Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Captain China BRUCE McALLISTER

NO ONE KNOWS CAPTAIN China the way I know Captain China. No one sees him do what I see him do. I look down from my window on the hill and watch him walking the rooftops of Chinatown every night. I watch him climb the demon slides of the pagoda roof of the Ching Po Restaurant, where he looks out at the city lights, searching for someone, searching for me.

I see him look down at the round-eyed tourists, who are dressed so strangely and who never look up at him. I watch him save a kitten that has gotten lost on a roof. I watch him carry it in one hand as he leaps bravely from roof to roof, landing far below in the alley, which smells the way I imagine Chinatown smells—like the streets of My Tho when I was little, but different, because it is not My Tho. It is Chinatown, and the My Kong Delta is far away.

I watch him set the kitten free. I watch him watch it wander away happy.

I cannot see his face—so much like mine—from this window, but I see it in my dreams. I see his eyes, which are like mine. I see his skin which is paler than mine because my father’s people left China so long ago that their skin darkened and their bodies grew smaller and thinner. I see the special suit he wears, his “cloak,” which clings to his body like a woman’s glove and sparkles in the night like the Phoenix Bird my father’s brother told us of, how its magic was stronger than the Tiger’s, though it never brought harm to a soul.

His suit sparkles in the night on the roofs of Chinatown but only I can see it. Because he wants it that way. He wants me to know he is looking, looking for me.

We have a secret, don’t we, Chu—you and I? he tells me in my dream, as if we were in a comic book together.

The comic books that Mister Thupak brings for me to read (because he will not let me leave this room to get them for myself) are not in the language of my people or Mister Thupak’s or even Chinese. But I have studied them and I know what those heroes do. We had comic books in My Tho—where I was born—and in the Thai camps, and in the bigger camp in Malaysia. Everywhere you go in the world, there are comic books, I know. That is how I know what the green man with the lamp is able to do, or the man who looks like a bat, or the man who is afraid of the green rock, or the man who climbs the sides of buildings. They are heroes because they want to save us. They want to save people who are about to be robbed. They want to save children who have no parents and kittens from rooftops. It is all the same for them. It is what they do. They do it sometimes without people knowing it, and they do it without asking for thanks. They spend their lives looking for ones to save—in cities, in rooms just like mine. That is why they are our heroes, why there are comic books in every country about them, and why so many of them have names like the one I have given my friend: Captain China.

Captain China has come from a world far far away, he tells me, in my dreams. He, too, is looking for someone to save—

Someone like me.

The most famous story in my country is not a comic book. It is the story of Kim Van Kieu, a girl who does what she must because it is right. She gives up the young man she loves to take care of her father. She gives up a free life, out of duty. She gives up everything, because she must so that she will know, at the end of the her life, that she has lived her life correctly, and, most importantly, so that she will not have to return to this world and live again.

If I could believe that my own life is like hers, I would be happy. But it is difficult to do. I have lost everything—but for what? For the men who come to me in this room?

Captain China knows I am somewhere, but not where. Mister Thupak, the villain, has hidden me very well. If I try to escape, Mister Thupak will catch me and beat me. If I try to shout through the window (to let Captain China know where I am, of course), Mister Thupak will catch me and beat me. The window is never open. My shout cannot get out. The walls are thick, not like those of the house of my childhood. With the windows closed and the walls so thick Captain China cannot find me, except in dreams. This is the way of his kind, he tells me. If you cannot find the one you love in the real world, there are always dreams…

In my dreams he smiles, to let me know he is looking, and that he will not stop.

The men that Mister Thupak brings to my room are of many kinds. Some wear expensive clothes—suits like the ones I see on the tourists down the hill, or suits made in Hong Kong, or suits I have never seen before. Some are dressed no better than Mister Thupak himself, smelling like him. Are they his cousins or brothers? I must wonder. Some of the men who come to my room speak languages I have heard before, though I do not understand them. Some do not. If they speak the language of my own people, I do not hear it. I do not want to. Some want me to face them when I do what they want me to do, or when they do to me what they want to do. A few ask only that I stand by the window, so that they can see me in the sunlight. That is all. They look at me and touch themselves and then leave. Most ask me to get down on my hands and knees, tell me not to look at them. This is what I prefer. This way I cannot see them. I can close my eyes and see Captain China jumping from roof to roof, his dark cape flying behind him. This is what I would rather see.

The touch of skin is the touch of skin, but people—no matter who they are—are more than this. They are what they feel. I know what the men feel who come to my room. I know what Captain China feels.

I would rather see Captain China, and by seeing him, feel what he must feel.

They do not hit me, or if they do, it is only once or twice. Mister Thupak has his rules. Mr. Thupak may hit me—if I am standing by the window when he comes in with nuoc mam or pho soup from the restaurant, or if one of the men complains that I have not been worth the money and tells Mister Thupak, with words or gestures of the hand, what I did wrong. But the men, they cannot—unless they have paid for it—and even then, only once or twice.

Captain China knows about all of this, and it makes him angry. He believes that no one should hit a boy like me. He says this in my dreams. He says it with tears in his eyes, so I know that he is feeling it.

This room is on the highest hill in Chinatown, but Chinatown isn’t Chinatown any longer. There was a part of Saigon called Cholon, I remember. A part where the people spoke Chinese. Maybe it is still there, maybe not. After the war many people left Cholon to come across the ocean, just as I did, to the Chinatown in this city, and by coming they have changed it. They speak Chinese but are not Chinese. They are from my country, yet we do not speak the same language. They have money. My father’s people do not. I can see them on the streets in my dreams. I can hear them speaking Chinese, though I do not know that language. Were it not for my dreams—and the nuoc mam and pho that Mister Thupak brings from a restaurant down the hill—I would not know any of this. I would sit in my room without anyone to talk to and not know how Chinatown has changed.

When, in my dreams, I hear the Cholonese of this Chinatown speak my language (because they know both languages, because they had to) I am sad. I wake up crying. How could hearing your father’s language not make you sad? I ask myself.

When people lose what is most important to them, they are always sad. That is how people are. No matter where they go, or what they do, or what is done to them afterward, they are sad.

Could he speak my father’s language, Mister Thupak—who is darker than my people, whose eyes are rounder than mine, whose hair is coarse and very dark—would call me moi. That is our word for animal—and it is the word we use for the simple people who live in the mountain jungles of our country and live like animals.

That is how I live—like an animal, on my hands and my knees in a little room full of the sounds each night that animals make. That is how Mister Thupak has kept me since he bought me four years ago.

That would be the word he would use.

I can hear children playing in the apartments across the alley. I do not need dreams for this. They have found a metal hoop and nailed it to the wall above the automobiles that are parked there. They try to make a ball go through the hoop. They laugh when it does. They laugh when it does not. I remember phung thy and muong, but not this game. It is a game they have learned here. They have families. Their aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters came with them, were not left behind, did not die when the boats sank or the Thai pirates came. They did not have to say good-bye to each other in camps. Perhaps (I tell myself) they did not have to come in boats at all—perhaps they came another way—and that is why they are still together. Can cha hoa. The luck of the lucky.

I saw (in a dream last night) Captain China walking on the roof of their apartment building, so close. He does not know roofs like these. In his world, there are only buildings of glass reaching like hands toward the sky. I saw him looking down at their hoop and wondering to himself: Why do they wish to put a ball through a hoop when there is a boy—alone in a room somewhere in Chinatown—who is unhappy, who is so much more important than any ball?

He was so close, yet he could not hear me.

I was crying.

In the dream.

I do not know the man who comes to my room today. He has never visited before. His skin is as dark as Mister Thupak’s, but there are freckles on it, something I have never seen on someone so dark. He grabs me by the hair (which I must keep long, Mister Thupak says, because most men like it this way) and hits me in the face. He is the kind of man who will hit me once—I know this—but whether he wants me to cry or be silent, I do not know. I do not know what kind of man he is except that he will hit me once. I am silent. I do not cry, and I know this is right. He does not get angry. He grabs me and turns me so that I am facing the wall. He says something in his language. It is rough, yes, but it is only a sound.

He wants me to hurt, but he does not want me to cry. He is that kind of man, I see now.

He pushes me down, so that I am on my hands and knees. He gets behind me. I hear the animal—the one I always hear. A tiger, a dragon whose breath is like rotting cloth. The animal begins to chase me through the great shadows of the U Minh Forest, where my family lived for a year, past the Hoa Binh rebels in their dirty camps, through the great bomb craters that filled with rainwater (catching the light of every sunset), through the paddy water where dead bodies floated like dolls. The animal growls. It grunts, wanting to kill me and eat me. It chases me on to the sands of the South China Sea, into the water, into the beautiful sea, where the boat sank and my uncle—

I close my eyes. I see him. I see Captain China. I see his head turn to listen. He hears it, the hideous sound. It makes him angry, but what can he do? He does not know where I am. He knows only what I am feeling, as I know what he is feeling.

Please, I say.

The animal snarls.

People do not understand. There are no orphans in my country. There never have been. I remember an Englishman talking about this to my father in My Tho, one day when I went with him. The Englishman knew French, as my father did, and so they spoke in French. When we returned home, my father told me what they had talked about. “You have no orphans,” the Englishman had said to him. My father did not understand at first, but no one in my country would have. In my country, there is only family. “Mu cheng ni chuong ma,” we say. “The world ends at the hedgerow,” we say. We have said this for a thousand years. We mean there are no loyalties, no duties, as strong as those of family… nothing that calls to us beyond the thorny hedge around our village. If a child’s parents die, there are aunts and uncles and cousins to take care of him. There is always someone. After all/an “orphan” is but a boy or a girl without family… and in my country this is not possible.

But I am not in my country. I am in the Chinatown of a country far far away, across a sea. Mister Thupak is the one person I know, and he is not family.

Unless a family sells its children for the pleasure of others.

Captain China understands this. He is far from home, too, and he understands. He cannot return until he has done what he must do here—

Which is save someone—someone who needs saving.

Because, he says, of what I did long ago and must be forgiven for…

I do not understand this, but it is true.

Because of what he did long ago and must be forgiven for.

I lie on my bed—which smells of skin and bad dreams—and I dream of the camp in Thailand, where Mai and Cam got sick and were taken away. I see Captain China. I see him going through the camp looking for us, when there are so many others, too. Shouldn’t he save the little boy with one eye from Phankek, the teenage girl so beautiful that even filth cannot make her ugly, the old woman who cries every night for her husband (though he died thirty years ago)?

There are so many here who need saving, and only one Captain China.

When he finds us at last, he is too late. We are in the water, our heads are bobbing, the waves are swallowing us, spitting us out again. The pirates are drifting closer, trying to decide which of us they will leave to drown and which they will pull from the water, dry off, and sell.

He sees us—Mangh and Li and Phue and me—floating in the water, but which will he save first? He is late. There is time only for one. A hero, but only one.

He is crying because he knows he can save but one.

Mangh drowns. I watch his head disappear in the waves and I shout: Save him, Captain China. Save him. Mangh is gone, taken by the water. Li tries to grab the pirate boat, its wooden side, but the pirates aim their rifles and shoot him. I shout: Save Li, Captain China. Save Li! But Li is gone, the water as red as flame trees. Captain China can only watch, his face in pain, his eyes full of sadness as the pirates pull Phue and me from the water because we are young and handsome.

And then Captain China comes for me.

He covers me with his cape, so that I will be invisible—so that the pirates will not see me and I can escape—but I shout: No! Go back to My Tho. Save my mother, Captain China. Go back to the camp. Save my father and uncle. Put the cape around Li or Phue—not me. Without them, I tell him, I am nothing. Do you understand?

I can see this in Mister Thupak’s eyes: You do not exist. You eat nuoc mam, you eat pho soup, you read comic books I give you, but you do not exist. You are nothing.

“You have no orphans,” the Englishman says.

In my dream.

In other dreams I do—I let him save me. I let him come to my room. I let him take me in his arms, and hold me. I feel his skin against mine, my cheek against his chest. I touch his arm with my fingers. He wants nothing from me. I let his cape surround me, so that I will be invisible to the men who visit my room.

This is the dream I love best. The dream I dream to feel happy.

The room smells of the salt and rotten fish of nuoc mam. I have gotten nuoc mam on the comic books. I have been careless. I turn off the light and look out the window into the night. I do not see him on the pagoda roofs of the tourist streets. I do not see him by the statue of the Chinese men who long ago helped build a train track in this country, or in the dark alleys to the west, where you can watch the sun set. For a moment, in the darkness of this room, I am afraid he is gone, he has given up because he is tired of looking. After all, he is only one man.

But then I see him, and it is not a dream. I am not asleep. I see him from the window. He is walking in an alley, one where I have never seen him before.

He keeps his eyes on the pavement, as if looking for something—a footprint, something I might have dropped.

I have never called out to him—because of what Mister Thupak would do to me—but I do it now.

I slide the window open—the one too high for me ever to jump from—and before he can disappear, the way he does in dreams, I shout at him. I shout in my father’s language:

“Chin lo cang! Chin lo cang!”

I am here! I am here!

He turns.

“Muong ki, Captain China!” I shout. “Muong ki!”

The children playing at the hoop look up. They hear me. They shout back, laughing: “Muongchi ki tip! Muong chi ki tip!”

I blink my eyes, looking for him in the shadows of the alley. He was there. I know he was. He turned—I saw him turn. He heard me and he turned—

As the children shout and laugh I see him again, his body still, his eyes looking up at me at last. And then my face hits the window. I cry out. I am jerked back into the room.

I do not know what happens next. I am on the floor. My head is under the bed. Mister Thupak is beating me. He beats the parts of my body that are not under the bed. He beats them with his piece of wood.

I wake up in the morning with my head under my bed. My lips are hurting. My face feels like fire. I cannot move my arm.

I do not want to move. I want to lie here forever. I want to be nothing.

I have tried to keep it from Mister Thupak—these marks on my skin, this cough. I hide my arms from him. I scratch my face and arms so that he will think it is only scratches—ones left by some man—and he will shout at me for that. If I am ill, the men will not want me, I know, and what would happen then? What would Mister Thupak do then?

I have not looked out the window for many days. I have not dreamed of him.

When I go to the window I shake. It is as if Mister Thupak were standing behind me, waiting.

I am weak. I have been weak for thirteen days.

I do not see him when I close my eyes. I see nothing because I am nothing.

I dream of the lepers on the beach at Can Tho, the ones I saw with my mother and my aunt. I dream of the camps where the skin peeled from our feet like white rubber, hurting us.

I dream of skin.

Why would Captain China want to see me this way, my skin like this?

Mister Thupak points to the scratches on my face and asks questions. I do not understand the words, but I know what he asks. He grabs at me. I step back. He grabs at me again, catches my arm and holds it, looking at the scratches. He looks at my face. I am thinner. He can see this. The marks, the thinness, and my cough—which he has heard through the door. He is thinking:

The men will not want him now.

When he leaves, I lie down. I am breathing hard and I cannot stop.

Please, I say. Please.

Mister Thupak comes to my room and puts a cream the color of my skin on my face and arms, where the marks and scratches are. He makes a coughing sound and shakes his head. If you cough, I will beat you. He will. He changes the sheets on my bed. He opens the window to let in air, to let out the smell of nuoc mam and illness. He points a little can in the air and sprays it. It smells like familiar flowers.

A man comes to me two days later. He is thin like a wire and his eyes are like empty jars. But when he looks at me, his eyes fill with happiness. He is thinking of death—my death—how he will do it—and it makes him happy. I tell myself I am mistaken, but when I look at those eyes again, I know I am not. I have not seen eyes like his since the South China Sea, but I argue with myself. I say: He will only dream it while he is with you. Chu—he will not really do it. Mister Thupak will not let him. Mister Thupak can hide your illness with cream and still make money from you.

I say this to myself, but I am weak. I cannot think clearly. I cannot stand up without shaking. I am afraid.

He gestures to me, like the others. He knows I do not speak his language. I take the position he wishes me to and no longer have to see his eyes. I feel him against me and then something cold against my neck.

I jerk away. He swears, angry, but the cold metal—I have never felt this before—makes me jerk. I cannot help myself.

I know what it is.

It is a gun. He likes to do this, I tell myself. He likes to scare his young men. He likes to imagine things when he is with them—like that man two years ago who paid Mister Thupak to have me cut myself, so that he could see my blood; that man a year ago who wore a special shirt with buttons to hurt me; that man six months ago who wanted me to believe he was going to blind me with his knife… so that he could feel my fear.

No. I am wrong.

This is the last man, I realize now.

He has paid Mister Thupak more money than I can imagine to kill me—to be inside me when I die.

Because Mister Thupak no longer wants me. Because I am sick and no one will want me now. If he can get this money—so much—before people hear how sick I am, he has not lost everything.

This man will grow ill and die. He doesn’t know it, though I do. But it doesn’t matter. I will die now, instead of later—that is all.

I close my eyes. He has begun to move against me. I feel his bones. It is difficult for him to stay still. A cough slips between my teeth. He should sound like an animal to me, but he does not. He sounds like a man, that is all. A man hurting me a little but not as much as some.

The metal wobbles. Can he do it? Can he hold the gun long enough?

He makes his sounds. The cold metal presses harder on my ear and I know it will be soon. It will be sooner than he imagined, because he is so excited. He wants his moment to be the same as mine, and my moment, the bullet from his gun.

I see Captain China. He is standing in front of me, so close that I could touch him, or him, me. I try to see his face clearly and cannot. He has no face. No eyes, no lips—

I do not understand this.

And I do not understand what happens next.

A window breaks, the screen tears, something slips in. The room fills with a wind. It is a dream, I tell myself, something I am dreaming from the illness. The cold metal at my neck jerks away, the body against me jerks away, the man is screaming. The door into the room opens, slamming. I hear Mister Thupak’s voice. Then he is screaming too. The room explodes with the bullet. I hear nothing else. The screams are gone. The voices are gone. I am deaf. I feel only the wind rushing through the room.

Something grabs me, lifts me into the air, and puts me back down again.

I know what is happening.

He has found me through dreams. He has found me at last.

I start to cough and cannot stop.

I am standing. I am weak but I am standing. It is as if the illness were only a waiting, and the waiting is over. I start to look down at the floor, to see what is lying there, when I have not been hurt, but a voice—one I can hear even in the deafness—tells me: No. It is the voice from my dreams. His voice. There is indeed something on the floor—a body, two—and he would prefer that I not look at them.

If you do, Chu, the voice tells me, you will be afraid.

I will never be afraid of you, I tell him.

I look at him instead, standing beside me—the way I have always dreamed he would—and as I do, I start to scream.

His head is the color of red wine, old blood in a glass. Things move under its skin, folding against each other.

I look at his face, but it is not a face—and I go on screaming.

The smile is not a smile. It is a wound at the top of the head, a mouth that never closes, never eats. The eyes—all six of them, not shaped like mine at all—are not eyes, but gills like a shark’s at the fish market in Can Tho.

I cannot look anymore. He says: You must. It is time.

My heart moves in my chest like the engine of an old boat. My eyes want to find his face—the one from dreams.

Look at me, he says. I do.

The cape is not a cape. It is even darker than his skin. It moves like an animal, one that lives and eats and will do anything for him—even kill.

He says: Touch it. And I do.

The cape shifts like fog. It makes a sound like teeth on glass. It moves away from me, unsure.

He speaks to it. He tells it to be still, to let me touch it.

I touch it again and see a dog. I see a monkey, because it wishes me to, because he has told it to. I see a man—one with a cape and a smile just like mine, eyes like mine. It will show me whatever I need to see, to stop screaming.

And I would be screaming if it weren’t for the monkey and the smile.

Instead, I am crying.

I thought, I tell him, that you were a man.

The cape moves. I smell the jasmine of My Tho. I see the flame trees of Hue and the sands of Vung Tau, where my mother and father met, and the blue waters of the South China Sea. I see my mother and my father by the hedgerow of our village, my uncles and aunts, my brothers and sisters and cousins. I see myself standing with them, my family. I am with them again.

Without the people you love, you are nothing.

For you, the voice says, I am.

He is taking me away, he tells me now. He is taking me home—not to my parents’ country, no, but to his world, where there are no beaches, though water laps at the roots of trees, where the trees grow down instead of up, toward water, where buildings grow like crystals toward the light, and two suns set like eyes at evening, like flowers, and when these suns have set, the winds begin to roar. Where children that do not look like children laugh and play with their own dark capes, which are not really capes, but living things, until these things learn what the children wish them to do…carrying them into the sky on those winds, hiding them from what might hurt them, playing with them if they are bored.

Why? I ask him.

I killed a creature long ago, he tells me again. I should not have. There was no reason except anger. It wasn’t even my world, so the anger was only vanity. I must save another, if I am to save myself…

That is what his kind believes.

This is what it has been like for them on their world, and on the worlds they have known.

Without forgiveness, we have only our own darkness, he says.

We will go the way I came, he says.

How? I ask. On a boat? A plane?

Yes, he says. On a thing like a boat. But there is no way for you to really understand, he says.

I can take you away, he says, his eyes again like mine, his hand—like my father’s, bony and wrinkled—reaching out as if to touch me. But that is all I can do, Chu.

What does he mean?

I can take you away, the voice says. I can heal your sickness, but I cannot touch you.

I understand.

He cannot hold me. He cannot hold me naked in his arms the way I have dreamed he would.

I understand, I say.

I try to.

I do.

And then he is taking his cape, unwinding it from his back, and putting it on my shoulders. I do not understand why. I do not understand why he would do this, for when it touches me, it enfolds me like someone else’s skin, someone else’s blood, water I cannot breathe in, and I can barely scream. I barely have enough air to scream.

And then it passes.

I breathe again.

I feel what he has always felt. What his kind has always felt:

To be held forever by someone—or something—that will always be yours…

I’ll get another one on the boat, he says brightly.

It is Captain China saying this, grinning, ready for our adventure.

The room begins to spin like another dream, and I go with him where this story, this comic book that is ours and ours alone, wants us to go.