It's 9:45 on a Wednesday night. I've just finished teaching English to a group of Vietnamese adults. I hustle down the stairs to the basement garage, where my motorcycle is waiting for me. It's a Honda '67, an old 'cafe racer', all polished chrome and deep burgundy paint and tawny leather. I pull off my tie, scrunch up my sleeves, and flip a shiny black helmet onto my head. Then I'm off.
The engine rumbles as I aim the bike up the ramp out of the bowels of the garage. I grip the clutch and kick the bike into second, third, fourth gear in rapid succession. The rumble fades to a gentle hum as I weave through traffic, circumnavigating the night's first roundabout.
I like driving at night. By day the city is chaos - a mad bumbling swarm of wrong-way bicyclists, overloaded xe máy deliverymen, and homicidal bus drivers who careen down the streets with blaring horns and neglected turn signals.
Things are different at night. An occasional reckless drunk hurtles through the intersection, but on the whole the streets are much calmer. The air is different too; the clouds of exhaust fumes have dissipated, carried off by the cooling night breeze. There is a sense of peace on the road - a calm after the storm.
Sometimes I sing as I ride. Old favorites, blues tunes mostly, from Dylan and the Dead and B.B. King. The wind carries my voice away, along with worries of pitch and tune and lyrical accuracy. Only the joy of expression is left. I am not self-conscious. I sing and feel glad.
Even at night, the streets of Saigon offer much to the senses. The flashing neon lights of karaoke parlors illuminate the street-side vendors with their carts of cigarettes and dried squid. Here and there a nightclub blares its music into the road, heavy bass that shakes the chests and draws the eyes of passerby regardless of age, homeland, or occupation. We hear the frantic music and feel a short stab of longing as we pass it by. Shirtless old men fiddle with nameless meats on small grills and clink their beer glasses together, the ice cubes melting slowly in the sultry Saigon night.
The streets of Saigon are lined with trees. Old, majestic trees whose branches reach above all but the tallest buildings. At night they are especially striking, lit up by the city lights, each green leaf sparkling if it turns just the right way. There is something beautifully colonial about the trees - as if a provincial French bureaucrat decided decades ago that boulevards ought to have trees, big ones at that, and somebody should be put to work getting some trees posthaste. There is no debating the aesthetics of the trees.
I try to notice these things as I meander through the familiar maze that leads home. I try to keep my eyes and ears and nostrils open; I pin the throttle and blast through the night, searching for nothing and finding everything. Almost. I am joyful and melancholy, in perfect proportion, the feelings exerting equal force and creating in my mind a vacuum in which there is no 'me', only a neutral observer who sees life as it is and has nothing to say about it. I swerve past a rat dragging half a baguette into the sewer. I look at the woman selling cheap plastic helmets on the corner and wonder when her day will end.
At a certain point in every ride, usually around the corner of Cách Mạng Tháng Tám and Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, my mind drifts away from the city beneath my wheels and floats across the Pacific, beyond the western desert and ascending over the Rocky Mountains until it settles in Denver. She lives there. My heart lives there too. I am homesick for a place that is not my home. I stop at a bún bò Huế stand and buy a bowl of noodles for takeaway. It has become my comfort food.
Before I turn down the alley with the blue-and-white 'Châm Cứu' sign and swerve around a puddle of motor oil outside the mechanic's shop, I realize that every action of my adult life has been cunningly if unconsciously aimed at winning her back. I beep my horn at a stray chicken and understand that every step through the jungle path, every underwater breath, every photograph and fried insect and rickety bus ride are offers of love to her. A love that is reckless and brave, always new, never fearful, forever growing. A love that she could return.
By this point I have reached my destination - a tall, narrow blue house with white balconies and a heavy iron gate in front. I fumble for my keys and step aside to let the midnight garbage collectors clatter past. I resolve to writer all this down and leave some record of my life in Vietnam. I promise myself that one day when I am old there will be a thick yellow diary that explains how I felt and lived as a young expatriate in Southeast Asia.
But the noodles are getting cold, and I am tired. All I want is to eat and sleep. So I do that. The thoughts that blossomed during tonight's ride slowly fade away as I close my eyes.
I'm not worried. They will return. Tomorrow night I will ride again through the soft winds of perpetual summer.
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