Chapter 34: Four Years Under the Bridge
He never learned whether those people were real charity
workers or hunting for something else. But he understood one thing now: for
him, any hand held out could be a trap.
Mo sat down beside him.
“Were you scared of them, Brother?”
Khai Minh faced the direction where the engine had
disappeared.
“I wasn’t scared.”
“Then why did you hide?”
He didn’t answer. Under this bridge, no one knew he was
the heir of Vinh An. He was just a blind man with no name. And that, more than
anything else, was what kept him alive.
In Khai Minh’s first rainy season under the bridge, the
river climbed almost to the lowest concrete steps.
Rain drove in sideways on the wind, soaking the cardboard
sheets on the ground. The people living there packed themselves against the
pillars, crammed together in the scrap of dry space that remained.
At night, when Khai Minh came back and there was nowhere
dry left to lie, he sat with his back against the concrete, the bamboo cane
across his knees, and waited out the flood season in silence.
By the second year, he had begun venturing out to beg on
the busier street corners. And at night, no matter how exhausted he was, he sat
by the little cassette radio, waiting for the business news and the medical
news.
Every time the names Vinh An or Truong Sinh
Pharmaceuticals surfaced, his back straightened. At first the items were short.
A new investment. A new research project. A newly founded
subsidiary.
To anyone else, dry noise. But Khai Minh memorized every
name, every figure, every project code that passed through that speaker.
Each night before sleep, he recited back everything he had
heard, over and over, until it was carved into his memory.
Mo once asked:
“Why do you memorize so much stuff?”
Khai Minh answered, his voice far away:
“So I know what those people are doing.”
“Who are they?”
“The people who took my home.”
Mo didn’t understand, but she didn’t ask again.
In the third year, Khai Minh caught a bulletin about Vinh
An Hospital overhauling its records system.
He understood instantly. If the old files that still
survived were moved or destroyed, every last trace of D-17 could vanish for
good.
He had always believed that as long as he stayed alive, he
would have a chance to reach the truth. Now, it seemed, even that was slipping
beyond him.
But from then on, news of Vinh An came more and more often.
The Truong Sinh Group had bought up most of the hospital’s
debt. On the radio, they called it a restructuring plan, a way to save Vinh An
from bankruptcy and keep its doors open.
Khai Minh listened, and his face went cold.
He knew exactly what lived behind those pretty words. Hold
most of a hospital’s debt, and you don’t need the shares in your own name; you
can strangle it whenever you please. Vinh An, the legacy his parents had held
on to, was being turned into a debt sitting in Truong Sinh’s fist.
Then one morning, the announcer reported that the transfer
of control over Vinh An Hospital was complete.
The stated reason: the heir, Lam Khai Minh, had been
missing for years and was no longer capable of exercising his rights of
management over the estate. Mr. Vu Minh Quan would serve as principal
representative throughout the restructuring.
The bowl tipped in Khai Minh’s hand.
A coin dropped to the sidewalk, rolled in a circle, and
lay still.
Four years ago, Mr. Minh Quan had wanted him dead.
Four years later, the man took the last thing his parents
had left him.
Khai Minh bent down, picked up the coin, and set it back
in the bowl. He didn’t smash the radio.
He didn’t scream that he was still alive. He only sat
there, and committed the date of that transfer to memory. Because he understood
that rage, right now, would change nothing.
Not long after, the city buzzed with another piece of
news.
Mr. Minh Quan was publicly marrying Linh Chi.
The ceremony was lavish. On the radio, the host spoke of
them as a couple who had walked through loss and found new happiness together.
Khai Minh listened to people praise Mr. Minh Quan, a man
who had suffered so much after his wife’s death, and had still found the
strength to rebuild his life and shoulder the estate his brother- and
sister-in-law had left behind.
A bitter laugh broke from the corner of his mouth. The man
who had murdered his parents, framed him, stolen his inheritance, and tried to
destroy him outright was now marrying another woman in the open light of day.
While he, the one who should have had all of it, still sat
under a bridge with a beggar’s bowl in front of him.
Four years passed. His mother’s watch collected new
scratches, and the bamboo cane Old Hai had cut for him wore smooth and thin.
The people under the bridge came and went. Some found
work. Some were taken elsewhere. Some simply vanished, and no one ever knew
where they had gone.
Only Khai Minh remained. He lived as a man without a name,
listening, day after day, to the city moving above his head.
That afternoon, Khai Minh sat on the street corner near
the bridge.
The bowl in front of him, the cane resting against his
leg. The crowd streamed past without pause: high heels, dragging sandals,
rolling wheels, all blurring into one wall of sound.
He wasn’t tracking any one person.
He simply sat, head slightly bowed, his mind drifting
somewhere far away.
Then, out of the crowd, a woman’s voice, speaking to
someone:
“You don’t need to follow me. I can get home on my own.”
Khai Minh’s whole body seized.
Four years had passed.
The voice hadn’t changed at all.
His head snapped up.
His hand clamped down around the cane.
The woman’s voice had barely brushed past before the
traffic and the footsteps on the sidewalk swallowed it whole.
Khai Minh planted the cane and shot to his feet.
His knee caught the bowl in front of him. It rolled into
the street, the coins inside scattering with small, bright clinks among the
moving feet.
“Miss Hoa?”
The name tore out of him, hoarse.
Ahead, the woman’s footsteps stopped.
Only for the briefest instant. But Khai Minh heard it
clearly.
The click of heels, gone silent in the middle of the
crowd.
Her breath, catching.
He couldn’t see her face. But in all his years of living
in the dark, he had never forgotten the voice that pulled him out of Room 407,
and he had certainly never forgotten the woman who dragged him along at a run
through the sound of barking dogs on the road by the river.
“Miss Hoa. It’s you, isn’t it?”
Khai Minh stepped forward.
The tip of his cane knocked against a passerby’s ankle.
The man dodged aside in irritation, but Khai Minh kept pushing toward the spot
where the voice had sounded.
The woman turned around.
“I think you have the wrong person.”
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