You wonder now why he would include this footage of himself — why stitch together all this video of her bizarre behavior, alongside his own, and keep it locked up in a safe? It’s like a secret affirmation of their connection to each other. An act of communion with someone he has already lost.
The video stutters, and you skip to the next scene, which is again at night and looks at first like a replay of the previous scene. Sonny is naked again, his back to the camera, the knife again in one hand as he’s touching himself with the other. But it’s another night. She’s lying on the bed beside the long pillow she always hugged in her sleep, her slender arms visible atop the blanket though her face is obscured in the shadows.
A moment later he sets the knife on the nightstand and draws back the blanket. Slowly he lifts her nightgown, drags her underwear down her legs. He crawls on top of her. His movements are careful, unhurried, soundless. His broad back conceals her face entirely, but you can see that her body has not yet moved, not on its own.
THIS WAS THE MOMENT, she told Victor, that stopped her heart. She wanted to turn off the video, throw the remote at the TV. But she couldn’t look away. She forced herself to keep watching, to confront it all no matter what new horror came into view, until suddenly it did: she saw those thin arms beneath him move and snake themselves around his back, the hands clawing now at his head, his neck, his spine. The legs were moving under him too, wrapping themselves around his backside. She heard a voice groan in the video, a distant sound, and realized it was her own voice, though it sounded deep and throaty and alien.
When at last he finished and moved off into the bathroom, the body fell still as though it had never awakened, the face a shadowy blur. He returned with a towel to clean the body, but it might as well have been a corpse on the bed.
Only then did she flip off the TV and rush to the light switch. She retched into the wastebasket. The office door remained locked no matter how much she wrenched the knob. The room must have felt a mile underground.
They had not touched each other in over half a year. The last time he kissed her, she insisted to Victor, was the night he threw her down the stairs, months ago. The last time he saw her naked was when her arm was in a cast and she couldn’t bathe herself. She was convinced of all this, that she could not have tolerated being intimate with him that entire time — except for the possibility that she had somehow forgotten, or been drugged, or been out of her mind. Was that truly her on the video? What else had he done and what else had she forgotten? What else was on those other five tapes?
She didn’t have the stomach to see anymore. What made her most ill was her last reaction, when those thin arms awakened and started touching him all over and she found herself more horrified than if the body had not moved at all.
It was now two in the morning. He must have locked the office and expected her to sleep through the night — that deep and impenetrable sleep of hers that was more an affliction than a rest from anything.
She ejected the tape. She put it back inside the safe, but then changed her mind and pulled it back out, along with one of the handguns. She buried both at the bottom of her handbag.
She turned off the lights and lay back down on the couch after swallowing two more sleeping pills. The darkness swam around her, she said, for hours.
It was Junior who woke her in the morning with a bowl of ramen, a cup of coffee, and another apology for his father.
VICTOR WAS LOOKING from Mai to me, gauging our thoughts.
“Anyway,” he concluded. “That’s what finally did it for her. She said she had to leave after that — no matter what.”
He fell silent, averting his eyes like he’d run out of things to say.
Mai drank from her watered-down Coke. His story had disturbed her, and she was trying not to show it. She wiped her mouth with her fingers. “So you believe her, then. That Sonny’s capable of killing her.”
“Mr. Nguyen is capable of anything. But your mother was afraid of herself too.” He nodded at the videotape in front of us. “Especially after she saw that. She told me to keep it in case something bad happened to her. As proof, I guess. I’m giving it to you now.”
Mai shook her head slightly. She nudged the tape toward me. “You’ve told me enough.”
I fingered the tape, inspected it, and knew I would have to watch it, that I both wanted to and was afraid to. I imagined Suzy sitting alone in that dark locked office, petrified in the white glow of the TV screen. What horrified her most about seeing herself in the video — what she had forgotten, what she didn’t know, or what she recognized?
“Proof of what?” I said. “This tape doesn’t prove anything — except that she’s sick and that your boss is a perverted fuck. What use is that to anyone? Victor. . why have you been telling us all this?”
The question startled him. He seemed sheepish for a moment, as though realizing that he’d gotten carried away with what he’d divulged, even with what he felt.
“She wanted me—” he replied meekly before beginning again. “The last time I saw her, a week ago in the hotel room, before she disappeared, she asked me if I was sure I wanted to help her. When I nodded, she asked me to kneel on the floor and close my eyes, and then she prayed over me. I didn’t like that. It made me feel like all those people, the ones I’ve had to hurt, begging me not to hurt them.”
He spoke haltingly, and it made his face appear pathetic.
“Before I left, she gave me an envelope. She asked me not to open it until I was home alone. It was a letter. Things she couldn’t say in person, I guess.” Victor looked at Mai. “The last thing she wrote was that if something happened to her, I had to protect you. And no matter what, even if it meant hurting her, I had to make sure you got the money. Every last dollar.”
Mai wasn’t even blinking, probably thinking about the money again, but no doubt reminded of her own letters too, wherever they were. I could see it clearly now, the orphan in both of them.
“So where is she now?” she asked.
“She didn’t share that part of her plan — and I have no way of reaching her. We figured the less I know about that, the better.”
“Your mother’s probably long gone then,” I said.
“I’d say yes,” Victor agreed as he pocketed his cell phone.
Mai sat up. “You never told us how you got your share of the money.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want it.” He rose heavily from the table to put on his jacket, then stood before us with a philosophical air. “She said something. That she’d been asleep all these years, ever since the night she left Vietnam. Got me thinking, I guess — of my last night in Vietnam, the last thirteen years of my life here.”
A ceiling fan spun slowly above his head, dragging shadows across his face. Who knew if the kid truly regretted the shit he’d done for Sonny, but it was clear he didn’t enjoy it anymore. It occurred to me that Suzy had not only been exposing his boss to him, she’d been confessing all the dark ugly things about herself too, the same thing that Victor — maybe without intending to — had just done with us.
He checked his watch and said to Mai, “I’d say you have until eight thirty tonight. At nine my brother and I will be replaced at our post. Mr. Jonathan’s orders. Go home, Chi Mai, and get everything you need, then go back to the Coronado. Park on Ogden Avenue and use the south entrance. My brother won’t see you there. Get your money in room 1215, all of it, and leave town. Go somewhere far away. I’m heading back to the hotel now to do my job, but I will see to it that you’re safe. On my brothers’ lives, I won’t let anyone stop you.”