ARCHEOLOGY: EXCERPT

(BEGINNING)

The Joker is the first to round the corner, clutching a crocodile skin handbag, tightly followed by Carrie, empty-handed, holding her long, blood-stained dress up so that she can run faster.

‘In here,’ The Joker hisses as they spot the open door of The Room Mate Club. The bar girls, some of them sleeping sitting up, snap to action as the two horror movie characters barge in the door. ‘Hush,’ The Joker says as he crouches behind the reception desk. ‘Nguoi xau.’ Bad people.

After some initial protesting, the girls abide, and for a couple of minutes not a word is said inside the brothel. Eventually, The Joker pokes his head out the door. 'I think they're gone.’

Carrie sneaks up from behind, puts a hand on his shoulder. 'You sure?'

The Joker stares at her hand. 'Is that real or fake blood?'

Carrie spreads her fingers, parts of them cracking, parts of them glistening. 'I don't know,’ she says, the words coming out a sob. She gasps for air, and her sobbing increases, grows frantic, until it culminates in hysterical laughter. Tears come out her eyes and make little rivers of clean in the blood on her cheeks. 'A mixture, I think.'

As the animal sound she’s been making dies down, the music of Bui Vien returns: xe om engines, bottles being poured into garbage trucks. The Joker glances at Carrie, sideways. ‘Hi,’ he says finally, holding out his hand. 'I'm Adam.'

'Ruth,' she says and takes the hand, and there they stand, two kids covered with fake blood, real blood, beer, face paint, sweat and dirt, looking into the only unmarked piece of each other that remains. Adam's face is entirely covered in white paint, scars not just drawn, but built across his cheeks, built with wax until the texture of the original skin cannot possibly be detected. Across his mouth a wide stroke of red, stitches, eyes blackened, makeup caking across his eyebrows. Carrie is all blood, or, rather, corn syrup and cocoa and cornflour, her once strawberry blonde hair slicked and then dried against her head, tiara adorned with swollen tampons. Only their eyes remain uncovered, his brown in black, hers blue in red.

'Want a drink?' he asks and nods to one of the tables outside The Room Mate Club.

Ruth smiles, flakes of red falling from this earthquake of her face. 'A drink sounds good.'

I know I'm buried down there

It was nothing when you told me. You were sitting in your window on the twenty-second floor of Cao Dat, looking out across the city, the pastel houses and the river a slithering metal snake among them. You didn’t cry, like you would later, the only other two times you mentioned it for the whole three years we spent together. You’d be drunk then, so drunk you could barely speak, and, thankfully, so drunk you wouldn’t remember it the next morning. But that day you weren’t drunk, just defiant, I suppose, and perhaps not so attached to me that you cared what would happen if I found out. If only we’d stayed that way, nonattached, then we could have lived happily ever fucking after.

in the catacombs

The Joker and Carrie are laughing and do not immediately notice the bar girls in front of their table, and it is only when one of them taps on the plastic with her acrylic nails that they resurface, disoriented at first, surprised to find the world still here after all the places they've been. The girl with the acrylic nails, unimpressed with their tales of other planets, galaxies, other universes, taps her wrist.

'Time go-home,' she says. 'Eight on mor-ning.'

And it's true, it's eight, eight on mor-ning and they've been sitting at the table for five hours. Two beers, that's all they've had; no wonder the bar girls are pissed. The bowls of Cha Ga that they must have bought at some point remain untouched, and the couple try to make this their defense, but the bar girls, seasoned, have already come out with plastic bags and spoons. They pour the congee into the bags and hand them to the foreigners. The girl rubs her fingers together, tin-tien; the bill. She's had it with these mad kids in costumes, wants her own gap from these streets of broken bottles, backpacker vomit and scabby kittens licking through it for half-digested pieces of sausage.

'Oh no,' Carrie says, crouching down to stop the tabby at her feet. The kitten looks up, a ring of burnt flesh around its nose. Just the shape of an exhaust pipe. Carrie lifts it, her hand nearly closing around its belly. The kitten doesn't even resist, but relaxes in her arms like a ragdoll, so malnourished that even its innate suspiciousness has been disabled. 'Xin chao,' Carrie says to the cat; Vietnamese for 'hello.' She feeds it a piece of chicken from the bag, the red of her hands mixing with rice congee and cat hairs. 'Xin chao, meow-meow.'

'Well then,' The Joker says and kisses her forehead. 'That solves the problem of a name.'

of your mind

‘Emotionally handicapped,’ you said and looked at me.

You’d just been to see a therapist, six months after I’d started asking. It was a big thing you’d done. Last thing you wanted was to remember. I wasn’t surprised what she’d told you, that your inability to trust was simply something you’d have to live with; a limp. Even less surprised were you, and your face had nothing pleading about it. Your face was the opposite of take-it-or-leave-it as you spoke.

‘This is who I am,’ you continued. ‘Fucked.’

Because of your dad, not that you said it – even as I write it, now, months later and miles and miles away, not even on Earth, I feel I am deceiving you. I didn’t ask if you’d told her. You looked so vulnerable where you sat in your shirt, not touching your broken rice, and at that moment I understood. I understood what growing up like that had done to the boy you’d been, to your ability to love and to believe that someone else might love you back. How could I reject that, stamp it as undesirable, defect, push it out of my life? When it was you, you were that history, that inability to trust, that emotional handicap. You, who’d been the only one to get it, who’d taken me to a different planet, made me feel I was on ecstasy. Who’d looked at me from a face full of scars, pus and stitches and made me feel like I’d been clubbed in the stomach. You wore scars when I met you. I knew, I knew what you were, but I didn’t know what it would do to me.