even if only in the mind, into something it is not. At this thought, Shakespeare feels hopeless, and the pain in his heart intensifies. Unbearable. He takes another drink. His head spins faster and the alcoholic wall between him and things gets thicker and foggier. He is losing consciousness, but with a little sanity left, Shakespeare says to himself, before I pass out, I must finish the story, I must see it to a satisfactory conclusion before the night is out.

 

The door of the tavern opens and in steps a man in a long trench coat and with him a strong gust of wind and blowing snow, and the sudden rush of cold air hits Shakespeare in the face and shakes him out of his delirium, even if for a few short moments. The man appears drunk. He walks unevenly to the counter, climbs onto a stool and mumbles something to the bartender who puts a glass in front of him and pours liquor in it. The man immediately throws the liquid into his mouth and as he puts the glass down, the bartender pours another shot and this time it looks like a double and she takes money from the man and returns the bottle to the shelf and sits looking out the window again. At the sudden sobriety, Shakespeare's thoughts returns to Eve:

 

While Adam was living his new life in America, Eve was in the new economic zone with her family in Ca Mau province at the southern tip of the country. In addition to farm work she was making dresses for the women in the collective for extra income, a skill she had learned in Sai Gon. Her parents knew about her love for Adam. The mother approved the relationship and was ready to give him her hands if he asked. And Eve, in her simple way of thinking, was waiting for just that. She loved him, wanted a life with him, and would wait to become his wife. That was all she was thinking about. Nothing else. But her father hated it. He was having a problem with Eve falling in love with a boy from that family: Adam was the brother of his first son-in-law, and things had not been all peaceful between the two families. Eve's father did not like Adam's parents even though they were related by their children’s marriage. The father thought that he was humbled when he married off one of his daughters to Adam’s family. Eve’s family was then in very bad economic situation and was going to the new economic zone, and the less mouths in the family to feed, the better, and that was why he had agreed to give his beloved daughter away to Adam’s brother. So one of Eve's sisters became the wife of Adam’s older brother and the marriage allowed this sister to stay in the city instead of going to the new economic zone in a faraway region where hardship was guaranteed, if not worse than then equal to the difficulty they were having in the city. The marriage hurt the pride of Eve's father. Therefore when he found out that Eve had fallen in love with a boy from that family, he was very unhappy: not another boy from that family, he swore. He ordered her to forget about Adam because he had decided that there would be no marriage between her and that boy. Even though fearful of the father who she called a brutal dictator, Eve was determined not to give in to his demand. She loved Adam and would be his wife and no one else's, she said to her father. And he beat her. The mother could not do anything to stop the beatings because she was fearful of her husband too. The father was the authority in the family and he would not tolerate disobedience.

 

While Adam was doing forced labor in the mountains, Eve continued to live with her family in the new economic zone and she daily endured the physical and verbal abuse from her father. It was one of the most unhappy periods of her life. She thought about Adam days and nights and the longing crystallized in her heart and made her face look melancholy at all times. She stopped talking to others, withdrawing into herself, doing her daily chores in the fields and in the house like a robot, and spoke only when spoken to. Her love for him and her faith in a future union with him gave her the strength to endure the sufferings and the abuse. Every night going to bed she cried under the blanket and talked to him about what happened to her during the day and she heard him talk back to her too as if they were face to face in bed. Once or twice she thought about ending her life. But when she thought about him and her hope of seeing him and becoming his wife in the future, she felt stronger and became less bothered by the thought of suicide. I must live to see him, she said to herself.

 

Eve was twenty two years old and had been in love with Adam for five years. Other families in the same collective had asked for Eve's hands for their sons and whenever the father saw a boy from a family he liked, he told her she must get married. Every time her father approached her with the demand that she marry someone he had chosen for her, she rejected it, each and every time. The beatings continued, but it only made her more stubborn.

 

"You know who I want," she said to her father.

 

"But that boy is not around. And you don’t know if you’re going to see him again!"

 

"I don't care. I can wait!"

 

Shakespeare is increasingly fearful that these two lovers' fate might end up like that of Romeo and Juliet.

 

One day Eve told her parents she was going back to Da Nang because she did not like the life in the collective anymore. After some petitioning, the collective agreed to give her travel documents. When Eve arrived in the city, she learned from her sister that Adam was no longer around, he had left the country after escaping from the labor camp. Eve felt devastated when she heard the news. But her faith in their future together said to her that this separation did not mean that was the end to their relationship, but she would see him again, one way or another. And she decided to stay in the city. She found a job as a dressmaker in a tailor shop in the market .

 

Everyday after work, she went back to the house and sat in Adam's room, and she even slept in it if her brother-in-law allowed. When she was in his room she went into the drawers and found the journals he had left behind. He was a prolific writer. Eve found not only journals in volumes after volumes of his daily life before he went to the camp, and the entries were almost daily, she found collections of short stories also. She sat and read them all. She saw in her mind a tortured soul of a young man growing up in a prolonged spiritual crisis. He wrote about his confusion and his inquiries into the meaning of life. He wrote about his desperation and hopelessness, his days struggling with emptiness and depression, and his suicidal thoughts. Eve felt painful when she was reading his journals and most of the time she read under the candle light in the middle of the night when she was unable to sleep. But when she got to the notes about his feelings for her, their love, his missing her, she felt happy and rewarded. In one of those notes, Adam wrote that he had known many girls but Eve was the only one he loved, and he not only loved her, he was crazy about her and he loved her with his entire being. She thought one day not very far, she would see him again and they would be happy together again and would never part again. That was her faith, but how she was going to do that, she had no idea. She might try to escape too, but she was too poor, and her family was poor, they could not afford to pay for her escape. But she was determined to find a way.

 

Two months after coming back to the Da Nang, Eve received a letter from Adam, written from Hong Kong. It was night. She was happy because in her hands she saw not a piece of paper but a treasure. Words from him. However, the letter was short and strange. It looked as if he was drunk when he was writing it. It was a crumpled and stained piece of paper that contained only 25 words. He wrote that he missed her very much but he was afraid that he might not be able to see her again. And that was it. When she was reading the note, Adam's brother came into the room and asked what she was doing there and she said she had just received a letter from Adam and the brother told her to give it to him but she said no and the brother said if you don’t give that letter to me you must leave the house. She put the letter in her pocket then stood up and walked out. It was midnight. She could not understand why Adam’s brother treated her like that. What was the matter with him? She walked toward the center of the city where her grandfather's house was. The streets were completely empty. She was afraid and she walked fast. Two men on a bicycle rolled by and they appeared to be drunk and as they biked past her they said dirty things to her as if she was a streetwalker. After that night, she never returned to that house again but told her sister to let her know if there were letters for her from Adam. She lived with her grandfather and continued to work at the tailor shop in the market. She saved and sent money to her parents in the economic zone. And she wrote to him, telling him to wait for her, they would see one another again. But as days went by, she became more and more restless. Every street corners reminded her of him, and the longing for him became more and more intense. She must find a way to escape, she told herself, only then she might find him. And she thought, because the economic zone in Ca Mau province was near the sea, there might be a better chance to do so. She had to go back. And she went back.

 

In the zone, her father returned to his old ways, demanding that she get married. But still she said no. She belonged to Adam and believed that she would reunite with him one of these days. A family in the collective was making plans to escape and they approached Eve's father and said that if she agreed to marry their son, the two would go together. She said no. She was determined to do it her own way, she would work hard and save money to pay for her own passage, and did not want to be indebt to anyone who might force her to betray Adam.

 

As times went by and the money she made and saved remained meager, she became desperate. So she wrote to Adam, asking him if he had money to spare, send her some to help finance the escape--because she could no longer stand the separation. Months passed and still she received no reply from him whom by this time had settled in the US. Then she wrote to him again even though mailing a letter overseas cost a day's wage. She thought perhaps he did not have the money she was asking for, and that was why he did not answer her. In the subsequent letters, she wrote and told him not to worry if he did not have money, because one way or another she would make the journey, and that he must have faith in her and wait for her, that she would be with him soon, that she was praying for him everyday, that he must not drink too much and too late in the night, and she asked him to send her a picture of his. Then everyday she looked out for the mailman. And everyday it was the same disappointment--the mailman had nothing for her. She wondered if Adam had received her letters or if they had got lost. And she continued to work hard to save money and reject the advances of people trying to marry her and everyday she waited for news from Adam but no news from him ever came. Meanwhile, her father would not relent on his treatment of her. Everyday he scolded and accused her of being a burden on the family, and if he was angry enough, he beat her. One day, getting a hold on Adam’s address in America, he wrote to him asking him what did he do to Eve that made her so obsessed with him, and added that if he truly loved her, he must pay for her escape to join him because she was now twenty two years old and must get married; and if he could not--and this was what Eve‘s father was hoping for--he must let her know in the form of a rejection letter so she might abandon her senseless hope and go on with her own life. Eve did not know about the letter her father wrote to Adam.

 

One morning two months after the angry words from the father to Adam, Eve received a letter from him. At last. She felt vindicated that her faith in him had proven right, that he still loved and remembered and thought about her. She was happy. There was no one in the house when the letter arrived and she went to a corner and sat down on a stool and hold the letter in her hand as if it was the most fragile thing in the world. On the white envelope at the upper right corner was a stamp with an American flag, and underneath it was her name in his familiar handwriting, her address, and in the upper left corner was his name and address. She studied all the details on the face of the envelope including the red postmark. She felt an intense joy she had never felt for a long time. Then she turned the envelope over and carefully opened it with a scissor, taking care not to damage the paper inside. Her breath quickened and her heart beat wilder, perhaps he was answering her prayers, perhaps now he had money to help her with the journey. She took the folded sheet of paper out of the envelope and suddenly was disappointed because at first glance it appeared that it was a very brief letter. Then she read, and as she read, each word stabbed her heart like a dagger. "Eve. I have received letters from you and your father. I did not know what to do in response to your and your father’s requests. I don't think there is a chance we will see one another again. This time our separation may be for good because of the immense physical distance between us and because I don’t think I can ever go home again. I want you to forget about me and whatever had happened between us and I want you to get married and settle down like your sisters. After this letter, I will move to another state and I will not write to you again. Good luck. Adam." Eve was dumb-struck. She did not believe what she was reading was true, so she read it over and over and over and slower and slower each time and each time it was still the same words, and at last she had no doubt what she was reading was really the words, and she was not delusional. Adam had rejected her. What did her father write to him that upset him so much? But anyhow, he had turned his back on her with those cold and brutal words. He had stopped loving her and forgotten her and perhaps was loving someone new. The pain was immediate and complete. She felt as if she had suddenly died and she felt cold all over. She sat very still, holding the sheet of paper in her hand and her mind went blank. That was it. That was the end, all her hope and longing and faith and love for him had been crushed. How could he, she thought. I refused to believe that he had stopped loving me. But what if it was true? What he had written was so clear, he meant every word he said. He did not want to have anything to do with me anymore. He had rejected me and my desire to be with him. He did not love me anymore. He must have had another girl. What am I going to do? Do I beg him to continue loving me? No, I cannot do that because once he had stopped loving me, that was it, there is nothing I can do to bring him back to me. The love I had for him and my waiting for him all these years had meant nothing to him. How cruel! All the memories between us that are so valuable to me meant nothing to him. My hope and wish of becoming his wife was rejected. If that is what he wants, there is nothing I can do. I will let him be. I will try to forget about him, about my love for him. He doesn't love me anymore. He loves someone else. He has betrayed me. That is it. This love, this relationship is over. No, I still love him, I always love him. But my pride is hurt--bad. I will not forgive him for this. If he rejects me, I will reject him. Eve sat for hours as if she had turned into stone.

 

That night, after people were asleep, she took all of his letters and gifts--including a weather-beaten little book of poetry by Tagore--that she had saved as her personal treasure, and brought them out to a corner of the garden and built a fire. And as the little flames danced and as each letter was fed into the fire, tears rolled down her face. She watched as the wind scattered the ashes into the night air. That was the end of the affair. That night she stayed up and cried.

 

Days after that, she became mute, and her face hardened. She was thinking about what she was going to do. She still wanted to leave the country, but now it would not be to look for Adam, but to make a life for herself; and besides, she could not languish here being haunted by memories about Adam everyday, and she thought that wherever Adam had settled, that was where she was going to settle to. They would be under the same sky, but they would not see one another. Because she still loved him and knew that she would love him to the end of her life, the thought of being under the same sky with him gave her some comfort, even though she now had a strong feeling that fate had not meant for them to be together. They had crossed path, and now each were going into different directions, or in the same direction but on parallel paths perhaps, which mean they would never meet. At the same time, however, a small voice from the bottom of her heart whispered that not all had been lost, that maybe something could be savaged, that Adam would think again and leave whoever he was with and come back to her. After all, she did not believe there was anyone in the world who loved him like she did, and besides, she tried to convince herself that he still loved her, despite what he had written and despite whatever that was going on with him. There might still be a chance they would find one another and all would be forgiven and they would be together again. These thoughts, even though flickering like candles in the wind, made the pain less intense, and Eve said to herself that she would take to the sea, whatever the price, come what might.

 

Eve started asking her mother for help arrange an escape. Seeing the state Eve was in, the mother secretly made contacts with snakeheads. She found a man who was planning an escape and after much pleading from her, the man agreed to let Eve on board for nothing-- only on the condition that once she reached the other shore she would make money to pay off the debt of passage. So one moonless night Eve with a few others from the village sneaked out on to the beach and boarded a small boat. There were men, women, children on the little vessel. They headed out to the ocean. The wooden boat, with a small engine that was intended for river and coastal sailing only, sailed northwest across the Gulf. People knew that if they kept going in the that direction, they would arrive in Thailand where they would be accepted as refugees, given temporary shelters and eventually settle permanently in a third country. That was the hope. The boat held out against the big waves; and on the second day of the journey Eve had become used to the violent movements of the vessel and she stopped vomiting. In fact, there was nothing in the stomach to throw up any more, and even though there was food on the boat, she could not eat. She helped the young men throwing the water out of the boat. And she was alone, while traveling with her were families with husbands and wives and children.

 

On the third day, after eating some of what was left of the food supplies, she regained some strength. Then over the horizon they saw a big boat and all were excited because that was the first human sighting after three days floating on the open sea. They thought they could batter for food, water, and fuel with the gold some were carrying with them. They even hoped they might be picked up and saved from the rough sea by the people on the big boat. So they sailed in the direction of the other boat and realized that it was heading toward them too. When the two boats came closer, they realized that it was a fishing boat at least ten times bigger than theirs and made of steel, not wood. Fishermen on the big boat came out to look at the small boat. They were all men with dark skins and they made gestures and seemed wild with excitement. Then as the boats touched, one of the fishermen jumped onto Eve’s boat with such a violent landing that he almost threw some people overboard. He had a cleaver in his hands. And after quickly regaining his balance he shouted in the language of Eve's people that they all must lied down; and as he was screaming, he pumped the cleaver repeatedly in the air as if he was going to chop someone, and his face contorted with savagery. People lied down and made no attempt to resist, they did not have any weapons and beside, after three days exposing to the elements on the sea, they had little strength left. Then another fisherman on the big boat threw down a rope and the man below tied the two boats together. Then more men jumped onto the small boat and all carried some kind of weapons even if it was only a wooden stick. And they started to rip people of their neck chains, rings, gold. And when they started to grab the women, people screamed. One man jumped up and lunged to defend his wife when she was grabbed by a fisherman/pirate but was held back by two others and stabbed in the stomach. He collapsed, blood gushing out of his wounds. The woman yelled and kicked and punched wildly and her two small children cried hysterically and it took three pirates to hold her down and one of them hit her repeatedly in the head with the handle of a hatchet, and she fell. They lift her up and carried her to the big boat and some of them stayed on the small boat to guard the people while the rest of them were raping the woman. After they were done with her and two other young women--including Eve, and all happened in the same manner--they threw them back to the small boat and sailed away. The same thing happened the next day and the next day and the next day with other groups of fishermen/pirates. Out of food and water and fuel, all on board passed out and let the boat drifted in the intense heat of the sun during the day and in the cold of the night. Eve and the other young women were raped and brutalized repeatedly over many days and now all were dying of hunger and thirst. They looked dead.

 

On the thirteenth day, they were picked up by an ocean liner, nursed back to consciousness, and transferred into the custody of the Thai authority. Two people died.

 

On land, Eve became a mad woman. The local Thai authority kept the people in a camp near the beach and everyday Eve wandered along the water looking into the distant horizon and nightmares of the days at sea made her scream out. She was a bundle of cuts and bruises inside and out. She had lost grip on things around her and people had to force her to eat, consoled her, trying to bring her back. With a cloudy mind and a confused heart, Eve felt that she had lost the most valuable thing she had: integrity and dignity. She had no courage to face the light of day, to look at people in the face, she felt like a piece of rag, dirty and unwanted. Since a very young age, her mother had drilled into her head that for a woman, the integrity of the body was the most sacred thing to be protected at all cost. She believed her husband was the only person allowed to take off her shirt, to touch her body, to see her naked and what she had as a gift to her him was her own virgin body. But she had no such thing anymore. During the days at sea, she had fought with all her might, with whatever strength she had, against the violation of her body, but she lost the battle, and now she felt worthless, and wished she were dead. She thought about Adam and said to herself I am not worthy of him anymore, so I will not look for him, because I cannot come to him with a dirty body like this.

 

One month, then two months, and Eve slowly recovered. The life instinct in her began to come back, reality returned and confronted her with demands. She remembered that she had a debt to pay, that she had to contact her family to tell them she had arrived in Thailand and was now waiting for permanent settlement in a third country. She started to make dresses for people in the camp, saved money, and sent it back to her mother to pay off the debt of the passage. Once in a while, the camp officials called the women who had been raped to the camp's clinic for periodic checkups and blood tests to see if they had contracted any diseases from the incidents at sea. And on those days, names of the women were announced with a loud speaker and the whole camp would hear and people knew who had been raped. Eve felt as if she was being violated again and again. Being alone and needing protection, Eve asked two teenage orphans, a boy and a girl, to live with her in her hut and she provided them with better foods from the money she made.

 

Eve thought that news of her escape must have reached Adam; so on many occasions she went to the Red Cross office in the camp to inquire whether anyone was looking for her. And every time, she was disappointed. No words from him. The Red Cross office also helped people find friends and relatives overseas and three times she went there with the intention of filing forms to look for Adam but three times she turned around, abandoning the idea. She did not forget that he had rejected her and how her pride was wounded badly by the rejection. Besides, she did not feel clean and would be very ashamed if he knew she was raped, and no longer a virgin. Better go on with my life and keep the memories of him locked away in a corner of my heart, she thought.

 

In the camp, Eve kept to herself, having for company the two orphaned teenage boy and girl that she shared the hut with and took care of. Not a day went by without her thinking of Adam and not a day she did not hope to get a letter from him, even though she knew the hope was futile. She thought that perhaps Adam knew she had escaped and knew where she was but did not write because he did not care about her anymore. As months went by, she tried to chase the thoughts about Adam out of her head and tried to live as normal a life as she could while waiting for resettlement. Paperwork and interviews by the United Nations officials and by the US immigration had completed, and she now only had to wait for the day to board an airplane for America. Because Adam was now in America, the thought that she was going to be under the same sky with him gave her some consolation, even though they might not meet again. She had no plan to see him even if it was possible--because the shame of the rapes and the wounded pride.

 

Young men in the camp sometimes approached her and made advances but she rejected them all. Memories of Adam were still too much on her mind; besides, she had no feelings for any of the men in the camp. But one day someone appeared and the first time she saw him, a chill down her spine and caused her unexplainable fear. That someone was a young man about her age who arrived in the camp a year after her and lived in the same area of the camp with her and she knew he was having his eyes on her. He sent her gifts of fruits that she refused to accept, and she always tried to avoid him, afraid of getting into conversation with him. She felt as if he was a creditor going after his debtor, her, and she was scared. His name was David.

 

After seventeen months in the camp, she was informed by the camp’s officials that the date for her settlement in America was set. But two weeks before departure, she fell sick with malaria, but there was no one around to care for her. The two teens she was living with could do nothing to help. David, who had been following her, took the opportunity to come near and cared for her. He would fed her, sought medicine for her, watched over her, and while doing all this, he told her he loved her. Eve had no reaction when she heard him say that. But despite having no feelings for David, she received the care from him with gratitude, telling herself that one day she would repay his kindness in someway. At last she recovered, and on the day she boarded the bus for the airport, David said to her that he wanted to marry her and that he would look for her when he arrived in America perhaps only a month or two after her. Eve said she first must wait and see how things turned out for her in the new land before she considered his proposal. And they exchanged addresses and telephone numbers. David had entered the picture, and he appeared to be a nice man and love her sincerely. He was the man close to her and had shown he cared for her, and he knew what had happened to her on the sea and knew how she had conducted her life in the camp and seemed to accept all that without conditions, and she became more and more convinced that he might be the man she would be spending her life with. But she felt conflicted, because she had no feelings for him except gratitude.

 

On the last days of her stay in the camp, David was constantly by her side. He asked her about her past; and she told him about Adam, how she loved him but had been rejected by him, about the years waiting for him, about her desire to become his wife. And she added that she now did not think about looking for Adam anymore even though they were about to be in the same country. David was comforted to hear the part about her not looking for Adam, but at the same time, he was sad that she did not seem to have the same feelings for him that he had for her.

 

Eve landed in New York and was greeted at the airport by a younger brother who had been living in the US for two years. On the way to the city from the airport she was shocked to see a landscape devoid of people, all she saw through the windows of the taxi cab were highways, cars, and houses in the distance behind the shrubs. She was used to live in an environment where people and noises were around and in her face almost twenty four hours a day. Here in the US, all was silent. Even the cars on the road did not make any noise, or very little noises. Eve carried with her a large plastic bag with the initials ICM on it, indicating that she was a refugee, that contained all the important papers and some clothes. The new environment was totally alien, resembled little what she had used to back in Viet Nam. Here things looked ordered and cold.

 

The brother lived in a basement apartment in East New York and after a few days taking her around to shop for clothing and other essentials, he disappeared. He would be gone for days and when he came back he said he was away working. Most of the times she was alone in the basement, seeing no one, talking to no one, and had no courage to come out to explore the neighborhood. The people looked intimidating to her whenever she glimpsed through the half-window of the basement and saw them walking by. She spent the time by reading the books her brother threw all over the apartment, cleaning up the place, and cooking whatever there was in the refrigerator. And she wrote letters to her family, relatives and acquaintances, some back in the old country, some here in the US. Sometimes the phone rang and it was brother inquiring if she was ok, and sometimes it was his friends and they were surprised to hear a female voice. Sometimes she thought about Adam, but chased the thoughts out of her mind whenever they appeared. Disappointment and sadness always came over her whenever she thought of him. Now she was in the same country with him but she had no idea where he might be, she did not have his address, and even if she had, she wasn't sure if she should contact him. Better not, she thought. The last time she heard anything from him was that rejection letter to her when she had still been in the new economic zone in Ca Mau, and it had been two years and still felt like only yesterday. The wounds he caused her were still fresh. And she continued to feel bitter. What would he think and how would he felt if he knew she was now in America, under the same sky as he. Would he look for her? She wished that he would, but still, she felt conflicted. The love she had for him did not lessen with distance and time, it was still as strong as the first days she knew him; only this time, hurt pride was added to the mix. Sometimes she thought that if she had had his address, she would write to him, to try one more time to find out if he still loved her and wanted her. If he did, she would go and find him even if with reservation and caution, because she missed him, and wanted to see his face again: it had been four years since they last saw one another, and two years since the last contact. Perhaps he would not mind that she was no longer a virgin, and he would accept this soiled body if he really loved her, because it was not her fault. If that was the case, then she would come to him, and become his wife, as she had wished since the day she fell in love with him.

 

But nothing happened. In stead, she received letters from David almost every week. He wrote that he missed her and wanted to see her when he arrived in the US. She put the letters aside, feeling confused, not knowing what to do.

 

Every three or four days, her brother would come home and took her out to see a some of the sights of New York and she felt better to have some fresh air and saw the faces of other people. But at nights, sleeping alone in the basement she was fearful, and nightmares of the rapes frequently came back to wake her up in cold sweat.

 

Then one month after her arrival in New York, she received a call from David who said he had arrived in the country and was now in San Jose and asked her how things were where she was. She told him it was terrible where she lived, that she was a prisoner in her own home, and she felt scared most of the time. He again proposed to her and suggested that she came live with him and she said that she was still thinking about his proposal. Even though she was playing the delaying game with David, her intuition told her that he was the man who would become her husband, not the missing Adam. She and David talked on the phone almost daily.

 

One night, she was terrified by a dream in which she saw she was raped again but this time not by the pirates, but the rapist was her own brother, the one she was living with. Cold sweat drenched her after the nightmare and because she strongly believed in dreams which for her were foretelling of things to come, she thought she must get out of the place. Two days after the nightmare, her brother came home and she could not bear to look at him. And when the lights went out at night, she tried to keep her eyes open, alert of any unusual movements from the direction of her brother's bed which was only fifteen feet away in the same room. The next day she called David and told him she was going to join him. He sent her a plane ticket. And one week after the nightmare, she was on an airplane to San Jose. David mat her at the airport and took her to an apartment he had rented just days before--and they started living together. At this point, Eve felt that living together with a man without marriage was not such a big deal, she had been through worse; besides, she was not in Viet Nam, her parents were not around. And besides, where would she live if not with David, the only person she knew in this strange land? Eve liked this city better because the weather was not too cold, and there were a lot of people like her who spoke the same language. David showed his concern for her, cared about her, and they agreed that when they had made enough money, they would get married. Eve had then found a job at a factory where David was working. Done deal for Eve, she had decided to marry David, because she needed a man for protection. And the hell with Adam, wherever he was. She wrote home to tell her parents about David and her intention to marry him but did not tell them that she was living and fucking with him.

 

Shakespeare continues to sit at the table while outside the winter storm continues to rage. He finishes the pitcher and ordered another one. He has not drunk this much at one time for a long time; but tonight is a night like no others. Shakespeare has been completely taken over by the story he is constructing in his mind and he is determined to finish it before daylight. The tavern will be closed at 2, so it is only an hour before he has to walk out. He feels that his mind is now boundless and his mood exuberant, and the creative juice is flowing like lava. But at the same time he feels dismayed, almost to the point of desperation, because as he continues to sketch the events, he becomes increasingly convinced that a happy conclusion to the story is impossible. There are obstacles to the characters’ happiness, obstacles that seem trivia but actually formidable. Both Adam and Eve are deeply trapped in their own situations. There are choices, of course, but none looks too promising. At this point in the story, Eve had set foot in the US, but she had no intention to look for Adam. That is a cold fact. And Adam was under the water, no one could detect him, his whereabouts was unknown.

 

Shakespeare takes another long drag from the pitcher, this time not bother to use the glass. And a thought hit him: There will be no happy resolution to the story. It will end on a low note, but in what form? There is no clear answer yet. Is there a happy ending to anything at all? Shakespeare smacks his lips as he ponders. Things end in death and destruction one way or another. All. That was why the plays he wrote while alive in Medieval England all ended in deaths of the characters. He understood the truth then; and this time, the truth is still the same but Shakespeare feels revolted against it. Love affairs rarely end in happiness, if ever. What happened to Romeo and Juliet might happen to Adam and Eve, but it could be different if they decided to revolt against their circumstances, but that remained to be seen because it is still too far in the future. At this time both were trying to survive in the new homeland. Eve had erased from her heart the longing for a union with Adam because she had been involved with David and she had even let him fuck her while they were in the camp together, something that she was not proud of. The first time she let him fuck her, she had to cover her face because of shame. Adam had retreated further and further into a far corner of her mind. She regretted the loss of a love, the wasted years waiting for him, but circumstances demanded that she forget the past and move on. The two years since the escape had taught her to become a practical and even callous woman, learning to stay alive amid adverse circumstances.

 

And at this point, Shakespeare feels sick to his stomach. He has reached the point where the characters have to make hard choices that further widen the rift between them. And he feels even more sick when he thinks about the way Eve conducted herself while in the camp. Shakespeare understands that circumstances do play a role in her behavior; she was traumatized by the experience at sea, among others, but as far as her love and relationship with Adam is concerned, she is behaving more and more like a betrayer. While in the camp, she had chances to look for Adam and reunite with him, but did not do so. She argued that it was her hurt pride--Adam's last letter rejecting her--and what happened to her on the sea were the two reasons that prevented her from looking for him. Shakespeare thinks that Eve was wrong not looking for Adam. Despite what her reasons were.

 

The other patron wobbles to the juke box and plays Sade's "Stronger than Pride." In the silence of the almost empty tavern and in the semi-darkness, Sade's silky voice dances like smoke streaks in the air. “Love is stronger than pride,” she sings. And suddenly Shakespeare bursts out laughing and his laughter turns the head of the bartender who glances at him curiously. With the mood he is in, every word of the lyrics, carried by the seductive voice and the melody, hits him with more meaning now than ever. "Love is stronger than pride?" Shakespeare mumbles, "Not always. Not with this woman." And he feels sorry for Adam, who was living a lonely life while his lover was fucking with another man. Adam did not know Eve was now in the same country with him but had no interest in a reunion with him. Shakespeare feels like shit. The woman was a betrayer.

 

After arriving in the US, Adam lived with his friend in Houston for six months then moved to Philadelphia. He found work, registered for college but never went, made new friends, got drunk and high. It was during this time that he wrote the last letter to Eve telling her to forget about him. Then he got into trouble, a fight that resulted in serious injuries to another person, and had to flee to Georgia. He lived there for a year, working in a chicken factory. Then after a year in Georgia, he moved back to Philadelphia, again living the same kind of life: working to make a living and getting high. He thought less and less about Eve and also stopped writing to his family. Then he moved again, this time to New York. And years went by.

 

He was living in New York the time Eve arrived in America. The irony was she landed in New York too. So for a month before she left for San Jose they were no more than ten miles apart--even less. They might even have rode the same train once or twice. At that time, Adam was working in a warehouse and continued to burn his days in weed smoke and soak his nights in alcohol. He did not think about doing something for his future, all he did was working to make a living. And saving nothing. His thinking was short term. The thoughts about Eve sometimes crossed his mind, but never stayed for long. She must be now married with children back in the old country, he believed, and felt a little bit regretful because he knew he still loved her. It was the first love of his life.

 

Meanwhile in San Jose Eve was busy working to save money for her wedding with David. She was also filing papers with immigration to bring her parents over. In New York, Adam started going to college and working on a variety of odd jobs. He moved from one apartment to another, never stayed in one place for long. He still did not write to his family, the thought never occurred to him, he was too busy living. New York was an exciting city and the opportunity for fun and entertainment were endless and Adam enjoyed them with all the strength and enthusiasm of his youth. He went to night clubs three times a week, getting high with the crowds, hung out with thrill seekers in Greenwich Village. And he also painted a lot during this time, it was his habit since a child; and he also started to write journals again.

 

For a time during this period, Adam shared an apartment with a couple. This couple had a fourteen year old girl, and he fell in love with this girl. It might be love or it might just be infatuation, some kind of attraction. Of course, the whatever-it-is was all one way, the girl was still too young to understand the special feeling he had for her. What made Adam fell attracted to this girl/child was her angelic innocence, her playfulness and naivety, her chubby little face, her birdlike voice. It was her youth and innocence that fascinated him. He bought her candies and ice cream, and helped her with homework. Every time she was near him with laughter and the display of innocence, he felt happy, very happy. At work during the day, he thought about her, the child, and longed for the day to end so he could go home and see her. One afternoon while he was in the kitchen cooking a meal, the girl ran to him and lift her t-shirt and showed him the bra she was wearing and said that her mother had just bought it for her and from now on she got to wear this. Stunned, he looked at the white thin straps that ran around her back and chest and up her shoulders. And as she turned, he saw her breasts, two little budding lumps of skin and flesh hugged by the two cups of the bra. And while he was speechless, the child smiled her big bright smile and asked him is it beautiful and he tremblingly said yes it is. Then she dropped her shirt, and ran out of the kitchen. Adam stood still, baffled, but intensely happy. During the time he was in that apartment, he painted a picture that depicted two hands open up like a lotus and raise to a blue sky and hover above the hands were a pair of red lips, a heart, and a flower. It was a beautiful painting, Adam thought, it expressed his feeling for the girl at that time. He had no idea where the painting was now. Perhaps he gave it to a friend and forgot about it, or it got lost somewhere when he moved to another apartment. This mind-trip lasted for about six months.

 

It was also during this time that Adam became acquainted with a girl living in another building across the street. This girl fell in love with him. Her name was Jane and she was about his age and was the sister of one of his friends. The first time they met, he came to see the friend and saw her cooking at the stove. She was a small woman, with long hair and a face pockmarked with acne. She served her brother and him a meal. Adam thought nothing about her, he only knew that she had just come to New York from California. She was going to stay and live in in this city with her brother.

 

One night, Adam was called to the phone and on the other end of the line was Jane asking him about her brother: she was worried because it was late and her brother still was not home. Adam said he did not know. After that, she called quite frequently to asked him about things that are utterly trivia, and Adam was surprised, he thought the girl perhaps was having a crush on him. Then he decided that if it was what she wanted, he would respond to her.

 

One Sunday morning she came over to his room and they talked and soon she fell into his arms and onto his bed and they made love and he discovered that she was a virgin. And the relationship began. She called him day and night despite their seeing each other every day. They met in the park in the neighborhood, on the roof top of his building, and in her apartment, and they made love at every opportunity. Adam was happy, but he did not have the same feeling for her as he did for Eve or that girl/child. All he did was responding to the girl's passion, in a way that made her think he loved her too. Adam felt conflicted, but he thought it was too late, the ball had rolled and there was no stopping it. Eventually, because of the frequent phone calls late at night that bothered and wakened the family he was sharing the apartment with, and perhaps because of the noise of love making from Adam’s room that annoyed the family, he was asked to leave. Adam had to look for another room in another apartment. In fact, the noises he and Jane made, either it was from sex or the phone, caused him to move quite frequently from one apartment to another, because wherever he went, people would complain. They always asked him to leave after a few months. Whenever he and Jane met, and as soon as the door was locked, they grabbed one another and made love.

 

Jane was attending college and Adam helped her with assignments, explained to her things from the textbooks she did not understand. He met her at her school and escorted her home, took her to the movies and museums and long walks in the park. She was a good and caring person, but one thing about her that made Adam uncomfortable: she was so insecure and suspicious of people, and she talked a lot. And soon after, no more than six months into the affair, the fighting started, all because of Jane’s unusual jealousy and insecurity.

 

Jane told Adam that he was the first man she loved in her life. And she was 26 at the time. Adam felt that his life was being changed by the relationship in ways that he did not feel comfortable. Many times he wanted to end it with her because he felt that she was unstable, prone to hysteria, and extremely possessive. She followed him closely and made him feel as if he was under surveillance at all times. She would call him in the middle of the night to see if he was home; and if her calls were not answered, she would take a cab to his apartment to see if he was there, or what he was doing, even if it was two in the morning, and she would demand to know why he did not pick up the phone and made her worried. She even started to accuse him of infidelity. All of this was happening when Adam was working full time and going to college part time.

 

One year into the relationship with Jane, Adam abruptly moved to Philadelphia. He was unhappy with her, and besides, he had just made friend with another woman, one who was many years younger than Jane, looked much sexier, and this woman seemed to be a good, easy-to-deal-with type of person. Adam was fascinated by this woman and he decided to listen to his heart and move to Philadelphia to be near her. He took a bus to Philadelphia one morning, telling Jane that he was tired of New York and needed a change but would go back to see her now and then. She saw him off with a tearful face, not knowing that he was running after another woman. In fact, Adam was only trying to escape from Jane and her irrational ways: she had worn him out. And the woman in Philadelphia was offering an opportunity.

 

In Philadelphia, he found an apartment, a job, and started to make contact with the other woman, who appeared to be interested in building a relationship with him. Then Jane eventually found out what Adam was up to when a letter that woman sent him after he left New York fell into her hand. She called up the woman and they had it out with each other. The woman was intimidated and backed off, terminating the budding relationship with Adam. He was disappointed but not really angry at Jane, who by now had began to go back and forth between New York and Philadelphia to see him every weekend. The love making and the fighting continued. One Saturday night, after a fight, she walked out of the apartment at one in the morning and went back to New York after Adam slapped her.

 

After one year in Philadelphia, Adam, tired of the long distance relationship with Jane, returned to New York. One morning, he loaded his car with some meager belongings and drove to New York, having rented a room in Brooklyn a week earlier. Adam was not happy about going back. He could not say no, and Jane, with her possessive behaviors, seemed to exert a binding influence on him. They were incompatible in every way, but still, like magnets, they were attracted to each other. There were more pain than joy in the relationship, Adam realized. During fights which happened quite frequently, Adam would smack her, threw things against the walls, call her names that he later regretted--he was often out of control when arguing with her. Once he kicked her out of the car because he could not stand her mouth anymore. Jane had a way of angering people with her words but she did not seem to care. She would talk and talk and it did not matter to her if the person she was talking to was listening, or how her words made that person feel. But as the madness went away, they would have sex again and forgot all until another fight broke out.

 

Adam's frustration with Jane sometimes made him want to kill her. One time after dropping her off, and when she was crossing the street toward her building, Adam felt an impulse to step on the gas and run her over. It was hard for him to find in himself any tender feelings for Jane; and when she asked him if he loved her, he refused to answer. He felt that he had been trapped. What’s more, Jane had instilled in him the fear that she would pursue him wherever he ran to, even to the farthest corner of the earth. But amid the misery, he managed to graduate from junior college and prepared to finish his Bachelor.

 

Years went by and one day Adam woke up after a drunken night and suddenly remembered that he still had a family back in the old country. Memories of the past came back and he felt guilty. For so long he had not written to his family, he had forgotten and did not know why. So he wrote. And as he wrote, everything from his past came back, and he remembered Eve, a major part of his adolescence, and wondered what happened to her. He was sure she was now married, had children, and perhaps still living in the new economic zone. Thoughts about her saddened him when he recalled the joy and happiness they had had together back then, the delirium and madness and ecstasy of the first love--and he felt regretful.

 

Meanwhile, his affair with Jane continued. He thought of two possible solutions to the stalemated relationship: he could either abandon all and disappear, or he could wrap it all up by marrying her. But both seems equally unsatisfactory. So the stalemate continued, and Adam felt that he was the most unhappy person in the world.

 

A months after writing again to the family, his father wrote back, saying that the family for the last five years had been worrying about him and searching for him but now they were happy he was ok. Adam started sending money to his family every few months. And every time he sat down and wrote to his family, he thought about Eve and wanted to ask about her. But then he thought he should not disturb the water because he was sure she was not a free woman anymore as most women of her age must be, and he must not do anything to upset the situation. Besides, he remembered the last letter he had written to her, so he did not ask about Eve, but thoughts about her lingered on his mind.

 

Then there was news that the regime had allowed travels between Viet Nam and the outside world. The government was adopting economic reforms after realizing that socialism did not work. Travel agencies in the US began to organize flights to Viet Nam, and exiles trickled back to visit the homeland. Traffic to and from the old country increased. And one day in 1992 Adam decided to go back for a visit. He booked a flight. Preparing for the trip, he was excited not only because he was going to see his homeland and family again, but perhaps he was going to see Eve too. He could not forget their love, and he was curious to know how she was. It had been 12 years since he left the village, and 15 years when he last saw her--and he had thought he would never had this opportunity again. He planned to look for her and see her as a friend if in fact she was married; but if she was not, he would marry her and bring her over to America with him--it was a strong possibility.

 

That summer night as the aircraft descended on Sai Gon, Adam looked out the windows and saw the points of lights on the ground; and just as the aircraft touched down, he broke down and cried. The joy of being home again overwhelmed him, and he could not hold back the tears. Then as he stepped out of the plane, the tropical heat hit him in the face and he realized that this is it, this is what I remember Viet Nam by: an endless summer. He boarded the bus that took him to the terminal, and there in the darkened area outside the fence, he saw a big crowd, and towering above all was his father who saw him and yelled his name and waved to him wildly. He felt very happy. You can really go home again.

 

It took Adam a few days to re-adjust himself to the environment. For the first few days, he felt as if he was floating in the air: people and things around him seemed surreal. Twelve years in America had really did damage to his memories of home: he felt extremely difficult when trying to cross the streets which were choked with motorcycle traffic. The way a waitress served him in a coffee shop fascinated him: she handed to him all he requested with both hands and with her head slightly bowed, in a most respectful manner. You don’t find that in New York. And the language the people spoke delighted him when he listened. And the way people looked: they were so raw, especially the laborers, they were so lean there seemed not to be an ounce of fat on their body, it was all meat and bone and skin. But somehow Adam found that nothing much had changed. The streets, the houses, the corners, the river banks, and the trees were all the same--only the people were older. It was a world that almost had nothing resembling America, except that here lived people too.

 

After visiting the relatives as required by courtesy Adam began to meet his old friends and they had a wild time together. Mostly what they did was getting drunk and fooling around with the prostitutes. One night he went to one of his friends' house. The friend wasn't home and he waited and half an hour later the friend came back and they went out. They wandered the dark streets for a while then went into a restaurant and drank a lot of beer. At midnight he and the friend left the restaurant and wandered around some more, talking about the old times when they were in high school together. At a corner they stopped by a cigarette stall to buy some smoke. There were two women sitting behind the stall and the small oil lamp was not bright enough for Adam to see their faces clearly. It was pitch dark. There was no moon and no stars. And the street was deserted. Hearing the women's voices, Adam knew that they were young. One of them suggested that they spend some times together. They bargained and quickly agreed on a price. He went with the skinny girl. He and the girl climbed a wooden staircase to a small room that looked like an attic. It was hot. There was no candles or no oil lamps for them to see each other clearly, but he could see vaguely the form of the woman’s body. She was wearing a white silk pajama and she spoke with the Hue accent, the same as his. Her lips were blood red and her eyes were large. She took his hand and led Adam to a bamboo bed, then she went to the window and drew the curtain. Then she lied down on the bed that groaned under her weight and slowly took off her pajama. It was an ivory white body She whispered, "C'mon." He undressed and lied down next to her. There seemed to be no air in the room. He felt suffocated. Then he turned and touched her skin. It was incredibly smooth and cool and it sent a shudder through his body. He was immediately aroused. The woman, lying on her side facing him, and without a word, took hold of his penis and stroke it gently and steadily. Drops of sweat were rolling down on her face and her breasts. He had an erection. She then spread her legs and took him in. It was a tight and well lubricated pussy. He thrust and pumped gently, trying to prolong the overwhelmingly good sensation that made him forget the oppressively hot night. His sweat fell on her white face and her small breasts. He did not do anything fancy. Just a methodical fuck. It was past midnight and it was so quiet, all he heard was the groaning of the bed and the lizards' wailing and his and the woman’s fast breathing. After about ten minute he ejaculated. She immediately grabbed his ass and kept him tightly inside her until the last drop of his semen was discharged and the erection was gone. He was sweating as if in a steam bath and it felt sticky when he rolled off her. "I made you come properly, didn’t I?" The woman said. Then put on her pajama, got off the bed, climbed through the window and quietly disappeared into the dark. Adam dressed, went downstairs and sat waiting for his friend. No one was watching the cigarette stall. He would not recognize the woman if I saw her again tomorrow morning. The city now was totally silent. It must be one in the morning.

 

Adam slept in his old room, and in the middle of the nights, he woke up and unable to go back to sleep because of the sweat that poured out of his body. So he lied there and remembered all that happened in the house between him and Eve. There was the staircase and the room of his sister where he had seen Eve for the first time. And there was the bed where he had lied sick with love for her and where he received the first token of love from her, a roasted corn. And there was the roof where he and Eve had their meetings at nights under the starry sky. And also there was the living room where one afternoon he held her hands and had the first sexual experience of his life. He must find her because the trip would be wasted if he did not. And besides, finding Eve was one of the things he had intended to do. He remembered her face, her hair, her small breasts, her ass, her walk, her smile--and how little she talked. All the memories of love came back to him and it saddened him. He thought if nothing had happened, she would be his wife now and they would have had many children and would probably be happy together.

 

One morning Adam asked his sister in law about Eve but was told that she was no longer in the country. That she had left two years after Adam, now living in America--and married with two children. Adam felt like he had stepped on a banana peel and tripped when he heard this. What he had hoped to hear was Eve living somewhere in the country, perhaps still in Ca Mau. Eve was in America? And she had been there for many years? So she had been living under the same sky with him all this time--and no one told him. He felt betrayed--and bitter. The sister said that the reason Adam had not been informed of Eve's situation was that nobody knew where he was all those years. Adam did not ask any further questions. It was over. The sister then showed him pictures of Eve's days in Ca Mau after he had left. He looked at the old black and white pictures of that familiar face, the face that he loved and had hoped to find again. One picture showed Eve in a profile shot, with beautiful proportionate features, but her eyes looked sad. She was looking into the distance as if she was waiting, expecting something. The sister then showed him pictures of her wedding with David, taken in San Jose. She looked strange in these color pictures. The layers of makeup made her an unrecognizable person to him, even though the main features of her face were still there. And when Adam looked at the groom, he was disappointed. How could a pretty woman like her married such a man? He had a fat face, all red, a protruding big nose, and a small mouth. In other words, not a pleasant face to look at, according to conventional eyes, and did not look bright at all. But looks can be deceiving.

 

The days after that Adam went to the spots around the city where he had had his meetings with Eve when they were still together. Nothing had changed. The park by the river where he had his first rendezvous that summer night with her was still there with the same flower trees and the marble benches. He visited the corner where her grandfather’s house was in the center of the city, even the big tree was still there, and on the second floor of that house he recognized the veranda where he and Eve had sit next to one another for hours on many occasions. In fact, there was not a place in the city that did not remind him of Eve. And he felt sad. They were probably not meant to walk the road of life together. He tried to chase thoughts about her out of his mind. Eve in America all these years and he did not know. What the fuck.

 

One month later Adam returned to the US. He brought with him an old picture of Eve that his sister-in-law had given him. The day he was back to New York and saw Jane, they had a big fight in his apartment: she was mad because she thought while on the trip back to the village, he had cheated her, like most men would do in the absence of their wives. But after the ill feelings subsided, they made love.

 

Then one day about a month after the visit, Adam received a letter from Eve. He was surprised. He thought his sister-in-law must have leaked his address to her. In the letter, Eve explained that she got married because circumstances had forced her to, that before she married she believed Adam had been married too and forgotten about her. She then said how disappointed she was with her husband, David, who had turned into a gambler and an adulterer, and that she now lived for her two children only. She even gave him her phone number, and invited him to visit her family in San Jose. Adam was moved by the letter but was confused. She still remembered and thought about him, he thought.

 

Should he respond? He asked himself this question over and over and two days later, he called her. A male voice answered the phone, Adam thought it was Eve's husband and he asked for her and moments later he heard a female voice. It was not the voice of the Eve that he remembered. She sounded strange, speaking with a mixture of the Hue and southern accents, but Adam had no doubt that it was her. He could not describe his feeling the moment he heard her voice, but he knew it was confusion, and the first thing he said was "Is it you, Eve?" She said yes it was her, and seemed to recognize him immediately. In the background he heard the crying of children, and it was hard for them to hear each other.

 

The conversation was brief. Adam told her that he still loved her and wanted to reunite with her. Eve said she understood his feeling, and that she still loved him too, but did not know what to do. She said the burden on her shoulders were too great: she had two children and both parents to take care of, and she did not think she should transfer the responsibility to him because that would be unfair for him. Then she asked him about his situation. He told her he was still single but having a relationship, that his life had not been peaceful the day he came to the US. He added that he was shocked to find out Eve had been in the same country with him all these years. Eve again said she circumstances had forced her to choose another man, and it was too late now. Then he wished her luck and happiness, then said goodbye. That night Adam got drunk.

 

Days later Jane found Eve's letter and pictures in Adam's drawers and she confronted him and they had a big fight. Jane demanded that Adam wrote to Eve to ask her not to interfere in their "happiness." Adam refused. Jane then called up Eve and they had an angry exchange. Jane destroyed the letters, the picture, and Eve’s telephone number was lost. Adam never contacted Eve again. What for, he said.

 

Nine years after knowing Jane, Adam decided to marry her. 1996. He thought if he did not, what the hell was he going to do with her? Jane, however, was fearful of the prospect of having him as a husband despite the commitment she felt toward him. She thought he was an irresponsible person, not caring about her and did not want to make a lot of money, and that her life with him would be insecure. So she consulted one fortune teller after another, and she always got the same answer, that if the marriage was going to be hell, it would be because of her mouth, and it would not last for more than three years. Still, she went with him back to Viet Nam because they planned to get married there in the presence of both families. Back in the country and before the wedding day, she continued to seek the fortune tellers' advises. The ceremony, however, eventually took place at Jane’s family house in Vinh Long, a small town by the Mekong River. In the evening there was a reception with a lot of guests. But that night Jane refused to sleep in the same bed with him.

 

Returning to New York, Adam moved into Jane's apartment to begin their life together as husband and wife. "Husband and wife" only in the eyes of their own families because they had kowtowed in front of their ancestors' altars and put rings on each other’s fingers in the presence of witnesses on their wedding day, as tradition required. But legally, they were just domestic partners. They did not register with the city. Adam did not feel that they need to because both were working and having their own benefits. And Jane did not insist on legalizing their union. After the wedding ceremony and back in the US, Adam took off the wedding ring and put it away. He just did not like jewelry.

 

Now seeing each other everyday and getting in each other's ways more, they fought more often. And Adam became more violent. He destroyed things in the apartment and slapped her around. She plunged at him with a knife, and he fought her off. One night during a fight he walked out of the apartment in a fury and kicked the door and broke his foot and had to stay home for two months. And they rarely slept in the same bed. Sex together usually happened on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Other times, each pursued private wet dreams. Adam remembered Kevin Spacy in the movie "American Beauty:" the guy stands in the shower in the morning and said to himself, "Look at me, forty years old, married, jerking off in the shower every morning, and in one year I will be dead." Adam thought I could identify with the guy.

 

Jane was unable to become pregnant because she had a chronic illness--Endometriosis--that made her infertile. His semen always dripped out of her vagina after right after intercourses as if there was a wall inside her that prevented his sperms from entering her uterus. She had had one ovary removed many years before because of the illness. She made him take a sperm test, just to make sure it wasn't all because of her. He agreed. The nurse gave Adam a magazine and asked him to go jerk off in the bathroom and get a sample for her. But Adam did not see childlessness as a big deal, he thought if he and Jane had had a child, the child was going to suffer because of her because she was such a possessive woman--and he would be trapped in the relationship. Thoughts about leaving her were always on his mind.

 

Two years after moving in with Jane, Adam returned to Viet Nam for another visit. 1998. He needed sometimes off from the turbulent life with Jane. Jane did not go with him; but with communication improved between the country and the US, she had no problems monitoring him despite the ten thousand mile distance between them. Adam often wondered why with all the miseries they inflicted on one another, and despite all the repeated threats of separation, they still hung on to each other. He did not understand himself, he did not know what in his psych that made him so attached to this woman--and she to him. On the wall in the bedroom, he hung a picture of Tolstoy the Russian writer that showed the old man walking with a bag on a pole on his shoulders: the man was running away from home, or rather, from his wife. Tolstoy and his wife despised each other, but they could not separate and daily inventorized in their own journals each other's faults. Adam thought what depicted in the picture applied to him, his situation, and his state of mind. He believed that one of these days he would do the same thing as Tolstoy. But unlike the old man, he would be gone for good.

 

Back in Da Nang on this visit, his third, Adam did the usual things: visiting relatives and old friends, and sight-seeing in other cities. Jane called every two or three days and said she believed he must be cheating on her: there were too many available single women where he was right now. Those were not happy conversations. Often times, he put the phone down in mid conversation, feeling very upset.

 

Two weeks into the vacation and while at one of his sisters' house in a nearby town his fathered called and asked to see him as soon as possible. The father said he had something urgent to discuss with him. When Adam saw his father the next day, his father said Eve was on her way back to the country with the intention of seeing him, and added that Adam had better not see her because that would be a disaster for him, Eve, and Jane. His father knew Jane was a very jealous woman, but a good woman, and he wanted her to be happy with him. The father said he thought his sister-in-law had informed Eve of his presence alone in Viet Nam and also said if Jane found out he met with Eve, she would go out of her mind, and god knew what would happen. A taste of that kind of thing had happened in 1992 when Eve contacted him and Jane found out, and that was even before they became husband and wife. Adam thought the matter over and decided that his father was right, he would not try to see Eve. The pain and trouble that might result would not worth it. Besides, they both now led separate and different lives, one or two meetings with an old lover would only disturb the water, doing no one any good, no matter the love he still had for her and she for him.

 

So Adam called up the airline to reschedule the return flight, two weeks earlier than he had planned. The last night in the hamlet Adam had a farewell party with his friends. There was a lot of eating, drinking and doing drugs. Everyone was drunk, not just drunk, but very drunk. Vodka and beer flowed like river and people popped tranquilizers like popcorns. There was music and dancing. At the end of the party, most people passed out. And Adam, intoxicated and not knowing what he was doing, left the devastation of the party with one of his friends’ wife and they went together on her motorbike for a joy ride around the city when it was almost midnight. They parked the bike by the river. All prohibition was dropped. They grabbed one another, saying they had special feelings for one another. Then they French kissed and Adam felt the woman’s body with his hands under her loose fitting dress. She did not resisted and when he said they must find a hotel room, she said it was late and they should not do that now but in the next few days when they met again in Sai Gon where Adam would stay to prepare for his flight out. They agreed on a date and a location. Then they parted. It was almost two in the morning.

 

The next day waking up and remembering what had happened the night before, Adam was wrecked with guilt and remorse. It was terribly wrong what he had done with that woman, because she was his friend's wife. He felt he was the most disgusting person in the world. He had betrayed a friend. He hoped the woman too realize what she did with him was wrong, and dropped the idea of a secret meeting with him in Sai Gon. What if the guy found out what his wife and Adam did together? He had asked the woman the question the night before and she said she would tell her husband that she was late coming home because she was picked up by the police for DWI and kept for hours in the station. That morning Adam was having one of the worst hangover of his drinking life. He gathered all courage and called the friend to say goodbye because that was the day Adam had to leave the town for Sai Gon from which he would fly back to New York. The friend sounded like he knew nothing unusual had happen the night before, and wished Adam a good trip. He felt somewhat relieved. But what if the woman was crazy enough to go look for him in Sai Gon? He hoped she had recovered her sanity and would not attempt such a stupid thing.

 

In Sai Gon, Adam stayed at his uncle's house. He left his luggage there and took a bus to Vinh Long to visit Jane’s family. He stayed there for two days, sleeping at her family’s house at night and having his meals there but most of the time he sat in a café by the Mekong River looking at the dark water and feeling depressed. There was nothing to do in this town except sit and watch time go by.

 

The morning he came back to Sai Gon his uncle told him that Eve had been at the house the day before looking for him, and she was now in Da Nang. The uncle said Eve was a beautiful woman and she had told him briefly about their story; and the uncle seemed to empathize with the sadness and conflict he saw in Adam's silent reaction to the news. Adam knew that was what was supposed to happened: Eve looking for him. But this time what she had written in her letters years ago did not materialize; he remembered she wrote that "The earth is round, we will meet again." But for now at least, he realized that the earth was a square block, and they had both fell off in opposite directions. That was one missed opportunity for them to see each other again. But Adam still thought he did the right thing not to let Eve find him--even though it was a hard decision.

 

The next day he flew back to the US. The evening he arrived in New York, he had a terrible fight with Jane. She called 911 and ran out of the apartment. Adam then took four Valiums--pills that he had bought while in the Viet Nam--and drank a beer then lied in the darkened bedroom. A while later a two cops and two EMS workers walked into the room. And they asked him questions.

 

"Were you trying to kill yourself?" They asked after finding the bottle of Valiums in his pocket.

 

"No, I was trying to sleep."

 

"Any alcohol?"

 

"A beer."

 

Then they cuffed his hands and led him to an ambulance and took him to an emergency room. There they tied him up in a bed and a nurse drew his blood and a doctor asked him questions to test his sanity. At midnight they released him. The following morning Jane talked to him as if nothing had happened.

 

Adam continued to work, quit one job, got another, quit that job too, then got another. And life between him and Jane went on as it had been going on for years: misery.

 

In the fall of 2002, Adam made a road trip alone across the US continent. As he got closer and closer to the west coast, he thought more and more about Eve. San Jose where she was living was on his planned trip. He had wanted to go that route. He wanted to pass through San Jose, to leave his presence there because he knew Eve lived there. At least for some brief moments, he would be aware of the fact that they were only one or two miles apart: San Jose was not a big town. I will be very near you, he thought--even if it was only he who would know. Not like before when Eve first arrived in the US: she had lived in New York but not known that she was in the same city with him and he had not known she was in the same city with him, either. That was the worst situation imaginable. If Adam had known that back then, she would have been his wife now and they would have had at least three children. And happy together, perhaps. It would not be anything like what was going on with him and Jane. Because they loved each other. And love was the foundation on which to build happiness, he thought. Other things might get in the way, like money and shit, but love would be the equalizer. At least when he was having sex with Eve, his fantasy wife, it would have been different--because it would be sex seasoned deliciously with love. Adam salivated.

 

He arrived in San Jose one sunny afternoon on the third day of the trip. He checked into a motel room. Vagabond Inn. He thought about looking up Eve's telephone number in the phone book. He searched for her name in the White Pages but could not find it. Was it possible that she had an unlisted number or her phone was registered under someone else’s name? But even if he had found her number, would he have the courage to call her up? What if he called and her husband answered the phone, what would he say then? And what disturbance might he cause her family with his sudden appearance? Would she invite him over to see her family? But seeing her with too many people around would make him very uncomfortable. If he was going to see her, he only wanted to see her alone. If he called and she herself answered the phone, he would tell her to come to the motel to meet him and no one should know about it. That was what he wanted, but he felt it was impossible. First of all, he could not find her phone number. Then even if he had, how would he call discreetly and arrange a secret meeting with her? That afternoon he cruised around the town in the numbered streets because he remembered in the last letter Eve sent him years ago, the address contained a numbered street. It could be Ninth street, Second Street, Fourth street…He entertained the wild hope that he might encounter her on the street, perhaps they might accidentally glance at each other through the windshields of their cars and recognize each other. That would be heaven. After driving around for a while, he returned to the motel, feeling low, and lied in bed watching the afternoon sun through the window. Then tired of staying in bed and feeling agitated, he went out and strolled in the shopping malls, again held on to the hope of running into her. Adam was sure they would recognize each other the instant their eyes met. He remembered the main features of her face even if she must look a lot older now. It had been 24 years since they last saw each other.

 

But what Adam had hoped for did not happen. Running into an old lover in one accidental afternoon? It was like a blind man feeling for a needle in a haystack. In the evening he went back to the motel room, deciding to leave town the next morning to continue his trip. The next stop was Los Angeles. He was not going to see Eve even though right now they were possibly no more than one or two miles apart. He felt as if he had missed an opportunity. And he was not happy at all.

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

Shakespeare empties the pitcher, and looks at the clock: it is near two am, the time the tavern closes. The bartender is wiping off the counter, getting ready to close the bar. Then she turns off the tv and the neon sign at the window, and says to the patrons, who at the time are only Shakespeare and another man, that it is time to close. Shakespeare stands up and feels unstable on his feet. He has drunk a lot tonight. He anticipates a blackout but it has not happened, or not yet. He walks to the door, opens it, and a rush of cold air hits him in the face along with blowing snow. He sobers up.

 

He takes a few steps to the corner and hesitates, unsure of where to go. There is no one on the street; and visible under the street light, the snow blows and dances and bounces and twists wildly. He thinks about going back to his basement apartment, but quickly discards the idea. He would only feels more depressed inside the four walls. And even though drunk, he does not feel sleepy at all. Because of the cold air, there is less chance that a blackout will happen. Shakespeare likes the state of mind he is in now. He feels less constrained, even liberated, joyful, and confident. He has had enough alcohol for the night. Then without thinking, he walks in the direction of the subway. The snow has only dusted the surface and it is not hard to walk. When he gets into the tunnel, he saw no clerk at the booth, and he remembers that riding the train was free at this time of the year. So he walks through the gate and down the stairs. There is another person at the other end of the platform. It is not much warmer in the tunnel. Shakespeare turns up his coat collar and hugs himself against the cold. He sits on the bench and listens to the deep silence of the tunnel and his mind works back to the story. The last image he has of the lovers’ saga is Adam on a lonely trip through the vast land of the US and his sad afternoon in San Jose. Again, they were separated by a very small physical distance but it was like a million miles. There were other barriers, socially and psychologically, that were more formidable than physical barriers and Adam were not insane enough to break them down. Adam thought too much of the possible consequences, and that slowed down or even prevented him from achieving what he felt he wanted to achieve. He was not the type who took risks. A failed meeting with an old lover was only one example of his indecisiveness, a psychological condition that made him adverse to risks, and that might be the reason why he continued to be a failure in life.

 

But Shakespeare is determined that the lovers will meet again, one way or another. It will happen, and it will not because of chances or circumstances, but their own will. The question is when and how it will take place. At this point in the story, Adam and Eve had reached their early forties, and if they waited any longer, they would get older and older and there might be less and less a chance that they would meet. Time is not waiting for anyone, Shakespeare thinks. The morning after that sad day in San Jose, on his way to Los Angeles, Adam might get hit by another car and killed. The same fate might befall Eve in a different way. There had been two missed opportunities already, time was running out, and Shakespeare must find a way for them to meet--soon. Then what about a happy ending to the story? Shakespeare feels that a happy ending is becoming a remote possibility. Shakespeare thinks of a number of ways for them to end their saga, but none could produce a happy conclusion. He could have them commit a double suicide, like Romeo and Juliet. He could have them abandon their families and run off together. Or he could have them conduct a secret affair until they die while living a masked life--like Chekov’s lovers in "The lady with the dog." But no solutions seem satisfactory.

 

The cold and the hunger made Shakespeare tremble. He feels that he is out of shape. His chest is flimsy. And the amount of muscles on his body is small. He has lifted weight in the past while in his late teens and early twenties, trying to put some meat on his body but the result has been minimal. It is as if he was born flattop. He is not a muscled man. In fact, he looks like a character out of Chopin’s world: pale, thin, and sickly. He musters all his strength to struggle against the winds.

 

Shakespeare is somewhat sober because of the cold, his thoughts are clearer, and the power of his imagination has not diminished. As he sits on the train and rides into the center of town for what he does not even know, he thinks about the story again. He has gone at least two third of the way into the story, the part about Adam’s lonely trip through the continent; and near the end of the trip, his state of mind and his low feeling that afternoon in San Jose when he was unable to locate the object of his desire. Now what? How is the story going to proceed? How long has it been since the two characters were out of touch, out of sight? 25 years. That--is a very long time for any separation. Even the north and south of Vietnam did not separate that long. And it seems that there is no end to the separation. Shakespeare thinks he must reunite the characters, anyway he can.

 

The train stops, the doors open, and a man and a woman, both wrapped from head to toes, step into the car and sit down a short distance from him. They appear to be tired and weak: the man has his chin in his chest; and the woman, with her mouth slightly open, rests her head on her companion’s shoulders, and they fall immediately into a deep sleep as soon as they sit down. What are they, Shakespeare wonders, a pair of homeless lovers? Where are they going? Do they have a home to go to or do they only get into the subway for some warmth, to stay out of the snow storm, to ride out the night? A man and a woman! Why the fuck does it always have to be a man and a woman, Shakespeare asks himself. To perpetuate the race, that is why. Love is the topping on the pizza. What is for real is the act of copulation and the reproduction of more humans. Nature has installed the sentiment called love into the psychology of humans, to make way for lust. Love and lust bring the male and the female together. Love is for the heart and mind, lust is for the body. Lust is the real motive masked by love. People can celebrate love all they want, but what they really celebrate is the initial part of the process that would eventually lead to sex, the interaction between a penis and a vagina, for the perpetuation of the race.

 

Cut the bullshit, Shakespeare tells himself. But if I cut the shit, what do I end up with? You end up with what you have to do, that’s what, you fucking scumbag, you colossal failure of mankind. And do you still remember what you have to do? I hope you do, because if you don’t I am going to beat the shit out of you. But before Shakespeare can regroup and remember what he needs to do, the train pulls into the Times Square Station. The train doors open and a bunch of people walk noisily in. They wear tall coned paper hats that say “2005” and “Happy New Year” and shit of that kind, and some of them are blowing horns that make hissing noises. All appear to be drunk. Shakespeare feels very annoyed near this kind of people, so he gets off at the next stop, and walks up to the surface. He finds himself in Rockefeller Center. He strolls in the direction of the Xmas tree. It is now almost 3 am. The snow continues to fall, and accumulation is now noticeable.

 

Shakespeare knows he does not have much time left: the daylight will be here soon, and he must finish the story. He feels something is pushing him in the back and burning him under his ass. The images of Adam and Eve comes back vividly to his mind. He feels bad for Adam, being one or two miles from Eve while in San Jose but unable to meet her. Adam thought about her everyday of his life since he knew her, the only difference was how intense one day as compared with another day.

 

Shakespeare walks toward the giant Xmas tree and he sees a couple in a tight embrace. He stops and looks. The woman is small and she is burying her head inside the man’s chest. The man covers her head with one hand while wrapping around her back with his other arm. He kisses her hairs, and whenever she looks up at him, he kisses her on the mouth. Then as if aware of Shakespeare’s observation, they walk away, the woman clings to the man as if he is a magnet. Shakespeare stands in a doorway, out of the falling snow, and his imagination kicks into gear again. Now he is painting another part of the picture of Eve:

 

When Adam called that day in 1992, Eve was living a miserable life. She had two small children with David, but got little help from him taking care of them. David was a useless man, he could not even hammer a nail straight on the head. He disappeared for days at a time, and never helped her with anything, not even with the rent. He was brought up as a spoiled kid in a rich family back in the old country, used to being pampered since childhood. They got married after living together for two years, but he did not have a dime to pay for the wedding. Eve had to pay for all the expenses with her own money, she was working 12 hours a day and six days a week on an assembly line. And she was deeply humiliated by doing so. She felt so debased when she had to spend her own money to marry a man, an act that is against tradition and the way she had been brought up. Traditionally, it is the groom or his family who must pay for the wedding expenses. It is like buying a wife for the son: the bride will leave her own family and become a member of her husband’s. But Eve felt she could not do otherwise because David was the only person she knew in the US, someone she relied on for companionship in a strange land; and furthermore, they had been living together for two years and she had become used to him. When Eve expressed to David her shame of having to pay for the wedding herself, David laughed and said that she was only practicing the customs of the new land: the bride’s family pays for the wedding. The American way. When she heard David said that, she felt like throwing up, and wanted to spit in his face. She had thought many times of leaving him, but did not know where to run to. She had grown used to having him around, and he was good at begging her for mercy and forgiveness and not abandoning him every time he screwed up, which was quite often. Every time he pleaded, Eve’s mother instinct was touched and she allowed him back in, she felt conflicted: he was the father of her two children. Being a dutiful wife, Eve allowed him to fuck her almost every time he wanted, but she felt like a piece of meat. She let him do what he wanted with her body but did not do anything for him. And David fucked like a chicken: one-two-three-done. She just spread her legs and closed her eyes. However, the two times she had orgasms was the two times she conceived. David was using her, whether he was aware of it or not.

 

In the couple of months before the brief conversation with Adam in the summer of 1992, David had gambled away all their money, and accumulated a large debt. When Eve found out, she went mad, and filed for divorce. She kicked David out of the apartment. He then called his parents and asked them to help him plead with Eve to again forgive him. David’s parents, half a world away in Australia, called up Eve repeatedly and pleaded their son’s case, saying that for the sake of their two small children, she should let David back in and allowed him another chance. In the end Eve relented, but she had become a hardened woman, and would rule David, who now submitted to her will.

 

Eve warned David that if he screwed up one more time, she would divorce him, and the next time she would not be around to hear his pleading. David knew his wife meant what she said this time, and promised her that from now on he would stop gambling. And he did. The couple then worked hard to pay off the debt. From then on, David lost all authority in the household, he let Eve make all decisions, big or small, inside or outside of the house. Sometimes he would argued with her, but it was just for the sake of arguing, because in the end, it was Eve who always prevailed.

 

Years went by, David got over his gambling habit, but his psychological dependency on Eve had become another habit. Eve ruled her family. She was glad that her husband had mended his ways and now worked hard to provide for the family, assisting her to bring the money home to take care of the two children and Eve’s parents who had just come over from Viet Nam and were living with them. Eve and her husband rarely saw each other because he worked the night shift and she worked day, the only time they saw one another was on weekends. On weekends, David sometimes asked for sex, and most of the times she accommodated him. For her, it was the duty of a wife to satisfy the husband on the matter of sex. But she was reluctant and passive. And when she slept everyone must tiptoe around her. David sometimes in relaxing moments would venture to ask her if she loved him, and every time, he received the same answer from her, "I don’t know."

 

When they first met in the refugee camp, Eve had told David about her love affair with Adam, that she had loved him and but he had abandoned her. David always had the nagging feeling that even though he had her body, her heart and mind and soul belonged to someone else, and he suspected that she was still thinking about Adam, still loving him, that he had no place in her heart even after two children and all these years living together.

 

The day Adam called in the summer of 1992, it was David who answered the phone, and when the caller asked for Eve with a Hue accent and mentioned her by her nickname only her family knew, David knew it was her old lover. He handed the phone over to her. And he did not talk to her for a week after that. She left David alone with his jealousy, and did not try to offer any explanation, and he did not ask: perhaps he was too intimidated by her to ask. Adam called twice, but Eve talked to him only once. The second time he called her father answered the phone, and soon as the old man found out the caller was Adam, the boy he had hated back in the old country, he told Adam not to attempt to destroy his daughter’s family. Adam, having his own trouble with Jane, stopped calling.

 

Eve worked hard. She often worked 12 to 16 hours a day. In addition to her own children, Eve had to take care of a nephew and a niece who were entrusted to her after one of her sister in law died of cancer. So she had four children to bring up; and there were also the aging parents to take care of, and all live in the same household. Eve thought her effort and determination to rehabilitate David had succeeded. He had stopped gambling and was now working regularly. She felt content to live a quiet life, even if boring and tasteless.

 

Sometimes thoughts about Adam crossed her mind and bothered her, and at those moments she would retreat into herself to indulge in the memories. She still thought of Adam as the only one she loved, but she also felt that he had wronged her. He left her languish the years after he had left the country, forgot about her while she was suffering, and eventually rejected her--when she needed him most. She never forgot the last letter he wrote her. Even now, whenever she remembered the years in Ca Mau, the years waiting for any pieces of news about him, any letters from him, the mental and physical suffering she had to endure at the hand of the father all because of her love for him, she felt bitter and wanted to cry. When she fell in love with him, she felt that she would belong to no one but him, and all she knew was she must wait for him to come and marry her. She was determined that she would be no one else’s wife but his. And wait she did, in desperation, for a marriage proposal from Adam that never came; and years went by, until the rejection letter arrived and destroyed all her hope. From that day on, she considered herself free, and Adam was no longer relevant to her. He rejected her, did he not? However, the love was still there, she had no doubt about her affection for him. Her only regret was she did not become his wife, but it was not her fault. Then the escape, the rapes at sea, life in the camp, David, and the years and the loss of contact…all added to the oblivion. She now believed that fate had brought them together as lovers but not as husband and wife, a fate she was now willing to accept. She still had a sister back in the old country and whenever she called and talked to the sister, she always asked for news about Adam, and every time, the answer was the same: he was all right. She did not ask further and no further information about him was given. But a slow fire had been burning in her heart all these years, and it was gathering intensity: she wanted to know more about Adam; and if possible, to see him again. It was a longing that only she knew.

 

Years passed, the children grew up, the apartment became crowded. Eve and David bought a big house and worked hard to pay it off. In lonely moments, Eve sat in the garden and thought about Adam, then David would join her and smoke a cigarette with her. But he did not know and would not never guess what was going on in her mind.

 

One day she went back to Viet Nam, because she Adam was there at the time and she wanted to find him--but failed. He was one step ahead of her. After two weeks in the country, she returned to the US disappointed.

 

A gust of cold wind hits Shakespeare and wakes him up from his fantasy. The last image he conjures up in his mind is that of the characters missing a chance to see each other; no, not one chance, but two. And Shakespeare feels sick. Very sick. Not only because of the cold, but of hunger. He has not eaten anything since early evening except for some peanuts at that tavern in Brooklyn. He feels weak and the cold makes him feel even weaker. I got to get out of the cold, he says to himself, and find something to eat. He steps out of the doorway and walks toward Times Square, thinking that he might find food there. The streets are deserted. There is no traffic. It is like a ghost town at the end of time, the apocalypse. But in the distance through the small space between the tall buildings, he sees lights, color neon lights that stand out in the darkness. Pushing his frail frame against the winds and toward the lights, Shakespeare is afraid that with this cold, he might collapse because of hunger. When he gets to Seventh Avenue he finds the area empty, the only people he sees are the cleaning crews who are sweeping up after the party. The New Year Celebration has ended and everyone was gone.

 

Shakespeare walks along the avenue between the tumbled barricades and the confetti and the cans and bottles and all sorts of trash and he looks around hoping to find a restaurant. As he staggers, he sees no store open, not even McDonald’s. All is closed. And when he looks up at the ticker tape, it is near four o’clock. In another two hours, it will be first light of the first day of another year. Walking toward 42nd Street, Shakespeare gives up hope of finding food, and the sickness in his mind and in his stomach intensifies. He walks to the subway and into the tunnel, then sits on a bench, waiting for the train. He is going back to his hole in Brooklyn, not to sleep, but to find food. There might be something in the refrigerator. And he wants to stay out of the cold, and to continue with the story. He wants to finish the story before daybreak, before going to sleep.

 

Shakespeare sees no one around him. The only signs of life other than himself are the rats running on the tracks. He feels as if he is going to faint, things around him start to spin and he sees approaching darkness. Shakespeare pinches himself hard on his own arms, and the pain somehow clears up some of the cloudiness in his mind and keeps him conscious. Then from the distance, a man, looking like a homeless person, appears and comes near him and then stands in front of him. The man has a face and out of the face comes an intense, inquiring look.

 

"Hey, are you ok? Hey, you! You!" The man said and touched Shakespeare on the shoulders.

 

"Have you got any food?" Shakespeare lifts his chin, looks at the man and whispers.

 

The man, after hesitating for a few seconds, reaches into his inside coat pocket and takes out a sandwich wrapped in foil paper.

 

"Here," he says, and hands the food to Shakespeare who immediately unwraps the sandwich and devours it in no more than three bites.

 

"You’re really hungry," the man says.

 

Shakespeare feels a little better after eating, and he takes out a five dollar bill and gives it to the man.

 

"Thanks," he says. And the man takes the bill and smiles brightly.

 

"This will help, where you going?" The man says.

 

"Home," Shakespeare answers.

 

"You were at the party?"

 

"No."

 

Then in the distance, the noise of a coming train. The two men fall silent and look into the dark tunnel and see a headlight that gets brighter and brighter. The train stops and the doors open and Shakespeare steps in after saying thanks again to the stranger who remains on the platform. Shakespeare again finds himself alone. He sits, closes his eyes and again, the story comes back. Shakespeare feels that he has reached the critical point of the story, because at this juncture in the timeline, it would be gross injustice if the characters don’t meet. He must create conditions for them to see one another. He cannot let them run in opposite directions anymore. The separation had been long enough. Enough of missing and longing to see each other. And time was not waiting. Both were getting older, much older, they were in their early forties now, and had not seen each other for almost 27 years. The injustice of their situation is even more profound when Shakespeare finds that not a day went by in the last 27 years that they did not think about each other, no matter where they were and in what circumstances. Shakespeare wants them to meet, and he is preparing to do so. But how?

 

It would be at least an hour before the train gets to his home station, so Shakespeare closes his eyes and imagines again:

 

It was the summer of 2004. Adam had quitted his job at a New York hospital and had been unemployed for almost two years. He was living on his savings. He did not have to pay rent because there was a lawsuit between him, Jane and the landlord. The landlord was bringing them to court on the ground that they were illegal tenants at the apartment. Jane inherited the apartment from her brother and had been living in it for almost 15 years. The reason the landlord now demanded his property back was , Adam believed, it would be more profitable to rent the place out to new tenants because then he could charge higher rent for the place. So Adam and Jane hired a lawyer to fight the lawsuit and the thing had been going on for almost a year--with no end in sight.

 

At the end of April, Adam said to Jane that he was going to Philadelphia to work and would only come home once a week. Jane had no objection, because she knew when Adam wanted to do something, he would do it no matter what she said. She did not feel too bad either, because at least he would be with her once a week, and she hoped that he would only do that for the summer. For Adam, the main reason he was going to Philadelphia to work was he could not stand another idle summer in New York. He would be severely depressed languishing in the parks and in the libraries. Besides, he was running out of money. He had contacted a friend in Philadelphia and the friend said he could live with him for the summer. Finding work would not be a problem because there was a labor contractor the friend knew who would hire Adam. He thought that this was a good time he get back to working to see if he was still able to work. He had been drifting for so long and was afraid that he had lost the work habit. He thought he must test it out and see if he still had what it took to be a useful person again. Useful to society.

 

So one day Adam loaded a few belongings into his van and drove to Philadelphia. There, the friend said Adam could take the basement which was a completed apartment in itself, with bathroom and a kitchen. The friend then called the labor contractor who said the next morning she would come over to pick Adam up for work. The pay would be minimal and in cash, eight hours a day five days a week, doing labor at a warehouse in the suburb of the city. Adam agreed. It did not matter to him what the pay was, the most important thing for him now as to get back to work, to see if he could work and get along with people again: he had been a lone wolf for so long.

 

The next morning a yellow van stopped in front of the house and Adam climbed in and found the vehicle already packed with people from teens to the elderly. The van took him to a warehouse 35 miles from the city; and there, along with others, he sorted books for Simon &Schuster. The work was back breaking--but fun. He talked and laughed with the people while working and it felt good to be around people again. People appeared fascinated with him because he looked different from a common worker. He looked bookish and frail, and did not seem to belong there at all, out of place.

 

For Adam, it was an interesting time. The labor contractor--Adam’s boss, and it was a she--had a crush on him. She was lonely, after being dumped by a live-in boyfriend of 12 years. She was a small woman, 42 years old but looked much younger, and got really nice ass and tits. She had three children of her own. Her ex-boyfriend also had his own children when he moved in with her. In fact, he had left his wife for her. Now he left her for somebody else who was much younger. At least fifteen years younger than her. As a person in the warehouse who worked for her and who was knowledgeable of the story said, it was all because of "pussies." One can't fuck the same pussy for so many years and not get bored and sick. So while fucking the wife, the boy friend was also fucking the whores and maybe his hide-away mistresses. That was why he left her for a fresher, tighter, and wetter pussy. And she was bitter. But people said that one of the reasons he left her was that she was a bitch, a real bitch. They said that she once attacked her boyfriend with a cleaver and wounded him. And Adam believed this woman was the kind of woman who was capable of such violence. She could be very brutal if she wanted to.

 

So the woman was infatuated with Adam, or at least all indications pointed that out to him. Everyone in the vicinity knew she liked Adam. She offered him this and that. But he declined, thinking that he was not there to fall for a woman who was not his type. Adam was there to work and to reorient himself. Not for romance. She might be infatuated with him--but that was her business. So he felt somewhat uneasy every time she came around and talked to him. She told him about her life, that she was a Cambodian but born in Viet Nam into an impoverish family where siblings frequently fought for every scrap of food, that she was a tomboy who had learned to survive on her own while still young, that she had never fallen in love with anyone in her life except the man who had just dumped her, that if she had loved when she was younger, like in her late teens or early twenties, she would have had more children, not just the three that she had now, that she moved to Cambodia in the late 1980’s, then crossed the border into Thailand and lived in a refugee camp for a couple years then migrated to the US.

 

On some occasions, she lent him her Lexus. She asked him to help transport people to work. She bought him soda when it got hot, she gave him foods, she invited him to dinner, among other things. Adam knew what the woman wanted. But he stayed unresponsive. And he thought she knew that he was not interested. So after a while, seeing that her efforts were futile, she dropped the overtures, but continued to treat him nice and with respect--because he was different from all the people there. She once said Adam was like a being from heaven, not from the earth. And he was stunned, not knowing how to respond.

 

After two months, she stopped all her come-ons and started to confide in him that she had been talking to a guy in Orlando, through the introduction of a mutual friend. This woman really needed a man, and she would go to great length to get herself one. One day she said that she was going down to Orlando to meet her perspective boyfriend. And she showed him his pictures. It was a muscled man with dark complexion. According to her, he was also Cambodian, working as a cook, and making decent money. She also said that he had divorced his wife four years ago. He had one daughter but his wife got custody of the child. So he had been lonely for a while and was also interested in finding a woman. That was the story she told him. On his part, Adam encouraged her to go ahead and wished her success. Then one day she flew down to Orlando. After three days she came back and told Adam that she had succeeded in convincing him to move to Philadelphia, to live near her, so they could get to know one another better. That was how it went all summer.

 

During the time in Philadelphia, on Friday afternoons Adam drove back to New York and spent the weekend with Jane. And he started to have sex with her again, feeling much stronger and more invigorated perhaps because of the daily physical labor. His blood pumped faster and color returned to his face and his arms and legs got firmer. He felt well.

 

May, June, then July. One evening after work Adam stopped at an internet café to check out his emails and saw a message that stopped his heart: it was from Eve. Why now, after all these years? He could not believe his eyes, but it was her name on the header. The message was brief and the few things she said in the message were the details only she and he knew. He had thought that they had become non-existing to each other except in the occasional and fleeting thoughts, and that nothing would ever happened between them again. Adam could not figure out how Eve had his email address. Could it be the sister in Viet Nam who had given her his address? Adam glued his eyes to the computer screen--immobilized.

 

In the short email, she asked him how he was and hoped that he reply to her message. He was thrilled to hear from her again, but unsure how to react. It had been 12 years since they had any contact. Adam remembered the last time he was in touch with her was in 1992, and it was a couple of letters and a brief phone conversation. Then all was lost. Now the sudden email from her. Twelve years. Because they had been living in oblivion of each other for so long the possibility of finding each other again was almost non-existent. After reading the message, Adam wondered if he should answer her. Memories of love came back to him and he knew that he still loved her, that she was the only true love of his life. But to reenter her life? Adam was not too sure about that: she was now a wife and a mother with big responsibilities, he believed, I don’t want to disturb the water. So he did not reply to the message, but still wondered if he was doing the right thing not responding to her. Thoughts about Eve now quietly crept into his mind daily but it got lost among a million other fleeting thoughts. He had more immediate concerns.

 

In the days after the message, Adam debated with himself about the matter. What was he going to do now that he had contact with Eve again? One week later he found another message from Eve. She asked him why he had not reply, and wanted to know if he still considered her his "friend." Thinking no more, he immediately replied to the second message. And pretty soon, they started an email conversation. Things of the past came rushing back to him with each email. Eve expressed regret that they had lost one another for so long, and said to him that she still thought about him and loved him despite the time and space between them. Days went by, and slowly Adam felt as if he was falling in love with his old lover all over again even though she was not physically near him and the feeling kept intensifying until one day he found that he was a lovesick man. It was the powerful memories of their young love that resurrected the passion in him.

 

He and Eve wrote to each other daily. She wrote that she regretted Adam did not know her better when they first fell in love, when they were still in Viet Nam--those long lost years of adolescence! She wrote about the years waiting for him, the longing, the hope, the sadness and the desperation. She explained how she had lost faith in him, why she decided to get to get married, and she wrote briefly about her present situation: two teenage children and a husband whom she had no feelings for. She mentioned her hurt pride because of Adam’s rejection, the tragedies that had happened to her at sea, and said that they were the two reasons she had not look for him after she arrived in the America. She could not come to him with a damaged body and a hurt pride, she wrote. Despite the love.

 

One month later, at the end of the summer, Adam moved back to New York because the lawsuit with the landlord demanded his fulltime presence. He continued to exchange messages with Eve. She gave him her cell phone number. All of this happened without Jane’s knowledge. Eve invited Adam--and Jane--to visit her family in San Jose, saying that she would treat them as friends. But Adam was making sure Jane didn’t know he was in contacted with Eve because he knew that to Jane, Eve was a rival, an enemy. The two women had talked at one another once in 1992 while Jane was in jealous rage. So he dismissed Eve's invitation, thinking that it was only diplomacy that made her say so. Besides, he and Eve could not be just friends, because they had been lovers, and lovers they would remain.

 

Days went by and the messages became more and more intimate. They wrote about the memories of their love, the time they were with each other in Da Nang. And Adam increasingly felt that he must see Eve again. He was falling in love with her all over again. The lovesickness in his heart became more acute after each email, and the more he remembered what had happened between them, the more passionate about her he became, and the more he wanted to see her. He told her about his feelings. She wrote back that she wanted to see him too, because it was also her wish, but she just did not know how it could be arranged.

 

And while all this was going on, the lawsuit was settled. Jane had agreed to move out of the apartment with a compensation package of 15,000 dollars and almost two years of free rent. So they found another apartment that cost more but in a better neighborhood, and moved in. After things settled, Jane planned a trip back to Viet Nam. She would go alone. Adam declined to accompany her, citing lack of money and occupation with finding a job--which were true.

 

The train pulls into a station and Shakespeare emerges from his fantasy. It was not his stop, he realizes, then closes his eyes again and imagines the state of mind Adam is in--Adam who was now a lovesick man. Shakespeare thinks up to this point Adam has become obsessed with Eve and thoughts about her has totally occupied his mind--to the exclusion of all else. Adam says to himself--as Shakespeare imagines:

 

"I am a man possessed. But I like the state of mind I am in. Possessed...consumed, devoured by a thought, by one idea. About you. What a long and strange trip it has been, five months now since we found each other, and there is no end in sight.

 

I am a lovesick man. I feel sick right now. I have been sick for the last few months. Nobody knows I am sick. But no one should know. Because there is nothing anyone can do. Yes, this love makes me sick. And I have no immunity. Not that I am sick of love, no, no one should be sick of love. Because to be able to love is a sacred gift from heaven. Rather, the love unfulfilled makes me sick, very sick. The longing to be united with the object of my love is killing me. The sickness is eating me up hour by hour, day by day. All the songs I am listening to now remind me terribly of you. I know I am being selfish, very selfish, because I love but am not satisfied with just that, I want my love to be answered, I want a union with the object of my loving-madness. I thirst for a spiritual and physical union with my beloved. You. Eve. But no union is possible right now, that is why I am so sick. I am sorry, but I am not Jesus or Buddha, I am only a man, a mortal, that is why I am selfish, that is why my heart cries when my call for union with you is not answered.

 

The mind-trip continues and there is no sign of ending. Yeah, I think I understand you better now. But not entirely, there is still some questions unresolved, some unknown that bugs me. You told me about the terrible suffering you had to endure on the sea and what trauma it had left you and how it had changed you. I was sad and felt guilty as you continued to write about what happened to you in those years. You blamed me for abandoning you. You said I was heartless, that I did not care about you, that I did not know you had been waiting for me all those years, that I was responsible for the dissolution of our relationship. That all was my fault. That I had hurt you with my rejection of you, written in the last letter I sent you while I was in America and you were in Ca Mau. You said your pride was badly wounded and you decided to end it with me. I admitted I had written those words, but you must understand that I was under extreme pressure of the circumstances, not only physically but also spiritually, during that time. I was hopeless. I was convinced that once I left the homeland it would be forever, a one-way trip. But how wrong I was! You also said that despite the hurt, you still loved me, but you had no courage to look for me after you arrived in America, because your pride would not allow you to. Furthermore, you said the incidents that had happened to you while on the sea made you feel unworthy, and that--was another reason you decided against looking for me. Eve, I had my share of faults, I accept responsibility for what I said and did, and I am sorry to have hurt you. That said, I cannot help but thinking that you too are responsible for us not being together. I am sure you never had the intention to look for me after you landed in this country. While in the camp, you had a relationship with another man and you carried it with you over here. And once you were here you decided to live with your new boyfriend, then married him. It never crossed your mind to at least make an effort to inform me that you had arrived, let alone to look for me. Eve, you must share the blame for the death of our relationship. You could have looked for me after you came here. But you did not. And you chose to be with the one that, according to you, you never loved. What irony! What the fuck! Do you know I never stopped thinking about you all these years? Do you know I never forget you, that I always love you, and always long for the day we reunite? But you kept me in the dark all these years. Why was your pride too strong, so strong that even your love for me, as you professed, could not overcome? You meant to say that if I had not hurt you back then you would have looked for me? Well, convince me! As for the other reason--that you did not look for me because you felt unworthy due to the terrible things that had happened to you during the sea voyage--I can only say that it should not have been the reason that prevented you from looking for me. Why? Because what had happened to you, terrible as it was, was not your fault! It was a disaster that befell you as it did hundreds of others. If I had known about what had happened to you, I would have loved you more, yes, much more, to make up for your pain. You said you felt unworthy of me, but what about love? I don’t care if you were or were not worthy, because I love you unconditionally. No, I don’t think that was a legit reason that stopped you from looking for me. It was something else. Was it because you were heavily involved in your new relationship, so involved that it made you forget me? No, Eve, it was your fault that we did not consummate our love. Do you know how disappointed I am? I might even say that you have betrayed me. But all is too late now. Our love did not have a happy ending. I know my accusation does not do you or me any good now but the disappointment will stay on my mind and in my heart for the rest of my life--as will my love for you. All I have now is memories of you, of our love, that I carry with me everyday, and that is it. But I feel comforted knowing that I still love you, and will do until I die--and beyond. This life is wasted.

 

You wrote that every time you sat down at the computer to write to me, you cried. I don’t want to see you cry. I have made you cry for so many years I don’t want to see you cry anymore because of me. What did I do? Did I hurt you? Or is it the love, the unrequited love, and the longing unfulfilled that is hurting you and making you cry? You know, I am dying myself. I love you so much I think I could go crazy thinking that we may not have a chance to see each other again. What are you doing to me? What am I doing to you? When I think about the life and how it hurts lovers, how it separate lovers, how it exiles lovers, how it makes lovers cry, I hate the life! Eve, I want you to go to bed tonight and don’t think about me and please sleep and I will see you in your dream and in your dream we will be together, we will kiss and hug and we will make love and we will never separate again. Sleep, and I will be with you in your dream.”

 

Shakespeare then steps out of Adam’s head and imagines the situation the lovesick man was in:

 

Since the feeling came back, Adam felt as if he was rejuvenated. He was in love again, and the feeling was extraordinarily wonderful even if painful. Painful because Eve, his love, his obsession, was still an abstraction, a fantasy. She was three thousand miles away. And all he had were the words in the emails. He had never thought he would feel this way again, he felt as if he was meeting Eve for the first time, and the feeling was as powerful as it had been back then, when they were both seventeen and madly in love with each other. He was on a powerful mind-trip. He had started to listen again to the music of Phuong Thanh whose lyrics reminded him terribly of her and their unrequited love. And the more he was attracted to the fantasy of Eve, the more the music killed him. Every word that Phuong Thanh sang hit him in the heart and bled it. He listened to the songs on the subway, on the streets, at home, in the van--everywhere--and hallucinated about Eve.

 

And he drank more, much more than usual. Not hard liquor, but red wine. In the evenings, he would go outside, bought a bottle of wine and sat in his van and drank it and listened to Phuong Thanh. And as the alcohol took effect, thoughts about Eve became alive in his mind and he felt that the love became even more intense during those moments when love, wine, and Phuong Thanh came together in a potent mix of pain and bliss. The earth could fall off its orbit and Adam wouldn’t be aware.

 

By the end of January, 2005, Jane left for her vacation. Adam was home by himself. And the first night Jane was away, Adam picked up the phone and called Eve. It was a Saturday night. They had been exchanging emails for five months; and tonight, Adam decided to take the affair one step further: he was going to hear her voice.

 

Shakespeare feels that he has reached a critical point in the story and he thinks he had better let Adam speak for himself. So again he imagines what was going on inside the mind of Adam, his inner monologue:

 

"I’ve decided to call you. You’ve given me your cell number. We have been writing for so long, and now we must talk, a big step forward, and I wanted to have the courage. So I bought a bottle of wine and sat down and poured a glass of wine and then picked up the phone and dialed your number. I had told myself that I must never talk with you while drunk, that was why I called you when I was not drunk yet, only when I was having my first glass of wine and my mind was still clear, not after I was drunk like a pig. You answered the phone with a strange accent, but I am not surprised, because I had anticipated that. I remember the last time I talked to you was in 1992, and I was shocked to hear your voice: you had a strange southern accent, something perhaps you acquired while living among the southern people all those years in Ca Mau. I had to admit that when I was talking to you that time I had had 12 beers. On that occasion I remembered you asked me about my current girlfriend and you suggested that I dump her. But I did not dump her. In fact, she is now my "wife," even though it is such a painful relationship. That time I also said I still loved you and wanted to be with you but you said you now had two small children and both parents to take care of and you would not pass on that responsibility to me. But anyway, this time you immediately recognized my voice and said that the way I talked and my accent had not changed at all despite living in America all these years.

 

Then as we continued to talk, clumsy at first because we had not had a conversation for 12 years and we were caught off guard. But as we talked, I continued to pour wine into my glass and I drank fast; and only after fifteen minutes with you on the phone, I finished the whole damn 750ml bottle of red Yellow Tail. I started to get drunk and my voice became increasingly boozy and my mouth started to get loose. And as the drunkenness upped its intensity, I began to get carried away by the conversation. I told you about my undying love for you, about how for the last 27 years there was not a day that I did not think of you, that I still loved you like I loved you when we first met, that my love for you would never die. Because I was so damn drunk, I only heard what my mouth and my heart were screaming and I did not listen much to you, but I was not too concerned about that because I knew you still loved me but you just did not say it straight out because you were afraid. I really spilled my guts out to you. And I told you that I wanted to go to San Jose to see you--and you only. And you said yes, but you have to tell husband because you said you and he are very open and straightforward with each other. You said that your husband is an understanding man, and would have no problem letting you to see an "old friend," even if that old friend is really a lover resurrected from the dead and this lover is bent on making love with you if he sees you again--to make up for what we have missed for the last twenty seven years. Perhaps your husband is a sucker?

 

For me, this is no longer a sickness. It has turned into madness. I am standing on the edge of insanity. All because of you. Of this crazy love for you. Of the terrible longing for you. I said to you last night that when I go look for you in your town I want to see you alone, only you. I don’t want to see your family or anyone else, I only want to see you. I said I will rent a motel room and contact you and you will come to me. And you said yes, you are willing. Now, I said all that while I was delirious with love and the thirst to see you. But this morning on waking up from the delirium, I realized that I was wrong, that I had lost my reason when I said those things to you. Rationality tells me I must not see you. It is dangerous. I don’t know what may happen if I see you. I have a strong desire to make up with you for what we have missed in the last 27 years. And what I want to do if I see you is to undress you and kiss you 27 times all over your body, one kiss for each year we were apart. And I want to make love to you. Passionate love. Crazy love. Mad love. But I don’t know how you may react to what I may do with you. You are committed to your husband and family and you don’t want to cheat, despite your feelings for me. But I am afraid I will force you into making love with me and you will have no strength to resist. I am afraid that I may lose control and so will you. I don’t want to force you into committing sin, to do things against your will, against your better judgment, and I don’t want the peace of your family destroyed. Therefore I am backing down from the intention to see you alone. So what am I to do? I will not see you at all. You must understand that I am not your friend. I am your lover. A lover makes love. And if a lover cannot make love with the person he loves, you know how painful it will be for him? Knowing you and the limitations you face, I now decide that we’d better not see each other. Perhaps never. Not in this lifetime. We are two lovers fate have meant to suffer separation for the rest of our life. And I am outraged.

 

Then the next night you called and said that you keeps crying whenever you think of me, that it hurts you to know that after all these years, I still am so much in love with you, and that it’s painful for you to know you are helpless and could do nothing to help ease the madness in my heart and mind. You are not a free woman, you are chained, you told me. Then you said we must try to see each other one more time before we both become so old and senile that we cannot recognize each other anymore. How, I asked. And you said, I don’t know, leave it to fate. My love, I am afraid that fate will always be cruel with us. We may never see one another again in this life time, except if all around us are dead and leave us alone. Then I said that if I saw you again, I would kiss you 27 times, one kiss for each year we were apart. And you said why only 27, why not 27x2? If we met, first I would let you cry because of joy, then I would take you and place you in bed and slowly take off your clothes and kiss you on your hairs, your face, your lips, your nose, your neck, your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your breasts, your belly, your thighs--and your pussy. I would kiss your pussy with love, respect, and reverence because I know how much it has suffered. With my kisses, I would wipe off from your pussy and from your heart all the hurt you have been carrying all these years. And you would cry for joy and happiness because at last, with my love and kisses, you are liberated from the nightmares that have been haunting you. Then I would make love to you, respectfully, and with all the passion my crazy love can muster. I would lick you from your head to your toes, and you would do the same to me, and we will carry one another to heaven! Do you want to stay in heaven with me forever? But all these are only my fantasies. Reality is when I asked you what would you do when you see me, and you only said you will definitely hug me and cry. I said I want more than that, I want us to lie in bed and wrap our arms around each other’s body and I will squeeze you and squeeze you and you said my embrace might suffocate and kill you and I said that is fine with me, I want you to die in my arms. And I would die too. Before we die, I will write a suicide letter to ask people to bury us in the same grave so we can be together for eternity. And I asked you if you would lie down in bed with me, you answered that you would know what to do when we are together, but right now you could not say yes or no."

 

Shakespeare leaves Adam's head. He felt that both characters are now so entangled with one another. The ball has been rolled down the slope and there is no stopping now, Shakespeare feels. He is convinced that the lovers will meet, no matter what. Because they cannot do otherwise. It would be gross injustice if they don’t. Twenty seven years is a long time, so long in a person’s lifetime, almost half a life.

 

The train slows down then stops. Shakespeare looks out and finds that he is at his home station. He quickly walks out of the car just as the doors close behind him. He walks up the steps and when he passes the token booth he looks at the clock and sees that it is now four thirty in the morning. Time is not waiting, he must finishes the story before daybreak. Shakespeare hurries home. The snow has stopped falling and the streets are now completely white. The wind has also died down. He walks for two blocks, and his are the only footsteps in the fresh snow. Arriving at his apartment he steps slowly down the snow-covered stairs and into his room in the basement. The room is still cold as when he left it yesterday evening. He goes straight to the refrigerator but finds only water and raw vegetables. The hunger has come back. But no way he could get any food now, all the stores are closed. Shakespeare boils water to make tea and after it is ready, he sits on a chair and imagines again:

 

The next day, after the drunken conversation with Eve, Adam went to Maryland with a friend. They were going to spend a day there with the family of the friend and would go back to New York the next day. All through the trip, he was silent and talked only when he was talked to. He listened to the music and looked at the highway and the scenery but his head was full of Eve. The hangover after all the wine and beer last night was making him sick, in addition to love. He felt that he could no longer leave “fate” alone to decide what they were going to do. He must see Eve. Because if he did not, the lovesickness would kill him, and he thought it would kill her too. That night Adam and his friend and others had a party, there was a lot of drinking and eating and talking. He drank a lot, but did not go out of his mind. He went to sleep fully aware. The next morning when he opened his eyes, he thought tonight on getting back to New York he would book a ticket to San Jose and would call to let Eve know. The day dragged and he could not wait to get back to New York and to his computer and the phone.

 

As soon as he was back in his apartment that evening, he went straight to the computer and got online and ordered a ticket to San Jose. Then he opened a bottle of wine and turned on the stereo and as Phuong Thanh was singing, he called Eve and told her that he had just booked a ticket to go see her and they would see each other soon.

 

"When are you going?" Eve asked.

 

"I will tell you when the day gets near. I am so happy."

 

"I can’t wait."

 

"Nobody must know."

 

"No. It will be our secret. How do we meet?"

 

"When I arrive and after checking into a motel I will call and you will come to me."

 

"Do you know what motel you are going to stay at, so I can scout the area before you come? I don’t want to waste any time."

 

"I think I will stay at the Vagabond Inn on First street. I stayed there before when I was going through the area a couple of years back."

 

"First street? Downtown? It would be only 15 minutes from my house."

 

"Oh."

 

"Bring a shirt of yours for me to wear." Eve said.

 

"Ok." Adam thought that was cute.

 

"How long are you going to stay?"

 

"One night and one day. We will stay in the room and will not go out. What are you going to do when you see me?"

 

"I will hug you and cry. What will you do?"

 

"I will hug you and kiss you."

 

"Then?"

 

"Then we will lie in bed together all day. Bring food and water."

 

"I will. What do you like to eat?"

 

"Sandwiches…"

 

"No, that would be unfair. I will cook and bring the food over. Do you like beef noodle soup?"

 

"Yes."

 

"So I will cook beef noodle soup. You want coffee?"

 

"I drink black coffee."

 

"I will bring black coffee."

 

"Just bring yourself."

 

"We will have a wonderful day together. I will ask for a day off from work to be with you." Eve said.

 

The conversation went on for two hours.

 

That night Adam went to bed happy. He had made the right decision. He thought there would be nothing to stop him from seeing Eve, not even her husband. If the husband tried to stop Eve from seeing him, or intrude in their reunion such as busting into the room that day, he thought he would kill the guy. Adam was not a violent person, but nevertheless, the homicidal thought crept into his head.

 

Eve and Adam talked on the phone in the days after as if there was no tomorrow. The tension and expectation built as they talked about the day. They talked into the nights, into the early mornings, and for four hours and hours; one time it was for seven hours non-stop. He had never talked like that on the phone before. The longest he had been on the phone with someone was forty five minutes. He used to hate the phone. But now, because of her… and she sounded as if she was dying of love whenever she was on the phone with him--but she laughed a lot too. They talked about the days they first fell in love, and memories of love. At one point during one of the conversations, he said that he was mad at her for letting her pride get the better of her love, and she said she was sorry she was stupid and that if she could do it all over again, she would not repeat the same mistakes. She told him that she had had a difficult life, suffering from verbal and physical abuse at the hands of her parents since she was very young, and now her boring marriage with a man who said he loved her but never cared for her.

 

As Adam began to lose sleep over the phone, the conversations got more and more passionate and more intimate. Eve said she would take off her clothes for him and would make love to him when they met.

 

"That is what I have been wanting to do for you all these years. I could not be your wife, but that is the least I can do for you, even if I could not come to you with my virginity intact. You understand." Eve said.

 

"What if your husband finds out?"

 

"I don’t care. He can divorce me if he wants."

 

"Make sure he does not find out. You must not destroy your family over this. You have responsibilities to your children and parents."

 

"I know. He will not find out. It will be our secret. I love your voice. You sounded so lovely and sweet."

 

Adam was surprised to know he had become a smooth talker.

 

"Where are you right now?" Adam asked.

 

"I am sitting in my closet."

 

"Why the closet?"

 

"So no one will hear me."

 

"What are you wearing?"

 

"Jumpsuit."

 

"How often do you have sex with your husband?"

 

"Perhaps once every few months. And only if he asks. I never ask. Sex with him for me is a duty because I am his wife. But sometimes he cannot get an erection."

 

"What are we going to do for each other on that day?"

 

"Whatever you want. But one thing I know I will do: I will hug you very tight and maybe I will cry."

 

"And we will get in bed, and we will make love."

 

"…" Eve suddenly became silent.

 

"Hello?"

 

"I am listening."

 

"We will get in bed, and we will make love."

 

"Yes."

 

"I will kiss you all over."

 

"Yes."

 

"I will kiss you on your hairs, your lips, your ears, your neck, your breasts."

 

"You know, I don’t wear bra."

 

"Why not?"

 

"Because it hurts."

 

"Fine. Then I will suck your nipples. How big are your nipples?"

 

"They are big."

 

"What color?"

 

"Kind of pink."

 

"Then I will go slowly down your belly and I will kiss your vagina."

 

"…"

 

"Hello?"

 

"I am here."

 

"I kiss your vagina because I know it has suffered a lot and my kisses will make it--and you--forget about the pain it has endured all these years."

 

"I will love it. I love you."

 

"I love you too. Feel your pussy now."

 

"Yeah?"

 

"How is it?"

 

"It’s wet."

"I know."

 

“You are making me feel so uncomfortable.”

 

Adam was having an erection. And it was three o’clock in the morning where he was and midnight where she was.

 

The next day Eve emailed and wrote that she had never felt like she had when listening to Adam.

 

One night during a conversation with Eve, Jane, on vacation from halfway around the world, broke in and asked if everything was all right at home and Adam said all was fine and they talked for a little bit then hung up, then he returned to the conversation with Eve. He felt as if he was living those younger days again when he ran looking for Eve after she had left the city to go to Sai Gon. It was the same fever. The same madness.

 

Shakespeare looks out the small window and sees the dim early morning light. He feels very tired, but at the same time he is happy that the lovers are going to see each other. There is justice at last. Shakespeare feels that Adam was responding correctly to the calling of his heart. He could not wait any longer, because it would be bad if they waited and waited and not knowing when they were going to see one another. Adam could not let himself and Eve get any older before they saw each other again. Eve felt the same way too. "I want to see you again and as soon as possible. I don’t want to see you when we are both old and sick and senile and I cannot recognize you," Shakespeare imagines Eve say to Adam. At this point in the story Shakespeare almost identifies himself with Adam and he is feeling the same tension and the fever as his character is feeling.

 

Shakespeare stands up and paces the room. Steam is coming out of his nose and mouth because of the cold air. He sees in his mind how the lovers prepare for their reunion:

 

Adam was slow in telling Eve exactly what date he would be in San Jose. He only said that he would be there before the end of the month, which was two weeks away. He did not want her to count the day. He continued to call her on her cell phone during her daily lunch breaks, and she called him at home every night and talked to him for hours. The insomnia was getting worse for him. But in the morning, he would still get up and go about his daily business, albeit in the fog of his mind.

 

And three days before the flight he gave Eve the date and time of his arrival.

 

"I will be there around 9:30 pm on February 22 and I will call you as soon as I got the room," Adam said.

 

"I want to pick you up at the airport. I want to do that," Eve said.

 

"No. Listen to me, I will call you from the motel."

 

"Ok, if that is what you want. But I will leave the house early after my evening bath and I will drive to the motel and I will wait around in the area. I will wait for your call. I will have all the food and water ready. But you must get a room with a microwave oven and a refrigerator."

 

"Ok."

 

"What do you want me to wear?"

 

"Jeans?" Adam said.

 

"I will wear jeans. Do you want me to put on makeup?"

 

"Yes, but no perfume."

 

"Why? Don't you like me to smell good?"

 

"I like the smell of the flesh better. And if you are so clean that you don’t have any smell, that’s fine with me."

 

"Ok. No perfume."

 

"I will buy two wedding bands. One for me and one for you because on that day we will play husband and wife even if it is for only one day. That is what you have been desiring all these years, have you not?" Adam said.

 

"Yes." Eve said.

 

"You and I will get our wishes. We will be married."

 

"When you see me, you will find that I have changed. I am not as naive as I was before."

 

"I will not expect anything. You are you. I know you have changed, of course, after all these years, and that is ok."

 

"Do you want me to be naive and sweet as when you first knew me?"

 

"That would be nice."

 

Adam drank a lot of wine when he was talking with Eve because it put him in the proper mood for sweet and feverish conversation. The words came out of his mouth easier, and they carried the passion that overwhelmed Eve who said she was becoming addicted to listening to him, and to his voice.

 

On the afternoon of the flight Adam took the subway to the airport and it was a nice and cool afternoon. After checking in and while waiting to board the plane, he called her and told her he was on his way.

 

"You still don’t want me to meet you at the airport?" Eve said.

 

"No. just wait for me to call you. I have already booked the room." Adam said.

 

"And it has a microwave oven?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"After work I will go to the gym and after that I will take a shower and I will leave the house and I will wait for you near the motel." Eve said.

 

"Have you seen the motel?"

 

"I have checked it out twice. It is a nice place. It has a swimming pool. I want to see you swim."

 

"We will not have time for that."

 

"I will wait for your call."

 

Adam sat around the terminal and ran to the gate when he suddenly heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He was the last one to board the plane because as soon as he walked into the cabin, the attendant closed the door behind him. Adam found his seat, buckled himself, and lost in thoughts: the tension had been building for almost a month and the time had come for an anti-climax. We have talked a lot, it is now time to face reality, he thought. I will see you and you will see me as two concrete objects, not images, not thoughts, not imagination, not fantasies, not abstraction, not words in the emails, not the distant voices on the other end of the phone. We will see one another in the flesh and in the blood. We will come near each other and touch and sniff. I am sure you will sniff, because you are such a clean woman and has such a sensitive nose. I will let you sniff. But I assure you, this body is me, mine, the real me, the one you have loved all these years and desired to see again. So here I am, touch me and sniff me all you want. Look at my face, you will see the same features, still those large eyes, that nose, that flat cheek, those full lips, and the dark skin. But of course, time has ravaged me and made me look much older. There is nothing I can do. I am not seventeen years old anymore. I am now 45 years old. You cannot use the past to measure the present. Things change, and so do I and so do you. What you will do to verify my ID I will do to you too. But I have seen your latest pictures, and have seen how you have aged, how the youthfulness was gone, how your face now has the sharp edges, and also the lines under your eyes. You clearly look a middle-age woman in the picture. So I am prepared. I know what I will see. I will touch your face just to make sure the basic features of your face are still there, those that I have carried in my memory for 30 years since the day we met and fell in love. A reunion at last. We must meet, even if in secrecy. Because if we don’t see one another before we die, there is no justice in the world. So let’s prepare for tonight. We have discussed the game plan in details. We know what we are going to do for and to each other. I don’t think I will cry because I know my tear-well has long dried up, I cannot cry anymore. But I guess you will, because you are a woman, and women are faster with tears than men. And I will be happy to see tears streaming down your bony cheeks, because I know they are tears of happiness, a rarity, and how precious they are. But what if you do not cry? I will take that as a sign that you have become a strong woman, and I will compliment you for that. You said you want love and only love, not viruses. I promise: love only, no viruses. But why the hell am I so anxious? I need to curb my enthusiasm. I must have no expectation. The only thing that is 80% certain is I am on an airplane right now heading west to see you and I pray that I will get there safely--because I must see you. After one day with you, I am willing to die. But I am going into the unknown.

 

Adam looked at the TV screen in front of him until his eyes got tired, then he took a pill and drifted off to sleep. Sleep but no sleep, because he was always conscious of the presence of the guy next to him and the conversations that were going on around him and his left foot sometimes was stepped upon by the flight attendants or by the passengers going to the bathroom. The tension in him strangely died down with each passing hour. It was the start of the anti-climax, he realized, because now the wish was about to be fulfilled.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

Shakespeare feels as if he was going to see Eve himself. Like Adam, he is also full of expectation and is determined to make sure things go smoothly for them. The parallel paths they have been walking on all of their life are now about to meet, if only for a brief moment. There is no stopping now.

 

Adam flew for six hours and landed in San Jose. It was 9 pm. Walking through the parking lot from the motel's office on the way to his room he saw a small head inside the window of a small car and he immediately thought that it was Eve. The two bright eyes were looking at him. Eve had been waiting. He walked toward the car. The car door opened and a small woman stepped out and threw her arms around him. He returned the embrace. Strangely, he did not feel excited, but calm, very calm. You are a small woman, small enough to fit nicely in my arms, he thought.

 

"How are you?" He asked.

 

"I am fine." Eve said and placed her palm on his cheeks. They were silent for a few moments as if to recollect themselves. Then he said: "Let's go to the room."

 

She gave him a big bag of food and drink to carry and they walked up the stairs. Room 206. Vagabond Inn. With one hand he carried the bag, with the other he held her hand and they walked along the dark corridor. This was the motel where Adam had stayed three years ago while driving through the area on his roadtrip across the continent. That time he had wanted to look for Eve but could not.

 

They had arranged to meet tonight at this motel. Enough of not seeing one another. They had been talking and emailing for five months and tonight was the night they saw each other in the flesh and in the blood. Twenty seven years was a long time for any separation. But at last they met--because they must.

 

As soon as they entered the room and the door was closed, she flew into his arms. She looked intensely at his face and slowly ran her fingers on it the way a blind person feels a face, and she smiled. Adam thought he saw small tears in her eyes: they looked wet. He lifted her head and saw a familiar face, familiar but at the same time very strange. It had been too long. If he had accidentally seen her on the street, he might have had a difficult time recognizing the face even though he would know right away that it was the face of an old lover. Time had done its job on her. Adam found that she was much older. There were faint lines around the mouth and under the eyes, but the features of the face that he remembered her by were still there. It is you, he thought.

 

Then they walked to the bed, lied down next to one another, and Eve rested her head on his shoulders. The light in the room was low, and around them it was silent.

 

"Put your leg over me." Adam said.

 

And she crossed her leg over his body. "I am not used to lie with anyone like this," she said.

 

Eve had taken off her jacket and was now wearing a sleeveless red t-shirt and a pair of tight blue jeans. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled and pressed her body against him. A quiet and gentle happiness slowly took over him. He felt warm, peaceful, very peaceful, and was fully conscious of the feelings. He could not imagine a day he would be able to hold Eve in his arms like this--a lover that he thought he had lost forever. It was beyond his wildest dream. He was hugging Eve for the first time, the girl/woman he had been missing and whose image had been following him all these years. The memories of love. They lied in silence. Then he touched his lips her on her hairs on her face and on her mouth. And they kissed. The kisses were short smacks of the lips touching that made quick, snappy, and happy sounds.

 

"Do you want me like I was 27 years ago or do you want me as I am now?" She said.

 

"I want you to be as naive and sweet as when I first met you."

 

"But I am no longer."

 

"That's very unfortunate."

 

"I will take off my clothes now. Do you want to make love to me?"

 

"Yes."

 

Eve took off her clothes. Adam took off his clothes. She had said she would do this with him when they met. He turned off the light. Now the only light that illuminated the room was the light from the hallway that sneaked in through a small parting in the window curtains. In the dim light, he saw a naked, small, and compact body. He was overwhelmed by confusion as if he wasn't sure this was really happening: he and Eve naked in bed and making love. Her body was proportionate. Her breasts were small and her stomach was flat; and in the faint light, her skin looked yellowish ivory. Then under the cover of the blanket, he started to run his lips and tongue on her body starting on the forehead. It was Eve's body, presented to him willingly and respectfully as if on a silver plate. He kissed her breasts which seemed to be soft and sagging, and munched on her nipples. She had big nipples. He felt extremely good to suck his lover's breasts like that, like a baby feeding on his mother's milk. His penis hardened. He then went gently down her stomach and then her pelvic area and he found her vagina and as he placed his mouth on it he found that it was moist with love juice and it smelled nice and fresh. His lips and tongue worked tenderly and lovingly on her vagina. Holy sex. Love-full sex. Eve looked down at him with dreamy half-closed eyes while he was licking her and she started to moan and her butts and legs started to quiver. Then she whispered, "Enter me." And he raised himself up, parted her legs, and inserted his hardened penis into her throbbing vagina. But he was disappointed to find that her vigina was wide and loose. It did not grab his penis tightly. He felt as if he was inside a room. But no matter, he thought, it is your pussy and I am having sexual intercourse with you and I am in ecstasy. He had never dreamed of such an occasion, Adam, having sex with Eve, the girl/woman he had been loving and longing to see for 27 years. Twenty seven fucking-less long years. But tonight he was actually making love to her, the love of his life. Adam could not describe the happiness he was feeling while sliding his penis in and out of Eve's vagina. I am making love to you, and it is real, not fantasy, he thought. She closed her eyes and moaned and groaned and he thought he heard her whisper "Fuck me, fuck me." If that was what she was really whispering, he was somewhat surprised, because it sounded so X-rated, so unlike the innocent and perhaps saintly Eve that he had imagined her to be. He was also a little shocked to hear her moan and groan like a professional, like a porn actress in a porn video. He also wasn't sure if she was having real orgasms or she was only faking it. Most likely, she was faking. Perhaps that was what she thought she was supposed to do when having sex, to make the man feel confident--the thought flashed through his mind. Then amid the "ooh," "aah," and "uuh," Eve said, "Come, come with me," urging him to reach orgasm with her. He guessed this might be the way she acted while having sex with her husband or whoever, and now she was doing that with him too. But in these moments, it didn't matter a bit. Adam continued to pound on Eve and his breaths were getting faster and faster. Then she told him to lie down and she got on top of him. And while she was going up and down on him, he grabbed and squeezed her sagging breasts. After a while, they returned to the missionary position. He fucked her real hard, but was having a difficult time ejaculating. And he felt exhausted. He did not know what was the matter with him, but he could not ejaculate, no matter how hard and fast he pumped and how good he felt. But it did not matter to him. After all, the more important thing was he was making love with Eve, he was having his penis inside her, he was having a physical union with her--and that, for him, was the ultimate reward because never in his life he had imagined he could do such a thing with Eve. But still, he could not come. At last, he gave up, out of utter exhaustion. He told her perhaps it was because he was tired from the flight. And she said ok. But he knew she was disappointed that he didn't come.

 

Then they lied down and embraced one another. He was embracing the girl/woman he loved, not anyone, but Eve, his first, only, and probably last, lover, one that he thought he had lost forever. But tonight, in this motel room, in this town, they had found one another at last, the longing of the last 27 years were fulfilled. Eve had said that she wished to see Adam once again in this life, then she would be happy to die. He had the same wish, because they loved each other, still loved each other despite the long separation, a separation that had seemed endless. He regretted that they had not found each other sooner, because if they had, their life would have been different, they would have been the two happiest lovers on earth, they would have been the happiest husband and wife. But fate was cruel, as Eve said, it separated them and kept them apart and never reunited them as husband and wife. But tonight, and tomorrow, at least, they would be husband and wife, even if it was for only one day, even if it was only make-believe.

 

They lied, hugging each other and once in a while they kissed. Again, those snappy and happy sounds of the lips touching and smacking. They did not talk much. There was no need to talk because what they wanted to tell each other they had done so for the last five months through the emails and the phone. Then he looked at the clock and it was 10 pm and he told Eve to get ready to go home because people might be wondering where she was.

 

"Did you tell anyone where you were going?" Adam asked.

 

"I told my mother I was going to a party at a friend's."

 

"What about your husband?"

 

"He doesn't know."

 

"You should go now. I don't want you to get into any trouble with him."

 

"I have to take a shower before I go," Eve said; and like a squirrel, she sprang out of the bed, and walked quickly into the bathroom. He looked at her. Her ass was big, just as he had remembered. He smoked a cigarette, then joined her in the shower. He stood behind her and put his arms around her while the warm water showered down on them. She turned around, hugged him, and they kissed. He knelt down and kissed her vagina again, then he caressed her butts and kissed them too. Then they stepped out of the shower and she dried his hairs for him.

 

It was now 10:30. Eve put her clothes on then went sit on his laps and looked into his eyes and smiled. He hugged her and rested his head on her shoulders, and they kissed again and again and again. Suddenly her cell phone rang--it was her husband. Eve answered. She said she was at a friend's house and would be home in fifteen minutes. Then she snapped the phone shut and returned to his lap. They sat hugging each other, and around it was silent.

 

"Go." Adam said when he saw the clock go past eleven.

 

"Let me take my time."

 

"Don't be home too late."

 

"Are you trying to get rid of me?"

 

"Yeah. And I did that once." Adam said and smiled as he remembered that ancient morning in Da Nang: he had asked her to go away and leave him alone.

 

"You did? When?"

 

"Back then. When we were still together."

 

"I don't remember."

 

Eve gathered her bag and keys. Then holding hands, they walked down the stairs to her car and kissed good night.

 

Back in the room Adam could not sleep. Twelve, then one o'clock. He thought about the reasons why he could not ejaculate making love with Eve. He thought of many reasons: it might be that her vagina was not tight enough to massage his penis to give him the intense sensation needed to achieve orgasm; or he was tired from the long flight; or because of all the anti-depression pills he had been taking for the last year, drugs that reduced the libido. But he had had an erection, and it was a firm one. He could not understand what the real reason was, it might have been the combination of all those reasons, or something else. So he went into the bathroom to masturbate--but still, no matter how hard he shook, he could not ejaculate. Then he returned to bed, feeling bad and very tired. But he could not sleep. He thought about Eve and wished she were here with him. If she were with him, he might be able to sleep. He opened the bottle of wine that he had brought with him, drank some, then drifted off. She would come back in the morning and they would have a whole day together tomorrow.

 

When Adam opened his eyes, it was five o'clock. He thought he had slept for about two hours. He closed his eyes again, but sleep would not come back. He thought about Eve and wondered if she had come home peacefully last night. Her husband probably asked questions but Adam was sure she could handle him. She would be back with him again at daybreak.

 

Adam took a shower, brushed his teeth, dried his hairs, and lied in bed again, waiting for the daylight and for Eve. Then the light came, and soon after, there were knocks on the door, and it was her, coming into the room with two cups of black coffee. As soon as he closed the door and Eve put the coffee on the table, they hugged. He had said that today they would stay in the room and not go out, and she agreed, because they did not want to waste any moments they had together. He did not want any distractions, he only wanted to be with her in total privacy. And they did not have much time together--only 12 hours. Twelve hours out of 27 years of separation. Better than nothing, Adam thought.

 

"I put my cell phone in the car because I don't want anybody to bother us," Eve said, "People will be looking for me."

 

Then she changed into his shirt. It was too big for her small body, but she wanted to wear something that belonged to him. He thought that by asking to wear his shirt, Eve showed that she was an experienced woman, because a naive woman would not ask a man for such thing: Eve had asked him to bring a shirt for her to wear the moment he told her he would see her. She was 45 years old, and Adam could only guess what kind of life she had been living during the long years they were apart. How many men she had been intimate with in her life and what she had learned, he wondered. But the thought didn't bother him. Eve was Eve, whatever she was. And he loved her.

 

Adam allowed only a little sunlight into the room, just enough for the two of them to see each other's face. Then they climbed into bed and into each other's arms. He placed his head on her chest and kept it there and listened to the beating of her heart.

 

"When you sent me a picture of a man resting his head on a woman's breasts, I knew right away what you wanted and I got goose-bumps," Eve said. "Now you want to do like in the picture?"

 

He lied face down on her chest. She caressed his head, run her fingers through his hairs, and when he raised his eyes to look at her, she smiled brightly and they kissed, then he laid his head down on her chest again. Adam felt like a child curling up in the lap of his mother, and he was not worried about anything anymore, he felt protected, peaceful, secure, and extremely happy, a quiet but intense happiness, a feeling of profound well being. He had never felt like that before in his life, and he knew it was the love that made he feel that way. It's blissful to be in the arms of the beloved. He wished he died while lying in her arms like this because then he would be with her forever, and in peace. Then he drifted off to sleep. But sleep was shallow because he always felt her presence.

 

They lied together like that for an hour, not saying anything, then Eve woke him up--and they made love. Again, he kissed and licked all over her body and he sucked her vagina for a long time; and judging her reaction, he knew she was having multiple orgasms: her body twisted and turned and trembled as he devoured her. Then Eve laid him out and took his penis into her mouth. She was lousy at oral sex, he thought. He showed her briefly what to do, and she did as she was told. Then he placed her down and inserted his penis into her vagina. How wet she was. And as he slowly slided in and out of her, he again felt that wonderful feeling of a physical union with her. It was a holy feeling. This was sacred sex, because it was not for carnal pleasure, but for the fulfillment of the desire to be physically united with the beloved, the missing half, not just emotionally and spiritually, but physically. The two had become one. As he was pumping, she again groaned and moaned as if she was having unbearable pleasure and he knew she did that only to encourage him to ejaculate, to come inside her, knowing how hard it was for him to come. But again, he could not ejaculate. Eventually he rolled off her body, lied on his back, exhauted. She looked at him with concern, then caressed him and licked him and bit him all over his body while he masturbated. The frustration was becoming unbearable and he shook his hardened penis violently. Then he shot the load all over her belly and felt an explosive relief, as if he suddenly lost his footing and fell into an abyss, then came a satisfying lightness in the head and in the body.

 

"You're good." He said.

 

"But I didn't do anything. You did it yourself."

 

She said she was disappointed he didn't come inside her, and she blamed herself for not being able to make him do so. He said it was his fault, not hers. It might be the consequences of the anti-depressants he had been taking, he told her. Eve's vagina was wide and loose, perhaps because she had given births; or perhaps because the men she had been having with sex all had big penis--bigger than his? Adam's penis was more responsive to the violent shaking of his own hands and to the much tighter vagina of Jane who had never had children. But for him, during those moments and despite the doubt, it hardly mattered at all even though it would be very nice if he had ejaculated inside Eve.

 

After making love, they were exhausted. She sat in his lap, wrapping her arms and legs around him, and he did the same to her. Sweat were pouring down their bodies. Then they took a shower and went back to bed and embraced each other again, not letting go for even a short moment. Again, happiness overwhelmed him as he lied wrapping his body around hers. Time passed. Then they got up and went sit at the window. Adam opened the curtain a little bit for more light to come in and they sat facing each other.

 

"Do you want to eat?" Eve said. "I will heat the food."

 

"Not now."

 

Adam put his legs on the back of the another chair and rested his chin in his hands. Eve took his hands away and said, "We have only today, let's be with each other. Don't daydream." She knew that when he put his chin in his hands, he would be transported to another world and she would lose him.

 

"I am wondering if this was only a dream," he said.

 

Outside, the sky was cloudy but sometimes the sun broke through and brightened up the sky. It was a beautiful day. Eve said it had been raining for the last two weeks but today it did not. It was really a beautiful day, in every sense of the word. She sat there, wearing his gray shirt, and they drank coffee and smoked. Music was playing: Andy Gibb was singing I want to be your everything. Then Adam took out the rings. He put one on her finger and she put one on his. He had bought the rings just for this day, the day they were husband and wife. It was only play acting, but how real it felt. Eve had said that she had always wanted to be his wife but fate and circumstances had not allowed. She had said that her husband had only her body but not her heart, that her heart belonged to Adam and Adam only, since she was 12 years old, when she first saw him in her daydreams, and her heart would belong to him for the remainder of her life. And today, even if only for 12 hours, they were husband and wife. Their wish had been fulfilled.

 

The more Adam looked at Eve, the more he realized that it was the face that he had carried in his mind all these years. She had pearly eyes and her smiles were bright. Her face was not as full as when she was younger, it now had edges, and the marks of time were visible under her eyes--and her hairs were thinner. Then she slid into his lap like a sleepy cat and rested her head on his chest, and they became silent and looked at the sky outside the window.

 

"It's better like this," She said after positioning herself comfortably in his lap. Then she fed him little pieces of bread.

 

Outside the window, the sky was overcast. Then Adam said let's go back to bed. And they went back to bed and hugged each others again and they closed their eyes and felt the happiness of being together--in the same bed, like real husband and wife. And they made love again. And again. It always started with Adam kissing Eve's nipples and gently and rhythmically brushed his body against her. Orgasms came to her easily. And during intercourse, he was conscious of each and every push his penis made inside her vagina. He savored all the sensation he felt when his penis caressed against the wet wall of her vagina--because he was not just having sex with anyone, he was making love with Eve, and that--was a big difference.

 

The hours passed inside the motel room while the world outside seemed to cease to exist. At one point, Eve sat up on Adam's stomach and they talked, and suddenly she cried, saying that of all the men who loved her but she did not love, he was the only one who was not a "success." He saw the tears fall out of her eyes and onto his chest and felt their warmth. She cried because the man she loved was such a failure, a man without money and without a future. He wanted to promise her that he would work very hard from now on, that he would be a success. But he couldn't say the words. He could only hugged her, wiped off her tears, and comforted her.

 

Then the evening came. Seven o'clock, and outside it was dark, they did not see anymore daylight through the narrow parting in the window curtain. Time was coming to an end.

 

They took a shower for the last time but this time Eve did not dry his hairs for him. She put her clothes on then prepared him a meal with the noodles and soup she had brought the night before. He ate some, but had no appetite. They hugged and kissed. He said this had been the happiest day of his life. She said she would not ask for anything more, that she was satisfied that her wish had been fulfilled, and she didn't look forward to anything else. They would each return to their own life, live their separate lives again, but they knew they always loved each other. Always, until death--and beyond.

 

Holding hands, they walked through the dark parking lot. He returned the key to the motel's office then got into the car. Eve was in the driver's seat, looking at him.

 

"We will drive around a little before going to the airport." Adam said.

 

The air had turned chill and there was a gentle breeze. Eve drove up a deserted boulevard and Adam played the Andy Gibb CD again. He felt sad looking at the desolation around him. After half an hour, Adam said let's turn back and Eve made a U-turn and headed in the direction of the airport. She glanced at him and reached over and took his hand while keeping the other hand on the steering wheel. And she did not let go of his hand.

 

After checking in, they went back to the parking lot and sat in the back seat of the car and Eve curled up in his lap. It was thirty minutes before the flight. They shared a cigarette. He kissed her on her head, then on her lips again and again and again and again.

 

"I know you are sad. You are so sad that you forgot to hold my hand," Eve said. "We had a wonderful day together that we will remember for the rest of our life. Think about that so you be comforted. All is too late for us. I cannot relive my life for you and you for me. I have a family to take care of. And you have your own responsibilities. What can we do now is cherish the memory and live out our life. We can't be together."

 

"If in the future we talk on the phone less and I email you less, don't think that I've forgot you. Think that I always love you. You are always in my heart no matter where I am and no matter what the circumstances." Adam said.

 

Silence.

 

Then he said: "You may not feel sad now because we are still together this moment. But beware, it will sink in slowly as the days pass."

 

At nine o'clock, he told her to start the engine, turn on the headlights, wear the seatbelt, then he kissed her again. She still had that bright smile on her face but wasn't looking at him--she was looking into the distance. Then he tore himself away and walked into the terminal. The flight was scheduled for 9:30.

 

In the airplane, whenever Adam closed his eyes, he saw Eve and felt again her kisses and hugs and the feeling was as real as if she was actually still with him. He felt cold and his body shook. He missed her already. Terribly. He felt that he loved her even more, much more, a million times more than before he had seen her, because today she had given him not only her heart, but also her body, completely and fully, without holding anything back. The love had been consummated, and that was why he loved her more, much more. The realization cut his heart like a thousand knives. He felt broken--and he cried. Why can't we have each other? Why do we have to separate again?

 

Shakespeare thinks that another chapter of the long story of Adam and Eve has opened and now ends. It ends with another separation, and this time, like the last time, nobody knows how long it might be. But Shakespeare knows one thing makes Adam feels better, and perhaps Eve too, is that they are not going to lose contact again. Shakespeare continues to pace the room and imagines Adam saying to himself after coming back to New York:

 

"I am back. The fourteen hours with you were the happiest of my life. But it is a gross understatement. What I want to say is ... if there was one happy day of my life, it was Feb 23, 20XX, the day we met after 27 years of separation. Before we met, I had told myself to curb my enthusiasm, to lower my expectation, because I felt apprehensive about what I was going to see: the you of today might not be the you that I knew 27 years ago. But all my fears proved so wrong. I was overwhelmed by your love, it was too sweet, too sincere, too devoting--too much. I literally swam in the boundless ocean of your love. You are a beautiful woman. Your eyes are bright and your smiles are refreshing. You are a wonderful woman. You are a perfect woman. You are caring and attentive. The love you made was unreserved, you held nothing back--I have no word to describe the sweetness of your affection. When I lied in your arms and laid my head on your chest and you caressed my hairs, I felt so peaceful, so reassuring, so secure, I thought that I have returned home at last after years of wandering in the desert. I have never in my life hugged anybody with such love and devotion. To be in the arms of the beloved is a divine blessing--and I was blessed--by you. I was the happiest person on earth when you held me tight in your arms and kissed me on my lips, not one or two kisses, but kiss after kiss after kiss after kiss after kiss. "Have I kissed you enough?" You asked, and I said no. When you laid your head on my shoulders and closed your eyes and I wrapped my arms around you, you smiled, I knew you were happy, and your happiness was my happiness. It was the happy day of my life. We did not come out of the room for the whole day. We stayed inside and in bed together. Because we would not want to waste any moment loving each other. You gave me all and I gave you all. And the love we made. You said that all your life you had been waiting for this day so you could give me what you had always wanted to give me: your body. And you did. The moments of sexual intercourse were just as satisfying as when we wrapped ourselves in one another's arms and listened to the beating of our hearts. Then there were the rings we put on each other's fingers to declare to ourselves that for that day we were husband and wife--the wish fulfilled at last. I thought I could never cry again, but on separation at the end of the day, I could not hold back the tears, you just did not see them. Separation stabbed me in my heart. After seeing you and spending the day of my life with you, one thing became clear to me, that I love you more than ever, much more, perhaps more than when we were young, because our love is now complete: body and soul. But why did you let me go at the end of the day? Why did you not let me die in your arms, so we could be together forever? I am having a fever right now--missing you."

 

The days immediately after the meeting were rough for Adam. On the train going home from the airport, he felt sad and angry and had to fight the tears that welled up in his eyes. Sad because he had to separate from Eve again, angry because he cannot be with her whom Adam thought was such a wonderful woman. He thought he would be the happiest man if she were his wife. He wanted to possess her, to have her for himself for the rest of his life--into death and beyond. The happiness of the reunion had turned into the agony of parting. He emailed Eve and wrote that why did she let him go, why did she not let him die in her arms while in that motel room, because that way he could be with her forever. Eve wrote back that he must not talk nonsense, that they must face reality, and reality was that they could not be together, that they would have to continue to live different lives, perhaps to the end.

 

For Eve, the first few days after the meeting were not too bad. She felt ok because her wish of seeing her old lover had been fulfilled. But as days went by, the missing and the sadness began to eat at her. She shut herself up in her room and talked to no one, and played again in her mind events of the day she met him. She wrote that she had lost again what she valued most in her life: him. She remembered about how Adam had held her in his arms, she remembered the greedy kisses, the sincere and passionate love they made to each other, the happiness, the ecstasy and the orgasms that she had never felt before. All the memories came slowly back and made her sad. She wrote him the most passionate emails since they re-contacted. And each Saturday morning, Adam would call and she would already be sitting in her closet waiting for his call and she would swallow each word he said like a person dying of thirst swallowing each drop of water in a burning desert. Then they would make plans for their future, not the future in this life, but in the next. And they were not joking because they sincerely believe that they would meet again in the next incarnation. Eve had said that she had seen and been haunted by the image of Adam and she could not explain why--since she was 12 years old, and his image was on her mind daily until she met him; and because of that, she believed that they had been pursuing each other through many lifetimes. Adam said in the next life they would not make the same mistakes like they did in this and they would be husband and wife and she would bear him six children and they would be happy together. Eve said she would do that for him but he must promise her that he will be faithful to her, that he must love her and her alone and not mess with any other women because she is a very emotionally selfish woman and if he fools around and she finds out she would leave him without regret. And he would also have to make a lot of money to take care of her and their children. Adam said yes.

 

Three weeks after the meeting, Eve wrote an email that seemed to show she was recovering from the madness. She wrote that they could not go on like this, because there could be no satisfactory resolution to the affair except they must forget each other and each must go on with their own life. She wrote that she must now redirect her attention to her own family, that her husband was a good man who made a lot of money and she needed him. She had said she and her husband once said to each other that if they hit the lotto jackpot, they would divorce, because there was no reason for them to go on living with one another when the love was only one way. What was keeping them together now as far as Eve was concerned, it was her dependency on him. Sure, she was making money too, but what she brought home was small. So she needed him. As Adam heard this, he though it was only a joke between Eve and her husband--because they would never hit the lotto jackpot. They would continue to stay together for the foreseeable future. Unless something dramatic happened.

 

Adam also saw the hopelessness of the situation. He agreed that they would have to cut down on the frequency of their communication and would eventually stop it all together. Both had different lives to live and there was no way they could be together no matter how much they loved. So the days after that email from Eve, Adam stopped calling her, and did not write to her everyday anymore, even though he checked his emails frequently to see if there was anything from her and he found that she also wrote less, and when she did, her messages were not as emotional as before. She wasn't saying she missed him or wanted to have him near her, to hug and kiss him, to stroke his hair, to share a cigarette with him. What she wrote was now matter-of-factly and short and the emails were few and far between.

 

 

 

Chapter Seven

 

Shakespeare is happy that Adam and Eve have met even though at the end of the day there were sadness and tears. At the beginning, which was only yesterday evening, he was determined to reunite the lovers, and he has done that. Now what's next? Is this the end? And what kind of ending is this? Shakespeare asks himself. The reunion may be just one short chapter, but a significant development of the 30-year love affair. There might be more to come, but what? They have had the happiest day of their life, and now they were back to their separate lives, to the their own daily concerns, to the bills, the rent, the mortgage, the wife, the husband and the children. But they might still have a long time to live, at least 20 years for each of them. What are they going to do with all that time as lovers? Are they going to walk on parallel lines again?

 

While at the motel with Eve, overwhelmed with happiness and love, Adam said to her that they should meet at least once a year as long as they were still alive, but she had no reaction to the suggestion, she seemed not to be very enthusiastic about that idea, even cold to it, even tried to ignore it. And when he pressed the issue, she was forced to say that she would see him again only when he had become a "success." For Eve, this reunion might be the last. Eve did not feel she should continue. She had wanted to see him one more time, and she did, and that was good enough. She did not expect a drawn out secret affair with Adam. She did not want it. For Adam, he one thing he had learned about Eve since they re-contacted was that she whenever she talked about a person she always mentioned whether or not that person "makes a lot of money." That led him to suspect that she respected people who made a lot of money and looked down on those who didn't. He felt dismayed at the thought. He was worse than poor because he not only had no money, he didn't have the means and the skills, not even the motivation to make money. For him, not lacking is good enough. One time, before their meeting and when he was talking about buying her something for her to remember him by, she was shocked to find out he was so poor that he did not have enough money to buy her a platinum neck chain. He said all he could afford was sterling silver. The disappointment had also caused her to cry when they were together in the motel room on the day of their reunion. Eve could not look past the fact that Adam was a loser, and she was hurt, because she loved him and wanted him to succeed in life, and by success she meant having a lot of money. Adam tried to comfort her by saying he would buy her what she wanted in the future when he had money and his circumstances improved. The love she had for him now was perhaps left over from the day she fell in love with him when she was still young and naive. It is a long lasting love. But it was just that: love. Through tribulations of life, Eve had become a practical and calculating woman who measured a man's worth by how much money he had or could make. And in this regard, Adam was not within her field of vision. He was not her kind of man. Adam was too much of an artist and a dreamer for her tastes. He did not seem to belong to this world. She had met him and made love with him because she loved and missed him. And that--was all. She might even think, now that she was more mature and experienced, that she had loved the wrong man, even though she could blame that on her adolescent stupidity. That might be why she refused to think about seeing him again in the future after the reunion. What for, she asked herself. She had wished she could see him once again and she did. Her wish as been fulfilled; and there was no need to go beyond that.

 

Shakespeare ponders what he is going to do next. At the beginning of the project, he wanted to bring a happy ending to the story, but as things stand now, the possibility of a happy ending seems nil. There has been at least a happy episode, however: the lovers had met again. After the reunion, if they went their own ways with no prospect of future meetings, not an attempt to carry out a secret affair, it is because Eve did not want to continue. Then there is no real ending to the story. The lovers would just disappear again from each other's life and add another 20 or 27 years to the separation. Shakespeare feels that this is the worst possible ending of all. But choices are limited.

 

Shakespeare stands up slowly from his bed and paces the room again. It is 15 steps from one end of the room to another. The air in the room is cold and he is breathing steam. The light of the day is getting brighter outside the half-window, and the street is quiet. It is still too early in the morning and it is New Year’s Day. Shakespeare feels very tired and wants to lie down and sleep, but he cannot do that before he finishes the story, and besides, he has almost reached the end.

 

Eve was not committed enough--or perhaps not crazy enough?-- to cooperate with Adam in any scheme he might have concerning their future, or at least the future of the affair. Adam had only a wife and no children, no family to take care of. Jane was an independent woman and could take care of herself. Even though he felt committed to Jane because they had been together for too long, there was no economic or legal barrier to prevent him from leaving her. But for Eve it was not so simple. She had two children and parents to take care of and a mortgage to pay and she could not do it alone without the help of her husband. She was trapped, and could not break out even if she wanted to. But did Eve, with all the love she professed to have for him, want a life, or what remained of it, with Adam? She could run off with Adam, if the desire was strong enough. She might have the desire or she might not. If she did not have the desire, there was nothing to say. But if she had, she seemed determined to fight it. Her husband was a "success," making a lot of money, according to her--while Adam was not. So the choice for her was clear. She did not have the enthusiasm for a life with Adam. He was a world-class loser.

 

Shakespeare feels that the more he delves into the mind of Eve, the clearer he sees his way to the conclusion of the story. It will be a conclusion which does not seem like a conclusion at all. The story would just end suddenly like a stone thrown into a still lake, it makes some ripples, then quickly returns to silence as if nothing has happened. There will be no dramatic end. Instead, it will be tasteless, boring, hollow, and lukewarm. The lovers will just stop communication and forget about each other, and all will become like the last 27 years. Perhaps they would still think about one another everyday, but it would be just that: thoughts and feelings. Shakespeare evaluates the merit of this ending and feels that it would be so, unless something dramatic happens, such as Eve and her husband divorce for some reason--they have threatened to do that many times. But this is very unlikely. The husband may want to leave her for some reason, he knows that Eve never loves him. But Eve would not leave. Adam's situation, on the other hand is much less complex: he could leave Jane if he needs to. Shakespeare feels that he is confronted with impossible choices. Adam and Eve separate again after a brief reunion is a sad ending. Adam and Eve run off together and leave their families behind is another sad ending because both will be racked with guilt and unable to fully enjoy their happiness. Besides, there is no guarantee that even though they are passionate lovers, they would be good husband and wife. And if the pain of separation is too much that they lose their minds and commit suicide, it is definitely a sad ending: their story would just be another version of Romeo and Juliet. So accept the separation and live with it for the rest of their life may be the only possible solution. And even though separation is painful, at least the physical distance may help them preserve the memories and maintain the love, as they have done after the first separation.

 

Shakespeare looks out the window and sees the bright daylight. The snow has stopped falling. It is just another day even though people mark it as the beginning of a "new year." But for Shakespeare, nothing is different, except it is a day off. Thinking about the story of Adam and Eve, he feels the same way about the day: same shit like Romeo and Juliet, just different setting. The parting of the lovers this time may be for good, and it may just be the death of both, in a symbolic way. Circumstances beyond their control keeps Romeo and Juliet away from each other, and circumstances also do the same to Adam and Eve. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet ends in their physical deaths, and whether or not they reunite in the next life is a question without an answer. Same thing with Adam and Eve. Even though they are still alive, they might as well be dead, simply because they don't have each other. They live in two different worlds, they have debts to pay to people around them, obligations and duties, and time is needed to pay off the debts, especially Eve. Adam's life with Jane is also a form of debt. How many times he has tried to run away, to end it with her, but failed. He always comes back each time to continue the unhappy life.

 

Like Romeo and Juliet, Adam and Eve will die. They will die because they have lived. They will not commit suicide, but die they will in some other way, in old age and sickness perhaps. And when that happens, their story would be more or less the same as Romeo and Juliet. The only difference is Adam and Eve are dying an extremely slow death. Two young people fall in love, torn apart for 27 years, then meet again for only fourteen hours in secret when they are middle-aged--only to separate again. It is inhumane. Shakespeare feels like shit.

 

The effort to improve upon the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet with the story of Adam and Eve has failed. Shakespeare feels that no matter what he does and how much he wants to, external forces and uncontrollable circumstances always prevail: they pull the characters' strings like puppets; and Shakespeare, as a writer, can only report what happens. He cannot intervene or direct the courses of events and their outcomes.

 

Shakespeare decides he has reached the end. He feels exhausted as if drained of the last drop of energy and vitality. He has not accomplished the mission he has set out to do. The reincarnation has been wasted. The injustice he has done to Romeo and Juliet remains an injustice. He thinks there is no point in writing down the story of Adam and Eve, because a similar story, or very similar to it, has been done with The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet . There is nothing new to add.

 

Shakespeare collapses on the bed, and with trembling hands, pulls the blanket over his frail body. With each breath, steams come out of his nose and mouth. The room is freezing. And he is starving, having had no food for almost 24 hours. He feels he has no strength left, but does not have the will to get up and look for food. The “conclusion” of the story depresses him so much that he feels he does not want to go on anymore. In fact, if death comes now, he would not resist. His breaths become slower and shorter, and eventually they become gasps. He is losing consciousness. And the cold is accelerating the process. Like a corpse whose blood is being drained, his face now turns sickly white. Noises from the streets now become faint echo as if from a dreamy and different world, a far off reality.

 

The autopsy two days later says the man dies of exposure.

 

(End)

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 01.12.2020

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