works by william pham, 2005-present
Two bowls of pho on a Sunday evening
We sat across from each other in the little family-owned Vietnamese restaurant waiting for our bowls of pho. She had ordered the pho bo vien, beef meatballs and rice noodle soup, and I had ordered the pho tai chin, thin slices of rare steak and tender brisket with rice noodles. We sipped espresso mixed with condensed milk and served on ice in the Vietnamese style; I held my glass to my lips while leaning back in my cheap plastic chair, while she hunched over her glass and drank slowly from a straw.
Behind her, a plasma-screen TV displayed a Chinese period drama dubbed over in Vietnamese, replete with extravagant costumes and exaggerated facial expressions. I didn't understand Vietnamese, so as the mismatched voices spoke in hieroglyphics, I filled in the blanks myself, thinking:
"No...you mustn't, or our father will surely discover my secret love affair!" says the youngest daughter, eyes wet with artificial tears, as she clings to the satin gown of her eldest sister.
"I must protect the honor of our family! Your little tryst will be the undoing of us all if I allow it to go on!" shrieks the eldest sister before she slaps the youngest daughter.
Pause for dramatic effect; the accompanying soundtrack reaches an appropriately sentimental crescendo.
Then: the middle sister enters, her face drained of color.
"Father...he has...!"
Her eyes roll back into her head and she faints; the eldest sister barely catches her in time before she falls to the ground, and as she cradles the middle sister in her arms, she stares venomously at the youngest sister.
Shouts from the father echo through the hallways; venom turns to despair, and then -- cut -- end of the episode.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked, shifting the ice cubes in her glass around with her straw.
"Nothing," I said.
The ceiling fan spun in circles overhead, oblivious to the world. How nice would it be to live the life of a ceiling fan, or television, or cash register? These machines were built for an express purpose and spent their existences fulfilling these simple purposes. I read somewhere once that old machines had souls, like vinyl record players and telegraphs, but why couldn't new machines have souls too? That's like fundamentalist religions denouncing other religions, Christians telling non-Christians that they're going to hell, Muslims labeling non-Muslims as infidels. Apples telling oranges they aren't real fruit because they don't have cores.
Do you have a soul, Mr. Ceiling Fan?
"Can I tell you what I'm thinking about?" she asked.
"Sure," I said.
"I feel this overwhelming desire to...to destroy something," she said. Noticing the surprised expression on my face, she began to speak faster. The words came pouring out like coins from a slot machine. "Hear me out. I haven't gone crazy, if that's what you're thinking, and I'm not going to become some serial arsonist or anything, and I don't want to hurt anyone. I definitely don't want to hurt anyone. You know me, I couldn't hurt a fly, literally. Even if it landed on my birthday cake and started eating without having been invited to the party. I can't kill spiders or ants or mosquitoes or gnats or anything."
It was true. Every time she had an insect or arachnid problem, she called me, her voice high-pitched. In cases like that, I imagined her as a cat in a cartoon after a gunshot, clinging to the ceiling, fur sticking straight out from her back.
"Anyway, I feel this insane urge to do the exact opposite of creation. I mean, some people feel that need to create, to leave something behind as proof of their existence. You know, like building cathedrals, or painting murals, or inventing the telephone. But I don't want to do any of those things."
Her glass was still half full of that rich hazel-colored mixture of espresso and condensed milk, looking more like a glass of melted coffee ice cream than anything else. I had a sudden craving for coffee ice cream. My favorite brand was Häagen-dazs.
"Are you even listening?" she asked. She clenched her teeth.
"You can't invent the telephone again. It's already been invented," I said.
She sighed.
"That's not the point. The point is, I have to destroy something. It's not a question of will I, or should I, or can I destroy something. There is no question; the question's been answered, and the answer is that I have to reduce something to nothing. I have to turn two plus two equals four into zero. But I don't know how, or what, when, where, any of that. The details have completely escaped me; all I have inside of my core is that inescapable thirst. I don't know, it's like the gears have clicked into place for the first time in my life and I never expected it to be like this."
"Does it have to be something beautiful?" I asked.
"What?"
"You know, like that Palahniuk book. 'I want to destroy something beautiful,' or something along those lines. The protagonist was crazy, though."
"No, no -- you are absolutely no help at all!" She leaned back, crossed her arms, and blew her bangs out of her eyes, admitting final defeat like the Emperor of Japan telling the people of Japan that he was not a living god.
"Sorry," I said. I really meant it, too. I wanted to help her, but how was I supposed to know how to handle this? I've never really wanted to destroy something, or create something. I mostly just drank coffee, read books, and occasionally went to class. Debris floating along the river of human existence, and here she was, like a great white shark, tearing down the river, devouring fish all along the way in desperation, sucking in the fresh water by the gallon as if by pretending it were salt water, she could live. I had no idea why she had picked me to be her friend in the first place.
And she had most definitely chosen me; no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
---
We met for the first time in this exact same family-owned Vietnamese restaurant. I was eating the same thing I was eating now, drinking the same thing I was drinking now. But she was the kind of person who ordered a different thing every single time; to her, having a "usual" was a crime of the highest order. It took her a long time to get over that part of me; whenever I ordered, she looked like she wanted to sentence me to the guillotine. Her eyes would narrow, her nostrils would flare, her cheeks would get a little bit redder; she could've easily played the part of the indignant French revolutionary circa 1789, and when I told her that, she shifted gears, laughed and said that that was one of the reasons why she liked me.
Anyway, there I was, eating my pho tai chin, drinking my ca phe sua da, and catching up on my Dostoyevsky, when she sat down across from me without a word.
"What're you reading?" she asked.
"Crime and Punishment," I said, not looking up. It hadn't sunk in yet that a complete stranger had just seated herself across from me and asked me what I was reading. It took a few full, round seconds to register, and then I put my book down: "Wait, what?"
"Just curious. You like to read?" Back then, she had one of those beatnik haircuts, with the straight, even bangs falling just above her eyebrows; it was dyed a bright, pulsing color somewhere in between blood red and sunset orange. She even had those black wasp-eye sunglasses; later, she would tell me she liked to wear them when she talked to strangers because they made her look mysterious. Her t-shirt declared "bacon is a vegetable," with a cartoon pig's head replacing the "o" in "bacon," and her jeans were the kind of faded that comes from wearing them a lot, not the pre-faded kind that cost an extra hundred dollars. A veritable great white shark.
We spent hours talking about books, literature, plays, music, everything from Chaucer to Chopin, Dostoyevsky to Duran Duran, Ferlinghetti to the Flaming Lips. She preferred to shoplift CDs instead of downloading music because it was "more tangible," and she always got the hottest kind of salsa available when we went for tacos. In fact, she was something of a spiciness aficionado -- some people could rattle off year and location of origin of a thousand different wines; she could do the same thing for all sorts of peppers.
I learned everything I knew about her at weekly rendezvous at the Vietnamese restaurant over the course of two years. We had never verbally agreed on anything, but a week after that first meeting, when I walked into the restaurant, she was already there, sitting at the same table I had been sitting at. We never exchanged phone numbers, or e-mail addresses, or even last names. I was me and she was her, and that was that.
---
"I'm done," she announced. She stood, wiped her mouth clean with a napkin, crumpled it up and threw it on the table, then pulled her wallet out of her back pocket. She was wearing the same jeans, as always. For the first time, I wondered if she ever wore anything else. Or any underwear, for that matter. Not like I'd ever find out -- but my mind continued thinking along those lines, the out-of-control train heading into the abandoned coal mine after the villain has changed the direction of the track.s.
I shifted my weight, never more thankful for the existence of tables than at that single uncompressed moment in time.
"Hey," I said. "I'll pay this time." I don't know why I offered, and it looked like she didn't know either. Her eyes tried to divine the hidden meanings in my words, but there were none. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
After a while, she said, "Okay," and pushed her wallet back into her pocket.
I drank down the rest of the melted ice from my glass and went to the counter to pay. When I had finished, I turned around to say something witty to her, but she was gone. And then I forgot the witty thing I was going to say. It was a lose-lose situation, no matter how you look at it.
---
I never saw her again after that Sunday evening. I asked everyone who worked at that Vietnamese restaurant if they knew who she was, but they didn't have any answers for me. The pho tai chin lost its familiar, welcoming taste, and the contrasting sweetness and bitterness of the ca phe sua da no longer appealed to me. I stopped going to the restaurant.
I started reading the newspapers every day, checking for reports of condemned buildings burned in midnight fires, bank robberies, or acts of random vandalism, perpetrated by a young female.
But nothing ever came up. After I graduated from college, I gave up trying to find her. I moved to a new city, started working full-time. My copy of Crime and Punishment gathered dust in a box tucked into the corner of my closet.
I never did find out why she chose me, of all people, to sit across from; why she chose to share her Sunday evenings with me over the better part of two years. No amount of soul-searching would provide me with the answer to that, so I gave up on that, too.
But every once in a while, I'll imagine us sitting across from each other in some sort of metaphysical Vietnamese restaurant, figuratively eating two bowls of pho on a Sunday evening in the infinite depths of time and space and imagination.
"I loved you," she would say.
"I know," I would say.
"But I was a great white shark, and you were you. It never would have worked out."
"I know."
But I didn't, really. I didn't know anything except for what I could see with my own two eyes, floating down the river of human existence.
copyright (c) 2005 by william pham