The lieutenant began to speak again. He said that there were many unfortunate things in the world and one of these was the death of a nineteen-year-old American girl in his city here in this country, and another was that a fifteen-year-old, who claimed to know nothing, and who would be missed by no one, should he disappear for some reason, what was unfortunate was that this boy might think that he could hold in his hands the sun, the moon and the stars.

The lieutenant spat.

He pulled up a chair and faced the boy. The boy did not look at him. The lieutenant said, “There was a bump.” He touched the back of the boy’s head. “Here.” The hand came away and the lieutenant leaned backwards and raised his hands. “Where did this bump come from? Do we think that it grew there on its own? Like an onion would grow in the ground?” He shrugged. “Perhaps.”

It was quiet. Outside, beyond the closed window, the boy heard the faint sound of motorcycles on the street. He thought about the street and the light that fell from above and how he might not see that light again.

“Her name,” the lieutenant said.

The boy looked up. He looked past the lieutenant’s face and he said, “That day, when I ate cheese, on that day she was called Marcie.”

The lieutenant nodded. “On that day,” he said. Then he sighed and said that the girl’s friends had gone back to America. They had taken the girl’s body with them. So now, there was nothing more.

The lieutenant sat up straight and said, “They talked too much.” He said they should have kept their god in their own country. “They believed they were better,” he said. He made a little noise in his throat and told the boy that it was dangerous to think this way. He said that too much self-belief could come back to injure you.

“Did she pray?” he asked the boy.

The boy said that he did not understand.

The lieutenant smiled, and he did not stop smiling. He said, “Trust me.”

Then he asked if the girl could swim. Because if she couldn’t swim, then she must have drowned.

The boy said he didn’t know about this, if the girl could swim or not.

The lieutenant ignored the boy. He said that the ocean was dangerous at that place. A week earlier a fisherman had drowned there. He stood and lit another cigarette and closed his eyes and then opened them. Then he sat down at his desk and wrote on the paper and then he looked up and he saw the boy sitting there. He said that he could go.

The boy raised his head and for the first time he looked at the lieutenant’s face, which was calm and appeared to hold no malice. The lieutenant repeated again what he had said the first time. “You can go.”

The boy stood and dipped his head slightly and he began to back out of the office, but before he reached the door he turned and slipped sideways between the door and the jamb and he went down the hallway, expecting to be called back, or to be caught, but by the time he had reached the main doors which led out onto the street, he knew that, against all odds and contrary to the truth and facts of the case, he was free.

2. On that day, he had been standing in the doorway of a jewelry shop on Quang Trung Street when the girl passed by on her bicycle. He had not seen her since the Sunday when she sat beside him in the small room and he repeated the words that had flowed so easily from her mouth. And then she had whispered that he was saved. “Oh,” she said, “That’s wonderful.” He had not known, at that moment, what was wonderful, but he was pleased that she was pleased and he had loved the calm of that moment, the stillness, the closed space in which the two of them sat, side by side. At that point he had been carried away and he imagined that it was she who had saved him.

But the stillness had passed and what he experienced in the days that followed was confusion. And shame. Though he did not know it was shame. And so, when the girl passed by on her bicycle he thought of calling out, but he didn’t, and instead he took his own bicycle and he followed her. She rode across the bridge and towards the mountain and then up the hill to the trail that led down to the beach. She locked her bike at the top of the hill and then disappeared. The boy set his bike in a grove of trees and he walked to the edge of the hill and looked down onto the beach. The girl was alone. She wore black shorts and she took these off to reveal a dark blue bathing suit bottom and white legs, and then she removed her top and under that was another part of the bathing suit, and this part covered her breasts. Her stomach was bare. She lay down on her back in the sand and stretched out her arms.

She lay like that and did not move. The boy descended the hill and walked through the sand towards the girl. It was a windy day and the ocean threw itself against the shore. There was a white bird out over the water and it dropped and then rose quickly.

She saw the boy before he spoke. She was surprised and she sat up quickly and covered her chest with an arm and said, “Oh,” and then she looked around and back at the boy and asked how he had found her. What was he doing here?