Sleeping with a Triad: To Dream of Dark Nights on the Beach

By Max

One day you awake, and you have your own personality. You have your own tenacities, you play your own tricks, and you have a new awareness of the world. You are a precocious toddler sent to test those around you. I had been wandering through a fog, the fog of Huan; me an innocent, me a fool.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Oct 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984501691

Max

Crazy Max joined the US Marine Corps in August 1965 with five of his close friends. He served as a combat mud marine in Vietnam from December 1965–March 1967. He was honorably discharged in 1971 as an E-5 Sergeant. Courage is doing something you are afraid to do. —Eddie Rickenbacker

Book preview

Chapter 1 (Conception)

She would disappear for Weeks on end. No prior warning. She would maintain absolute radio silence. Calling her mobile number I’d be asked to leave a voicemail that went unanswered. Text messages the same. Emails that I sent to her went unreplied. I had no contact details of her family nor her friends; even her wechat* stream went cold. She became a ghost, and that is what she wanted. The first few times this happened I was worried and hurt and confused.

During the first few days of the relationship outage, I thought to myself ‘Well she has gone to visit a friend and maybe she has lost her mobile phone, or she is out of credit and doesn’t know’. You clutch at any straw. Then, some evenings, I would drink too much and have dark episodes; thinking that she might have been murdered and her body dumped in the Australian bushlands. Occasionally you hear about such stories on the Australian news. At those times I felt so helpless and considered ‘should I go the Australian police and report her as missing?’ All that I had to hold onto was that photo of her tattoo.

Then one evening I would return home after work and she would be sitting calmly on the couch, watching Australia television that she didn’t understand and she would quietly say ‘How are you?’ Never a word of explanation.

We met in a sub-urban pub in Brisbane. This wasn’t a setup. As I hadn’t visited that pub for Years. It was the pub that my Dad and I used to drink at when he visited me from Holland. My father’s health was failing so I felt a sentimental urge to visit the place. She was standing by the bar, orange juice in hand, waiting for a friend. She was muttering to herself a bit. I assumed that she was a gambler, here to play the poker machines. I was standing next to her ordering a beer. She was dressed in a smart black outfit. I had lived and worked in China for four Years, so I was fairly confident that I could pick her as a Chinese national. She was made up how Chinese girls like to be made up. She was dressed how Chinese girls dress. I knew there was an outside chance that she could be Japanese or Korean, but I felt bold.

I said to her Nǐ hǎo ma? which means ‘How are you?’ in Mandarin.

Her face was quizzical for an instant and then she gave a small smile. I imagine that she would never think that an Australian guy, in an Aussie pub like that, would know any Mandarin. She turned to face me squarely and said Wǒ hěn hǎo, cher cher which means ‘I am good, thank you’. She was keeping it really basic for me.

So that was the beginning of our journey.

We began chatting in Mandarin. After four Years of living and working in Shanghai, my Mandarin is pretty awful; passable conversational, at a push. So we could do all the petty talk. She told me she was here in Australia as an English student; though in all my time with her I never saw a single English study book. She came from a farming town South of Shanghai, so our Chinese dialect and slang seemed to match. I asked her name and she replied Huan, meaning happiness. She didn’t do English pet names.

She began to quiz me and her line of questioning felt quite direct, for such a fresh start. But I was used to Chinese girls being direct. She wanted to know where I lived. I told her I live in a two bedroom apartment in central Brisbane. She asked me how many people live there. I told her that I live alone. She asked me how many girlfriends I have, and she laughed for the first time. I was between dates and told her ‘none’. She said ‘Liar’. I told her that I was telling the truth. She asked ‘Really?’ and I said ‘Really.’ I offered her another drink and she declined.

Her phone buzzed as she received a wechat message. She said My girlfriend is arriving soon. Huan wechat-ed her friend back in an instance, probably with some metadata about my presence included. Huan was not kidding about the word ‘soon’. Within a few seconds another pretty Chinese girl, perfectly attired in black, rushed through the doors of the pub and towards us. She didn’t even glance at me. The pair did not hug nor kiss. They simply starting talking furiously in Mandarin at each other. I was never introduced to the girlfriend and she was never introduced to me. They were talking so rapidly that they lost my understanding of their conversation, so I kept quiet and nursed the rest of my beer. After a minute of this, Huan turned to me and said in English We go now. You stay. I was being dumped.

They started to move away. I said Huan. Wait. They paused. I breathed deeply and said, in trepidation Can I get your number? All the other guys in the pub froze to watch. Huan turned towards me and scowled at me and swore at me in Chinese. She spun away and grabbed her Girlfriend’s elbow and they stormed out together.

I went to the bar and ordered a second beer. The pub was very quiet.

I sat at the bar in numbness for ten minutes wondering what emotional tsunami had just rolled across me. I was planning to head home, cook dinner and watch some mundane television. As I drained my final beer, Huan came back into the pub and strode towards me. She was all fired up. She said in English You want my number? I said Yes. She said Give me yours. The barman had a pen and some scrap paper to me in a flash. I scrawled my mobile number. I was so shaken that the numbers I wrote were barely legible. She grabbed the piece of paper from my hand and cleared out.