AllFreeNovel
Share Us
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
As Halloween slidpast, I became increasingly concerned that something was wrong. For the first time, I was presented with a problem I could not think my way clear of. Nor could I think what Nao Kao was possibly thinking every time he raised the subject of staying in the U.S., which he did now with increasing urgency. I tried to brush it off, but still, he persisted. I grew frustrated. The terms of his visa could not have been clearer, the latest date of his legal departure from this country inked in red alongside the landing permission when he arrived. I considered again the investment in his education, the ways in which his country was depending on him putting his American experience to good use. How could I take that away from him? How could I take him away from Laos? To say nothing of the wife, waiting at home, going on a second year now, and the babes in arms, one, at least, still recovering from malaria and wretchedly thin. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. Didn’t Nao Kao know? Feelings did not matter. Obligations mattered. Policies and procedures mattered. Emotion could not enter the equation. After all, there were rules and there were strictures.
I reminded him only of the complication with the visa; he did not, or at least he should not, need me to remember his duty to his family.
At night when I waited for sleep to come, I would try to picture what their good-byes must have entailed, envisioned him at the airport, awkwardly embracing his wife, their babies between them, or maybe the babies were home with a grandmother, and it was just the two young parents, there at the airport, reassuring themselves that the years would pass quickly, that this was, as Nao Kao had once remarked, the best way. It was not every day you had the chance to go study at one of the world’s great universities, to rub elbows and exchange ideas with leading luminaries in the field, certainly not if you were from Laos. The future would open before them in ways neither could have imagined from the inside of a refugee camp. And then she was gone and it was just him, wandering the terminal, alternately floating above the clouds or staring at the white caps below, wide awake the whole, long way.
I couldn’t fathom what he was thinking.
“More power to you,” I replied, tersely, when he told me in the clearest terms possible that he had discovered the loophole that would allow him to remain.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I turned forty-threein the middle of the pandemic, deep into January as thousands died each day. I made myself cookies and pretended not to care. To a certain extent, I did not: friends with spring birthdays would soon be celebrating lockdown-style for a second year in a row. Pouting would have been petty; in the face of global pandemic, one homebound birthday hardly merited mention. In the midst of so much carnage – half a million dead in America and counting – I was just grateful to begin another trip around the sun.
If Nao Kao never wished me a happy birthday – and he did not – he did send his own enigmatic acknowledgement of the day. As always, it came in the middle of the night, a collage of portraits, not of him but of his beloved motorbike. He had ridden around Vientiane and over hill and dale to Luang Prabang. In each one, his bike was positioned carefully in front of various landmarks or landscapes, intricate architecture in some, the soaring layered roofs pointing skyward, the native flora, the ginger or orchids or bamboo or ferns in others. In every picture, positioned between the handlebars, was a little brown cow.
I drove to my office to enlarge the pictures on the biggest monitors I could access to confirm that I was not seeing things. I had given him that cow, though how it had survived the humidity of the tropics for twenty years, let alone a succession of small hands, was a thought to behold. It was a gag gift on Halloween, inspired when I had overheard him struggling through the static and echoes of a bad connection with a customer service representative three continents away.
What need he had for customer service eludes me still, but after being asked to repeat his name for a third time, Nao Kao resorted to the use of homonyms. “Nao” and “now, as in at this moment” were homonyms, as were “Kao” and “cow, as in cattle.” At last the hapless creature at the far end of the line understood. “Oh, Mr. Inthavong,” she said with astounding clarity, “your name is Nao Kao, like ‘how now brown cow?’”
“Yes,” Nao Kao responded, “like that.” He rolled his eyes, annoyance etched on his features. “How hard was it, really?” he asked me when he finally hung up.
“You know I’m the wrong person to ask,” I said, and he laughed.
“Right. You are not actually American. It’s okay, I like you anyway, Liss.”
I laughed genuinely to hear my sarcasm reflected back at me so accurately and flashed my best smile, two rows of startlingly white, perfectly aligned teeth just to prove I did have something of my compatriots in me.
A few days later, when I saw the little brown cow with those great glass eyes in the greeting card section at Meijer, I couldn’t resist. Knowing that it had survived this long touched me as much as that he enlisted it for a photo shoot.
The next day a picture of his office door arrived, a big block M at eye-level, and the day after that a photo of his bookshelf, where the textbooks he’d pored over in Ann Arbor dominated, the little yellow ‘USED’ tags still affixed to the spine.
Dammit, Nao Kao, I thought, and just when I was convinced that there was nothing more than a loosely woven fabric of an old, familiar friendship between us.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
And then therewas the Valentine, that baffling digital greeting, an enigmatic half-card, half-gift that sent me seeking counsel. A message in a bottle would have perplexed me less.
“Um, this seems pretty straightforward to me, what’s the question?”
For a week I had been ruminating on the meaning of the “Valentine” that Nao Kao sent. Digitally, of course. Two photos, each of them signed. The first was a stylized room service cart, the domed silver warmer lifted to reveal breakfast for two. The other a pair of arms extending a box of strawberries drizzled in chocolate, with “Happy Valentine’s Day” overlaid. There was no mistaking the intricate script. Pictures he had taken? The signature implied that these were pictures he had taken himself, yet there was a blandness to their composition that made me think of stock photos. I couldn’t help but picture him perusing stock photos the way one selected a card from the rack at the Hallmark store.
I was still working through the questions, my mind as yet half-asleep, when my phone buzzed. The coincidence of timing seemed too great. Intuitively, I was certain he had been watching Messenger like a hawk, waiting for the little green dot to tell him I was active.
“So, breakfast in bed and a box of chocolates. How is that for Valentine’s Day?” The message was accompanied by a couple of laughing emojis, no hearts.
“Not too shabby. Though I wouldn’t have complained about a few flowers. Aren’t roses the traditional gift?”
Forty-five minutes later, when I was assembling my own breakfast, decidedly alone and decidedly not in bed, he sent me a shot of a dozen roses accompanied by a half-finished slice of lavishly mouth-watering chocolate cake, the fork poised for another bite.
“Your flowers. And my dessert tonight,” he texted. “But I can share.”
If he was putting it out there that he in any way considered me his Valentine, he had a funny way of doing it: I didn’t hear from him for the rest of the week. Not a picture to wake up to in the morning, not a single note of hello in the evening, no links to articles of mutual interest, not even a response to the work-related email I had sent mid-week. Mercy.
“So how exactly would you describe your, uh, relationship with this guy?” Catherine asked me when I finally put the problem to her.
“What relationship? I don’t think we have one. Or maybe we do, in the same sense that any two individuals or any two objects can be described to be relational to one another.”
