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No response.
“What the hell?” I fumed to Stacy. “The man asked for photos of campus, I sent them, and he didn’t even have the good grace to acknowledge that he received the pictures. They weren’t great, but they were Ann Arbor in spring. Was that not what he requested?”
“Liss, do you remember in the depth of the pandemic when, and this is what you described to me, it was like he put you in his pocket and took you on a tour of the city, that one with all the temples?” my ever-patient therapist asked me by way of response.
“Luang Prabang,” I corrected, reflexively. “Uh huh.” It was never a good sign when she answered my question by posing one of her own.
“Do you know what I’m going to say next?”
“No.” I darted my eyes to the tapestry behind her, to my toes, anywhere but into her gaze.
“Liss.”
“Fine. I think you’re going to tell me that maybe he did not just want a picture of flowers in Ann Arbor. That he could find that online without asking me for it. That maybe the tour he hoped for was more akin to the little journey he took me on, a carefully constructed and narrated tour from the wave fields and woods of North Campus to the Union and Diag and everywhere else.”
If what Nao Kao had offered me was a brief respite from the ironclad grip of the homebound life, perhaps now, as Laos experienced its first cases of COVID as the virus began to hopscotch through mainland Southeast Asia and the stress level ticked another notch higher, now he hoped I might offer him something of the same.
“Now you are getting it,” she beamed at me, and I fidgeted.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what he thinks or wants any more than I do, Stacy.”
“Right, but I’m taking you at your word in terms of ‘high-context,’ and I do know people – it’s my one skill in life. And I also know, again, that none of this is common. There is a definite subtext, I’m sure about that. And since we have both arrived at the same conclusion –”
I stuck out my tongue.
By a similar token, any email I sent, whether professional or one of the personal notes he had repeatedly claimed to enjoy reading would seem to disappear into a black hole, until finally, my patience stretched too far, I asked him whether he read a single message I sent.
“I read every word,” he replied. “I’m just not always great about making sure you know that.”
The next week I sent him a note about summer, my hopes for a “normal” summer with swimming pools and sidewalk chalk and a waning of the restrictions on life that had become so ubiquitous. The next time we texted, he switched the Messenger emoji from the generic thumbs-up to a blazing, yellow sun.
Ever mired in denial, I wanted to believe it was merely a coincidence, and not intended as confirmation that he did, as he’d recently claimed, read and reflect on every word I crafted. I already knew that Nao Kao did not believe in coincidence any more than I did.
Once when we were students, I tried to explain to him how often I felt like I was chasing ghosts. I had almost opted to attend grad school at another university, so strong were the phantoms that lurked in the corners of my mind.
“The universe does not make mistakes; it’s good that you are here,” he replied.
“Maybe. I’m not sure the spirits are always friendly though.”
“Ah, but Liss, la. In Laotian culture we believe in spirits. The land, the water, all have spiritual masters. And of course, the ancestor spirits,” he began, telling me in detail about the PuYer-YaYer, the guardian spirits at the center of the annual Songkran, or New Year festival.
“These spirits are holy, sent from heaven to save humankind. Even today the Lao worship these sacred spirits who destroy demons and darkness on earth.”
How ironic, then, that Nao Kao was to become my own personal ghost, his long shadow quietly haunting my subconscious until, finally, he was forced back into the light.
Despite a career dealing in the currency of cultural difference, I struggled to puzzle out whether this was Exhibit A of said difference, whether our exchanges merely bore the hallmark of affection between friends, and consisted of no more than the normal give and take old friends could share. Always I was conscious of the prospect that whatever tension I sensed was something that felt unusual only to me. Still, I couldn’t entirely eliminate the possibility that this was something more, some kind of long game, and that Nao Kao harbored designs on a future encounter I could not even contemplate. I wanted to reach through the screen, through a dozen time zones and across the thousands of miles, to shake Nao Kao and ask him what was going on.
In truth, if I had harbored even the slightest sliver of hope that he would respond, maybe I would have, but I knew beyond all doubt that he would never show his hand, not unless and until he was ready. Sun Tzu might be my hero, but Lao Tzu was his. No matter how badly I wanted to know the game, I could do naught but let it play out. The ball was in Nao Kao’s court. If he wanted to run out the clock, that was his prerogative. Or, as my Japanese friends reminded me about virtually everything, you just have to be patient.
The arc of his life certainly lent itself to holding his cards close: a childhood in a war-torn land, possible informants in everyone you met. And whether there had been other women over the years, and whether anyone else on earth was aware, I, at least, knew for a fact that once upon a time he had strayed from his marriage vows.
The one time I asked my therapist directly what she thought he wanted, she had, of course, turned the question back on me.
“What do you want, Liss?”
“I don’t have the first clue, if I’m honest, Stacy. Well, I mean, I definitely don’t want to disappear, or for him to, for that matter. I enjoy our conversations. But what I want is to know what he wants.”
“If you don’t know what you want, what makes you think he does either?” Stacy asked me slowly as you might a young child. A young, slow child.
